Guillermo del Toro

I read an entire encyclopedia of health as a kid, and I've been very taken by anatomy ever since.

And we had a Victorian consultant, and I used a

An entire medical library that I purchased from 1835.

I bought it in London, and I used it to make sure the terms and the procedures were up to speed, but not too advanced.

What I was trying to capture is the...

the beautiful style of the illustrations of an American artist called Bernie Wrightson, who illustrated for me the best illustrated version of the novel ever, and who collaborated with me earlier on.

And it has a very Byronian, very doomed, very Wuthering Heights sort of look of a doomed hero.

And when he's first born and he's bald and almost naked, I wanted it to feel like an anatomical chart, like something newly minted.

Not a repair job on an ICU victim, but the skills of Victor.

His exquisite sense of design, the heaviest pattern after phrenology manuals from the 1800s, so they have very elegant, almost aerodynamic lines.

I wanted this alabaster or marble statue feel, so it feels like a newly minted human being.

And we also tried to make it the way I remember the Jesus images, life-size, in the churches of my childhood.

Yes, as a kid.

A lucid dream for me or waking nightmares used to be called too, is you wake up in your dream in the exact environment that you fell asleep on.

But there are elements that are not normal.

I used to see monsters.

I saw a burning figure at the foot of my bed, which is where the burning archangel comes in Frankenstein.

And that figure extended its arms and said, I live.

And I woke up screaming.

When I was a very young child, I used to see a fawn, a goatman come from behind an armoire while the church chimed midnight in the neighborhood.