Borrowing Brilliance
In Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a frame doesn’t just exist. It feels like a painting that stood up, stretched, and walked onto the set. Shadows curl like they have opinions, and light drapes itself across the creature’s face with the confidence of something that belongs on a gallery wall. It’s as if del Toro invited Caravaggio and Goya to hover behind the monitor and said, “Do your thing.”
He didn’t just reference the masters; he borrowed, borrowed boldly, and stitched together fragments from centuries of art into something startlingly new. That, really, is the essence of inspiration. It is less about inventing from nothing and more about assembling, mixing, and animating what already exists.
Inspiration is a lot like Frankenstein’s monster. You gather pieces from all over: a line from a painting, a rhythm from a song, a mood from a film, a fleeting conversation overheard in a coffee shop. Each piece on its own is static. Together, they have the potential to move, to surprise, to spark a moment that feels alive. You cannot predict exactly how it will come together, and that is the thrill of it.
Ideas resist being neat.
They twist, reroute, surprise you, and sometimes shock the very person trying to assemble them. Like Victor Frankenstein discovering his creation breathing for the first time, the process of combining borrowed ideas produces something with its own energy. It can be terrifying, absurd, or, when it works, beautiful.
Del Toro shows us how deliberate assembly can feel like magic. He did not replicate Goya or Caravaggio. He studied them, absorbed them, and let them influence the way he composed, lit, and moved through the frame. Then he added his own quirks, obsessions, and narrative needs, and out came a monster of inspiration.
So here’s the musing: our best ideas rarely appear fully formed.
They are stitched together, borrowed, mashed up, misremembered, and somehow they live. We are not creating ex nihilo. We are assemblers. We are collagists. And in that process, there is a kind of beauty that comes only from letting the monster breathe.
Michael is the Creative Director and co-founder of FoxFuel Creative. He loves British music, vintage German cars, and American history, and his sarcasm knows no bounds. #DreamBig
