Awards’ Season tends to spotlight directors, actors, and speeches delivered beneath hot lights. But Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, now an Oscar-nominated triumph, is not a film built by a single vision. It is a collective collaboration, and its true power emerges from the unseen hands working behind the scenes. Among them is Emmy-winning special effects artist, designer, and creative producer Lee Romaire.
Director del Toro began with sketches, and Romaire translated them into dimensional, physical forms designed to live and breathe on the screen. Romaire’s story is not merely a behind-the-scenes anecdote. It is a window into the discipline and obsession that underpin truly revolutionary filmmaking, like Frankenstein, the kind the Academy ultimately honors.
Romaire’s fascination with realism began in the small Louisiana town where he grew up. After church on Sundays, he would rush home to watch black-and-white horror films: Frankenstein. The Wolf Man. Ray Harryhausen creatures moving in stop-motion, like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. And Lee Romaire didn’t just watch them. He studied them.
At eight years old, he taught himself taxidermy through a mail-order course. In Louisiana, mounted animals were commonplace. Fish on walls. Ducks in entryways. A neighbor showed him how to preserve a crawfish. That was enough. He became obsessed. “I taught myself,” Romaire says. “People started bringing me animals to work on. I had a small taxidermy business all through high school.”
That obsession became a way of life. When he later learned to sculpt, he recalls sitting for eighteen hours straight, getting up only to use the bathroom. Months of that discipline preceded his move to Hollywood.
“It doesn’t seem like work when you’re enjoying it,” he says.
Oscar-caliber films like Frankenstein are rarely the result of casual effort. They are built on just this kind of devotion. In fact, Romaire studied under Dick Smith, the Academy Award–winning makeup legend behind Marlon Brando’s transformation in The Godfather and Linda Blair’s possession in The Exorcist. Smith also mentored Guillermo del Toro.
The connective tissue between teacher and students spans decades of creative craftsmanship. When Romaire joined Frankenstein, it was through sculptor Mike Hill, a master likeness artist tasked with creating del Toro’s “creature” in the film.
Romaire’s contribution was focused on the animals in Frankenstein: wolves, sled dogs, and sheep. Each had to be historically accurate to the period of Mary Shelley’s novel. Modern huskies would not suffice. The sheep needed to resemble breeds that had not changed significantly in the past two centuries.
The animals also required stages of damage and gore to serve the narrative. Though Romaire’s current studio work often centers on theme park animatronics, Frankenstein demanded a return to visceral physicality.
His studio, Romaire Studios, typically scales from fifteen to more than fifty artists and engineers, depending on the project, often creating animatronic figures for Disney Imagineering and theme parks worldwide. For Frankenstein, however, the timeline was roughly 4 months, and the work was carried out by a smaller, highly specialized team.
Romaire speaks often about performance. Not actor performance, but mechanical and sculptural performance: the way something moves, the subtle exaggeration required to make realism feel truthful.
“It’s about studying life and knowing how to exaggerate things,” Romaire says. “It’s about what delivers a good performance.”
That philosophy mirrors del Toro’s own. In Frankenstein, the creature is not a spectacle. It is sorrow. The animals are not the background. They heighten the film’s emotional register. Most viewers will never consciously isolate that work. They will simply feel it.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein stands as a triumph not because of a singular auteur but because of collective artistry, executed with discipline and trust. Oscar season may spotlight the names above the title. But the film’s emotional gravity belongs equally to the sculptors, engineers, fabricators, and artists like Lee Romaire, whose invisible hands built Frankenstein into physical reality.
Amy Pais-Richer is REEL 360 News’ newest contributor. She is a published author and we are lucky to have her!
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