Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions

“TO ME,” GUILLERMO CONFESSES, “the beautiful thing about Bleak House is that when I come in and go out of the house, it is cleansing for me. Catholics go to church, Jews go to temple. I come here.”

He adds, “Spiritually, my life is here. I exist in this house, really.”

Bleak House is Guillermo’s second home and working office, his artistic masterpiece, his cluttered attic, his pride and joy. It’s where he goes to draw and write, to recharge his batteries, to explore unfettered his creative whims. When in Los Angeles and residing at his family’s home nearby, he visits Bleak House at least two hours every morning and one hour at night, seven days a week. He delights in giving tours to luminaries from around the globe, including other noted directors.

The moment you step inside, you are dazzled by the extent of the visual delights. Bleak House bursts with “over 550 pieces of original art,” Guillermo notes. In fact, Bleak House has recently grown, so extensive is the collection. What began as one house has now expanded to include a neighboring structure, which is still finding its own distinct identity. Like the first, it features Guillermo’s prize possessions. For instance, the second wing’s living room is filled with magnificent preproduction maquettes of creatures from Pacific Rim (2013), which are flanked by a stunning bronze by Stanislav Szukalski and a full-size replica of Robert Picardo’s Meg Mucklebones from Ridley Scott’s Legend.

“When I was a kid,” Guillermo says, “I read Vathek by William Beckford. In it, Fonthill Abbey was mentioned. That was his personal treasure: an entire building—or series of Gothic buildings—created to lodge his collection of strange artifacts, oddities, and scientific anomalies. He inherited an obscenely large fortune, so he was able to secure every treasure he could dream of. And dream he did. Within my means, I have also indulged in collecting. But I do it because it is the world as I understand it; as it exists in my soul.”

Guillermo is quick to point out that neither Bleak House is intended to be a museum or storehouse. Both homes are working spaces, with each room serving a different purpose. “For example, I have a room where I assemble models,” he says. “The reason is as banal as the fact that it is well-lit and is set up so I can put the actual place where I assemble the models close to a window. Because I need to ventilate when I prime. Otherwise I get really high.”

However, creative inspiration, not base practicality, is what Bleak House is made for. In the main house, Guillermo says, “The Rain Room is literally my favorite place. I spend 90 percent of my time at Bleak House there, writing. But my second favorite room is the Sun Room, the Manga Room, the cabin in the back. I love to draw there, more than in the real drawing room, which is upstairs, because the Manga Room has really good energy. It’s so peaceful.”

Sometimes, though, where Guillermo works is more a question of what feels right on any given day. “If I want to write a scary story, I don’t necessarily go into a scary room,” he explains. “If I want to write a light-hearted story, I don’t go into a light-hearted room. It’s just whatever feels comfortable on the day. I do most of my writing on sofas. I sit exactly like my mother—one leg under my other leg, leaning. I have every form of desk known to man—I collect them as objects—but I never write on a desk. Except for the desk in the Rain Room. I can put my elbow on an adjacent desk, so it’s comfortable.”

It’s hard not to wonder: Will Bleak House continue expanding until it consists of, not one or two structures, but an entire block? Guillermo says no. “Most of the time, it’s just my personal office,” he elaborates. “I don’t want to expand because I think it would be unfair to the house and the neighbors. It needs to remain a home.”

And what a home! A journey into Guillermo’s imaginative world would hardly be complete without a tour of one of the most remarkable residences in the world. Beckoning warmly, Guillermo bids us to accompany him into the hallways, rooms, and recesses of Bleak House….

THE FOYER

Entering the Foyer of Bleak House, the first thing that confronts you is an enormous head of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, fashioned by former Tussauds sculptor Mike Hill. Hill had considerable difficulty making the head that massive. It took numerous attempts to get the proportions right. But since this is one of Guillermo’s favorite monsters—along with the Gill-Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon and Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera—it was no surprise that Guillermo snapped up the sculpture when it was exhibited at Monsterpalooza in 2011 and installed it in his home.

On one wall above the entryway are prints of Manhattan in troll language from Hellboy II: The Golden Army (“because,” he says, “the conceit was that the Troll Market was underneath the Brooklyn Bridge”). Taking center stage is a full-size figure of the demon Sammael from Hellboy, made for Guillermo by Spectral Motion.

Throughout Bleak House, other original props, concept art, storyboards, and preproduction maquettes from Guillermo’s films have been carefully selected and artfully scattered, but they do not dominate the collection. Were Guillermo to house everything designed and built for his films, he’d need a series of warehouses rivaling Charles Foster Kane’s. Instead, only those mementos from Guillermo’s films that hold a special fondness or significance for him are included among the wealth of glittering objects.

Certain artists make regular appearances throughout the house. A perennial favorite is Basil Gogos, the famed cover artist for the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. His portrait of Guillermo is featured prominently in Bleak House’s entryway.

Dominating another wall is a large painting of Saint George killing the dragon that looks old but is actually a recent painting by Russian artist Viktor Safonkin. It holds special significance for Guillermo: “It’s one of my favorite images: (a) it speaks of impossible tasks, (b) it’s a great image because of the way the dragon is rendered.”

Guillermo adds, “I love dragons. They are my favorite fantasy creatures and are the most beautiful animals in all of mythology.” He cites a theory he likes, articulated by David E. Jones in An Instinct for Dragons, that proposes the dragon “is an imaginary amalgam we, as a species of primates, made from the predators we feared the most—the reptiles, the birds of prey, and the big cats.”

THE HORROR LIBRARY

To the right of the Foyer is one of Bleak House’s many libraries, where a full-size—and utterly convincing—figure of H. P. Lovecraft stands perusing a volume. Lovecraft is one of Guillermo’s most cherished icons, a spiritual godfather, and Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is Guillermo’s most-longed-for, unmade film project.

The Lovecraft statue was sculpted by Thomas Kuebler. “I had it commissioned,” Guillermo says. “I approved every stage of the sculpt. People think his likeness is very easy; it’s actually very difficult. He has a few quirks, the fold by the mouth, the lantern jaw. They can be cartoonish.”

The Lovecraft figure stands watch over Guillermo’s beloved books on horror, including the first book he ever bought—an anthology edited by Forrest J Ackerman, which Guillermo purchased in 1971 when he was seven. The Horror Library is filled with classic stories by such outré and macabre authors as Arthur Machen, M. R. James, and Sheridan Le Fanu. “Everything that is in Spanish means that I bought it when I was very young,” Guillermo explains. Ravenous for knowledge, Guillermo began teaching himself English as soon as he could, so he could read more broadly: “I was very young. I was less than ten, and I was bilingual. I started with a dictionary and all the movies from America, which were subtitled, not dubbed.”

In the Horror Library, Prince Nuada’s sword from Hellboy II rests quietly a few feet away from the baby bug prop from Mimic. “And that’s one of the real Golden Army soldiers, life-size,” Guillermo says. “Next to it is the chopped-up head from Blade II.” Another familiar figure from Guillermo’s oeuvre stands out. “That’s the first concept maquette ever done of Hellboy,” Guillermo notes. “That was done by Matt Rose. And this is the Cronos device on one of the silicone hands we used in the movie.”

Guillermo avidly collects items from cherished movies and TV shows, including the Devil figure featured in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. “That’s my favorite character in the whole movie,” Guillermo says. Scattered throughout the room are also visual touchstones from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Phantom of the Opera, Lost in Space, and Night Gallery. The replica figure of Baron Boris von Frankenstein, based on Boris Karloff, from the stop-motion-animated Mad Monster Party was made for him by the animation crew on Blade II.

This library also holds a miniature scene from Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Disney, in particular, has been a towering influence on Guillermo. But to really appreciate that, we need to stroll down the hallway and find a certain bookcase, which slides to reveal a secret room….

THE DOWNSTAIRS HALLWAY

The downstairs hallway of Bleak House is lined with a cornucopia of wonders, gathering together framed insects, cameos, nineteenth-century anatomical drawings, a fake mummified rabbit, weird objets d’art, and stunning artwork. These pieces include concept art for Sleeping Beauty by famed children’s illustrator Kay Nielsen, original work by science fiction and horror illustrator Michael Whelan, and illustrations by Charles Doyle, the father of Arthur Conan Doyle.

“These are my magic books,” Guillermo says, pointing to tomes on the art of illusion, prestidigitation, and misdirection from across several centuries. Then he gestures toward a row of busts depicting famed magicians: “And these are Thurston, Houdini, Chung Ling Soo.”

Favorite works of literature also line the shelves—volumes by Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others.

Guillermo indicates a large framed insect. “That’s the bug I bought as a kid when I first visited New York. I always wanted to use it in a movie, and it ended up in Pan’s Labyrinth.”

Nearby are other touchstones of Guillermo’s life. “This is my grandmother’s cameo, which I’ve used as a prop in a couple of movies, and which I want to use again in Crimson Peak. And this is the first model kit I painted as a kid, Pirates of the Caribbean.”

THE HAUNTED MANSION ROOM

“I first went to Disneyland when I was three years old,” Guillermo recalls. “It was life-changing for me. My mind became what it is. I’m a big Disney fan. I believe the man changed the way we tell stories. He was doing transmedia before anybody talked about transmedia.”

The Haunted Mansion Room—also called the Fairy Tales and Folk Tales Library—replicates many elements from Disney’s unique attraction, including the wallpaper from the mansion’s foyer by Bradbury and Bradbury, gargoyle sconces, and Marc Davis’s original acrylic painting of Medusa. Also notable is the life-size figure of the Hatbox Ghost, a ghost no longer seen on the ride. “It was on the Haunted Mansion for only a few days, then they took it down,” Guillermo relates. “The legend was that it was too scary. The reality is, it wasn’t working.”

Recently, Guillermo committed to make a new film version of the Haunted Mansion: “With Disney, when I took Haunted Mansion, one of my conditions was that they would let me tour the mansion by foot and that they would open the vault, so we could see all the preproduction art by Marc Davis and Rolly Crump and all the Imagineers. So we did. I spent the morning there like a kid. Amazing stuff.”

Guillermo had Spectral Motion construct “The Ghost Theater,” which resides here. It’s a miniature tableau of a ghost whose head vanishes from his shoulders and reappears in a hatbox, while thunder rumbles and music from the Haunted Mansion ride plays. Guillermo has long been a fan of dioramas. As a child, he built a sprawling scene in his walk-in closet from Planet of the Apes, with sixty-five figures, AstroTurf, and an illuminated moon.

“That was, in many ways, my first Bleak House,” recalls Guillermo. “I art directed that room within an inch of its life. Back then I had drawers full of Plasticine props and ‘makeup effects’ for the action figures: prosthetic wounds or gouged eyes; set dressings; monsters; horses; and a slew of Russ Berrie jigglers (my favorite toys growing up). I mended, patched, and repaired everything as needed. I still do! I keep my ‘hospital’ at Bleak House busy, repainting, gluing, or patching anything that breaks in the house. I am pretty good at restoring toys, statuettes, and books in equal measure.” The dark corners of this room are havens for all sorts of eerie things, but some Guillermo found in unlikely places. For instance, he stumbled upon a macabre illustration of death on a horse, subtitled Sooner or Later, in a Hallmark store.

Presiding over the Haunted Mansion Room is a mask of Algernon Blackwood, one of Guillermo’s favorite horror writers. Nearby, the collected Oz books by L. Frank Baum and Arabian Nights mingle with a sign from the Troll Market used in Hellboy II, along with miscellaneous limbs from Guillermo’s films. “This is the hand made for the Prince in Hellboy II, for a close-up with the mechanical egg,” he says. “That’s the leg from Cronos, where he pulls the glass out of the foot.”

Look closely and you can find more personal, less ghoulish talismans, such as Guillermo’s first studio drive-on pass. “This is from my first meeting at a studio for a job—Universal. That would be 1992, ’93.”

Though most items from Guillermo’s films are judiciously placed and “not prominent,” he says, there is one artifact that is given pride of place in the Haunted Mansion Room: the original design for Santi from The Devil’s Backbone. Says Guillermo: “It was important to me for him to be here.”

THE RAIN ROOM

The Rain Room is the house’s heart, for it holds Guillermo’s heart. It is where he comes most often to write, on the big comfy sofa or at the corner desk. Beside the desk is a list of “things I have pending, things that I need to write,” Guillermo says. “I fill it up, and then I sit down and start hammering them out. It’s really ideal working this way. I usually write in the dark. It helps a lot.”

As he enters the tenebrous space, Guillermo flicks a switch. Thunder rumbles and rain from a projector cascades outside a perennially night-lit window. The illusion is perfect and sets the stage for what lies within.

“This is also my library of occult references,” Guillermo explains. Included are volumes of the landmark set Man, Myth, and Magic. “When I was a kid, it was very important.”

As inspiring as the books are, it’s difficult to tear one’s attention away from the lifelike sculptures that inhabit the room. Most dramatic of all is the astonishing re-creation of one of the greatest on-set photos ever: of Boris Karloff, bare to the waist in a makeup chair, his head fully detailed as Frankenstein’s monster, daintily sipping a cup of tea. In the Rain Room, this surreal moment has come to life: a life-size silicone statue of Karloff takes his tea break, the black lipstick from his makeup staining the cup as he drinks. “I love the detail of the cup and the lips,” notes Guillermo.

Attending Karloff is a sculpture of the genius makeup artist Jack Pierce, designer of Frankenstein’s monster, his Bride, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the silver-eyed, blue-skinned replicants from Creation of the Humanoids.

A replica of the doll from Night Gallery, sculpted by Thomas Kuebler, also graces this chamber. “The scariest moment of my life is that doll,” recalls Guillermo. “When she appeared on the screen, I literally—physically, biologically—peed my pants. I started screaming and lost control of my bladder.” Joining it are a cane and helmet from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a cover painting from Famous Monsters of Filmland, and stunning illustrations from Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein. All are originals.

A custom-made box holds stereoscopic photographs of the maquettes from the as-yet-unmade At the Mountains of Madness, a memento of eight months of intense artistic development and preproduction planning. The original sculptures are too large for the Rain Room. “I’d need a whole Lovecraft room—which I’ll build if we make the movie,” says Guillermo.

The Rain Room also displays the original Good Samaritan gun from Hellboy and Big Baby from Hellboy II, along with Kroenen’s mask and Professor Broom’s rosary.

Not every memento and artwork on the walls recalls the occult. “That’s by a painter from my hometown,” Guillermo explains, indicating a serene painting. “That’s exactly how the light falls in the afternoon in the area where I had my office. So it brings great memories from home.”

And why a room with a storm that goes on forever? “It makes me happy,” Guillermo says. “That’s all I know. I just love the sound.”

CASA DEL TORO ^{JOHN LANDIS}

FORREST J. ACKERMAN, the creator and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, lived in a big house in the Hollywood Hills known as the “Ackermansion.” There he worked surrounded by his huge collection of books, cinema posters, stills, and movie props. Visiting Forry’s house was a pilgrimage made by thousands of fans over the years, including a certain young Mexican whose visit clearly made a deep impression.

My friend Guillermo del Toro’s passion and enthusiasm for fantasy, horror, and science fiction burns as brightly now as it did when he was a child in Guadalajara. And like the five-year-old Guillermo, who read Famous Monsters of Filmland and made models of monsters to decorate his room, the adult Guillermo continues to create and collect images of the fantastic.

Guillermo now lives with his beautiful wife and daughters in a very nice home in a lovely neighborhood in Southern California. Just a couple of blocks away is another respectable suburban house in which his very large and constantly expanding collection of strange and wonderful objects—books, paintings, drawings, toys, movie props, sculptures, intricate clockwork dolls, and wax figures—dwells. A plaque on the front door reads “Bleak House.”

From the exterior of Bleak House, the only hint of what is inside would be the full-scale working replica of the satanic automobile from the insane 1977 Universal picture The Car, which is parked in the driveway. And there is that life-size bronze of the great Ray Harryhausen standing by the swimming pool in the backyard.

Guillermo’s own notebooks, which he has meticulously kept for many years, reveal the complex del Toro thought process and aesthetic. Drawings, diagrams, and ideas recorded in da Vinci-like detail. And like his notebooks, his collection is in constant evolution. There are works by famous painters, production designers, illustrators, prop makers, and makeup artists; one-of-a-kind statues of every size; mass-market action figures; and garage kits. Every classic monster is represented, plus denizens from Guillermo’s own films and many creatures that only exist within the walls of Bleak House.

There is an entire room to honor the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland. It is filled with Haunted Mansion memorabilia and, like the original, is rigged so that it is always a dark and stormy night outside its windows. A dark and stormy night complete with lightning, thunder, and rain!

Guillermo was an early patron of the extraordinary sculptor Mike Hill, who created the amazingly lifelike, full-scale tableau of Boris Karloff sipping tea while being transformed into the Frankenstein monster by makeup maestro Jack Pierce. Hill’s work is disturbingly realistic, as is the work of Thomas Kuebler, whose sculpture of the midget Hans from Todd Browning’s Freaks lurks at the end of a long hallway. Kuebler posed this exact duplicate of actor Harry Earles so that he is holding an open straight razor. Trust me, this is not something you want to stumble on unawares.

Guillermo’s fascination with the work and career of men like H. P. Lovecraft, Walt Disney, and Ray Harryhausen is profound, and his collection is a riot of both high and low culture. He has taken the inspiration of Forry’s Ackermansion and created Bleak House, his own private kingdom filled with items both sacred and profane. That Mexican kid has grown up into an author, artist, and world-class filmmaker. Forry would be proud.

THE ART ROOM

As everywhere, the Art Room contains items both expected and unexpected. True to its name, this is where Guillermo keeps books on art and photography; one cabinet also holds biographies. Guillermo ticks off the accretions gathered from auction catalogues and galleries around the world, then he points to a sculpture and explains, “This is a Victorian casting of an old lady’s skull made in bronze. These are masonic lenses, to read their secret documents.”

A few items from Guillermo’s own work are sprinkled into the room’s arrangement. “This is the Abe Sapien box in Hellboy,” he notes, “and that’s a mask for Hellboy II that was never used in the movie.” Nearby rest the seed that hatches the elemental in Hellboy II and a maquette of an albino penguin for the as-yet-unmade At the Mountains of Madness.

Throughout the house, these juxtapositions and arrangements provide tangible evidence of the dance in Guillermo’s life between his inspirations and formative experiences and what he himself creates. These influences span from childhood to the present day. “This is the original art by Richard Corben for a poster I had on my wall as a kid,” Guillermo points out. “I really loved it, and I hoped to one day own the original art.”

The guardian of the Art Room is Thomas Kuebler’s hyper-realistic sculpture of Johnny Eck from Tod Browning’s Freaks. Though in its totality the house seems filled with spirits and presence, Guillermo says this was literally true for one particular object: “This cabinet came with a ghost. It was here for a while. So my mother cleansed the house, and now it’s gone.”

THE STEAMPUNK ROOM

Adjacent to the Art Room is what Guillermo calls the Steampunk Room. Here, he gestures to another familiar figure from Freaks: “That’s Koo Koo the Bird Girl.” Nearby is Hans, the homicidal dwarf, from the same movie, both sculpted by Thomas Kuebler.

The Steampunk Room contains a supernatural bestiary: Along with a figure of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and a morlock from George Pal’s The Time Machine is a superb figure of Oliver Reed as the Werewolf, from the Hammer Films production. “My favorite werewolf in history,” Guillermo notes. “Roy Ashton’s design is almost like a cubist painter’s. It has that square head. There’s something ridiculously beautiful about it. And savage—Oliver Reed is an animal.”

Here, too, are Hellboy’s original coat and Rasputin’s robe from Hellboy, plus art by Mike Mignola for Pan’s Labyrinth. Prints by the brilliant French artist Moebius grace the wall and more art books line the shelves. “At the bottom,” notes Guillermo, “are all the symbolists,” and perhaps most important of all, “the encyclopedia of art I read as a kid.”

Two more of Guillermo’s heroes have strong presences here—James Whale and Ray Harryhausen. “This is an original drawing by James Whale,” Guillermo comments. “And that’s a brush from his paint kit.”

A sweep of his hand takes in model kits, a skull clock from the 1700s, Japanese netsukes, representations of the Gill-Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon, and finally an odd little container—a vial of blood from Steve Brudniak, an artist who sells his own blood as art. “We all do,” Guillermo notes.

THE STUDIO

Guillermo renovated Bleak House’s garage to serve as his art studio, where a quote from Albert Einstein sets the tone: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

The Studio is the most utilitarian of all the rooms in Bleak House. It’s where Guillermo invites concept artists to work together on his projects. “Normally it’s empty,” Guillermo notes. “But when I bring people in for preproduction, it can accommodate up to eight artists without any problem.”

On display in this room are some of Guillermo’s many awards—“The Hugos, the Nebula, Mexican Oscars,…”—along with mementos from fellow filmmakers. Of one, he remarks, “This is a letter from Miyazaki, thanking me for a book I sent him.”

However, most of the inspirational items in the Studio are meant to be directly related to the work at hand: storyboards and concept art from Guillermo’s films, which line the walls in greater quantity here than in the rest of the house. There is art from Cronos, Devil’s Backbone, Mimic, Hellboy, Hellboy II, and more. An illustration from Pan’s Labyrinth bears the inscription “In our choices lies our fate.” Maquettes and props are scattered about, along with terrific presentation boards from the unmade At the Mountains of Madness. Indicating a figure, Guillermo comments, “That’s one of the guards from Hellboy II with a crushable head, so you can see the dented portions. Mr. Wink grabs it and crushes it. So we had a wire inside. You pull that, and the head crushes in.”

The framed insignia from Guillermo’s company, Mirada, is prominently featured: “We wanted to make it sort of a baroque little piece that has death, rebirth, imagination represented by imaginary animals, octopuses—which we all like—and dragons. The owl is the gaze and the wisdom to look at things a different way. The company name, Mirada, means ‘the gaze.’”

THE STAIRCASE

At the far end of the Foyer, a winding staircase leads to the second floor. Upstairs are the Screening Room and the Comic Book Library. As we reach the landing, Guillermo points to an image and says, “This is the first concept drawing of Hellboy we ever did.” Next to it are illustrations by classic fantasy illustrator Hannes Bok, an original cel from the landmark 1914 Winsor McCay cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur, and a Ron Cobb design for Aliens, which was given to Guillermo by James Cameron. Continuing the Alien theme is artwork by H. R. Giger.

As in other areas, standing guard is a Thomas Kuebler sculpture from Freaks. This one is a life-size figure of Schlitzie. “This is my favorite, probably, because it usually puts me in a very good mood,” notes Guillermo. “I need to be very grumpy for it not to work.”

Two other notable items are originals of the posters Drew Struzan did for Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth, which were released only as limited editions. “The studios didn’t want to use them,” explains Guillermo. “I think Drew is a genius. Such a shame the marketing departments have their own ideas.”

THE SCREENING ROOM

Indeed, the primary function of the Screening Room is to watch films, but it is also a shrine to Guillermo’s favorite filmmakers—a place where he can come to study and be inspired by their work. In particular, Hitchcock and Disney, Guillermo’s eternal favorites, vie for wall space: “Everything on the wall is original art from Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad….”

The books in this room are predominantly biographies and retrospectives of four directors Guillermo holds in the highest esteem—Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, and Luis Buñuel. “I also have some texts on Kurosawa,” he elaborates. “What I try to do is, before I watch a movie, I read a little bit about it.”

Guillermo owns film prints of only two movies—Cronos and Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise—which are housed in their film cans beside a vintage Chinese desk.

An original Virgil Finlay illustration from Weird Tales hangs on the wall alongside Mike Mignola’s first drawing of Abe Sapien for Hellboy. The concept maquette of Mr. Wink from Hellboy II sits side by side with a figurine of the Gill-Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon. “Second-greatest monster ever made,” Guillermo proclaims.

Nearby, incongruently, is a figure of Jesus. “It’s a Jesus that was in my house when I was a kid,” Guillermo explains. “It’s a pretty gory Jesus. Pretty brutal, but his face is so serene. This explains a lot.”

THE COMIC BOOK LIBRARY

Though he has a library dedicated to them, Guillermo admits, “Every closet in the house has comics.” He’s read all of them, but he tends not to buy publications of recent vintage: “I only buy the new collected editions of Dick Tracy, the Spirit, or Little Lulu.”

Covering the walls are more originals by Mignola, Corben, Wayne Barlowe, Mike Kaluta, and Gahan Wilson. “The final pages of Alan Moore’s From Hell are over there,” gestures Guillermo. Then he notes, “This is one of the last drawings Charles Doyle did.” Doyle was a popular illustrator who went mad and was sent to a mental institution, where he continued to draw until his death in 1893.

Atop a drawing table rests a strange, furry creature. “It’s a toy from when I was kid,” Guillermo exults. “It’s an action figure of an insect warrior. I started collecting vinyl art long before people were into it. This is a real toy. It’s not a postmodern reflection. Somebody said, ‘This would make a great toy.’”

THE BACKYARD

The backyard shared by the two wings of Bleak House is surprisingly sunny and pleasant, and Guillermo admits he doesn’t work here. “I don’t like the outside. But I like sitting here in the shade, just enjoying the silence.”

In truth, Guillermo wishes he had gnarled trees like those his neighbors down the block have planted. A bit of Victorian topiary would lend a more somber mood to Bleak House’s yard and complement the rest of the decor.

But that’s a dream to be realized another day. For now, the backyard is a serene place where Guillermo can contemplate his next projects in the company of a life-size bronze sculpture of Ray Harryhausen, one of his creative patron saints.

One final question remains: Was this exactly the house he wanted when he was a kid?

“Yes,” Guillermo affirms, “if I ever finish….”

MSZ: Your work involves such a melding of influences. Is there a specific fine artist that you might say is your favorite?

GDT: Well, the guy I connect with most viscerally is Francisco Goya because I just find him incredibly powerful.

But I love the symbolists and I love some of the surrealists. Of the symbolists, I love Marcel Schwob, Félicien Rops, Odilon Redon. I was very influenced by Rops. And I love Mexican symbolist artists. I have two original drawings at Bleak House by an artist named Julio Ruelas. He did one of my favorite engravings. I have it right in the entrance. It’s called The Critics, and it is a self-portrait where Ruelas has a parasite with a long beak and a top hat on his head.

Ruelas was really incredible. He was influenced by Arnold Böcklin, who is another favorite of mine, but he was also influenced by Félicien Rops. Ruelas is very lewd, but he’s also very sensual and sort of a necrophiliac. He is a very strange guy. One of his drawings that influenced everything I do is called Profane Pieta, and it’s a crucifixion with the virgin at the foot of the cross. It looks like a really great religious illustration. You can show it to your grandmother, and she’ll go, “Oh, what a beautiful religious painting.”

But then, if you observe carefully, Christ has an erection—the shadow of death has taken him over—and the virgin has one breast out and a snake is suckling or biting her. I learned from this painting that you can make things with one apparent surface meaning and have them work as a symbolist piece that is completely counter, depending on the way you organize the symbols. I was fascinated by that drawing. I discovered it when I was sixteen or seventeen, and it had a big impact on me.

After that, I started to really get into the methodology of how to read a painting, and I started to appreciate the little symbols that medieval and Renaissance portraits would use, the symbology in Gothic cathedrals. And then I got into alchemy. My mind has always been guided by curiosity.

MSZ: With respect to the symbolists, you really can see resonances from those guys, such as Redon and Rops, in a lot of the visual elements that you explore.

GDT: Yeah, Redon and his feathered eyes. Fantastic. Proto-symbolist, actually.

MSZ: He’s an interesting bridge between the symbolists and the Pre-Raphaelites just in terms of his style.

GDT: I’m also fascinated by the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites and their ideas. They certainly are very interesting characters that start with the same spirit and, as you read about their lives, they get co-opted by the society that they set out to overturn. It’s a very interesting artistic moment.

MSZ: Why, then, do the symbolists have more power than the Pre-Raphaelites for you?

GDT: To me, the Pre-Raphaelites are more surface driven. More superficial. Vanity and aesthetics eventually overpower their spirituality and otherworldly power. The symbolists, on the other hand, tried to organize stuff, like medieval painters did—where they would organize every detail in a painting to tell a story. Like a portrait of a young woman—she would be holding a peach, which would represent the ephemeral nature of beauty. Because the peach rots very fast. Then, by the same token, there would be flowers. And there would be a skull. They would organize things so you would read the painting. But the symbolists take all that much further. And they start bringing in elements of subterranean eroticism, buried, unconscious desires. In some ways, they prefigure Dada and Surrealism in that they tap into concepts and ideas and spirituality but are driven by impulse!

MSZ: I see them as an arrow right into your work because your work puts beauty and sensitivity right alongside grotesquerie and death. You don’t sugarcoat stuff.

GDT: That’s what surprises me a lot when I read reviews of my work. I read one criticism on Pan’s Labyrinth in which somebody said, “Well, it’s a very simple dichotomy. Fantasy is beautiful, real life is hard.” And I thought, What movie did they watch? The fantasy in Pan’s Labyrinth, except for the ending, is super grimy. The fairies are these little imps that are dirty, naked, and kind of evil looking. The Faun is incredibly ambivalent, even menacing. I cannot think of the frog as a pleasant piece of fantasy. Or, much less so, the Pale Man. And having to feed the mandrake with blood, and the fetal implications of the mandrake? I mean, I tried to make the fantasy as gritty as reality because that’s what it’s supposed to be.

When you seek beauty only within a world of perfection, you end up with illustrations of fairies dressed in pink tutus, sprinkling dust, with cherubic babies and a flower garden. And then the images really, in my mind, don’t have any weight, any gravity. But when you have seen something horrible and you choose to create something beautiful, the work comes out with a hefty weight, and I think that’s why I like Rops, who was undoubtedly a guy who was tragic and fascinated by war, tragedy, destruction, and sex. He creates something beautiful out of that.

MSZ: The feeling with Rops is that he really indulged in a lot of vices.

GDT: Such was the life of the bohemians and the life of the symbolists. They would explore pleasure no matter what the consequences. After a certain moment in the history of art, the artist and the work become indivisible. For example, you can see the essence of Van Gogh in his paintings.

MSZ: That goes for Goya, too, at least in his later work. The interesting thing about him is his duality—he did these beautiful court images, the portraits, and then he finds his real power in all the grotesquerie.

GDT: With Goya, you really have a compulsion. He is literally chronicling the compulsions within him, the darkest phase of his life. The engravings and the “black” paintings are such a contrast to the luminous paintings, the court paintings, and all the parties in the garden. I don’t like the colors in those in the same way that I’m not attracted to Renoir because I find him too colorful. I’m attracted to pale—for example, Édouard Manet. I’m very much attracted to pale palettes or dark palettes.

MSZ: You’ve talked before about how on Blade II you were influenced by Caravaggio and chiaroscuro.

GDT: I wish, [laughs] I was trying for a very deep saturation of colors and dense blacks and I discussed Caravaggio with Gabriel Beristain, the cinematographer on Blade II, because he had shot Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. So we talked about chiaroscuro quite a bit. He said, “A lot of people think that chiaroscuro is just about creating one source of light, and the rest is darkness. But it really is incredibly thoughtful and very, very regimented and a very calculated, painterly approach.” In the same way, nothing is casual in Vermeer. A lot of people think, Vermeer is going to he a big window with soft light streaming in and certain textures, silk, and plaster walls. But, really, all those guys codified their paintings and approached painting and light very carefully.

Too, there is a narrative quality to the art. There was a moment when art made it very clear, as we approached the modern concept of art, that there was a refutation of the narrative in art, and this function was given over to mere “illustration.” Some people I admire, like Edward Hopper, are constantly demeaned as “just a great illustrator.”

MSZ: When discussing Blade II, you’ve also referenced Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. I don’t know if you know the story, but she is actually a crippled girl, and the only way she can get around is by crawling. So while a lot of people see Christina’s World as a very idyllic image, there’s actually a grotesquerie to it.

GDT: Christina’s World can never be confused with a mere illustration. What I always say is that illustration is a piece of art that doesn’t tell you a story. It needs the text to complete it. It’s incomplete art. Christina’s World, though, is a world unto itself.

I try to do the same in film. I always say that 50 percent of storytelling is “eye protein,” which is very different than eye candy. They look the same to the untrained eye, but they are fundamentally different. A master of eye protein, especially in his early films, is Ridley Scott. Half of why Blade Runner is important is not in the screenplay or the story.

MSZ: A moment ago you were talking about how the artists you tend to gravitate toward have somewhat muted palettes. But Blade Runner and your films have very bright palettes. Yours in particular are supersaturated, making them almost like comic books.

GDT: It’s true. The films I’m the proudest of are the Hellboys, Pan’s, Devil’s Backbone, and Pacific Rim. I think they are absolutely beautiful to look at. I try to work with very contrasted palettes in the movies and in the design of the monsters, and sometimes it works really well.

I base a lot of my color composition on a primary clash between blue or cyan and gold or amber. This over a thick layer of blacks and then the rest of the colors come in an absolutely punctilious, obsessive manner. I am particularly careful with red. I use it only in calculated ways. Even on Hellboy.

But if you look at Devil’s Backbone, the film is saturated, but it is divided into almost monochromatic episodes. And Cronos is very controlled. Pan’s Labyrinth, too, has a really controlled palette, although it is saturated.

I’m attracted to and influenced by some things that I don’t do. For example, I was always fascinated by a translucency of the skin. Many, many artists, going back to the Middle Ages, depict a translucency of the skin. There is a fascination with pale skin in European art that, for me, is really attractive. And there’s a moment where it becomes almost iridescent. There’s a hue of green, an almost fishlike quality in certain paintings that has had a huge influence on me. But I don’t know if that’s come through in the movies. I’ve tried.

MSZ: We’ve just covered quite a lot of Western art history. Your parents had art books in your home when you were a kid, and you were able to look at the entire history of art, right? It’s very interesting. You were really studying a lot of different styles and soaking up a lot of different influences at the same time.

GDT: Yeah. And at the same time, I was reading comic books by Bernie Wrightson, Jack Kirby, and John Romita Sr.

MSZ: In contrast with some of the fine artists you gravitated toward, those guys were dealing with extremely vivid colors, extremely vivid expressions. With respect to Bernie Wrightson, was it Swamp Thing?

GDT: Yeah, I never bought many superhero comics. I used to buy House of Secrets, House of Mystery.

So I have a very strange mix of art, movies, books, and magazines. I don’t like compartmentalizing. The mind is flexible. If you are rigid and you say, “I am a scientist,” or, even worse, “I am a nuclear scientist, and that’s my only area of interest,” it’s a tragedy. Or “I’m a serious literate. I’m a serious writer. I’m a serious filmmaker. I do only drama.” Obviously, you can find an amazing range in drama, but by not being rigid you really discover things and end up enjoying yourself.

As an artist, I think that you have to be as free as a kid: In the morning you can be an astronaut; in the afternoon an Indian or a cowboy; and at nightfall an Antarctic explorer. And you play, enjoy, and grow. Inevitably as you play, you grow.

MSZ: Let’s talk, then, about how you started drawing—how you started synthesizing all these influences and finding a voice that was your own.

GDT: Well, I started drawing very young because I was illustrating my horror stories. But the three creatures I drew obsessively were the Gill-Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Frankenstein monster, and Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. But obsessively—when I was eating ice cream, or on a bicycle….

I remember there was a panel by Jack Kirby, from the period when he was doing Etrigan the Demon for DC. It was a story about Farley Fairfax, who was an actor who got his face taken by a demon, and Kirby quoted from Phantom of the Opera. The original art, which I always wanted to buy, is in the hands of Mike Mignola, and he constantly tortures me with that fact. But that panel of Farley Fairfax—his mouth open, his eyes, and the tongue—and he’s saying, either in that panel or shortly thereafter, he says, “He took my face! He took my face!” Oh, I drew that panel like a Lichtenstein. I mean, I drew it small, I drew it big.

MSZ: How old were you when you started drawing?

GDT: As far back as I can remember.

MSZ: And was it always in color?

GDT: No, no. I did all the doodles, and all the little balls and sticks and all that stuff, in black and white. But color was very important because I’m very attracted to color, instinctively.

MSZ: So when you first started working with color, was it with crayons or markers?

GDT: I’ve always hated crayons because I hate the texture. What I did with crayons was eat them, like every kid. I loved the taste of crayons when I was a kid. But I always drew with colored pencils. I find them very soft. Now, if I had the time, I would do alcohol markers all the time because that’s such a gentle medium.

MSZ: And where did you get your color sense from? It’s very strong.

GDT: I think it’s expressive. The colors of youth are gold, blue, and white. Those are the colors of hope and untainted promise. Then, to me, cyan is always a very subterranean color. And death is black, revenge is red, and tarnished gold or blue for memories. But it varies from picture to picture. They all dictate their own palette.

I taught myself to mix colors because I started painting models when I was a very young kid. So I was assembling models, all these monsters.

Part of me dreams of what would have been if I had become an illustrator. There is a saying, “Those who can’t draw, render.” And I can’t draw. I really am a self-taught guy, so my drawings are very deficient, and the way you mask a deficiency in a drawing is by overrendering, so what you see in the notebooks are not very good drawings.

MSZ: You’re really skilled, though. Did you ever take classes as a kid?

GDT: Well, the ones at school. But I was always drawing the wrong things, so I never got good grades on that, because they always found the subjects objectionable. For example, they would say, “Choose a moment in the life of this president and make it in clay.” And I would do the president when he was shot in the head, with blood on the table.

When some people saw my drawings and my paintings, they told my mother, “You’ve got to take this kid to a psychologist.” And she took me to a psychologist, and the guy gave me some clay and he said, “Do whatever you want.” And I did a skeleton. And then I asked the psychologist, “What does ‘bastard’ mean?” That didn’t help my case.

But I was truly—I mean, I knew stuff when I was a kid that I just don’t know how I knew. There are proclivities in my life that I just don’t try to understand.

GUILLERMO’S MUSINGS ON SYMBOLIST ART

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN partial to the symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite artists, because they go against the avant-garde. To them, the past was a source of awe and mystery. But unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, the symbolists also cast their gaze inward to find the root of the stain on the human soul: lust, violence, corruption. They connect our human impulses—good and bad—with the mystical, mythical, and supernatural elements that represent them in art (for example, satyrs, skulls, centaurs, demons) and in that they are, in my opinion, truly modern and timeless.

There are a few key words to understand the symbolist movement: paganism, mysticism, Romanticism, and decadence. Not all artists in the movement share these in equal measure. Félicien Rops fits decadence perfectly, Carlos Schwabe embodies paganism quite well, Redon tended toward mysticism, and Arnold Böcklin ascribed, without a doubt, to Romanticism.

I first became aware of the symbolist movement through a Mexican artist who was not exactly a contemporary of Rops, but rather a spiritual twin: Julio Ruelas (1870–1907), a multitalented artist obsessed with two of the symbolists’ staple themes: sex and death. In the late 1970s, while walking through a flea market in Puebla, Mexico, an art book with a startling cover caught my eye: a forensically detailed oil painting of a drowned satyr being pulled out of a river. Its body was purplish and bloated and its tongue hung loosely to the side. The book was Teresa del Conde’s monograph on Ruelas, which to this day is the best, if not the only, authoritative source of Ruelas lore.

Although he is not formally considered part of the school, Ruelas is a bona fide symbolist and his work seems heavily influenced by Rops, to the point that they share some shockingly similar vignettes and tend to gravitate toward a consistent array of imagery and themes: blind faith, Circe, satyrs, Socrates.

FÉLICIEN ROPS (1833–1898)

I was first exposed to Rops when in Cannes promoting Cronos in 1993. A young French critic urged me to seek him out so, while staying in a crappy hotel in Paris, I bought a book or two on Rops and was blown away by his sensibility.

The similarities between Rops and Ruelas made it all click for me. The nineteenth century was a period of enormous moral contrast. Nobility, honor, and good manners, all of which were supported by the “academic” art of the age, started to be sabotaged by a wild and perverse notion: that life was full of pagan pleasures and savage impulses. Our flesh made us weaker, yes, but it also made us human.

Sex for these artists is a savage, almost demonic, task. And none of them is more accurate in portraying the hopelessness of male desire than Rops. In his paintings are abundant, detailed, and deformed genitalia that stand side by side with images of death, evil, and decay. Like his century, Rops was a prisoner of dread and desire.

It is a fact that sex and politics go hand in hand, and Rops was also blessed with a sharp satirical eye that yielded some of the best political cartoons of the time—all of them mordant portrayals of the changing social climate. Incessantly drawing, etching, and painting, Rops strived to capture a “tainted” century where the entitlements of royalty and the excuses of nobility were about to be supplanted by more mundane rights and ambitions.

Savage and sensuous as his themes may be, Rops’s line work is supremely elegant—even exquisite. His use of drypoint is testament to the precision of his draftsmanship.

ARNOLD BÖCKLIN (1827–1901)

Bocklin’s treatment of light has always fascinated me. The way he captures the soft, dying sunlight and uses it to cast deep, ominous shadows in his forests and rocky outcrops is exquisite. The jewel-like quality that his overcast skies confer to the green ocean waves is mesmerizing.

Böcklin’s superb technique makes his creatures and landscapes seem absolutely real. Hooves, roots, glazed eyes, and fur all appear to be accurate depiction of actual, living things. Look at any of his beasts and you will see that their eyes are wild and stunned by instinct, their bodies sensual but animalistic, their mouths agape and lubricated. They all have the strength and savagery that I associate with Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and—in the case of Böcklin’s sea creatures—with H. P. Lovecraft.

If Rops excelled at portraying the human form, then Böcklin is the single most gifted landscape artist of the symbolist movement and the best at creating a sense of atmosphere. Böcklin’s landscapes are characters themselves—full of dramatic gloom, trees, rocks, and seas that reek of antiquity. In his most famous painting, Isle of the Dead (1880), for example, the darkness in his woods lurks like a sentient creature and the majestic vertical rocks and cypresses form a perfect mausoleum. It’s no wonder his painting was “paraphrased” by another Swiss artist almost a century later: H. R. Giger.

To me, Böcklin is perfect proof that art does not reproduce the world; it creates a new one.

ODILON REDON (1840–1916)

Most art movements are comprised of such a variety of artists and techniques that it becomes difficult to define the borders that separate one from the next, or the qualities that fuse them into a movement in the first place. If you think of Schwabe, Böcklin, or most of the other painters associated with the symbolist movement, you’ll evoke a sense of realism. By way of contrast, Redon’s diffuse pastels and line work seem weightless and luminous—sometimes almost abstract. Both his technique and concerns remain unique amongst his peers. He is the sublime anomaly.

Even so, Redon was part of a more general movement amongst painters working at the end of the nineteenth century to turn away from technical realism and to begin to value the strength of a brushstroke, the immediacy of an emotion. But these new values were typically developed with respect to the outside world, whereas only Redon looks to the inside.

Distinctive motifs in Redon’s work are: the feather, the eye, prisons and bars, botanical shapes, feathery line work reminiscent of animal fur, and spidery forms with human faces—every one of these comes straight from the id and a sense of pagan frenzy. If one needs any persuasion to find a strong connection between the Surrealists, the Dadaists, and the symbolists, one doesn’t need to look any further than Redon. Most of his images go beyond the pagan contemplation of Böcklin or Schwabe and become iconic, striving to capture not only the essence of a symbol but its direct link to the human psyche. Jungian and Freudian images populate his work and remain elusive, slippery, and hellish, but then his color work has a nimble, vital energy that captures mystic rapture and the true light of paradise.

After I die, if there is life beyond this one and I go anywhere—either up or down—I am pretty sure that both places will be art directed by Redon.

CARLOS SCHWABE (1866–1926)

The two artists who inspired me most while working on Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army were Schwabe and Arthur Rackham. Their interpretations of the fairy world are not at all similar, but both men seem to approach it as explorers attempting to document a world only revealed to their eyes.

Schwabe did splendid graphic work based on texts by Zola, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, but his drawings, etchings, and paintings should not be regarded as mere illustrations for these works. Each one of them is suffused with a mystical energy and with pantheistic conviction.

In this day and age, we confuse hip smartness that does not fully endorse any idea with intelligence, and consider callousness the product of an experienced point of view of the world. Naturally, this attitude leads us to value artists who seem to know it all. But Schwabe and the rest of the symbolists were the exact opposite: They celebrated not knowing, the twilight of our knowledge. To them, the supernatural was absolutely real, and mystery was the supreme goal of art.

MSZ: One very distinctive quality about your film work is that it’s enormously tactile, textural, lyrical. There’s a sense that every moment, every image, is handmade, as if you’re sculpting every shot. Viewers can revisit your films over and over again.

GDT: Well, if they want to. I do put a lot in the audiovisual coding of a movie. Some is rational, but then another 50 percent is instinctive—the way you arrange things. I think a director is an arranger. Alien is the perfect example. It’s an absolutely mind-boggling feat of filmmaking. People can say, “Oh, well, it’s Giger.” No, it’s not Giger because Giger was a painter before Ridley Scott called him up to sculpt and design.

And lest we forget, Scott grouped him with Moebius [Jean Giraud], Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, and Roger Christian. Each of those men brought a syntax, but Scott created the context. I think that’s what directing is—saying, “I’m going to use this photographer, and I’m going to use this musician.” It’s a fantastic feat. Directing is the orchestration and the arrangement of images and sounds and also of people and talents.

MSZ: When you see films that come out well, behind them is a process in which ideas have become better and better, whereas with bad films it’s the exact opposite—they just get worse and worse, progressively.

GDT: Well, but you never know. You never know. You have no idea. If we knew what our destiny is, we would be great. Everybody would be great. What I do think is that there is a myth—the myth of the director as this inflexible creature that has it all figured out from the get-go, as if they are a mechanical master who arranges everything perfectly.

Some people can point to Stanley Kubrick, and I’ll tell you this: The more I read about him and the more I talk to people who worked with him, it’s only mostly true. He had 80 percent of it figured out. But the 20 percent that he didn’t have figured out, he found—through the same process that every director uses, which is finding perfection in compromise. Because you compromise with the weather, you compromise with the schedule, you compromise with the budget, you compromise with the fact that an actor is sick. You’re figuring it out. You are reorganizing. You don’t necessarily say, “I cannot take this out because the movie will be compromised.” At some point you might have to, but not always.

I remember very clearly an anecdote about Kirk Douglas having an accident during one of Kubrick’s movies. I think it was Paths of Glory, but it could have been Spartacus. The anecdote I read was that he was out of commission for over a week, and he got a letter from Kubrick, or a phone call, and Kubrick said, “Could you claim that you’re still not able to work so I can get a few more days? Because I’m just figuring the movie out.” Or take James Cameron, who is arguably one of the most precise filmmakers in the world and the smartest, most disciplined artist I have ever met. The myth is that he is an inhumanly precise filmmaking machine. But the beauty of Jim is that he is all too human. I’ve seen him toil and sweat and, in the middle of the night, ask himself, “What do I do here? What do I do there?” That’s the beauty and power of it: Jim is human but he demands more of himself than anyone else.

Why enthrone the myth of the perfect, infallible superhuman if it’s always more beautiful to know that the humanity that creates beauty is the same fallible species that can create horror or misery? Bach, when explaining his genius, used to modestly say that he just worked harder and that all you have to do is press the pedals on the keyboard and the notes play themselves. Here you have one of the greatest geniuses ever and yet this was a guy that had personal flaws of one kind or another and who created in the face of self-doubt and adversity.

I always say it’s more interesting to think that the pyramids were built not by aliens but by people. People go, “Oh, they’re extraordinary things. They were built by aliens.” No, the extraordinary thing is that they were built by people. Normal people.

When people say that cinema is life, I say, “Impossible.” Any cinema that strives to be realistic, in my opinion, is going to be confused with a theater play. But any cinema that attempts to be truthful is not afraid of assuming that it is not life. It’s an impossible endeavor.

Like René Magritte used to say, “The vocation of art is mystery.” That’s why one of the quintessential beauties of cinema is the spilled cup coming back to the hand by running film in reverse. I don’t care how many years go by, that’s pure magic. Why? Why is it so great?

MSZ: Because it’s impossible.

GDT: Because it’s impossible. In the same way, what the eye of the camera can see is so much more powerful than what the human eye can see. Think about this: We have such a fascination with slow motion. It’s primal. It doesn’t matter—it never goes out of style if you use it right. There are programs on the Discovery Channel that are dedicated to making you drool at a balloon being perforated by a bullet. Because you’re trying to stop time; you are trying to stop life.

I think cinema resonates with a piece of our brain that is way, way in the back. Because the way you watch a movie is not the way we watch life. When you go to a mall, yes, you’re absorbing, subliminally, Drink Coke, and Buy this, and Buy that. But cinema is different because when you go to a theater, it’s like you are going to church. You sit in a pew, and you look at an altar, and the reception is completely different.

MSZ: You often present screenings of movies and give talks on the nature of film. Does participating in these events help nurture you as an artist?

GDT: Oh, yes. If you dedicate yourself only to the business of film, your soul dies. I have come to the tragic conclusion that you have to be a mediocre businessman in order to be a good artist. I’d rather not make as much money and be at peace with my decisions and be free and not dependent on a big apparatus.

I think it’s really important to do things that make you no money, that give you no apparent benefit except they renew your little love affair with cinema. Seeing those movies with an audience is great. I mean, I introduced one of the movies I produced at the LA Film Festival, and I said, “This is as close as it gets to me taking you out for cookies and milk like Andy Kaufman.”

MSZ: What about producing? I’ve noticed you’ve taken a lot of young filmmakers under your wing. What do you look for?

GDT: When I look at short films, and I look at a lot of them, I don’t bother with the originality. Originality is one virtue that, without context, means nothing to me. Originality in context is valuable, but I think that, when you’re learning to write, you always follow an example. Like learning to write cursive. All the short films by kids, or young adults, whatever, I think they are like cursive. They need to imitate somebody.

Alfonso Cuarón and I, until we were in our twenties, every time we shot a piece of fiction, we would say, “I’m going to try this.” Like, I remember we were doing a TV series, and I had seen Scorcese’s Life Lessons with Nick Nolte [in the film New York Stories]. And it’s not that I had any rhyme or reason, but I said, “I’m going do a sequence with those chain dissolves he does so beautifully. I want to learn them!” That became the sole reason why I did that TV episode.

GUILLERMO AND ME ^{ALFONSO CUARÓN}

IN THE LATE EIGHTIES, I had just directed my first gig for a television show called La Hora Marcada, a Mexican anthology series of horror stories modeled on The Twilight Zone.

I was waiting in the production office to have a meeting with the producer. I had just finished making a very loose adaptation of a Stephen King short story. Everybody had praised it, and I felt proud. I had painstakingly storyboarded it, and even though I was aware of its shortcomings, I felt it was better than the norm.

Across the waiting room there was this guy sitting on a sofa looking at me with a mix of curiosity and mischief. I immediately knew who he was, since I had heard so much about him. He was the special effects makeup artist from Guadalajara who had studied with Dick Smith; he had worked on designing corpses, mutilated hands, and bullet wounds for a couple of people I knew working in film. He loved his work and was always ready to lend a hand to a production in need. Everybody described him as smart, funny, and very, very strange.

Now he was smiling at me from across the waiting room.

“You’re Alfonso, right?”

“Yeah…? You’re Guillermo?”

“Yup. You directed that episode based on the Stephen King short story.”

“Yeah, you know it?”

“It’s a great story.”

And so we went on to praise King and embarked on one of the first of many lengthy conversations we were to have about literature, film, and art. We became excited—it was immediately clear that we shared the same eclectic taste, that we spoke the same language. Suddenly, out of the blue, he asked: “If the Stephen King story is so great, why did your episode suck so much?”

There was no malice in his statement, just an honest opinion. I burst out laughing. When I could finally speak again, I asked, “Why do you think that?” And he went on to explain, in a very eloquent and well-informed way, what he thought was wrong with my show. And he was right.

That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one which has provided insights into my work and life that have become invaluable.

Guillermo went on to direct episodes for the same TV show, and he did the prosthetics for my episodes. We were certain that we were doing amazing stuff. One day he discussed an idea he had for an episode. It was the story of a little girl living with her abusive alcoholic father and the child-eating ogre that was haunting her. He said that he wanted to design the ogre and that he would be too busy working on the prosthetics to direct, so he asked me to do so instead. I agreed, and Guillermo cast himself as the ogre, enduring his own prosthetics. We were very self-congratulatory about the end result, which everybody else also praised. We thought we’d achieved greatness.

Several years ago, Guillermo re-watched the episodes we directed for La Horn Marcada and later told me over dinner, in words that can’t be printed, how awful they all were—both his and mine. Once again, I’m sure he was right.

At that same dinner, he went on to tell me about an idea he’d had for his next film. It was a story very similar to the one he’d told me about many years before, with a little girl and a child-eating ogre. He went on to make that film, which he called Pan’s Labyrinth.

I think that when people ask me about the notebooks and why I use them, it’s because they are a record of those sorts of ideas. You can see where it started, but then it bounces to another idea, and then a third one comes up, and page by page you see an evolution.

MSZ: I came upon a note in the notebooks where you talk about the way you have to work with an actor to remove aspects of their initial performance in order to get it right. Comparatively, when you have an abundance of ideas, I imagine deciding which ones not to use is just as important as committing to some of them.

GDT: What you subtract is very important, as is what you leave in. For example, the mistake most people make when designing a monster is they literally put in everything they can think of that is scary. It’s like Homer Simpson designing a car in that Simpsons episode. “I want a giant cup holder, and I want a bubble where I can see 360!” And the car that comes out is horrible because it has everything he wants.

With an actor, it’s the same thing. You let the actor act first; you don’t give him much direction. I like the first or second take to be his. And you observe. A director is not dictating, he is observing. I think the best job you can do at directing can be achieved in ten words or less. You have to give the actor something to do—or something to not do—that’s very specific. “Don’t do that,” or “Do this.” That’s great direction.

But you always have to ask, “Why?” Always try to think about the opposite of your instinct. In between, you’ll find the direction for everything. Color, light, monsters, acting. The first instinct, and then the complete opposite instinct, and then you decide, “I’ll go with this.”

MSZ: At what point does one develop the courage to speak with one’s own voice?

GDT: Well, I think you need to be blind, a little bit. I mean, I think you need to be willfully ignorant.

For example, I had the opportunity to direct many times before Cronos. They would offer me—because they knew I shot TV—little exploitation movies to do, in the horror genre and all that. Alfonso Cuarón and I always had each other to persuade the other not to do that. Alfonso used to say, “Don’t do that. Wait. Do your own thing.” And vice versa, because Alfonso was a very famous first AD [assistant director] in Mexico and a very good director of TV. They offered him a lot of crap, and we were very good friends with an exploitation producer who was adored in Mexico.

I think it’s important that, when you make your choices, you always make them by instinct at the end of the day, and that you fuck up sometimes. I recently made a mistake, but I’ve got to go with it. Whatever happens, that’s my decision, you know?

MSZ: You don’t always succeed, but the goal is to find your truth.

GDT: That’s right; you don’t always succeed. But very often you find people that guide you. You’ve got to recognize that they are wiser in certain ways than you. They become teachers, or partners, or whatever. There are very smart people that are fiercely alone, and I admire them. But I don’t want to be them.

MSZ: There is also that interesting tension between a filmmaker and his or her audience where, to a certain extent, you have to give them what they want, but to really be an artist, you have to go beyond that in service of your vision.

GDT: I believe very much in screening for friends, really harsh friends, or screening for an audience but not asking them anything. Because you see how they react, you see what they like, you see what they don’t like. But I don’t believe in asking about their opinions afterward. You don’t have that relationship with any other art. You don’t say to Robert Louis Stevenson, “I don’t like Dr. Jekyll dying at the end. I think you should kill Hyde and go into the sunset with the girl.” I think it’s a very corrupt exercise.

But I also think that critics are a genuine part of the art. As long as there has been art, there have been critics in some form or another. What I think is not genuine is to make the creation of art an open process.

MSZ: There’s a great line you wrote in the notebooks: “A critic is a man of whom you ask guidance, who instead offers you an opinion.”

GDT: In the process of creation, the one thing you’ve got to remember always is that if you ask for an opinion, no matter from whom, you’ll get one. So you’ve got to be very careful to be inclusive, but not to be so inclusive that you start listening to seventy-five versions of the same story. There’s always a different way of telling a story.

So, as a storyteller, one thing you want to say is, “I’m locking into this track until I’m proven wrong.” Or, “Life is a labyrinth and death is the only way out: the solution.” A labyrinth is a transit. You turn, and turn, and turn, and turn, but you will reach the center. In a maze, you get lost. A labyrinth is an instrument of meditation, and it is supposed to be a spiritual journey.

MSZ: And then you also write, “Criticism gives one the illusion of participating in the act of creation by way of an autopsy. The act is there and it exists and moves and challenges you while criticism fights to approve and validate.”

GDT: I feel that way. I was a critic for many years in Mexico and Guadalajara. Amateur, but I was on TV and radio. I think that the only times I felt really useful were when I was helping people understand a work of art.

It’s very easy to feel oneself smarter than the work you’re analyzing, as if that made you better than the work. But the moments where you’re really, really helping are so much more rewarding. The way we were raised in film school, they said, “A critic needs to show you where the work is, what the work’s intentions are, how the work fails to deliver on those intentions; to put it in context.” It’s not an opinion; it’s a construction. And when you read, really, the pillars of criticism, you see real analysis.

I mean, I think some critics are very happy to be critics. And blogs should, in theory, give people the freedom to review only stuff they like or that they want to talk about. So, ideally, today critics could claim a smaller stake and say, “We want to talk only about movies we feel passionate about, one way or the other, and take the time to analyze them.”

Reflections on the nature of ancient Greek drama in one of del Toro’s early notebooks. Del Toro often writes in his notebooks using a mixture of Spanish and English. Translations of the Spanish-language text and transpositions of the English-language text have been rendered in the margins of the notebook pages reproduced throughout this book.

MSZ: Let’s talk about your screenwriting teacher.

GDT: Two teachers were important for my love of cinema: Daniel Varela in high school, who was my film teacher and a dear friend—a very visual and sophisticated guy. And Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, who was a very literary, script-minded director. In America he became famous for a really brilliant gay comedy called Doña Herlinda and Her Son, which I produced for five thousand dollars. It starred my mother, which led to some very interesting and fun speculation in my homeland.

The decision to cast my mother came from jaime Humberto when he saw my short films and said, “Your mother is a pretty good actress.” He also saw what I was doing with my short films for very little money, and he said, “Would you like to be the line producer?” So one of my best friends and I were the producers, and they gave us five thousand dollars. I didn’t know anything about anything. I had never seen that much money at once. I was twenty-something, nineteen, I don’t remember.

I said to the producer, the guy who gave out the money, “What if I give you change?” And he said, “Well, if you give me change, I’ll give you a bonus of five hundred dollars.” So, in order to give him change, I ended up driving the grip truck and the electric truck on my own, back and forth, between Mexico City and Guadalajara, and then taking the bus back. I was like a thousand dollars under. So the guy gave me five hundred dollars, which I immediately put into my next short film.

MSZ: That’s great. Your screenwriting teacher, from what you say in some of your audio commentaries, sounds like he was really smart and didn’t say, “Well, you have to hit plot point one,” and all that nonsense.

GDT: Right. Let me make a good point about why people who say things like that are full of it. I won’t name any names, but I have read their books, so I’m not talking blindly. Some of them, they take a published screenplay and they say, “As you can see, character so-and-so does this, and plot point one, etc.” And then you realize, they are actually talking about the movie, the finished movie. They are not talking about the actual document that is the screenplay. With 90 percent of the movies that are made, 20 percent of the stuff that was written ends up on the cutting-room floor. Twenty-five percent of what was shot ends up living in a different place than it was written. And that is why, I always say, analyzing the movie is not analyzing the screenplay.

But that is now institutionalized. People talk about these things like they’re talking about Aristotelian theory, and even the Aristotelian core is valid only in Western storytelling. Eastern storytelling jettisons most of that stuff.

Jaime Humberto was a really good teacher. He encouraged us to read James, Chekhov, Tolstoy—not just “biz” books on screenplay writing. Some of his rules were very simple. He used to say, “You can’t write what the character can’t describe with actions or looks.” So when I open a screenplay and it reads something like, “Jack enters a room. You can see that he is a man to be reckoned with. He has the world on his shoulders, but he will take it by the throat and shake it until its end,” I say, “This is a terrible screenplay writer because the only thing that the camera can do is show Jack coming in. That’s it.” Humberto used to say, “If you put an adjective on the page, a qualifier, you’ve got to prove to me how you’re going to shoot it.”

The second rule he gave us—and I think he misread something somewhere about how every draft of a movie is different colors—is the first draft of any screenplay had to be on pink paper. That was him going completely wrong with the color paper theory. But the reason he used to do it is because you cannot photocopy pink paper. And back then, if you wanted to distribute a screenplay, you had to photocopy. He used to say you never, ever, ever show anyone, or distribute, the first draft. He would say, “If you like it so much, you type it again on white paper, and then you distribute it. And if you are able to type it again and not change anything, that means it’s really, really good.”

Now, this was misguided and all, but it was really good discipline. He was a really tough guy. I always tell the story of how back then, you didn’t have even word processors, and he made us typewrite everything by hand. So formatting became an act of discipline. Take The Devil’s Backbone. Before I did Cronos, I wrote Devil’s Backbone as a feature. It was a very different screenplay. He took the screenplay, which was pink, and he flipped through it. He flipped through it, and he threw it in the wastebasket, the original. He said, “It’s badly formatted. If you cannot take the trouble to write it well, why should anyone take the trouble to read it well?” It was too Mr. Miyagi for me, so we kind of fell out of contact for several years after that. That’s when I wrote Cronos. I said to myself, “I can retype Devil’s Backbone by memory, or I can start over and do Cronos.”

MSZ: You’ve mentioned that he used to say, “If a road is not presented, you build one.”

GDT: Yes. He always said that. He would give you rules that you understood immediately. One of those things he used to say was, “Look, it’s bullshit that a character needs to change through the movie. Sometimes the greatest character is the one that doesn’t change.” Like Candide, or Forrest Gump. Those are characters that, whatever they do, they stay the same. It’s not like Forrest Gump becomes smarter in the end. Sure, there is a journey, there is a pilgrimage, but there is not necessarily what Hollywood understands as an arc.

Another thing that Humberto used to say was, “In writing for a film, there is the star of the film and the main character. And sometimes they are very different things.” For example, the main character of Fight Club is Edward Norton’s. But the star of Fight Club is Brad Pitt. Or take The Shining. Tom Cruise said to me that Kubrick told him he cast Shelley Duvall because he found her irritating, and he knew that the star of the film, the main character he was painting, was Jack. So all the big moments, they all go to Jack. Kubrick said, “The only way to make people understand him is to share some of his darkest emotions in spite of themselves.” So if he made Jack’s wife grating enough, the audience would enjoy him going insane because they dislike her. I find that misanthropically fascinating.

In my own films, in Pan’s Labyrinth and Mountains of Madness, I identify with the assholes as much as I identify with the good characters. Why? Because we are all assholes, many times, during the day. You have to write them all from inside. Both of them have to contain things that you would be ashamed to discuss publicly, aspects of your own person that you can socialize only by fictionalizing them.

MSZ: In your work, one consistent theme that runs throughout is that your characters triumph if they hold true to themselves when put to the test. And often, they are silent victories.

GDT: That applies to all the things in life that are important. That’s why I find it so hard to write dialogue. Dialogue is the most challenging thing for me. In Spanish or English, I don’t care. The rhythm of it is easier for me in Spanish, obviously. But really good dialogue, which eludes me most of the time, has to be about something while being about nothing. I don’t mean the ramblings that you find in brilliant pieces of work like Barry Levinson or Quentin Tarantino. But I mean really, truly, in the same way that body language tells you a lot about the person. It’s very hard, but dialogue needs to communicate things, but not the things the characters are talking about.

If I had to, I would love to have lived in the time of silent film because I think it’s the purest cinema. Chaplin said, when sound came, “Film has died.” At some point he was very, very reproachful about it, and it was because, right at that moment, the black-and-white film was perfect. I mean, you were getting really beautiful hues of gray, and the visual language of silent cinema was completely absorbed.

MSZ: Cronos is very much like a silent film.

GDT: It is. I like writing silent. I mean, I can come up with stuff I like, such as, “In the absence of light, darkness prevails.” Or, “There are things that go bump in the night. We’re the ones that bump back.” Or things that I’m proud of, like in Pan’s Labyrinth where the Faun says, “I’ve had so many names. Old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce.” But that’s it. If I attempt to be naturalistic, I often fail. Most of the time I fail completely.

Some people develop their own style, like David Mamet, who has a rhythm and a style that is inimitable. I suspect—I may be wrong—that part of his writing style comes from the theater theories of Sanford Meisner, with their famous exercises in repetition, like where you go, “I’m okay.” “Oh, you’re okay?” “I’m okay.” “You’re okay.” It’s a rhythm that is meant to be about listening. I think that at some point maybe Mamet realized, if you really want the audience to listen to the dynamics, you have to hammer it three times. “I’m alone.” “You’re alone?” “I’m alone.” “Alone?” “Yes, I am alone.” “You are alone.”

But it’s funny because I always say a screenplay is almost like a partitur, but it’s missing half of the musical notes and annotation. Ultimately, when the director fills those in, he’s also directing the orchestra while completing the partitur.

I’ve always written my movies, but I have a real problem with writing them the way they should be written.

MSZ: In what way?

GDT: In the way that I read every screenwriting book growing up, but I couldn’t help but disagree constantly. Because I would always think of how many times Truman Capote, or Ernest Hemingway, or Saki, or Isak Dinesen, or so many of the writers I admire don’t follow or portray their characters through any of those devices. A lot of the stuff that we leave in as screenwriters—like the “rules of the game,” the antagonist’s plan, and finally, the character’s arc—is contradicted by majestic works of fiction that contradict and question those rules.

This translates to difficulties down the line if you follow their examples. Pan’s Labyrinth, for instance, was a difficult movie to finance. Nobody wanted to give us the money. I remember a meeting where some producers said, “Well, this is a very interesting movie. But we can’t put money into it because we think it’s not going to be appealing to a lot of people.”

They gave me a few notes, and they said, “If the girl really loves books, we should see her reading more often.” But you don’t need that. I mean, I love books, but you never see me with a book on the street. I read them at night, or I read them in the morning. I didn’t carry them around. I said, “The way I show the depth and the breadth of her imagination is when she makes up a story to the baby brother in her mother’s belly.” Because she’s not reading the story, she’s telling it. So that tells you how much she has read, but without doing it directly.

MSZ: Let’s talk a little bit about your storytelling techniques. There is a great thing you once wrote: “The epic is a vital genre for humanity.”

GDT: A lot of people think that in epics one character almost represents an entire race; the whole race is imbued in one character. Borges does that a lot. Borges talks a lot about a man who is “the” man that represents Argentina at a certain moment. In a strange sense, for me, I Am Legend is an epic because it really represents both the rise of a new civilization and the falling of another one, becoming a legend.

MSZ: It’s the microcosm that speaks to the macrocosm.

GDT: Yes. But the interesting part of that book, for me, was the fact that Richard Matheson brings the urban into horror, revitalizing it. This is not Transylvania; this is not a castle. This is the streets of an American city. What was really incredible is that I Am Legend is a very metaphysical book, in the same way that his The Shrinking Man is a very metaphysical book. The fact that somebody we have empathy with is not the winner, historically, and therefore they become the monster, the loser, the legend: “If you’re not good, the human will come for you at night.” I mean, there is a whole society of vampires outside, which he manages to show us are the antagonists. But at the end of the book you realize, “Holy crap! We are the anomaly. We are the legend.” That’s fantastic! I don’t think it’s ever been done in the movie versions.

The ending of The Shrinking Man is almost like Albert Camus. The final notion in the book is that you abandon yourself to the cold embrace of the cosmos. It’s . really fantastic.

MSZ: In that regard, two interesting things about Matheson are that he has a very strong belief in an afterlife—a very strong belief in a larger reality than the prosaic one—and in many of his books he uses himself as the main character and his family is the family in the book. He’ll often name the wife Ruth because his real wife’s name is Ruth.

GDT: Well, everybody does that. I mean, everybody that writes. Anybody that doesn’t do it, I don’t understand how they write. The same can be said of most everyone. Borges, certainly. And in a strange way—very, very twistedly—I think all the children in Dickens are sort of him in a shoe polish factory thinking, I deserve better. I think Mary Shelley is in Frankenstein big time, and so on and so forth. That is beautiful. Roald Dahl does it. H. P. Lovecraft more than anyone. And Stephen King.

King and Matheson are two writers I really love because they not only bring the urban and the suburban to horror, they bring in, brilliantly, family dynamics. This is interesting because horror, during the pulp years, was always about superlative characters: a professor, a reporter, an archaeologist. They were not regular people. Fritz Leiber does a little bit more urbane characters. But Matheson, starting with the family man in The Shrinking Man, is talking about the dynamics in a marriage, how they change. He becomes a child, a baby, and his desires are no longer acknowledged. He becomes a toy. The family dynamics in I Am Legend are gorgeous—how he loses everything, and how his best friend is every night outside of the house screaming his name. Matheson and King bring you people that go to the supermarket, fill their car with gas, take their children to school. And they put them in situations you can be absolutely scared shitless about.

MSZ: You mentioned Roald Dahl. He seems, in some ways, to be a spiritual relative of yours because, even in his writing for children, his work has enormous darkness.

GDT: Most of the great writers of children’s literature have a very dark side. Some of them are very repressive. Carlo Collodi is very repressive, for example, but I still love him. I also think Oscar Wilde and Hans Christian Andersen deal with a lot of identity issues, and they are present in a very dark and fascinating way in the tales. Strangely enough, both have these almost psychosexual dramas in their stories. Like Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” As a kid, I found it enormously sensual. I remember reading it and being vaguely disturbed and aroused as a kid. It really has a lot of strange images of snow, and it almost portrays death as an erotic goal, an experience. I mean, it’s really, really weird.

But Dahl, Saki—they all have something in common, which is that they create really, really great children’s tales that are really, really disturbing for parents. Parents often give children the Roald Dahl books thinking, Oh, they’re safe. But they’re full of great violence. I mean, The BFG? There’s more descriptions of ways to consume a child, and brutality, than anywhere else. It’s fantastic. And The Witches, where the witches sing something like, “Boil them, fry them, chop ’em.”

The reality is that kids are not bothered by these things. So I was sad that Pan’s Labyrinth didn’t get a PG-13 [it is rated R]. I think it should have gotten a PG-13 because the violence in the movie is part of the tale. As disturbing as it is, it is part of the flavor. We couldn’t get it. But, in my mind, Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie done from me to young readers, so to speak.

GUILLERMO’S MAINSTAYS OF HORROR

TO LEARN WHAT WE FEAR is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls. In that, it is no different or less controversial than humor, and no less intimate than sex. Our rejection or acceptance of a particular type of horror fiction can be as rarefied or kinky as any other phobia or fetish.

Horror is made of such base material—so easily rejected or dismissed—that it may be hard to accept my postulate that within the genre lies one of the last refuges of spirituality in this, our materialistic world.

But it is a fact that, through the ages, most storytellers have had to resort to the fantastic in order to elevate their discourse to the level of parable: Stevenson, Wilde, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Marcel Schwob, Kipling, Borges, and many others. Borges, in fact, defended the fantastic quite openly and acknowledged fable and parable as elemental forms of narrative that would always outlive the much younger forms, which are preoccupied with realism.

At a primal level, we crave parables, because they allow us to grasp the impossibly large concepts and to understand our universe without and within. These tales can “make flesh” what would otherwise be metaphor or allegory. More important, the horror tale becomes imprinted in us at an emotional level: Shiver by shiver, we gain insight.

But, at its root, the frisson is a crucial element of this form of storytelling—because all spiritual experience requires faith, and faith requires abandonment: the humility to fully surrender to a tide of truths and wills infinitely larger than ourselves.

It is in this abandonment that we are allowed to witness phenomena that go beyond our nature and that reveal the spiritual side of our existence.

We dislocate, for a moment, the rules of our universe, the laws that bind the rational and diminish the cosmos to our scale. And when the world becomes a vast, unruly place, a place where anything can happen, then—and only then—we allow for miracles and angels, no matter how dark they may be.

MARY SHELLEY (1797–1851)

Much like Matthew G. Lewis, who was only twenty years old when he wrote The Monk, Mary Shelley was painfully young—a teenager, in fact—when she first published Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, and into the monster and his tale she was able to pour all her contradictions and her questions—her essential pleas and her feelings of disenfranchisement and inadequacy. The tale spoke about such profound, particular feelings that, irremediably, it became universal.

While reading the novel as a child, I was arrested by the epistolary form Shelley had chosen (and which Bram Stoker would use in Dracula to good effect many decades later), because it felt so immediate. I was overtaken by the Miltonian sense of abandonment, the absolute horror of a life without a reason. The tragedy of the tale was not dependent on evil. That’s the supreme pain of the novel—tragedy requires no villain.

Frankenstein is the purest of parables—working both as a straight narrative and as a symbolic one. Shelley utilizes the Gothic model to tell a story not about the loss of a paradise but rather about the absence of one.

The novel is so articulate and vibrant that it often surprises those who approach it for the first time. No adaptation—and there are some masterful ones—has ever captured it whole.

Taking its rightful place among the essential characters in any narrative form, Frankenstein’s creature goes beyond literature and joins Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Pinocchio, and Monte Cristo in embodying a concept, even in the minds of those who have never read the actual book.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)

Clearly, the horror tale deals with the essential duality of mankind, a topic that has proved irresistible to philosophers, prophets, and saints. The Adamites, the Dulcinians, and other savage orders advocated salvation through Bosch-like excess and violence—and they all situated the root of all evil in the soul. It is not until Poe that the seat of evil is transferred back to its proper place: the human mind.

It is in Poe that we first find the sketches of modern horror while being able to enjoy the traditional trappings of the Gothic tale. He speaks of plagues and castles and ancient curses, but he is also morbidly attracted to the aberrant intellect, the mind of the outsider.

Poe grappled with the darker side of mankind, with the demons that reside within us: our mind, a crumbling edifice, sinking slowly in a swamp of decadence and madness. He knew that a rational, good-hearted man could, when ridden by demons, sink a knife in the eye of a beloved cat and gouge it out. He could strangle an old man or burn alive his enemies. He knew that those dark impulses can shape us, overtake us, make us snap—and yet, we would still be able to function, we would still presume to possess the power of rational thought.

ARTHUR MACHEN (1863–1947)

It is a rare breed of fabulist who transcribes and records—rather than invents—a reality invisible to most of us. These scribes, like St. John the Divine, are possessed of a near-religious certainty that such worlds exist. Arthur Machen was one of these.

Much like Algernon Blackwood, Machen had no doubts about ancient worlds beneath us and the power their inhabitants exert over our souls and, ultimately, our flesh. There are, he knew, barbarians at the gate, hiding somewhere in the darkness below.

Much like Borges, Machen was an acolyte of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the most painstaking writers in the English language. And also like Borges, Machen seemed to believe that reading and writing are a form of prayer, each an extension of the other. But where the world was a library to Borges, to Machen it was an all-encompassing concrete geography, even as he was fascinated by traces of pre-Roman cults. Today, as then, his words are neither scholastic nor philosophical, but rather an alarm, a frantic denunciation.

Machen recorded his articles of faith with great zeal as an explorer in a lonely spiritual universe. He abandoned the safety of his humble quarters, the sanctity of his God-given name, and the veneer of metropolitan sophistication to achieve an ecstatic vision. Much like Lovecraft, he believed in the transitory nature of our agency in this world and the unyielding ferocity of the cosmos.

Machen knew that to accept our cosmic insignificance is to achieve a spiritual perspective and ultimately realize that, yes, all is permitted. And that no matter how wicked or how perverse we can be, somewhere in a long-forgotten realm a mad God awaits, leering—ready to embrace us all.

H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890–1937)

One hot summer afternoon (I must have been eleven or twelve years old), I stumbled upon the text of the Lovecraft story “The Outsider.” I was riding in the family car, and the text was included in Spanish in an anthology for my older brother’s lit class. I started to read, and almost an hour later, I was left behind in the car, still reading, oblivious to the inclement heat, mesmerized and moved by this story.

Starting that afternoon, and for the rest of my life, I have devoted more time to Lovecraft than virtually any other author in the genre. His mannered, convulsive prose, so antiquated and yet so full of new ideas, is very compelling to a young writer for the same reason Bradbury’s is—it seems easy to forge. It is so clear, so full of evident quirks, that you long to imitate it, and it is then that you find out how full of secrets his prose can be.

Lovecraft’s crown jewel is, in my opinion, “At the Mountains of Madness.” Reading this tale in my mid-teens was a revelation. I had never been exposed to any literature that so dwarfed our existence and hinted at the cold indifference of the cosmos. I became entirely enamored. Making a film of it became my quest.

“Fear at the Foot of the Bed,” an image that has haunted del Toro since his childhood, as it appears on Notebook 3, Page 28B.