‘Frankenstein’ Production Designer Tamara Deverell Build Epic Lab and Ship Sets for Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic Tale

When Guillermo del Toro called on production designer Tamara Deverell to work on “Frankenstein,” one thing was clear: there would be no green screen. Everything would be handmade from scratch. “We had 20 sculptors at any given moment working,” Deverell says.

Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” traces young Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) as he comes to terms with his mother’s death. In doing so, he decides he’s going to find the answer to eternal life and spends his years building what becomes the Creature (Jacob Elordi).

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Deverell’s sets included building a ship — the Horisont — as well as Victor’s lab, where he creates the Creature.

Location scouting took Deverell around the world, including to Canada, Croatia and the Czech Republic, but she ultimately found Scotland to be the perfect home for the sets. “We were looking at a lot of places in Scotland,” Deverell says. “We were at Stirling Castle, and we were at the Wallace Tower.”

The latter served as the inspiration for the lab.

The “Sphinx feet” on the exterior tower was a detail that del Toro wanted and so was added to the stonework. The tower was built, and later the practical miniature was destroyed in camera.

The lab undergoes various iterations as it evolves onscreen. “We really mapped it out. At
a certain point, I did plans for each look that I would run by Guillermo over and over again, until I think he didn’t want to look over anymore,” she says.

A visit to the Hunterian Museum in London provided valuable research. There, she took over 3,000 photos of all the props of the period, the medical implements, instruments and dioramas.

During that same visit, she saw the real set of Evelyn anatomical tables from the 1600s that held preserved human tissue and which were used as a teaching tool. A replica table was made for the film based on that museum piece.

del Toro’s circular motif features heavily in the film. Deverell — who has worked with del
Toro on “Mimic,” “The Strain,” “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities” and “Nightmare Alley” — is no stranger to the filmmaker’s motifs.

It represents the circle of life, and in this film, the circular narrative of the beginning and the end. She embedded circles in the ship’s windows and the lab. The most prominent circle was the giant Medusa’s head in Frankenstein’s lab. For del Toro, it reflected the mythological scale of the movie and the misunderstood monster that is Medusa. del Toro wanted to remind audiences of how Medusa is used in waterways and water towers and cisterns in the Middle East.

The lab’s battery towers were also constructed.

Concept artist Guy Davis came up with design ideas back in 2022, and those stuck — they were carried through to the final film. Deverell’s team built all four of the glass towers to full size: each stood at 15 feet and had a green hue. When Victor powers them up with electricity, they turn red.

The massive scale of the sets didn’t just extend to the lab; the ship was another big set build for Deverell. “There was no studio space, giant factory space or anything that we could find that would give Guillermo all the angles he wanted because when he was shooting wide, he was actually in front of the ship,” she says.

That aspect of the project was a dream come true for the production designer, who says she had always wanted to build a ship. “I did a lot of research on ships,” she says. That research took her to the Cutty Sark in London as well as the Maritime Museum — “any ship that I could get close to, I was all over.”

In the end, Deverell and her team built the ship using old wood that they had to jet wash to age.

Furthermore, Arctic historian and archeologist Matthew Betts also advised her. “He was giving us information like, could we do iron plates on the ship, because that’s what they had for the ice, and
it was such a Frankenstein thing to do these iron plates that we could then age and ice.”

Once the entire ship had been completed, it was mounted on a gimbal so the Creature could rock it. “We had many conversations with Guillermo. ‘How do you want it to move?’ The first thing we had to build was this giant gimbal that our special effects team built to have the whole ship rotate,” Deverell says.

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