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How Scotland shaped Frankenstein on page and screen
How Scotland shaped Frankenstein on page and screen
You wouldn't know it from its numerous screen adaptations, but Scotland runs right through Frankenstein.
It was central to the 1818 novel's inception and sections of the story play out across the length of the nation.
After hundreds of film adaptations, Scotland finally makes it onto the big screen in Guillermo Del Toro's new take on the book, with the Royal Mile, Glasgow Cathedral and Aberdeenshire serving as locations for the Mexican director's vision of the 200-year-old story.
According to the filmmakers, the Scottish places they chose to shoot late last year helped shape the very way they told their tale.
But to understand Scotland's place in Frankenstein, we have to travel back to a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816.
That's when 18-year-old Mary Shelley began writing the book.
The daughter of political radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, she'd enjoyed an unconventional childhood by the standards of the times, leading to an early marriage to the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
They and their friend Lord Byron were spending the summer by the lake when a bad dream and a competition to make up scary stories spawned the idea that became Frankenstein.
Most people know the basic plot. The obsessive, brilliant Victor Frankenstein builds a horrifying creature from cadavers, abandons it in disgust, then suffers a terrible fate as his creation, left alone in the world and inspiring fear in everyone it comes across, enacts a terrible revenge.
It was Shelley's first book and her masterpiece. Her journey to becoming its creator began a few years earlier when she was staying with family friends in Dundee, as she wrote in the introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel:
I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy...
The final sections of the book took Shelley back to Scotland, if only in her imagination. Victor travels through Edinburgh, Perth and St Andrews to settle in Orkney, where he seeks the solitude and inspiration to build a second creature - a female companion for the vengeful one that follows him.
Victor isn't very flattering about Orkney:
It was a place fitted for such a work, being hardly more than a rock whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for it inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare.
Thankfully, the crew behind the new Frankenstein found today's Scotland much more suited to their filming needs.
Art director and production designer Tamara Deverell is a long-time collaborator of Guillermo Del Toro's. The Canadian was Oscar-nominated for her work on his film Nightmare Alley.
"Mary Shelley's book is like a travelogue," she says.
It's in Italy, Switzerland, all over the world. I spent months looking all around Croatia and Hungary but then we decided we could do most of it in the UK.
In 2022, Tamara accompanied Del Toro on a scouting tour of Scotland, starting with Edinburgh.
"Guillermo was still writing but we were gasping at all this architecture and that allowed us to visually create the film," she says.
"We were looking for neighbourhoods, rather than specific buildings, but we couldn't help finding inspiration in everything we saw.
I went to every close along the Royal Mile and then I selected a few to show to Guillermo. It's just so fantastic to be able to shoot right in the heart of the Royal Mile.
Two years later, the production filmed in Parliament Square, Writers' Close and the Canongate. But aspects of other Scottish landmarks also made it into the final film, inspiring the looks of the interior sets, which were built in Toronto.
The water tower which tops Victor's laboratory is a nod to one such Scottish landmark.
"You can't help but notice that our water tower with its pinnacles is partly based on the Wallace Monument in Stirling and the Scott Monument in Edinburgh.
The Gothic arches in the creature's cell are from the vaulted arches of the cloisters at the University of Glasgow. And the tiles are from a swimming pool, built in the 1800s, which we didn't even get to visit because it's on an island [Mount Stuart, on the isle of Bute] but the tiles still made it into the final film.
Popular filming locations such as Gosford House in East Lothian stood in for the Frankenstein family home.
It has all the round domes and double marble staircases that Guillermo loves.
The production also used Glasgow Cathedral, although it was almost dismissed as a location.
"We looked in the main space and although it was magnificent, it was just too big for the intimate confessional scene we wanted to shoot," Tamara says.
"The arches were all too high. You had no sense of the scale of the place. And then I realised Outlander had shot scenes in the lower chapel where the Gothic arches are much closer to the ground.
We'd missed that and as soon as I told Guillermo, we knew it's what we needed for the scene.
Tamara credits these places with inspiring the director to create new scenes and build the story around what they found.
But Scotland's darker characteristics made their way into the film even when they weren't filming.
The production team absorbed the spooky atmosphere of the places they stayed, such as Norwood Hall Hotel in Aberdeen.
It was bought by a James Ogston in 1872 and rebuilt in 1881 to house his lover. Today, Ogston apparently haunts the dining room, his lover is said to walk the main staircase and his wife has been seen in bedroom nine.
Del Toro wrote on social media that his colleague had witnessed strange electrical and physical phenomena inside room nine and the director had snapped up the chance to stay in the haunted bed chamber.
They swapped rooms but the stay was - sadly - uneventful in paranormal terms.
Still, Tamara left Scotland convinced it's a country full of ghosts and the gothic.
"Scotland is so old. It is haunted. In Edinburgh, I would get up at six in the morning before the tourists hit the Royal Mile.
"And after a rainstorm, I would see the sun coming up at the end of the Royal Mile and licking across these wet cobblestones.
And I was like I was back in the 18th century.
Frankenstein is on limited release in cinemas around the country and will be on Netflix from Friday 7 November.
Source: BBC
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