At movie awards ceremonies, most winners thank their stars, their agents, their significant others. Guillermo del Toro, during his victory lap earlier this year for “The Shape of Water,” thanked a teenager who had been dead for more than 150 years.

“So many times, when I want to give up, when I think about giving up,” he said onstage at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards in February, “I think of her.”

“She gave voice to the voiceless, and presence to the invisible,” he continued, “and showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own.”

Del Toro, the leading cinematic monster-maker of our time, was talking about Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein,” and not for the first time. Adapting the novel — begun when Shelley was only 18 — has long been a dream project for the director, who has called Victor Frankenstein’s nameless creation “the most beautiful and moving” of all monsters.