Did Guillermo del Toro Borrow James Cameron’s Playbook for Frankenstein?

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is getting a lot of love for how real it looks and feels, and that is not an accident. He went big on practical builds, light on CG, and one choice in particular stands out: the ship is not a digital creation. It is a physical beast you can practically smell through the screen. Old-school move. Smart move.

A real ship, not a render

"I'm not gonna do VFX on the ship. I want a real ship because the ship is a character... I didn't want the audience to go, 'Oh, it is digital,' because once you introduce that, it is like a license for people not to believe things."

That pretty much says it all. Del Toro treats the vessel like a cast member. So the team built it, inside and out, after a ton of research. The decision gives the movie a tactile, grimy, you-are-there quality that CG just struggles to fake.

If that puts you in mind of James Cameron, fair. Cameron famously poured more than $40 million into constructing a life-size RMS Titanic and a massive water tank for Titanic, a story that has made the rounds for years (filmmaker Murat Ozbek highlighted it in a YouTube breakdown). Del Toro isn't copying here — he has always loved practical effects — but both directors share the same north star: make it real, make the audience believe.

He chased an old Hollywood vibe

Del Toro has been circling this story his entire career. He told Netflix he has lived with Mary Shelley's creation for as long as he can remember and straight-up calls the book his bible. The goal this time: mount it like a classic studio epic and push every department to the edge.

• Set in mid-19th-century Europe, the film leans into scale: huge sets, huge props, and complicated wardrobe work.
• An abandoned water tower became the Creature's home and Victor Frankenstein's lab, crowned with a giant circular window.
• The ship wasn't just a shell — the team crafted both interior and exterior with painstaking historical research.
• Del Toro kept the process tight in post: he would finish cutting each day's material before the next day of shooting.
• Design, costumes, locations, and music were all steered toward the same emotional target — nothing worked in isolation.
• 3D rendering was used to previsualize fine details so the practical builds landed exactly where he wanted them.

The net effect is exactly what he wanted: it plays like a classic from Hollywood's heyday without losing the story's raw, beating heart. And yes, the ship being real absolutely adds a kind of old-world charm you don't get from a green screen.

Why you keep seeing circles

If you started spotting circles everywhere in Frankenstein, you weren't imagining it. Del Toro has used that shape as a visual signature before (see The Shape of Water and Crimson Peak), and it is all over this movie, from that hulking round window in the tower to the production design's quieter echoes.

"You'll see a lot of circle motifs, which, to Guillermo, represent the circle of life, the beginning, the end, the endless ouroboros, the snake eating its tail. It's a definite theme, and I do my best to incorporate it as many times as I can."

That comes from production designer Tamara Deverell, who helped translate del Toro's ideas into spaces you can actually walk through. He describes the whole process less like a checklist and more like conducting an opera: every department playing toward the same emotional moment.

One last note that tells you how personal this was: del Toro says he has wanted to make this film since he was 7 years old. Now it exists — and Frankenstein is streaming on Netflix.