A scene in Hellboy reminiscent of the landscapes of Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), a Swiss symbolist painter who has influenced del Toro’s aesthetic.
In his focus on these very personal obsessions, Guillermo works in a noble tradition, for the definition of a great artist often lies in his determination to fixate on things the majority deliberately ignore in order to construct an orderly life. “Eye protein” is what Guillermo calls the distinctive language of symbols and visceral figures he weaves into the tapestry of his films. “Fifty percent of the storytelling in a movie is submerged beneath the screenplay,” he says. In other words, the vast freight of meaning lies in the tension between what we can and cannot control, in the play between the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious. “In the symbolic and Jungian sense, and in every sense,” he adds, “I am interested by surface and beneath.”
The inside of the Cronos device, which had to be built at an enlarged scale so that it could be filmed by del Toro and his crew using the technology available to them at the time.
BEGINNINGS
The self-invention of Guillermo del Toro began on October 9, 1964, the day he was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
Guillermo del Toro (front) and his brother Federico (back) at the steps of their great aunt’s home.
“I was a very strange kid,” Guillermo remembers. “I was Aryan blond. I was like a German. And I was constantly ostracized because I had super-bright blue eyes and Roy Batty—white hair and was very thin, incredibly thin. I was constantly berated as a wimp, and I identified with those shortcomings; I felt like a freak. The nice, healthy kids were all those outgoing kids with dark hair and a tan. That’s one of the reasons why my villains are like that.”
Early in his youth, an event occurred that changed Guillermo’s life forever. “My dad won the lottery when I was four years old, and we bought a bigger house. My dad’s a self-made man, a very successful businessman, but he stopped going to school when he was very young, he never read, and I think he felt funny about not having a proper library now that he was rich. So he bought a collection of books for kids that I read. It was all the classics: Hunchback of Notre Dame, Edgar Allan Poe, this and that. But the real great thing for me was that he bought several encyclopedias, The Family Health Medicine Encyclopedia and one called How to Look at Art that was ten volumes. It took you from cave paintings all the way to what was then modern art: cubism, Klee, abstract art, pop art. I read them all, several times actually, and I consulted them a lot. Those were the beginning.”
Guadalupe Gómez (del Toro’s mother) and her father, Guillermo Gómez O’Colligan, on the porch of del Toro’s great aunt’s home, where he would spend a large part of his childhood.
The mixture of the two—the study of great art and of all the disasters that can beset the human body—had a major formative effect. “I became a very young hypochondriac because of that encyclopedia. I was constantly thinking about tumors, and liver disease, and parasites in my brain, and I thought I was going to die really quick. And the art was great because I was learning about Degas, Picasso, Manet, Goya.”
Guillermo laughs, adding, “There was a moment, I will not lie, where the family medicine encyclopedia and the art books were great because they had naked ladies. So I am very grateful to Manet, as I am very grateful to certain anatomical charts.”
At the same time, Guillermo was reading comic books. “So Bernie Wrightson, or Jack Kirby, or John Romita Sr., or any of those guys were on equal footing for me in terms of how important they were. Each was as formative an influence as fine art.”
The shelf in the Art Room at Bleak House where the encyclopedias del Toro read as a child are kept.
Never one for superheroes, Guillermo found himself drawn to horror comics. “I used to buy House of Secrets and House of Mystery. They did a lot of illegal reprints and ripoffs of EC comics in Mexico.” Guillermo also recalls a Mexican comics magazine titled Traditions and Legends of the Colonial Times, “a knock-off of EC that was supposed to be based on real occurrences and legends, but that spun out of control.” It was violent, brutal, and very sexy. “They started with tame nudity, but eventually went all out, and they had incredible violence. They had these rotting corpses in colonial clothing that were absolutely amazing. And eventually, they started to lie. They started to say, ‘Oh, this happened in so-and-so,’ and I would say, ‘No, that’s not true. That’s a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, or an Edgar Allan Poe story, or a W. W. Jacobs story.’ Because I was reading books.”
The first book Guillermo bought for himself, at age seven, was Best Horror Stories, edited by Forrest J Ackerman. From then until he was twenty, Guillermo read a book every two days, every day if he could, thousands of them. “I read really inappropriate stuff for my age: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Marcel Schwob, who was a fantastic symbolist writer, Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk, Thomas de Quincey. I read really weird stuff, at least by provincial standards. Look, my great aunt didn’t want me to read Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris because the local church had it on its list of forbidden books!”
By seven or eight, Guillermo also started drawing and painting and building model kits (the first he ever painted was Pirates of the Caribbean, but he gravitated toward the monster kits). He liked eating crayons but didn’t like their texture for drawing, so he used colored pencils.
“I started drawing very young because I was illustrating my horror stories,” he recalls. “I started with the illustrations and sometimes never finished the story! Normally my clients were my mother, my grandmother, and my dad, and I would sell them the issues with a great color cover. There was a story I remember called ‘The Invader,’ and it had an invisible dome covering a city, with a giant tentacled monster eating everybody in sight, and people trying to drill a hole in the dome. And I did these epic Prismacolor pencil illustrations and sold out the three issues to my captive audience.”
At the same time, Guillermo was drawing three monsters obsessively: the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein’s monster, and Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. “And I really loved sculpting. My brother and I would do full human figures with clay and Plasticine—liver, intestines, the heart—fill them with ketchup and throw them from the roof. So I was an artistic but very morbid kid.”
Morbid, but not passive. “I was speaking at a film school in Hollywood, and I said to them, ‘Go have a life. Live. Get laid, get into a bar fight. Get knifed in the fucking thorax. Lose all your money. Make all your money back. Jump into a train.’ When I was just a child, I was observing the world, but I lived a lot, too. We used to break into abandoned houses. We explored the entire sewer system of Guadalajara on foot. And then I became really crazy as a teenager.”
Del Toro shooting his short film Geometría with his Mitchell camera.
A poster promoting Matilde, one of del Toro’s short films, featuring art and typography by the director.