Inside Frankenstein: How Tamara Deverell Built Guillermo del Toro’s Tower of Creation

Tamara Deverell brings reality and fantasy together. Throughout her career, the production designer has made tangible dream spaces through the lens of Guillermo del Toro. The two have worked together since Mimic, leading to further collaborations on projects such as Nightmare Alley and Cabinet of Curiosities.

Now, they’ve dreamed up an interpretation of one of the greatest novels of all time: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Through lush interiors and exteriors, Deverell heightens yet captures the atmosphere of Shelley’s novel. Life is always present, even when death prevails in the story of Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) creating his “monster,” The Creature (Jacob Elordi). Perhaps one of the most stylish departures from the original story: Victor’s laboratory.

In the book, it’s an apartment. In del Toro’s film, it’s a haunting tower of creation with a funky laboratory. A hypnotic, character-driven set that Deverell recently spoke with What’s on Netflix about crafting.

For Nightmare Alley, you and the team built a working carnival. Now, did you have a working laboratory for Frankenstein?

There were a lot of moving parts. We physically had steam engines, which Victor Frankenstein used [in the lab], that we had to design and build. It was a big learning curve for me. A lot of research into what would’ve been viable at the time, but also pushing the fantastic, which is what Guillermo likes to do. I like to ground myself in reality and history.

We had what we call the Y crucifix – the table which the creature is created. The idea is that there are gears below that move i,t and then it elevates. There were a lot of hidden pieces that we had to integrate into the set, because it had this open vortex that went right up to the top of the tower. It was a union of different departments — rain towers and lighting and special effects, like lightning bolts. All these things that had to go on in the lab had to be carefully considered as we designed it.

There is a lot of religious imagery in this movie — a lot of crucifixes, for example — which is normal for a del Toro movie. How did you both want to infuse God into spaces, including the Y crucifix? 

Well, Guillermo tells a great story about how he would go from mass as a kid and then watch movies like Frankenstein afterward on Sunday mornings, and that was his day. So, to him, it became like a religion.

There are such obvious connotations of man playing God and the newly born creature. He’s got a Jesus essence to him. He’s a beautiful creation. I know Guillermo, as maybe a lapsed Catholic, has the whole Mexican background of Catholicism — the symbols and imagery. I’m not particularly a religious person, but I want to play up what Guillermo sees.

Such as the Medusa head in the laboratory?

Like that giant Medusa. She’s sort of a misunderstood monster. She’s a water symbol in ancient times. So the idea with the water, with this lab, was that it was an abandoned water tower that never really got off the ground. They built this enormous thing that, through the vortex we called it, had this hole that ran through it. There would’ve been chains and pipes and waterworks.

So, that was our backstory. We had to actually develop a whole history of what the lab was, and then renovate it, and then make it into the lab. And then explode the whole damn thing. It had many different levels of structure and story.

FRANKENSTEIN. (L to R) Jacob Elordi as the Creature and Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein n Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.

In Mary Shelley’s book, it’s just a mundane apartment in which Victor brings the Creature to life. There’s no grand tower, so you really let your imagination run wild there. What was stage one of searching for the tower?

The first time I really started was while Guillermo was still writing, and most of my work was logistical. What are we going to build? What are the locations? I’m sort of the first person going through all the locations and looking at places all over the world. I looked at the States, Canada, everywhere in Europe: Hungary, Croatia, the Czech Republic.

We landed in Scotland and the UK. When we went there, that was when we started our process of spending time together. I looked at a bunch of things, filtered it down with Guillermo, and then we decided, okay, let’s just go to the UK. We shot Edinburgh for Edinburgh.

We saw the Wallace Monument in Scotland, all kinds of towers. They have towers for everything in Scotland, as monuments. So we were starting to draw from this one in particular, the Wallace Monument, and then we went to St. Stephen’s Church in Edinburgh. Guillermo went crazy for it. I was like, “Guillermo, we don’t have a church. We don’t have this exterior.” And he’s like, “No, no, I love this.” They had those big coiled feet that we actually built at the base of the tower.

It’s fitting how hand-made the movie is.

We built so much on this show. There was CGI, obviously, to extend the tower, but we built the full base, we built the whole lab. It was so handmade. Guillermo really wanted it to be sculpted and painted and layered. And of course, I love those layers of leaves and moss and pigeon shit, all of it.

There are layers upon layers in this movie. Are there any details you hope audiences catch on repeat viewings?

Oh, we used Bernie Wrightson. He’s a graphic artist who did a whole series on Frankenstein. He’s no longer with us, sadly, but Guillermo had some of his Frankenstein drawings. There were these crazy hanging spheres in nets in his Frankenstein drawings. Guillermo just loved that, and I loved it.

They didn’t come back into the lab, but the first time we got to know Victor in his Edinburgh apartment, it was this crazy, crooked set that we built full of all those little Easter eggs from Guillermo. The little pregnant figurine — the porcelain figurine that young Victor has — that’s part of Guillermo’s private collection.

Picture Credit: Netflix

As wonderful to the eyes as these sets and sights are, they always pop because of their service to the story. Obviously, you and Guillermo love the color green, but in the lab and tower, it’s a color that makes you think of life. How important were earthly colors?

Guillermo wanted us to create a moss squad. He’s like, “I need a moss squad,” which he had on Pan’s Labyrinth. And so, the greens guys and the scenic painters altogether made it. We kept adding this layer of green, which we had put a lot of in the creature’s cell. I did a corner with the guys, and then I photographed it and showed Guillermo because it was such a beautiful set. The tiles were like bone structures.

And so, we got into this moss squad kind of groove, which to me related to the creature. Even though he was manmade, he was the closest thing to nature because he was so beautiful. And when Victor made him, he wanted to make something beautiful — a beautiful natural object, a natural man, an Adam, as it were. Another religious reference.

What about the forest where The Creature first explores the world? It’s not gothic or creepy, but simply beautiful.

We shot some of the forests in both Canada and Scotland. The beach was in Scotland when he first exploded out of his cell, and then he wandered to Canada, believe it or not.

Movie magic. 

Yeah, movie magic. We were doing the moss-covered area where he found the coat. That was actually a big set. I don’t talk about it a lot, but it was a lot of work for us to do. We had to moss and age all these skeletons for just that moment in the forest and blend them in. There were a lot of natural tones.

And then as we traveled, the color palette came to us while we were together in Scotland in our first foray, as we were looking at the architecture and the colors of Edinburgh — which is a no-brainer — with the wet cobblestones and the stone and the marble of the villas that we were going in, and the wood floors. So out of this, at one point, Guillermo turned to me and said, “Ah, we have our color palette,” which we didn’t depart from.

I do want to create a background for the actors in the costumes to kind of sit in. There were some moments with the lobby [at the tower] with Victor in a robe that [costume designer] Kate Hawley created, and I just went, Oh my God. We had mosses, greens, and peeling blue paints that all complemented what Victor was wearing. Kate and I were so joined. It was joint artistry there.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix globally.