“My maker told his tale,” Jacob Elordi whispers over an image of a lightning-scarred tower in the new trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. “And I will tell you mine.”

If the teaser trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein focused on Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein, the new trailer centers on his creation: the patchwork Creature played by Elordi. In del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley story, the creature is beautiful and almost delicate; a statuesque figure. “He needs to feel like a baby, and then he needs to feel like a philosopher, like a man,” del Toro tells Netflix. 

That doesn’t mean he isn’t intimidating. As seen in the trailer above, the Creature is on the trail of his maker, riven with visions of his body’s past lives. This iteration of Frankenstein’s has its origins in the Crimean War, a puzzle pieced together out of the frozen bodies of soldiers found on a shattered battlefield. “He’s working with a bunch of mutilated corpses,” del Toro says. “This is a resurrected soldier out of a mass grave, basically.” 

PHOTO BY KEN WORONER

So when, as in the trailer, the Creature stalks through hails of bullets and attacks a grounded ship, he’s doing it with the full strength provided to him by his creator, and the fury inspired by that creator’s callousness. “If you are not to award me love,” he intones in the trailer, “then I will indulge in rage.” 

For his part, Elordi turned to a few unlikely sources for performance inspiration, such as the Japanese dance form butoh, and his own golden retriever. “There’s a real innocence in the way she moves and the way that she loves,” Elordi says, of his canine companion. That innocence may seem a far cry from the scarred Creature who tells Victor to run in the final image of the trailer — but as any viewer of del Toro’s films already knows, there’s more to his monsters than meets the eye. 

Frankenstein is now in select theaters and on Netflix Nov. 7. You can read more about the film right here.