How 'Frankenstein' Did the Near Impossible And Swept The Craft Categories At the Oscars

“Frankenstein” won Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling at the Academy Awards on Sunday, making it the third-most awarded film of the night after “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners, opens in new tab.” Although Guillermo del Toro’s visionary adaptation of the Gothic classic missed out on headline prizes like Best Picture and Best Actor for leading man Jacob Elordi, its success in these three categories tells a far more compelling award season story—one that underscores the value of championing moviemaking crafts and building a fully realized cinematic world.

In Oscar history, craft sweeps like this don’t often happen. Since the makeup and hairstyling category was established in 1981, opens in new tab, just a handful of films have achieved what “Frankenstein” has. The first was “Amadeus” (1984), the epic period piece about the life of Mozart, followed two decades later by “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2004), which brought every corner of Middle-earth to life in astounding detail. The meticulously stylized “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) then received the accolades, and a year later, the tactile, wasteland world of “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) repeated the sweep. The most recent film to take home all three awards was “Poor Things” (2023), a surrealist and visually sumptuous coming-of-age story (which coincidentally was also inspired by Mary Shelley’s seminal novel of reanimation).

The three categories may be judged by AMPAS voters separately, but together they are responsible for how a film comes alive on screen. Production design constructs the physical world that characters inhabit. Costume design signals identity through color, fabric, and silhouette. Makeup and hairstyling shape an actor’s appearance, transforming them into characters both familiar and new—or in the case of Elordi’s character in “Frankenstein,” a combination of the two. It’s in this balance between familiarity and invention that “Frankenstein” finds its visual identity. It’s not a straight period piece, but like many of del Toro’s films, exists on a plane where magical realism takes precedent, allowing the creative teams working behind the scenes to build something wholly singular.

When veteran prosthetics master and the film’s creature designer Mike Hill, opens in new tab—who shares the Best Makeup and Hairstyling win with makeup department head Jordan Samuels and hair designer Cliona Furey—spoke to The Set Set last year, he emphasised how reimagining the monster was no easy task. “When you're designing a character like this," Hill said, “it is very difficult because everyone has preconceived ideas of what it should look like.” He admitted that both he and del Toro “kind of have a crush” on Boris Karloff’s iconic version of the monster, but knew they needed to take a new approach, one that reset people’s perception of the Creature. “A lot of interpretations since Karloff’s look like a road accident,” Hill told us. “I wanted to make it clear that if you saw my character, you would know a man made this. It's very, very handmade.” 

Hill found himself mirroring the work of the film’s mad scientist as he painstakingly and precisely conceptualized the design of the Creature that would serve as the film’s centrepiece. The makeup consisted of 42 overlapping prosthetic pieces applied to Elordi more than 50 times in sessions that took upwards of 10 hours in the makeup trailer, and Hill wouldn’t have it any other way. “If you’d introduced digital effects to this Creature, you’d modernise it instantly,” Hill explained, echoing a principle del Toro has expressed before. “And the moment the audience notices that, you’ve destroyed it.”

In Kate Hawley’s, opens in new tab celebrated costumes, the Victorian era is given a Gothic edge. Early on, a decision was made not to hew too closely to an accurate nineteenth-century aesthetic. Instead, Hawley’s wardrobes for Mia Goth combine conventional fabrics and accessories with otherworldly touches—a gown featuring a hypnotic print created from X-rays of female anatomy, another with fluttering ribbon-wrapped sleeves that recall the Creature’s bandages and her own fascination with insects. “Guillermo wanted Elizabeth to feel very ephemeral,” Hawley, who reunited with the director following collaborations on “Pacific Rim” and “Crimson Peak,” told The Set Set in an interview. “You almost can't capture her as a character, and she reflects many different stages of women.” 

That idea is reinforced in the film’s dual casting, with Goth playing both Victor’s mother Claire and his romantic interest Elizabeth, something that in turn inspired Hawley to incorporate a color story in the film. At the beginning of the film, we see Claire in head-to-toe red with a billowing veil shortly before she is laid to rest with her face encircled in an arresting rose-carved coffin lid. The color becomes a symbolic thread throughout the movie, with an adult Victor going on to adopt the crimson shade in his choice of glove and neckerchief, and Elizabeth herself appearing in an all-red look when Victor confesses his feelings for her (her bonnet lined with blooming rosettes becomes a haunting nod to Claire)—all before Hawley brings the palette back to its origins when, as Elizabeth lies dying in the tragic penultimate act, blood blooms over her ghostly white wedding dress until she is enshrouded in the arterial shade. 

Completing the unified artistic vision is Tamara Deverell, the film’s production designer, who shares her Academy Award win with set decorator Shane Vieau. Together they incorporated the color palette, visual motifs, and textures of the film's vibrant 1850s world. And like Hill and Hawley, Deverell—who has worked with del Toro since his English-language debut, “Mimic,” in 1996—instantly understood del Toro’s vision. Across the 112 locations in Scotland, England, and Toronto, not a single thing was shot against a green screen.

Instead, breathtakingly detailed sets were constructed from scratch, including a 130-foot frozen-in-ice ship, which was built in a sprawling parking lot in Toronto. For builds like the interior of Victor’s lab and the rural cottage, del Toro instructed her to create every corner, resulting in a 360-degree spectacle that then gave cinematographer Dan Laustsen the freedom to shoot from every possible angle. As the filmmaker told Tudum last year: “I think VFX should only exist where set construction, prop building, wardrobe creation cannot go. I believe that people can tell when a set is real, when a prop has been made by human hands.” 

Del Toro has long said bringing his version of “Frankenstein” to the big screen has been a lifelong dream of his, something that he has been working towards his whole career. Winning all three design Oscars isn’t simply recognition of technical excellence in what he and his team achieved, but a reminder that cinema’s most affecting pieces of art require a human touch.