Del Toro’s Netflix ‘Frankenstein’ Feels Like a Classic

 Jordan Hoffman

A Mexican director took a British book set in Switzerland and stitched it up into pure Hollywood. The newest version of Frankenstein, like last year’s Nosferatu, is a strong and old-school iteration of a story that most people likely know, even if they’ve never sat down to read the book or watch one of the earlier films. For director Guillermo del Toro, it’s the movie he has been dreaming about making since childhood. He said as much in a 2011 interview from a second home in Los Angeles where he stores his comic books, Fangoria-ready props, and movie memorabilia, including a life sized version of Boris Karloff from the 1931 version of Frankenstein.

The film stars Oscar Isaac as the doctor looking to conquer death, Jacob Elordi as the Creature, and del Toro’s unrestrained adoration for big gothic sets, eye-popping production design, and a scene or two of mangled body parts crafted to make you go “ewww!” Anyone who watches new movies and grumbles about why they can’t make anything that feels like a classic anymore? This one ought to shut them up.

A Mexican director took a British book set in Switzerland and stitched it up into pure Hollywood. The newest version of Frankenstein, like last year’s Nosferatu, is a strong and old-school iteration of a story that most people likely know, even if they’ve never sat down to read the book or watch one of the earlier films. For director Guillermo del Toro, it’s the movie he has been dreaming about making since childhood. He said as much in a 2011 interview from a second home in Los Angeles where he stores his comic books, Fangoria-ready props, and movie memorabilia, including a life sized version of Boris Karloff from the 1931 version of Frankenstein.

The film stars Oscar Isaac as the doctor looking to conquer death, Jacob Elordi as the Creature, and del Toro’s unrestrained adoration for big gothic sets, eye-popping production design, and a scene or two of mangled body parts crafted to make you go “ewww!” Anyone who watches new movies and grumbles about why they can’t make anything that feels like a classic anymore? This one ought to shut them up.

Guillermo del Toro came on the international film scene in 1992 with Cronos, which was produced in Mexico and became an underground sensation due to its rich mythology involving a 16th century alchemist who creates a scarab-shaped doohickey that bestows eternal life, leading to a great many grisly but visually compelling complications. (Hold on to that summary for a moment.) The success of the project brought del Toro to Hollywood, where he notoriously locked horns with producer Harvey Weinstein on the film Mimic. With Weinstein now in prison and a director’s cut of the picture now in circulation, I guess you can say del Toro eventually won that battle.

The director regrouped at the time by reworking an older screenplay into The Devil’s Backbone, a Spanish-Mexican coproduction set during the Spanish Civil War that was essentially a drama from a young boy’s point of view, with a gothic haze. This success brought him back to Hollywood for the cheerily received comic book movie sequel Blade II, then an adaptation of the indie comic Hellboy, which relished in hand-crafted special effects, elaborate tactile creature design, a zest for secret lairs and laboratories, and a grand sympathy for mutants and freaks.

With Hellboy, del Toro became, alongside future collaborator Peter Jackson of New Zealand, one of the true nerd kings of cinema. These were dorky outsiders with encyclopedic knowledge of horror and fantasy fiction who clearly hung out at the comic book shop and not the gym. (I say this with nothing but love and admiration.)

His next move, however, was a career turn that has solidified him as a name-brand auteur. Pan’s Labyrinth, another Mexican-Spanish co-production, imagined a rich fairy-tale setting to explore the brutality of Francoist Spain, unleashing a series of mesmerizing images and original fantasy designs that, in a Hollywood context, would only be for a kiddie picture or a supernatural slasher—not something that had some intellectual heft to it. The film was nominated for the best foreign language Oscar and lost to Germany’s The Lives of Others (a great film, but maybe a short-sighted pick), though it did win for art direction, makeup, and cinematography.

Del Toro was now an “elite” filmmaker, eventually winning the best picture and best director prizes for The Shape of Water in 2018, and the best animation prize for Pinocchio in 2023, with several other well-received movies, television shows, novels, and comic book creations sprinkled throughout. He also proudly carried the flag for a classicist’s approach to “chiller”-style moviemaking that recognizes there is more magic in deploying practical special effects than just using a computer. A recent interview summed this up nicely when he said he would “rather die” than use generative AI on one of his projects. (At a fan event in Los Angeles he spoke even more bluntly.)

When you take all this and envision a dedicated alchemist going mad in an effort to bring forth life from the inanimate, yes, you can see how all roads have been leading to Frankenstein. When it was announced that this was to be del Toro’s second film (after Pinocchio) in his ongoing deal with Netflix, the pairing was so perfect, it almost seemed too easy. I am happy to report that, without upending the text too radically, he makes the film all his own.

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Like the Creature itself, the collective unconsciousness’s understanding of Frankenstein is a collage sewn together from various sources. This would even include readers in the early 19th century, who may have read the anonymously published book Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus from 1818, or the 1831 revision under Mary Shelley’s name. In between, there had already been one stage adaptation, so it was clear early on that this story had (large, shambling) legs.

The book’s legendary origin, revealed in the 1831 edition, sprung from swapping ghost stories on a rainy night near Lake Geneva between 18-year-old Shelley; her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; and Lord Byron. (This little scene plays out in a prologue to the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, if you feel like you’ve somehow witnessed this.) Mary’s tale of a reanimated corpse eventually developed into the story we now know.

Or did it? If you happen to be someone who always meant to read Frankenstein but didn’t until a week ago (and I may be talking about myself here), you’ll find that, yes, all those juicy themes about hubris, scientific ethics, the inherent darkness of mortal existence, divine cruelty, and social prejudice leap off of every other page. But most of the images that automatically pop in your head when I say Frankenstein—the green-gray creature with bolts in its neck, lightning searing through lab equipment, a humpback henchman, the ecstatic exclamation “it’s alive!”—come from the 1931 James Whale film, or, even more so, the cultural snowballing that the story underwent with its countless sequels, remakes, and parodies.

In addition to more notable retellings—like the Peter Cushing-led The Curse of Frankenstein from Hammer Film Productions; the stylishly underground Flesh For Frankenstein (also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein); and, of course, Mel Brooks’ iconic parody Young Frankenstein—there have been decades of Creature cameos in Mickey Mouse cartoons, in breakfast cereal commercials, and derivative titles like Frankenweenie (a Tim Burton-directed animated film about a resurrected dog), Frankenhooker (you can look that one up for yourself), and a 1970s blaxploitation picture called Blackenstein. (It’s no Blacula.) People still use the term “Frankenfood” to suggest an unnatural manipulation of organic material, so it’s fair to say that if ever there was a universal shorthand term, Mary Shelley’s old ghost tale ranks high on the list, even if very few of the particulars from her book are part of what everyone thinks is the story.

For example, she deliberately never gives even a hint of how the cobbled-together body parts are reanimated to form the Creature. The narrating Dr. Frankenstein, now deeply regretful of his actions, does not want to breathe a word of it, lest someone might pick up his baton. (As far as wiggling oneself out of a writerly corner, one must salute the teenage Shelley when she came up with that one.) Nor are there any moments in which Dr. Frankenstein shouts down naysayers to his unorthodox philosophies in a medical theater—which is the memorable opening scene in Mel Brooks’ parody.

This “you don’t know the real story” angle was the hook of the 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh as the doctor and Robert De Niro as the Creation (as he was called in this version), and it was by far the most faithful adaptation. (As a movie, it doesn’t quite come together, but it has its moments.) Its existence is of great aid to del Toro, who is free from the burden of sticking too close to the original text and, like the doctor yanking the best limbs from a charnel house, can find inspiration from the entire Frankenstein corpus—and his own imagination.

Del Toro sets his film in the late 1850s and introduces a new motivation for Victor Frankenstein’s quest to defy death. In addition to mourning the loss of his mother (an aspect from the book amplified in the Branagh version), this Frankenstein introduces a sinister father-son rivalry, with Charles Dance (best known as the stern head of House Lannister in Game of Thrones) as a brilliant and cruel physician grooming his son to greatness in the same field. Outdoing dear ol’ dad, in addition to laughing in the face of God, is what really sets Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein on his path.

Aiding him is a new character, Harlander, played by Christoph Waltz, an arms dealer making a killing off the Crimean War who financially backs Victor’s scientific experiments. (We’ll soon learn he has an ulterior motive.) Harlander’s niece, Elizabeth, is a spin on the adopted sister of the Frankenstein family who, in the book, later weds Victor but is killed by the Creature. Here, she is engaged to Victor’s younger brother, and is primarily deployed by del Toro for philosophical jousting, goading the determined scientist into increasingly boastful positions, and driving him wild with desire. (It does not hurt that del Toro’s costume designer dresses her in peacock blues or radiant reds in cavernous candlelit homes and, later, Dr. Frankenstein’s stone tower. It’s even more intriguing when you realize that the actress playing Elizabeth, Mia Goth, also plays Dr. Frankenstein’s late mother in flashbacks.)

Though the location is a little vague, the gang leave Edinburgh to return to the Continent, taking advantage of the body parts of fallen soldiers at the front. In time, the Creature is brought to life, and, like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, can only say one word: Victor.

The Creature’s inability to advance intellectually (or perhaps the burden of being the only thing on his mind) soon irritates the doctor. When the Creature and Elizabeth bond, it drives him even more crazy—to the point that he tries to kill the Creature before he’s ever harmed a soul. This sets off a series of calamities for the Creature, including a realization that he is unable to die. (Another Marvel superhero, Wolverine, cursed with his insurmountable healing factor, comes to mind.) In time, there is a showdown at the North Pole, which features action and adventure, but also some genuine, heartfelt drama. Oscar Isaac is incapable of being anything but terrific on film, but Elordi, still a relative newcomer, is remarkable as the doomed giant subjected to a cruel fate at the whim of a short-sighted creator.

At 150 minutes, del Toro allows his film to stretch out, not just to set his camera on cool shots of undead flesh and 19th century scientific gizmos, but to sink his teeth into the contours of the story. Yes, Dr. Frankenstein is the bad guy, but Isaac’s natural charisma and the thorough backstory keep him relatable. Naturally, the director of Hellboy and The Shape of Water aligns our sympathies with the Creature from his first appearance—but does he have to kill quite so many sailors during his North Pole rampage? Life has dealt him a bad hand, but that’s a tough way to make your case. These contradictions, and others, are part of what makes this old story feel new—and more than the sum of its parts. 

FOREIGN POLICY 

Brazil Proposes a New Type of Fund to Protect Tropical Forests

 

The multibillion-dollar fund would essentially pay countries to keep forests standing, hoping for success where earlier forest-protection ideas have struggled.

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Morning mist in Carajás National Forest, Brazil. The proposal comes as global climate talks start this week in Brazil.Credit...Jorge Silva/Reuters

By Somini Sengupta and Claire Brown

To mow down a forest is usually lucrative. You can sell the wood, then clear areas for animals to graze, or mine for valuable ores, or grow corn or other crops year after year.

This is how most of the world’s tropical rainforests have vanished in the past 25 years, including in Brazil.

Brazil is trying to change that. On Thursday it is due to announce the establishment of an ambitious fund designed to pay countries to keep their tropical forests standing. As many as 74 countries with tropical forests stand to gain a total of $4 billion per year if they leave their forests alone.

If fully financed, the fund would represent nearly three times the current volume of international forest financing, Brazilian officials have said. “It will mobilize large-scale capital with sustained financial flows to conserve our biodiversity,” Brazil’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, said this year.

Critics say the fund’s structure has some flaws that could block success. It relies on raising $25 billion from governments and philanthropies to kick-start the fund, which is a tall order.

Others worry it’s not future-proof. Governments change from election to election, and even in Brazil, a future administration may be more interested in the proceeds from deforestation than in the proceeds from saving trees.

The fund foresees payments of around $4 per hectare, $1.60 per acre, of standing forest, which may not offer enough of an incentive to prevent deforestation, and it applies to areas with only 20 percent forest cover, which some environmentalists say sets the bar too low.

Tropical forests are inherently valuable. They are rich in biodiversity, and forests swallow vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, slowing down the heating of the planet. They regulate the hydrological cycle and also local weather.

By turning these standing forests into a protected asset, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, as the new financial instrument is called, seeks to monetize their value as a global public good and give forested nations financial incentives to not destroy them.

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An iron ore mine in the Carajás National Forest. Credit...Jorge Silva/Reuters

Investors in the fund stand to earn around 5 percent, according to an assessment by Zero Carbon Analytics, an independent research group.

“It’s meant to reward countries for maintaining standing forests, and the measurement is only meant to be of forest cover,” said Andrew Deutz, managing director for global policy at the World Wildlife Fund, who has worked with Brazil on creating the new financing instrument.

The requirement for being paid is simple: Use satellite imagery to show that forests remain in place, and then receive money.

There is still a lot of forest to save. Forests cover about one-third of the Earth’s land mass, around 4 billion hectares. And while deforestation rates have slowed, they haven’t slowed nearly enough, international assessments have found. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency, roughly 11 million hectares of forest ecosystems are disappearing every year.

Countries with an annual deforestation rate above 0.5 percent are ineligible for payouts. That includes Indonesia, which has for many years rapidly lost forests to oil palm-oil cultivation and to mining.

Palm oil, a leading driver of deforestation in Southeast Asia, is used in a range of processed foods and cosmetics. Soybeans, which are used to feed cattle, chickens and pigs for human consumption, are the third-largest driver of deforestation overall.

One-fifth of the payments are supposed to go to forest communities, though that may be difficult to enforce, particularly in countries where forest communities have few rights.

The fund is different from what is currently offered on the global market. Earlier systems for protecting forests were typically designed around assigning so-called carbon credits that can be bought or sold. The idea being that, say, a company that wished to offset its emissions of greenhouse gases would pay to purchase a credit representing protected forestland that would pull one ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, offsetting the company’s emissions. But systems like this have proven difficult to measure and verify, and the nascent carbon-credit market has faced concerns about its integrity.

Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, warms the world by acting as a blanket in the atmosphere, trapping the sun’s heat.

To get started, the fund needs to mobilize $25 billion. That’s supposed to come from the governments and philanthropies, with private investors contributing the remaining $100 billion. So far, Brazil has put in $1 billion. The World Bank is managing the fund.

The forest fund is the centerpiece of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s ambitions at the annual United Nations global climate conference, which begins on Thursday in the Amazonian city of Belém.

President Lula has yet to raise anywhere close to the $25 billion required to set up the fund, and he faces powerful agribusiness industries that stand to gain from deforestation. The Amazonian state of Pará, where the climate talks are being held, is one of the states in Brazil with the largest deforestation risks, along with nearby Mato Grosso State. Deforestation has declined significantly in the past three years of Mr. Lula’s tenure.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

universo lirico de valter hugo mae chega à tela grande

 

 

 Por Eduardo Graça

 

Bastou o primeiro capítulo do livro para o diretor Daniel Rezende ter a certeza de que iria adaptar para as telas “O filho de mil homens”, em cartaz nos cinemas e, a partir do próximo dia 19, na Netflix. Sucesso de crítica e público no Brasil, o livro do português Valter Hugo Mãe, lançado em 2011 e atualmente publicado pela Biblioteca Azul, selo da Globo Livros, não foi, ainda assim, uma escolha óbvia. A história de Crisóstomo e Camilo, o pai sem filho à procura de um filho sem pai, se dá em uma aldeia onde o tempo esqueceu de passar. É narrada por diversos personagens, quase todos julgados sem amplo direito de defesa por uma sociedade preconceituosa e punitiva. A narrativa tem fortes pinceladas de realismo mágico. E o protagonista, o pescador vivido por Rodrigo Santoro, passa boa parte do filme sem falar.

— Devorei o roteiro. Não tinha lido o livro ainda, e foi uma das coisas mais bonitas que caíram em minhas mãos. Mas falei com o Dani: “Não tenho a menor ideia de como fazer esse personagem. Me parece impossível trazê-lo para a realidade de carne e osso, para a tela.” Ele respondeu: “Eu também não, mas a gente pode descobrir juntos” — conta Santoro.

Descobriram. O elogiado montador de “Cidade de Deus” e “Tropa de elite”, e diretor, entre outros, de “Bingo — O rei das manhãs”, cinebio de Arlindo Barreto, o mais célebre Bozo brasileiro, e das adaptações para o cinema da “Turma da Mônica”, jamais havia assinado sozinho um roteiro. Hugo Mãe, por sua vez, nunca tivera texto transformado em obra audiovisual. Quando começou a escrever, conta Rezende, lhe veio à cabeça a participação especial de Santoro na franquia juvenil na pele do Louco, personagem de Mauricio de Sousa que transita entre o real e o imaginário.

— Foi uma experiência rápida, intensa e maravilhosa. Enquanto avançava no roteiro, pensava: “Na hora em que estiver bom, vou mandar para o Rodrigo.” Como a frase do Valter no livro, eu “confiava por instinto que confiar era já a resposta” — conta o diretor.

• 'Estou muito nervoso, vou escrachar logo': veja como foi a participação de Valter Hugo Mãe na Flip 2025

O resultado, saudado por Valter Hugo Mãe, é o mais delicado dos filmes de Rezende, com histórias que se entrelaçam na solidão de Crisóstomo, na luz da fotografia de Azul Serra, na música de Tim Bernardes, e nas expressões e diálogos de um elenco afiado.

31/07/2025 : Cenas do filme "O filho de mil homens", baseado na obra de Valter Hugo Mãe — Foto: Marcos Serra Lima / Netflix

Entre os que encarnam personagens teatrais, quase míticos, está Rebeca Jamir, cuja Isaura pena com a versão ultrapassada do feminino a ela imposta; Antonio Haddad e Johnny Massaro, aprisionados em insuficientes limites do masculino; e Grace Passô, na pele da imigrante matriarca já impossibilitada de se tornar quem de fato deveria, em uma vida que se aproxima do fim.

— Foi um trabalho longo, detalhista e de muita delicadeza. Uma das chaves foi entender como este homem se relaciona com o outro. Ele é quase um Mogli. Não cresceu com os lobos, mas com as conchas e o vento à beira-mar. Como fala? Como faz quando precisa se relacionar? Encontramos uma espécie de haicai para o Crisóstomo. Quando ele abre a boca, traz a sabedoria da conexão com a natureza e a abertura de alguém que de fato vê e escuta o outro, algo cada vez mais raro — diz Santoro.

‘Aparecia tímido’

O “outro” mais crucial para “O filho de mil homens” aparece logo no título da história. O menino Camilo dá a Crisóstomo a dimensão mais palpável a um dos temas da obra: a adoção, a troca ilimitada, consequente e responsável de afeto. Quem vê o filme tem todo o direito de desconfiar da informação de ser este o primeiro trabalho de Miguel Martines, hoje com 12 anos, que prende a atenção do espectador.

— Fizemos testes em diversos lugares do Brasil. Vi a fita que ele mandou e Miguel tinha uma maneira tão... ele não estava interpretando, aparecia naquele lugar um pouco tímido do personagem. Aí cravei: “É ele.” Mas ele nunca tinha atuado — conta Rezende.

‘Foi um mergulho na minha infância’, diz Santoro

Na preparação do elenco de “O filho de mil homens”, a cargo de Estrela Straus, e nas locações, em Búzios e na Chapada Diamantina, Rodrigo Santoro e Miguel Martines encontraram a conexão necessária para o filme, que também é uma reflexão sobre os múltiplos sentidos de “família”, de fato acontecer. “O elo”, nas palavras do ator de 50 anos.

— Com ele, saí do meu lugar de ter essa experiência toda e me joguei um pouco no não-saber. O Miguel às vezes me convidava, não intencionalmente, a participar do mundo dele, de seus questionamentos. Um dia peguei ele desenhando e falei: “Cara, você desenha muito!” Ele se sentiu lisonjeado e envergonhado, numa complexidade muito interessante. Daí, parti para estimular coisas que foram criando este elo de que se vê no filme. Ele nasceu de uma relação de fato genuína — conta Santoro.

Johnny Massaro em "O filho de mil homens", de Daniel Rezende, adaptação de livro de Valter Hugo Mãe — Foto: Divulgação/Netflix/Marcos Serra Lima

Sem sandálias

Durante os dois meses de preparação, Santoro só fez um pedido central ao diretor, algo que não estava destacado no roteiro de Daniel Rezende e tampouco presente no livro. Ele gostaria de passar o tempo todo descalço.

— A figurinista Manuela Mello trouxe sandálias incríveis para mim, mas não quis. Foi importante pisar nas pedras, na areia, me deitar, me sujar, com os pés no chão. Mas não é aquela coisa de “ó, olha lá o processo do Rodrigo”, não, era só o necessário para eu me alimentar do Crisóstomo. Assim como foi sentir o vento, e como ventava, o que enlouquecia o operador de som, mas deixava ainda mais claro que a locação, em “O filho de mil homens”, também é um baita personagem — diz.

Entrar na história de Crisóstomo e Camilo também fez Santoro viajar no tempo. E promoveu um inesperado reencontro do ator com “o menino Rodrigo”.

— Foi um mergulho na minha infância. Acessei lugares que estão dentro de mim, mas que com os quais não tinha mais muito contato, pois também estou distraído, também tenho mil coisas para ver lá fora. Precisei tirar tudo da frente e meditar. E ficar aqui. Só — afirma o ator. 

• Entrevista: Valter Hugo Mãe fala sobre filme de 'O filho de mil homens' e livro sobre luto: 'A gente não pode permitir tudo à morte'
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• GLOBO

 

‘Frankenstein’ Has Always Held Up a Mirror. What Does It Show Us Now

 

 In Guillermo del Toro’s new version, the answer lies in how deeply it explores the relationship between creator and created.

 Parul Sehgal 

It is, perhaps, the most famous origin story in literature, and it begins with blood-red snow falling from the sky. The year 1816 brought forth freakish weather set off by the explosion of a volcano in Indonesia. Blizzards battered New England in June. Rivers swelled and filled with the bodies of drowned animals. Crops failed, hay rotted, typhus raged. In Paris, the pamphleteers warned of the end of the world.

In Switzerland, near Lake Geneva, heavy summer rains forced a group of friends to huddle indoors at the Villa Diodati. To amuse themselves, they competed to see who could come up with the most terrifying tale. Their little circle had been named “the league of incest” by the British press, not entirely without reason. Among their ranks was “mad, bad” Lord Byron, who was said to have gotten a touch too close to a half sister. Also in residence: the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and a young woman who was decidedly not the very pregnant Mrs. Shelley. This pale girl of 18 with a bright blaze of hair and a new baby in her arms (Percy’s) was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

The Villa Diodati still stands, looking like a slice of wedding cake among the tall trees. It appears to bear no mark of its history, of the evening Mary reported a curious waking dream: “I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”

Out of that initial vision emerged “Frankenstein,” the tale of a young scientist intent upon discovering the secret of life. He collects body parts from the charnel houses, stitches them together and by mysterious means animates his creation. Mary filled 11 notebooks with a strong, slanted hand that races down the page, the words tipping so close to the line that they look driven by a strong wind. It is a book full of rain, full of the storms and electricity in the air — the theories of galvanism, the stirrings of the abolitionist movement — all of which its young author followed keenly.

The novel is made up of three autobiographies, each one nested in another, like a set of Russian dolls — of the sea explorer Robert Walton, the scientist Victor Frankenstein and Victor’s creature. We begin at sea, with Robert, who has embarked on an expedition to the North Pole when he comes across Victor, battered and close to death. He has been hunting and trying to kill his creature, who has turned deadly.

It is the creature’s account, his eloquence, that lies at the heart of the book. His story begins with the very kindling of his consciousness — we encounter, perhaps for the first time in literature, the memoir of an infant. He narrates how his senses were, at first, deliriously muddled, how he came to identify them, to name cold and pain. He realizes he is alone, and he cries. Abandoned, he wanders. He finds a place to conceal himself, where he can spy on a family. Watching them, he is comforted; he learns to speak, to read. He understands what he is.

He tracks down his maker, pleads for a companion, some creature like him, to ease his loneliness. Victor agrees to make him a mate, but he feels a sudden revulsion and tears the female monster’s body to pieces. Mad with grief, the creature destroys nearly every person Victor loves. At the end of the novel, Victor dies on the ship. The creature comes aboard, mourns him and wanders away, to prepare his own pyre.

“Frankenstein” is a book about the mystery of creation — but what accounts for its own, this strange and desolate work of the imagination? Mary herself addressed this question in the introduction to the 1831 edition; how did she, a teenage girl who never had a day of formal schooling, “dilate upon so very hideous an idea”? And what accounts for its longevity? Byron and Percy Shelley feel like relics, but Mary’s work is still read, recast, passionately debated. Reportedly the most assigned college text in the United States, “Frankenstein” has been hailed as revolutionary and reactionary, feminist and drearily misogynist. It is interpreted as thinly veiled autobiography, a warning against scientific hubris, a critique of the French Revolution. It has been described as a book about fathers and sons but also might be read as the keenest expression of a daughter’s longing for her mother.

The creature appears in at least 400 films, and this season brings another, “Frankenstein,” from Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning director of “The Shape of Water.” It is the movie he has been trying to make his entire career. “My Everest,” he calls it. “Every movie I’ve done is the training wheels for this one.”

“Frankenstein” is a story famous for its depiction of the anxiety of creation, but its endurance comes from its own vibrating strangeness, the swivel of its sympathy between creator and creature, father and son. To bring Mary Shelley’s monster back to life, some 200 years later, del Toro had to plumb the past — hers and his own. “It’s like mudlarking in the Thames,” he told me. “Everything that is worth finding is at the bottom. There is a dense layer of tarlike mud in which she has buried her mother, feeling despised by her father, hated by her stepmother, all these things are there.” Shelley has her scientist animate the scraps of corpses to show us what we already know and pointedly avoid: how the dead walk among us and ghosts can edge out the living, how we struggle to emerge from the long, obliterating shadows of our origins.

The first time I met Mary Shelley, she was wearing a crisp white nightgown, with her bright hair brushed back over her brow. She was sitting at her desk — pen lifted, midthought — in waxen reverie, as del Toro knelt before her to delicately adjust the pillow beneath her bare feet.

This life-size silicone statue of Shelley occupies a large room on the second floor of a home in Santa Monica, Calif., that del Toro uses to store and display a vast collection of sculptures, specimens and props from his films. He calls it Bleak House, and like Dickens’s original, it is “delightfully irregular,” full of wandering little arteries of passageways and hidden rooms, stuffed with skeletons, Pinocchio puppets, family portraits (del Toro as a child, pretending to drink his sister’s blood), 13 separate libraries (e.g., fairy tales, forensics, horror), models of babies floating serenely in jars.

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Guillermo del Toro at Bleak House, home to his vast collection of sculptures, specimens and props from his films.Credit...Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times

On the wall is a framed paint brush that once belonged to James Whale, who directed the classic “Frankenstein” (1931), starring Boris Karloff, responsible for the monster in our minds — the bolts in the neck, the animal way of moving, the muteness. There is a life-size statue of Karloff himself, sitting shirtless in a barber chair, having his makeup applied, while drinking a cup of tea, a small stain of black lipstick on the rim.

Del Toro saw the 1931 film as a monster-mad child, and when Karloff’s face filled the screen, he was transfixed. “That is my Jesus,” he thought. “That is my patron saint.” He saw himself in the creature’s innocence and awkwardness and ill-fitting suit; he saw the Catholic martyrs in the heavy-lidded eyes rolling back, as if in ecstasy.

Much has been written about how that particular production itself brought together a group of outsiders, how they might have encoded their own alienation into the film — many of them were immigrants, the director was gay and Karloff himself concealed his Anglo-Indian ancestry. Del Toro, too, felt like an outsider. He was bullied mercilessly for growing up blond and wispy, “like little Lord Fauntleroy,” in Guadalajara, Mexico. The monsters he obsessively drew sanctified imperfection, offered some respite from oppressive “mandatory beauty.” They made it acceptable to be hairy, to have crooked teeth, to feel a bit shy, to disappoint.

“I think that ‘Frankenstein’ is maybe the first moment in which we recognize ourselves in the monster,” del Toro told me. “The monstrous and the demonic and terrifying narratives prior to ‘Frankenstein’ were mostly outside forces coming after us. Most of them had a Judeo-Christian sense of good and evil: We were good; the things that were coming after us were evil.”

We were sitting in the illustration library, talking across the cleared corner of a table, the other half laden with papers, props, figurines, an empty vitrine. He fiddled with a small skull as we spoke. In person, he is gentle and gregarious in his customary black hoodie and the circular, wire-rimmed glasses that seem to magnify his huge blue eyes. He is prone to enveloping hugs, to clapping you on the shoulder with such verve that you will drop everything you are holding, to crying while watching his own films. His sets are said to be joyful places. There are no secrets, says Oscar Isaac, who plays Victor Frankenstein in the new film. “I like it!” del Toro will roar when a shot pleases him; if not, merrily, “That was shit!”

When we met, in late summer, he was finalizing the cut of the film. Although deeply influenced by James Whale’s interpretation, his own version returns the story to its roots, to Villa Diodati. There are three editions of the novel: the 1818 version (published anonymously in three volumes, albeit heavily edited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who tried to “elevate” the language), the 1823 version (published under Mary Shelley’s name and edited by her father; for a time the most commonly read edition), the 1831 version (edited by Mary Shelley in light of public criticism and tamed into lifelessness; avoid).

Del Toro’s interest, however, lies in another document. It is the manuscript he is most drawn to, the original text that Mary began writing as an 18-year-old — the “most impulsive and the least ‘organized’” of the bunch, he calls it. It is the purest distillation of her voice and intentions, before she added the heavy allusions to “Paradise Lost” that mark the published editions. “What I love is the way a teenager asks questions,” he said. “I don’t need John Milton superimposed upon that.” Who else but a teenager could pose the creature’s questions with such raw fury and need: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?”

Del Toro takes considerable liberties with the plot — his creature is immortal; he introduces a love triangle, of sorts. It’s the spirit of the text that interests him, not fidelity. “A text is like a house; you have to move in,” del Toro told me. “What I can do is have the same urgency from my own questions that she had. And use the same questions to interrogate my own biography, which is that I’m the son of a man that tried to learn to be a father, and I tried to learn to be a father.”

The film explains Victor’s cruelty by giving him a cruel father of his own, a doctor who spits his son’s name with contempt and whips his face for making mistakes at his lessons. When Victor’s mother dies in childbirth, he holds his father responsible for not saving her. His scientific ambition is competitive, to bring life forth where his father failed.

In the novel, Victor is repelled by the creature’s ugliness — the “shriveled complexion, and straight black lips.” But del Toro, who got his start doing monster makeup, wanted to make the creature beautiful. Played by Jacob Elordi, who studied infant development and Butoh movement for the role, his motions are languid. Like a baby, he is entranced by his own hands; when tied up, he plays with his chains. His skin is not the brutal patchwork of sutures, as often depicted, in the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version, for example, but reminiscent of cracked porcelain, almost kintsugi — the Japanese art of pottery repair, in which gold or silver lacquer is used to accentuate the breaks.

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Credit...Ken Woroner/Netflix

In the film, Victor is dazzled by his creation. He flings open the shutters and lets light fall on the creature’s body; he demonstrates how to take in its warmth. “Sun, sun!” Victor cries (although it very well could be “Son, son”). It is only later that he will grow frustrated with the creature. It won’t learn fast enough; it whimpers. Victor will mock and taunt him, beat him. But not yet; in that first meeting, he touches his creature with wonder.

Until now, del Toro’s films have hewed to a tidy moral calculus. The villain is invariably the beautiful man in the nice suit, the one with the sharp part in his hair and the shiny boots. He torments the vulnerable within reach — his wife, children, subordinates — but his threat looms larger; we are led to look at how the desire to contain fear or conceal weakness can become an impulse toward power and control. Del Toro’s heroes are virtuous, bruised, misunderstood — innocents who possess little language and a great spiritual power.

But in “Frankenstein,” we feel the effort to embody both father and son more completely, to sympathize with them. In his own life, del Toro told me, “I was so busy being a son, I did not realize I was a father.” (He has two daughters, in their 20s.) Victor is endowed with a tragic back story and somewhat exonerated; the creature is given a taste for violence and lightly indicted. This is the complexity of the original text speaking through the film; in the novel, the creature describes his pleasure in killing a child. “We can’t deny the rage of the creature,” del Toro said. “In the past, I would have made him superior to human beings.”

Instead, the film has Victor and his creature double and overlap; they invite the question: Who is the monster?

The walls of Bleak House are painted a dark, internal shade of red — earthy, with a touch of rust. The color follows you — it’s the color of the binding of del Toro’s childhood encyclopedias and the ink in his journals. It finds an echo upstairs, in Mary Shelley’s neatly combed russet hair. When he showed me the room in which he writes — warm and dim and pulsing with the gentle rumbling of a recorded storm — I teased him: “This is a womb. You have returned to the womb.”

“You can really bloom here,” he responded happily, turning a little figurine on a shelf to display it at a more becoming angle. “Like a hydroponic plant.”

When del Toro was a child, his father won the lottery. The family moved into a bright white, very modern mansion, but he spent as much time as he could with his great-aunts in a wonderfully old and spooky home, full of sighing ghosts and visitations. He had waking dreams of goatlike creatures emerging from the wardrobe (he would recreate the scene in “Pan’s Labyrinth”). The great-aunts fussed over and tormented him in turn; one put bottle caps in his shoes, telling him that suffering was a fast-track to penance, which came to a stop only when his mother discovered his bloody socks. His father was perplexed by his introverted, bookish son and seemed to prefer the company of his older, athletic brother. But his mother was a soul mate of a kind — “a bit of witch.” They wrote poetry together, and she taught him to read tarot.

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A statue owned by del Toro of Boris Karloff, who played Frankenstein’s creature in the 1931 film, on set in his makeup chair.Credit...Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times

She was a woman of great imagination and intuition, but “her life was made of regret,” del Toro told me. Her own mother had died giving birth to her. Her father remarried but never recovered. He made his wife a saint and prayed to her. He was never fully sober again. How could the daughter not regard herself as the instrument of his loss? She lived in tentative possession of her own life, which had taken her mother’s. She could not step out of the shadow of her mother, nor could she fight it. Her own motherhood was fraught — she suffered stillbirths and miscarriages, terrible experiences that del Toro recalls learning about as a child.

Listening to him, I had the odd feeling of already knowing this history even though I had not heard it before. He is a filmmaker who nurtures recurring motifs: twisted trees, underground caverns, damaged eyes, enchanted books. Above all there is the figure of a woman who dies in childbirth. A woman in a nightgown who stands up suddenly and is bleeding; babies who are born wrong or too soon. There is an obsessive attentiveness to the precariousness of birth.

“Mary and I have a shorter gap spiritually than you think,” del Toro says. For whose story is this but Mary Shelley’s? Her own mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the principal forerunners of modern feminism and an iconoclast in her time, who spoke and loved freely. She sickened quickly after giving birth to Mary. She could not pass the placenta. A doctor was sent for; he reached into her body and pulled it out, piece by agonizing piece. (Impossible not to link those torn pieces of flesh to Victor assembling his creature.) Puppies were brought to latch at her breasts to draw the milk away for fear it was infected. She died when Mary was not 10 days old.

Her husband, the political philosopher William Godwin, bereft, raised the girl in the shadow of her illustrious mother. He taught her to read, the story goes, by tracing the letters in her mother’s headstone. Mary’s own years bearing children were marked by tragic loss. By age 21, she had married Percy Shelley, borne three children and lost two of them. “Dream that my little baby came to life again,” Mary wrote in her journal in 1815 after losing her first child; “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day.”

Curiously, there are no mothers in “Frankenstein.” The creature is born out of a man’s scientific ambition, not a woman’s body. The family the creature spies on is missing a mother as well; so is Victor’s betrothed. I have never understood this dogged slaughter of mothers in Shelley’s fiction (motherless characters are common in her subsequent books as well), until del Toro told me of his own mother’s story, how she was blotted out by her mother’s ghost. Absence is more powerful than presence, he explained to me. “Presence is fleeting. Absence is eternal.”

The figure of the dead mother is deep in our DNA, almost a precondition for narrative. Every culture produces ghosts in their own image to reflect their own fears and taboos. But she is found everywhere — a ghost representing a woman who died in childbirth: the Japanese ubume, soaked in blood from the waist down, or the churail, as she is known in India, with her backward turned feet and long unkempt hair, said to lurk at crossroads and burial grounds and (horrifyingly to me as a small child) near toilets. Or consider the missing mothers in fairy tales and children’s literature.

I used to think of the missing mother as precondition for story because only when she — with her penchant for safety and order — was banished could the adventure begin. The opposite might be true: The story coalesces around her lack — preserves it; the adventure leads not away but toward her radiant absence.

How do you depict such absence in film? How can we see that the missing mother saturates everything she has left behind? In del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” Victor’s mother is introduced to us wearing a trailing red veil. When she goes into labor, she reaches for her son with a bloody hand, marking him. After her death, red creeps into his costumes — specifically in his red leather gloves — everything he touches, we see, is stained with her loss. In del Toro’s films, the urge to narrate is always knotted together with a maternal body that holds life and death. In his telling, every story is, at its heart, the story of return.

What makes a monster? Every new version of “Frankenstein” must answer this question for itself. In “Presumption! or the Fate of Frankenstein,” the 1823 play that made the story famous (the novel itself sold poorly), the creature is blue-skinned and wild-eyed. Before he even steps onstage, his unnatural creation has been commented upon — Victor is said to be raising the devil. As soon as he bounds onstage, he is perceived as murderous and powerful, snapping his creator’s sword in two. It’s a softer creature we encounter in the Karloff film, but his monstrosity is also inborn. The doctor’s bumbling assistant breaks into a university classroom and steals the wrong brain — an abnormal, criminal brain — to complete the creature.

In the novel itself, the monster is not born but made — by Victor’s revulsion, his abandonment, his refusal to care for that which he has created. Victor himself experiences brief and awful flashes of guilt. Mary makes a transitive verb out of the word “compassionate.” Listening to the creature’s account, Victor registers that “his words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.”

There are many wounded and hurt children in literature — Dickens’s orphans, Nabokov’s nymphets — but none speaks so clearly, makes their accusations as forcefully as the creature. “Hear my tale,” he insists when at last face to face with his creator. His plaint feels like the basis of so much modern memoir — hear what I have endured. There is an implicit faith in the act of giving one’s testimony, the hope that finding the precise language for pain (“How can I move thee?” the creature asks) might bring forth redress. What feels almost unbearable in his account, even now, is not the injustice he reports, but his need for his creator despite it all. “I am thy creature,” he says. “You my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing?”

Destroy me, the creature says, but hear me first, “and then, if you can and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.” Victor, in turn, curses those hands; he cries out for relief from the sight of this “detested form.” And the creature reaches out to cover Victor’s eyes with his own hands, to spare his creator the sight of himself — “Thus I relieve thee, my creator,” he says, “thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor.” His tale is the story of the unrequited love of the child for the parent — the shame of dependency; the bottomless, almost perplexing willingness to forgive.

Percy Shelley made the fewest edits to this section. It is mostly Mary, alone on the page — that strong, sloping hand. It is the closest, I think, that we can come to hearing her real voice. She is a writer easy to speak for, easy to claim, because she remains so difficult to find. As a child, she reportedly hid behind the sofa when company came, to eavesdrop (much like her creature). The “cold chaste moon” in Percy’s poetry supposedly refers to her, as if her natural tendency was to reflect, not make her own light. As a writer she hid expertly, too, behind the overlapping testimonies of the characters in this book, through whom she titrated the details of her life.

Her journals, especially in her later years, are laconic. The later entries read as if she were trying to erase herself in real time, as if baffled to find herself alive. For she outlived everyone, starting with her mother. Her half sister overdosed on laudanum. Percy’s first wife drowned herself. Percy drowned too, in a sailing accident, not six years into their marriage. Byron died shortly after, of fever in Greece. Only one of her four children survived into adulthood, and he, famously dull. She wrote in her journal, “Seule avec mes tristes souvenirs” (Alone with my sad memories).

There is a mystery in those journals that has long preoccupied scholars. Mary was in the habit of noting daily activities: “1st March Nurse the baby, read ‘Corinne,’ and work.” What does it mean when she indicates that she “worked”? “Work” is noted as distinct from “writing” or “translating,” which she specified explicitly. It is unlikely to refer to housework, because housework would not occur in bursts and then vanish for long periods as “work” does. “Work” erupts unpredictably, at moments when the Shelleys were scrambling for money but also when they could afford a maid; “work” happened in company and did not require solitude, unlike writing, which did. Comparing these dates with Mary’s biography, the historian Nora Crook offered a theory. “Work” might mean “sewing,” for its dates correspond with pregnancies, when layettes and maternity clothes would need to be made, and with other points when clothes needed to be replaced, when worn out or ruined after breastfeeding. “Work,” Crook noticed, corresponded with times of grief, too — when new mourning clothes had to be stitched.

Every work of art is, in some way, about its own creation. Del Toro has always been confused about why the creature’s body had to be made of scraps of corpses. If Victor was so brilliant and could animate flesh, why couldn’t he reanimate an intact body? But this was Shelley’s “work,” in every sense, the piecing and patching together of parts, of sewing the clothes that might bear a body through new life and death, of weaving a story capacious enough to contain her prodigious self-education, the pain of losing her children, her mother’s absence, her father’s abandonment, the exhilaration of thinking alongside her husband and friends. She draws together these strands into unity, stitching them a story of loneliness, vengeance and the possibilities for repair.

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Del Toro in one of the 13 libraries at Bleak House.Credit...Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times

Her sure hands pull the plot very taut at the end. In the final scenes, as creature and creator hunt each other across the Arctic, what does the creature do but leave food for Victor — he nourishes his tormentor. Mary Shelley, let us recall, dedicated this novel to the father who had rejected her for running away with Percy Shelley; the father who sent her stepsister to school but kept her home; the father she would support financially for the rest of his life.

At the end of the novel, the creature is profoundly alone, mourning his creator, preparing to die himself. He evokes Mary Shelley on the stage of her own life, littered with the bodies of her children, her half sister, her husband. She wondered if, in conjuring such loss and loneliness, she had prophesied her own; it might be one explanation for her retreat from the intensity of the imaginative world of “Frankenstein,” why nothing she wrote could match it. “The novel ends up in a really bleak romantic existentialism. And I wanted to end with Frankenstein accepting the son, with the Catholic idea that forgiveness liberates everybody,” del Toro told me, and then put his own spin on a Borges quote: “To forgive is the greatest of gifts or the most violent of punishments.” In the film, there is an embrace, a moment of mutual recognition — and yet something ambiguous lingers.

After walking away, into the sun, del Toro’s creature bows his head — a moment signaling acceptance of his fate, I think. But I wonder if he is remembering, as we are, the morning of his birth, when his creator showed him the same sun, showed him how to take its warmth, those few, fleeting days when he was the source of only wonderment and pride. There is fresh pain in store, none keener than remembering yourself beloved. Is it the cruelty that makes the monster or is it the longing?

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 THE NEW YORK TIMES 

Drew Struzan, Masterly Painter of Movie Posters, Dies at 78

 

  

By Richard Sandomir

Drew Struzan, an artist whose talent for realistic portraiture and inventive composition captured the magic and adventure of films by directors like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Frank Darabont in some 200 posters, died on Oct. 13 at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 78.

His wife, Dylan, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Struzan created posters for some of the most popular films of the past half-century, including seven “Star Wars” films, four of the five Indiana Jones movies, the “Back to the Future” trilogy, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” (1982), “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" (2001) and several Muppet movies.

Using acrylic paints that he airbrushed over his drawings, brushstrokes for large swaths of space, and colored pencils, he was known for distilling the essence of a film without giving away the story.

“I look for the best pictures I can find of the actors and scenes,” Mr. Struzan told the website SlashFilm in 2021. “I look for the color palette. Then I design a composition that is open-ended. Not closed-ended, saying, ‘This is what you have to think about this.’”

For “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), Mr. Struzan used warm sepia tones to paint side-by side-portraits of Indy (played by Harrison Ford), with a nonchalant expression, and his father, Henry (Sean Connery), shooting his son a quizzical look. Below them, Mr. Struzan showed Indy on horseback being chased. In each of the poster’s four corners is a small portrait of a different character.

“We’ve had to live up to Drew’s art,” Mr. Spielberg, who directed four of the Indiana Jones films and “E.T.,” said in the 2013 documentary “Drew: The Man Behind the Poster.”

Mr. Spielberg recalled showing an early version of Mr. Struzan’s art for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008) to Janusz Kaminski, his cinematographer, and saying, “Now you’ve got to make sure that Harrison looks as good as that picture.”

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Mr. Struzan created posters for seven “Star Wars” films, including “The Empire Strikes Back.”Credit...Lucasfilm

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“It looks like me,” Harrison Ford said of Mr. Struzan’s portrayal of him in four movie posters, “but it’s invested with the nature and the character of Indiana Jones.”Credit...Lucasfilm

Mr. Struzan was considered one of the greatest poster artists in film history along with Robert Peak, Bill Gold, Renato Casaro (who died in September), and some of the anonymous artists who used the stone lithograph process to create colorful posters from the silent era until the 1940s.

“What Struzan did that was so revolutionary was that he brought back painterliness to posters,” Dwight Cleveland, a poster collector and the author of “Cinema on Paper” (2019), said in an interview. He added that Mr. Peak was also a skilled painter, but “he came from the comic book tradition,” whereas Mr. Struzan “was more realistic.”

For John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), about a shape-shifting alien terrorizing researchers in Antarctica, Mr. Struzan said that he was asked on short notice to create a poster but was given little information. In the 2013 documentary, he recalled being asked, “Remember the movie ‘The Thing’ from the 1950s? That was it.”

He added, “I couldn’t show an actor or a location or anything.”

His solution: a faceless figure in a parka on a frigid landscape with rays of light shining out of its head. The image was based on a photo that Mr. Struzan’s wife took of him, wearing a winter coat, with his arms outstretched.

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“Hopefully,” Mr. Struzan said of his poster for “The Thing,” “the response is, ‘I’ve got to go see this movie and find out what this is about.’”Credit...Universal Pictures

“He’s obviously standing in the cold and the snow, and he has some lights coming out of his face,” Mr. Struzan told SlashFilm. “And that’s the thing you can’t understand. Hopefully the response is, ‘I’ve got to go see this movie and find out what this is about.’”

Howard Drew Struzan was born on March 18, 1947, in Oregon City, Ore., and moved to Northern California with his family when he was about 4. His father, Wayne, was a real estate broker, and his mother, Bette (Miller) Struzan, was the manager of a See’s candy store in Palo Alto.

Drew’s gift for drawing, some of it on toilet paper, was so evident that when he was about 5, researchers at Stanford University heard about him and took some of his work to study.

“To this day, I don’t know what they were studying,” he told SlashFilm. “I guess I was unusual, but those of us who are freaks in this way still have a gift to give.”

But he felt unloved by his parents — “they didn’t like me; they were afraid of me for some screwy reason,” he said in the documentary” — and left home after high school. He tried to return after one term at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles (from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1970), but “they locked me out of the house so I never went back.”

While in college, he earned money by selling paintings to fellow students and stinted on meals so that he could afford to buy paint. In 1968, while still a student, he married Cheryle Dylan Hubeart, whom he had met two years earlier at a dance in San Jose.

After college, Mr. Struzan found work at a design studio, Pacific Eye & Ear, where he painted album covers for the Bee Gees, Alice Cooper and other musical artists. For Mr. Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” (1975), Mr. Struzan painted him as a dapper figure, in a tuxedo and tails, without his usual ghoulish makeup.

When the album’s image was blown up into a billboard, a film marketer, Tony Seiniger, saw it, tracked down Mr. Struzan and brought him his first poster work. He went on to give him much more.

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A billboard based on Mr. Struzan’s cover for the Alice Cooper album “Welcome to My Nightmare” led to his first movie-poster work.Credit...Atlantic Records

Mr. Struzan created many other album covers, including for Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” and Carole King’s “Fantasy” in 1973 and Iron Butterfly’s “Scorching Beauty” in 1975.

He made the transition to posters that year with “The Black Bird,” a spoof of “The Maltese Falcon,” for which he painted a Norman Rockwell-like illustration of the star, George Segal, who played Sam Spade Jr., being chased by an assortment of oddballs.

Mr. Struzan was soon busy painting posters for movies, including, in 1976, “Futureworld,” “Car Wash” and “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.” His biggest break came through collaborating with another artist, Charles White III, on a poster for “Star Wars” (now known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope”).

That poster depicted the large figures of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia “swinging across the Death Star Chasm,” according to Lucasfilm, which created the “Star Wars” universe, and smaller figures of the movie’s other main characters: Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, R2D2 and C-3PO.

After impressing Mr. Lucas with that first poster, Mr. Struzan became the go-to artist for “Star Wars” films, as well as the Indiana Jones films, which were Lucasfilm productions.

“His illustrations fully captured the excitement, tone and spirit of each of my films his artwork represented,” Mr. Lucas said in a statement after Mr. Struzan’s death.

Mr. Struzan made himself a model for his Indiana Jones paintings, posing for photographs in Jones regalia, including the familiar fedora and bullwhip. He pleased Mr. Ford with his portrayal in the posters. “It looks like me,” Mr. Ford said in the documentary, “but it’s invested with the nature and the character of Indiana Jones.”

Mr. Struzan’s “Back to the Future” posters form a triptych. In the first, Michael J. Fox, as Marty McFly, nervously checks his watch and has one foot inside the time-traveling DeLorean. The poster for “Back to the Future II” (1986) shows McFly in the same pose, joined by the scientist Doc Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, who also looks at his watch.

In the painting for “Back to the Future III” (1990), which is set in 1885, McFly and Doc strike similar poses (but wear Old West outfits and look at old-fashioned time pieces) and are joined by Mary Steenburgen, who played Clara Clayton, a schoolteacher who becomes Doc’s love interest.

“It’s not just an ad, you know,” Mr. Fox said in the documentary. “It’s the first notes of the piece. It’s the beginning of the story.”

In addition to his wife, a writer who ran his business, Mr. Struzan is survived by his son, Christian; two grandchildren; a sister, April Miller; and a brother, Bruce.

Mr. Struzan’s posters also promoted Mr. Darabont’s films “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) and “The Green Mile” (1999). Mr. Darabont, who modeled the main character in “The Mist” (2007) on Mr. Struzan, told The Los Angeles Times in 2008 that Mr. Struzan “crafts a piece of art that honors your film instead of just merely trying to sell it.”

He added, “Seriously, for a filmmaker who really appreciates what poster art means, Drew doing your poster is like getting an award.”

NEW YORK TIMES