Guillermo Del Toro is reimagining one of cinema’s most enduring monsters — and he says Jacob Elordi’s take on the Creature is unlike anything audiences have seen before.

In his upcoming film Frankenstein, premiering October 17 in select theatres ahead of its November 7 Netflix release, the Oscar-winning filmmaker describes Elordi’s creation as “staggeringly beautiful, in an otherworldly way.”

Rather than a stitched-together horror, Del Toro explained to Entertainment Weekly that he wanted the monster to reflect Dr Frankenstein’s lifelong ambition. “Victor is as much an artist as he is a surgeon, and if he’s been dreaming about this creature for all his life, he’s going to nail it,” he said. “It looks like a newborn, alabaster creature. The scars are beautiful and almost aerodynamic.”

He added that the creature’s skin carries traces of its many origins: “The hues are pale but almost translucent. It feels like a newborn soul. The skin is from different bodies, so it has different colours.”

The gothic tale stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant but arrogant scientist whose experiment — bringing Elordi’s Creature to life — ultimately unravels them both.

For Del Toro, the story is deeply personal. At the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere, he reflected on his lifelong fascination with the monster: “It was a religion for me. Since I was a kid — I was raised very Catholic — I never quite understood the saints. And then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like. So I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid, and I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world.”