guillermo del toro’s amazing creatures : the new yorker

7/28/2019 Guillermo del Toros Amazing Creatures : The New Yorker

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I

PROFILES

SHOW THE MONSTERGuillermo del Toros quest to get amazing creatures onscreen.

by Daniel Zalewski

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

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Del Toro, whose films include Hellboy and Pans Labyrinth, has amassed in a house outside Los Angeles an

enormous collection of horror iconography. All this stuff feeds you back, he says.

n 1926, Forrest Ackerman, a nine-year-old

misfit in Los Angeles, visited a newsstand and bought a copy ofAmazing Storiesa new

magazine about aliens, monsters, and other oddities. By the time he reached the final page,

he had become Americas first fanboy. He started a group called the Boys Scientifiction

Guillermo del Toros Amazing Creatures : The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/07/110207fa_f...

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Club; in 1939, he wore an outer-space outfit to a convention for fantasy aficionados,

establishing a costuming ritual still followed by the hordes at Comic-Con. Ackerman

founded a cult magazine,Famous Monsters of Filmland, and, more lucratively, became an

agent for horror and science-fiction writers. He crammed an eighteen-room house in Los

Feliz with genre memorabilia, including a vampire cape worn by Bela Lugosi and a model

of the pteranodon that tried to abscond with Fay Wray in King Kong. Ackerman

eventually sold off his collection to pay medical bills, and in 2008 he died. He had no

children.

But he had an heir. In 1971, Guillermo del Toro, the film director, was a seven-year-old

misfit in Guadalajara, Mexico. He liked to troll the city sewers and dissolve slugs with salt.

One day, in the magazine aisle of a supermarket, he came upon a copy ofFamous Monsters

of Filmland. He bought it, and was so determined to decode Ackermans pun-strewed

prosethe letters section was called Fang Mailthat he quickly became bilingual.

Del Toro was a playfully morbid child. One of his first toys, which he still owns, was a

plush werewolf that he sewed together with the help of a great-aunt. In a tape recording

made when he was five, he can be heard requesting a Christmas present of a mandrake root,

for the purpose of black magic. His mother, Guadalupe, an amateur poet who read tarot

cards, was charmed; his father, Federico, a businessman whom del Toro describes, fondly, as

the most unimaginative person on earth, was confounded. Confounding his father became

a lifelong project.

Before del Toro started school, his father won the Mexican national lottery. Federico

built a Chrysler-dealership empire with the money, and moved the family into a white

modernist mansion. Little Guillermo haunted it. He raised a gothic menagerie: hundreds of

snakes, a crow, and white rats that he sometimes snuggled with in bed. Del Toro has kept a

family photograph of him and his sister, Susana, both under ten and forced into polyester

finery. Guillermo, then broomstick-thin, has added to his ensemble plastic vampire fangs,

and his chin is goateed with fake blood. Susanas neck has a dreadful gash, courtesy of

makeup applied by her brother. He still remembers his old tricks. Collodion is material used

to make scars, he told me. You put a line on your face, and it contracts and pulls the skin.As a kid, Id buy collodion in theatrical shops, and Id scar my face and scare the nanny.

Del Toro filled his bedroom with comic books and figurines, but he was not content to

remain a fanboy. He began drawing creatures himself, consulting a graphic medical

encyclopedia that his father, an unenthusiastic reader, had bought to fill his gentlemans

library. Del Toro was a good draftsman, but he knew that he would never be a master. (His

favorite was Richard Corben, whose drawings, in magazines such asHeavy Metal, helped

define underground comics: big fangs, bigger breasts.) So del Toro turned to film. In high

school, he made a short about a monster that crawls out of a toilet and, finding humans


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Civil War, a defiantly imaginative girl, Ofelia, recoils from her harsh lifeher stepfather is a

Fascist captain who tortures dissidentsand descends into a ravishing underworld of sprites

and satyrs. Though she barely evades the jaws of a famished ogre, she ultimately finds

comfort in this spectral realm. For del Toro, who jokes that he never willingly goes

outside, fantasy, even violent fantasy, is a refuge. The story of Ofelia inverts the usual

scheme of horror; its as if one of the teens in A Nightmare on Elm Street had fought to

remain trapped inside the world of dreams.

Many contemporary filmmakers seem embarrassed by the goofiness of monsters,

relegating them to an occasional lunge from the shadows. Del Toro wants the audience to

gawk. In the Mexican film industry, he told me, it was so expensive to create a monster

that, even if it was cardboard, they showed it a lot. For del Toro, one of the key moments of

horror cinema is in Alien, when Harry Dean Stanton cannot run because he is in awe of

the creature when its lowering itself in front of him. Its a moment of man in front of a

totemic god.

Del Toro has battled to get his opulent vision of monsters onscreen. Miramax, which

financed Mimic, found del Toro tediously arty and commissioned a second-unit director to

add what del Toro calls cheap scares. He returned half his salary for Hellboy, and his

entire salary for Pans Labyrinth, because he insisted on creature effects that his backers

considered too expensive.

Pans Labyrinth received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, but

del Toro refused to reposition himself as a highbrow auteur. His next film was the hectic

Hellboy II. As del Toro has put it, There is a part of me that will always be pulp. He

may be proudest of his schlockiest creations, such as the vampire Nomak, in Blade II

(2002), whose toothy mouth folds open sideways, like labia, forming the ultimate vagina

dentata; or the behemoth plant of Hellboy II (2008), which ravages Lower Manhattan like

a greenhouse Godzilla. The plant monsters demise is one of the most memorable in movie

history: it spurts emerald blood that covers everything it touches in a lush carpet of moss.

Del Toro does not worry that such fancies will sully his reputation. In emotional genres,

you cannot advocate good taste as an argument, he said.Although del Toro makes suspenseful movies, he often seems less like a disciple of

Alfred Hitchcock than of Hieronymus Bosch. I dont see myself ever doing a normal

movie, del Toro said. I love the creation of these thingsI love the sculpting, I love the

coloring. Half the joy is fabricating the world, the creatures. The movie that he most longs

to make is an adaptation of a grandly ridiculous H. P. Lovecraft novella, At the Mountains

of Madness, in which explorers, venturing into Antarctica, discover malevolent aliens in a

frozen, ruined city. Some of the aliens mutate wildly, which would allow del Toro to create

dozens of extreme incarnations. He said, If I get to do it, those monsters will beso


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Dterrifying.

el Toro, now forty-six, owns a mock-Tudor mansion in Westlake Village, a sterile

suburb northwest of Los Angeles. The house, which is a three-minute drive from an

equally large house where he lives with his wife, Lorenza, and their two daughters, functions

as his office, but its also a temple to his obsession with collectingForrest Ackermansmansion reborn.

Even outside, there are ghoulish touches. A weathervane on the roof is a dragon, and the

front windowpanes are darkly tinted, suggesting a serial killer deflecting the postman. A sign

on the lawn announces the estates formal name: Bleak House. Del Toro calls the place his

man cave.

I knocked, and an assistant hollered for me to come in. When I opened the door, a

rectangle of California sunshine invaded the dark entryway, landing on the hideous face of a

large, lunging demon. It was a life-size cast-resin model of Sammael, from Hellboy,standing where a decorator would have placed a welcoming spray of flowers. Behind it,

French doors offered a shimmery view of the back-yard pool. Sammael was far from the

only model on display. Del Toro had filled the house with dozens of monster maquettes from

his filmsscale models created by special-effects shops during the early design phase,

allowing the imaginary to become palpable. Del Toro had given Sammael, who has a lions

mane of writhing tentacles, a subtle motif of asymmetry; one front limb is slightly longer

than the other, setting his gait off balance, and he has an extra eye on the right side of his

snout. Doug Jones, a mime turned actor who has played creatures in dozens of films,including Hellboy and Pans Labyrinth, says that, in the subculture of monster design,

del Toros creatures are couture. Its because hes a fanboy, he said. He knows exactly

how fanboys critique movies. He anticipates the That wouldnt really work! response.

I heard a heavy shuffling sound: del Toro, who at the time weighed more than three

hundred pounds, was coming from a back room. (As Doug Jones observes, Guillermo

doesnt pick up his feet when he walks.) Del Toro gave me a genial slap on the back, his

hand like a bear paw. Bleak House, he said, had been inspired by Forry Ackerman, who

had been his hero of heroes. He said, He was so nice! If you called him in advance, he

would let you come to the house. Then hed take you out for a slice of cherry pie. Del Toro

wore black sweatpants, a black T-shirt, and an unzipped black hoodie, all of which had been

laundered so many times that they had faded into clashing inky shades. He had large ice-blue

eyes, round glasses, and the rubbery cheeks of a kindergartner. An unruly brown beard,

touched with gray, grounded him in manhood. A film of perspiration on his forehead trapped

strands of hair that were supposed to be combed to the side.

Looming over the entryway was a huge contemporary painting of St. George and the

Dragon, by a Russian painter named Viktor Safonkin. A curator at MOMA would cringe, but


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del Toro had keyed in on the originality of Safonkins dragon: all tail and no body, it coiled

around St. Georges horse like a giant eel. Dragons, he told me, were his favorite

mythological animal, and he was finally getting to design one: Smaug, the talking serpent

who hoards the treasure in J. R. R. Tolkiens The Hobbit.

Del Toro, in the biggest project of his career, had signed on to direct two films based on

the novel. The project had already received enormous publicity, but, curiously, it did not yet

have a green light. The film rights to The Hobbit were shared by New Line Cinema and

M-G-M, and M-G-M, which had amassed a crippling $3.7-billion debt, could not finance a

blockbuster project. But The Hobbit was likely to be a huge moneymaker, and del Toro

felt certain that funds would be forthcoming. Peter Jackson, who had directed the Lord of

the Rings trilogy, was an executive producer of the Hobbit films. After Jackson declared

that he had no interest in directing five movies set in Middle Earth, del Toro was named his

successor.

Del Toro, with his ornate aesthetic, was hardly the obvious choice to follow Jackson,

who in his trilogy had placed Tolkiens mythological characters in realistic landscapesone

worried about Frodos furry toes getting frostbite as he trudged through heavy snow. As del

Toro put it, Jackson had reconstructed the Battle of Mordor with the same exactitude as the

Battle of Gallipoli. Del Toro described his own style as more operatic. Speaking of

Tolkien, he said, I never was a mad fan of the Rings trilogy. The Hobbit, he said, is

much less black-and-white. The monsters are not just evil. Theyre charming, funny,

seductive. Smaug is an incredibly smart guy! Del Toro later said that he inevitably imposed

his sensibility on source material: Its like marrying a widow. You try to be respectful of the

memory of the dead husband, but come Saturday night . . . bam.

He began to show me around Bleak House. The windows had blood-red curtains and

shirred blinds, giving the place a bordello vibe. In the downstairs library, the shelves were

rigorously taxonomized. This is Vampire Fiction, he said, pointing to a row of books.

And this is Vampire Fact. He picked up an aged leather-bound volume. This is a treatise

on vampirism, probably one of the best ones ever published, from 1759. The book,

Dissertations Upon the Apparitions of Angels, Dmons, and Ghosts, and Concerning theVampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, was printed in Paris and helped

establish the idea that vampirism was contagious. (Those who have been sucked suck also

in their turn.) Del Toro, who has inflexible preferences when it comes to vampires, admires

the Polish folkloric tradition, in which erotic fangs are replaced by vile stingers. They are

the nastiestcreatures, he said. Nothing romantic about them. In 2009, he co-wrote a

novel, The Strain, a gory update of the Polish typologyand a riposte to the swoony

Twilight.

We headed upstairs, del Toro adopting the hushed garrulity of a docent. The walls were


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crowded with framed images, as at the Barnes Foundation, except in this case the collection

featured Edward Gorey illustrations, concept-art sketches of the demon from Fantasia

(Im an obsessive Disney-villain guy), and comic-book panels, including a Richard

Corben drawing of a mutant with four breasts. Del Toro himself still drew. I cannot learn

technique from Caravaggio and those guyshow they did it, I have no idea, he said.

Thats why I started collecting original illustrations. I wanted to see the brushstroke or the

Wite-Out. Then I could understand how they did it.

Over a doorframe, del Toro had hung a Magic Marker skeleton drawn by his older

daughter, Mariana, now fourteen. She comes here to play, he said; his younger daughter,

Marisa, who is nine, found Bleak House too frightening. Lorenza, a former veterinary

surgeon who is now a homemaker, met del Toro when they were in high school. They had a

shared interest in animal anatomy. For a while, she assisted him with his makeup designs.

(Uxoriousness, as expressed by del Toro: She was the bestfoam technician Ive ever had.)

It was Lorenza who had transformed him into the leaky-eyed corpse, for a Mexican

television show.

The shows script had been silly, he recalled, but when it came to horror it was foolish to

focus on dialogue: Some of the most immortal things in our glossary of images come from

movies with not necessarily the greatest screenplays. He refers to a script as a libretto;

horror, he said, is special because it excites a nonverbal part of us. He mentioned

Kubricks The Shining: Youre reading, Danny rides his tricycle through the corridors.

You just dont get ithow lonely they are, the rhythm of the prrr, the change of frequency

in the wheels, the pattern in the carpet goingfrh, frh, frh, the lens enhancing the field and the

perspective, and the moment he turns the corner the twins being there. You cant explain that

in words. Del Toro often spends months planting visual rhymes in his movies; the tunnels

that Ofelia travels through in Pans Labyrinth, for example, all have feminine apertures.

What others call eye candy del Toro calls eye protein.

We went back downstairs, and del Toro gently tapped a glass panel covering a mounted

Malaysian stick bug; its rigid abdomen was nearly a foot long. He had bought the bug at

Maxilla & Mandible, the famous Manhattan emporium, on a childhood visit to New York,and its form had steeped in his imagination. Two decades later, it inspired a key sequence in

Pans Labyrinth. In her first glimpse of magic, Ofelia witnesses a stick bug on her bed

change into a chattering pixie. Thats why I collect images, he said. All this stuff feeds

you back.

In an adjoining hallway, he pushed on a bookcase: the inevitable hidden door. A severed

leg, from Cronos, was propped near the fireplace. Del Toro picked it up and smiled. This

is complete with fake hair! he said. We used to do this at Necropia. You put the hair

through a hypodermic needle and inject it. While running Necropia, he worked regularly on


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Hora Marcada, a Mexican homage to The Twilight Zone. In one episode, del Toro

played an ogre who befriends a child; the show was directed by Alfonso Cuarn, who later

made Y Tu Mam Tambin. They became good friends, and essential editors of each

others work. The mnage--trois scene near the end of Mam was del Toros idea.

The latest addition to Bleak House was a clockwork automaton of a skeleton playing the

accordion, which del Toro had bought for sixteen thousand dollars. He has said of his fetish

for the macabre, Its as hard to explain as a sexual proclivity. Some guys like high-heeled

shoes. I like horror. The size of the collection was disconcerting; it was as if the

40-Year-Old Virgin had been handed a three-million-dollar decorating budget. Del Toro

owned more than five thousand comic books and several puppets of Nosferatu. On a shelf, a

posed plastic figurine of Leatherface, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, battled Edward

Scissorhands. A life-size statue of Boris Karloff, in the guise of Frankensteins Creature,

lurked in a corner of the dining room. At one point, del Toro issued the apt warning, This is

the room where I keep most of my aliens.

The kitchen had no food other than a box of crackers. But, just as Carrie Bradshaw

stored Manolos in her oven, del Toro had slyly repurposed the kitchen into a museum of

anatomical models. Fetuses crowded the counters. As a young child, del Toro had read a

book featuring laparoscopic photographs of babies in utero; the images eventually provided

a visual rhyme for The Devils Backbone (2001), a ghost story set during the Spanish

Civil War. (A doctor keeps a collection of jarred mutants; the ghost drowns a villain in a

pool that has the golden tinge of amniotic fluid.) Del Toro then shared a story that, like many

tales he tells about his Mexican youth, had the polished feel of a fable.

I saw a guy with a split skull walking down the street, he said. The guy wasnt

mentally stable, because somebody had hit him, and I took him to the hospital. And they

said, Well take care of him. I came back the next morning, and they said, We returned

him to the mental ward. So I went there, and they said that he escaped in the night. I went to

the director and I said, What kind of hospital is this? And she said, Look, if you have

something to say about it, come and volunteer. So I got to know the embalmers. One day I

visited, and there was a pile of fetuses, new arrivals. Maybe its magnified in my memory,but I remember it being this tall. He lifted his arm to his waist.

Del Toro had been raised Catholic, but this sight, he said, upended his faith. Humans

could not possibly have souls; even the most blameless lives ended as rotting garbage. He

became a raging atheist. Guadalajara was a rough place, and he recalled his childhood as a

slide show of harrowing images: the decapitated body of a teen-age boy, found by a

barbed-wire fence; a crashed motorist aflame inside his VW Beetle. Del Toro said, People

tell me, Oh, you must love forensic photos. But I cant stand the sight of real pain or

blood.


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At one point, I asked him why he no longer lived in Mexico. He explained that, in 1998,

his father had been kidnapped by bandits for seventy-two days. After the family paid two

ransoms, Federico was released, and Guillermo moved his family to America. Although the

experience was wrenching, he observed, I highly recommend you save your fathers life.

You dont see yourself as somebodys child anymore. You become a man saving another

man. He claimed that the experience had ended his perpetual puberty.

We walked past a display case of Star Wars aliens, and returned to the front door. Del

Toro told me that, in a few weeks, hed be locking up Bleak House for a while. He was

taking his family with him to New Zealand, where filming for The Hobbit was to begin

once he had finished designing dozens of costumes and creatures. The production-design

work would be completed at Weta Digitalthe Wellington visual-effects firm that Jackson

co-founded, and that created much of the dreamscape of James Camerons Avatar.

For several months, del Toro said, he had been working on the dragon. It will be a very

different dragon than most, he said. He proposed discussing it over lunch. He went upstairs

to retrieve several notebooks. I keep my journals locked in a safe in my bathroom, he said

abashedly, as if this had been the afternoons sole display of eccentricity. As we left, I

noticed that several boxes of eye protein from Amazoncomic books, DVDs, model

kitshad been tossed onto the floor before Sammaels gaping maw.

e drove east to Burbank. Del Toro is devoted to the Valleyhe calls it that blessed

no mans land that posh people avoid in L.A. We pulled into Ribs U.S.A., a frayed

establishment on Olive Avenue. Del Toro ordered ribs and a lemonade, along with aredundant appetizer of riblets.

He told me that each of his notebooks was an art project in itself. Hed bought seven

leather-bound journals at an antiquarian bookstore in Venice. I opened up his current

notebook, which included sketches for The Hobbit, while he put on a plastic bib bearing

the inscription I RIBS. Ink drawings of creatures were surrounded by text that jumped

between Spanish and English: captions, musings, story ideas. The first drawing I saw was

titled Peces Sin OjosFish Without Eyes. Del Toro writes with a fountain pen, and

lately he has used a Montblanc ink the color of blood. The over-all effect is that of a

Leonardo codex.

I paused at what looked like an image of a double-bitted medieval hatchet. Thats

Smaug, del Toro said. It was an overhead view: See, hes like a flying axe. Del Toro

thinks that monsters should appear transformed when viewed from a fresh angle, lest the

audience lose a sense of awe. Defining silhouettes is the first step in good monster design, he

said. Then you start playing with movement. The next element of design is color. And then

finallyfinallycomes detail. A lot of people go the other way, and just pile up a lot of

detail.


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I turned to a lateral image of the dragon. Smaugs body, as del Toro had imagined it, was

unusually long and thin. The bones of its wings were articulated on the dorsal side, giving

the creature a slithery softness across its belly. Its a little bit more like a snake, he said. I

thought of his big Russian painting. Del Toro had written that the beast would alight like a

water bird.

Smaugs front legs looked disproportionately small, like those of a T. rex. This would

allow the dragon to assume a different aspect in closeup: the camera could capture hand

gestures and facial expressions in one tight frame, avoiding the quivery distractions of wings

and tail. (Smaug is a voluble, manipulative dragon; Tolkien describes him as having an

overwhelming personality.) Smaugs eyes, del Toro added, were going to be sculpturally

very hidden. This would create a sense of drama when the thieving Bilbo stirs the beast

from slumber.

Del Toro wanted to be creative with the wing placement. Dragon design can be broken

into essentially two species, he explained at one point. Most had wings attached to the

forelimbs. The only other variation is the anatomically incorrect variation of the

six-appendage creaturefour legs, like a horse, with two additional winged arms. But

theres no large creature on earth that has six appendages! He had become frustrated while

sketching dragons that followed these schemes. The journal had a discarded prototype.

Now, thats a dragon youve seen before, he said. I just added these samurai legs. That

doesnt work for me.

Del Toros production design for The Hobbit seemed similarly intent on avoiding

things that viewers had seen before. Whereas Jacksons compositions had been framed by

the azure New Zealand sky, del Toro planned to employ digital sky replacement, for a

more painterly effect. Sometimes, instead of shooting in an actual forest, he wanted to

shoot amid artificial trees that mimicked the drawings in Tolkiens book. In his journal, I

spied many creatures with no precedent in Tolkien, such as an armor-plated troll that curls

into a ball of metal plates. Del Toro said that it would be boring to make a slavish adaptation.

Hellboy, he noted, was based on a popular comic-book series, but he had liberally changed

the story line, and the demon had become an emotionally clumsy nerd. I am Hellboy, hesaid.

Even the major characters of The Hobbit bore del Toros watermark. In one sketch, the

dwarf Thorin, depicted in battle, wore a surreal helmet that appeared to be sprouting antlers.

Theyre thornshis name is Thorin, after all, he said. The flourish reminded me of a

similar arboreal creature in Hellboy II, which was slightly worrying. That film is so

overpopulated with monsters that it begins to feel like a Halloween party overrun by

crashers. Midway through the film, del Toro stages a delightful but extraneous action

sequence in a creature-clogged troll market hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The


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B

scene comes across as del Toros bid to supplant the famous Cantina scene in Star Wars.

The ribs arrived, and after one bite del Toro pushed them aside. They must have

changed management, he said sadly. He had frequented the place while editing Cronos

and Blade II at a studio in the Valley.

He showed me some notebooks from that early period. One contained the first

incarnation of the Pale Man, the ogre that chases Ofelia in Pans Labyrinth. A metaphor

for gluttony, he is del Toros most personal creation, and the five wordless minutes in which

he appears are among the scariest in modern cinema. Ofelia, wandering through a tunnel,

encounters the Pale Man sitting motionless at the head of a banquet table covered with food.

He is sickeningly thin, his chalky white skin hanging in drapelike folds. He has apparently

been cursedplaced, like Tantalus, before objects of temptation. The Pale Man came out of

a really dark, primal place, del Toro said. I had lost weight, and I saw my belly sagging.

He pointed at the notebook drawing, which depicted a wizened creature. Originally, he

said, the ogre was going to have an old mans face, to indicate that he had been cursed for

centuries, but he didnt like how trivial it seemed. To emphasize the Pale Mans

monomaniacal hunger, del Toro asked his designers to render the ogres face blank, except

for a mouth and tiny nasal punctures. He told them, Lets take out the eyes and put them on

a platter before him. The eyes are an allusion to St. Lucy: I saw a statue when I was a kid

where she had the eyes on a little plate. That was pretty freaky, and I liked it.

As Ofelia creeps through the banquet hall, she glances upward. A series of frescoes on

the ceiling silently unfurls the story of the Pale Man. In one panel, a hearty-looking ogre

devours a child, as in Goyas painting of Saturn. Del Toro told me that, in imagining the

monster, he had settled on a twisted rule: the Pale Man could engage in gluttony only if a

kid indulged in gluttony. If a kid broke the rule of not eating, then he could. When Ofelia

snatches a grape from the table, the curse is broken and the Pale Man quickens. In a

sickening change of silhouette, the ogre picks the eyes off the plate and squishes them into

his palms. Placing his hands in front of his face, like goggles, he pursues Ofelia with a

shuffling gait, his outstretched fingers like grotesque eyelashes. The image, del Toro said,

owes something to a poster for the trashy 1979 film Phantasm, in which the eyes of ascreaming woman can be seen through the hands covering her face.

Closing the notebook, del Toro spoke about his struggles with his weight. His pants size

was down from its peak, size 62, but he was concerned about the physical challenges of

shooting on location in New Zealand. He worried that his next few films might be his last.

Maybe it was time to resist temptation. Looking at the plate of uneaten ribs, he joked, Im

not just HellboyIm the Pale Man, too.

efore decamping to New Zealand, del Toro checked in on another monstera new

version of Frankensteins Creature. Since childhood, he had dreamed of adapting Mary


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Shelleys novel, which he considers a founding text of modern monster mythology.

Monsters exist only if the pretense of reason exists, del Toro had told me. Before the Age

of Reason, you cannot generally claim monsters as an unnatural force. There were dragons

on the mapas much of a fact as sunrise. For someone like del Toro, giving birth to a new

Frankensteins Creature is even more exciting than designing an original monster. Just as a

Renaissance painter relished the challenge of rendering the Crucifixion, a true

monster-maker wants to take on the icons.

Frankenstein was one of nearly a dozen projects that del Toro had in development. He

hoped to follow The Hobbit with a spate of more personal films, including Saturn and the

End of Days, a deranged little movie about a boy who witnesses the Rapture from his

bedroom window. Del Toro is sometimes mocked for his tendency to announce projects

prematurely. Recently, on the Hollywood news site Deadline, a commenter sniped, This

man is more famous for what he hasnt done than what he has.

To secure financing for Frankenstein from Universal, which signed a production deal

with del Toro in 2007, he had to direct a proof of concept video: a brief sequence

demonstrating that his Creature was thrilling enough to justify a new film. Though he had

mentally sketched out the film, he hadnt even begun a script. Everything would emanate

from the monsters design.

Work on Frankensteins Creature was being done at Spectral Motion, a design studio in a

warehouse in Glendale. Most of del Toros monsters come to life there. When we arrived at

the studio, del Toro was greeted by the companys founder, Mike Elizalde, and they amiably

exchanged curses in Spanish. Born in Mazatln, Elizalde has the compact, muscled build of

a superhero sidekick. He is a master of animatronicsmaking puppets move with robotics.

With del Toros support, Spectral Motion has become an avant-garde studio for traditional

monster design. It innovates with latex, not pixels.

We headed to the sculpting area, at the back of the warehouse. Monster maquettes were

crammed atop bookshelves, like sports trophies in a locker room. A headless Hellboy suit

hung on a gray mannequin. Desks were strewn with muscle magazinesthe sculptors

consult them when designing monster physiques. A torso lay on a long table, harshlyilluminated by a swing lamp; several maquettes had been wrapped in black garbage bags, in

preparation for storage. The place felt like a makeshift morgue.

At Spectral, a monster design is first rendered in clay. A mold is then made, and a plastic

compound is poured into it to produce a maquette. Even when a creature is destined to be

primarily computer-generated, del Toro commissions maquettes; seeing a beast in physical

form helps him detect design flaws. Elizalde said that del Toro was by far his favorite client,

because of his tremendous imagination and appreciation for what can be done practically.

Many directors, Elizalde said, haplessly begged him to make something scary; del Toro


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provided blueprints from his notebooks, and assessed maquettes like a biologist supervising

a dissection. They shared a distrust of excessive computerized effects, which often looked

weightless onscreen. Thats part of the goal of his films, Elizalde said. To celebrate the

handmade, old-school creature.

The Frankenstein project was tucked in a side room. Just before we got there, del Toro

stopped short. Is that the originalcasting? he asked. On a high shelf sat a bust of Gill-man,

from Creature from the Black Lagoon. One of Elizaldes sculptors had borrowed the bust

from an archive for close study. Del Toro, who considers Gill-man the apex of man-in-a-suit

design, informed me that its creator was Milicent Patrick, a former Disney animator. Patrick

did not receive official creditapparently, nobody involved in Lagoon had wanted it

known that a woman created the monster. Judging from the staff at Spectral, the

demographics of monster design hadnt changed much. Del Toro could recall working with

only one female designer, on Hellboy. This is a very geeky pursuit, he said.

Sculpting Frankensteins Creature was Mario Torres, a slight, doleful-looking Latino

whose head was covered by a navy-blue ski cap. For Hellboy II, he had helped del Toro

design Mr. Wink, a troll with a mace for a fist. On Torress desk, near a small portable oven,

was a large red clay bust of the Creature. Once the design was settled, the staff at Spectral

Motion would use the bust as a guide for creating prosthetics that could be layered on an

actors face.

In accordance with Mary Shelleys description, the head appeared to have been stolen

from a cadaver: there was exposed sinew around the jaw, and the cheekbones looked ready

to poke through the scrim of flesh. Most appallingly, the Creature lacked a nose; a single

bridge bone protruded over an oval breathing hole. Torres had been etching deep furrows

into the Creatures forehead, and shaved bits of clay were scattered on his desk, like

clippings on a barbershop floor.

The Creatures face was inspired, in part, by the graphic artist Bernie Wrightson, who, in

1983, published a stunning illustrated edition of Frankenstein. Four panels from the book

hung in del Toros study at Bleak House. Wrightsons Creature has been rudely cobbled

together from several corpses, but he also has a lithe, sensual grace. Its MichelangelosDavid, if Goliath had won.

For ten seconds, del Toro beheld the bust. Que lstima, he beganWhat a shame.

Torres looked ready to pull his ski cap over his eyes. Del Toro unleashed a twenty-minute

critique, largely in Spanish, lessening the sting with humor and pats on the back. Cabrn, is

that the nose of Skeletor? he teased. The nose bridge was implausibly long, del Toro said.

The facial decay was inconsistent: if the nostrils and underlying cartilage had rotted away,

the earlobes would be long gone, too. Anything that dangles goes away faster, he noted.

And the Creatures furrowed expression was too limiting: If it was going to be the monster


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just for a few minutes, I would say its really good. But its the main character. The

prosthetics for the Creature needed to accommodate a personality, allowing the actor

wearing them to express calm, vacancy, or even happiness.

So these lines are too deep? Elizalde, who was taking notes, said.

Yes, del Toro said. It needs to go beyond a good sculpture. You need to really

believe. He wanted fewer wrinkles across the face. It has to convey being newborn.

Del Toro studied the bust again, then told Torres that the jawline should be bulked up

to look more squareit would be the single allusion to the famous Boris Karloff

incarnation.

Ms Karloff, Torres agreed, meekly.

The bust was modelled on the face of Doug Jones, the former mime, who had already

agreed to play the role. Jones has performed as a monster so many times that Spectral

Motion keeps a full-body cast of him on hand. Jones is prized by del Toro for his tiny head,

swanlike neck, and spindly physique (six feet three, a hundred and forty pounds). Makeup

artists can layer prosthetics on him without giving him a clunky silhouette. Is this his real

neck? del Toro said of the bust, admiringly. Hes inhuman!

Elizalde asked del Toro about the Creatures hair. Shouldnt it be patchy, to emphasize

the theme of decay?

No, it should be long and full, del Toro said. Hes the Iggy Pop of Frankensteins! He

wiggled his hips. Shelleys story had resonated with del Toro as a metaphor for the

rebelliousness of teen-agers, and so he wanted the Creature to have the unnerving vitality of

a rock star.

Del Toro turned to a nearby table, where he examined a green clay version of the

Creatures entire body. The figure, about a foot high, was lurching forward. This is very

twenty-first century, he joked, pointing at the figures dangling penis.

Lose it? Elizalde asked.

Yes, del Toro said. Were going to have to make a gauze-cotton loincloth that is sort

of falling off. This would indicate that the monster just came out of the lab table. To

underscore the Creatures origin in multiple cadavers, one of the arms needed to be longerthan the other.

He complained that the sculpture didnt graphically indicate where the sutures were.

Give me the gauge, he said to Torres. He grabbed the tool and, squinting, carved into the

lower right hip; turning the sculpture wheel, he continued the line across the Creatures

buttocks. The suture lines, he told Torres, should look jagged, and the various body parts

should have different skin tones.

Torres took some warm clay out of his oven and began Karloffing the jaw. Del Toro,

scrutinizing the bust again, ordered a radical rhinoplasty: Take this nose off. He was


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questioning Wrightsons breathing-hole concept. Later, he explained, Its a greatgraphic

idea, but Im not sure it works so much practically. When an actor acts with his eyes, you

want to be looking at his eyes, not at a breathing plug-hole. He requested a nose that looked

semi-crushed and about to slide off.

Elizalde liked the idea. Its a cool effect, when you have that ridge of the bone, and you

have tissue thats sort of stringy and hanging on. Itll be pretty creepy-looking.

Torres asked, How should the nose look on the inside?

Not like this! del Toro said, patting him. This is too Halloween. He paused. Dont

you have a skull around? He flipped through Bone Clones, a catalogue of osteological

replicas. See? There are some very tiny, skinny bones in there. Del Toro told Torres that he

would return in four days, to determine exactly what the nose area should look like.

While we were in the sculpture studio, a pair of assistants filled del Toros Chrysler

sedan with maquettes that had been polished for display at Bleak House. As del Toro

emerged outside, the Angel of Death was being gingerly lowered into the back seat. Es la

Virgen Mara! he said. Elizalde wished del Toro good luck in New Zealand. Del Toro

climbed in and headed toward the freeway; a seat-belted maquette of Mr. Wink rode

shotgun.

hortly after that, del Toro and his family moved to Wellington, but he never shot a frame

of The Hobbit. For nine months, he waited for a starting date, but M-G-M was unable

to resolve its financial woes. In May, after the earliest possible release date for Part 1 slid

back a year, to December, 2012, del Toro abruptly flew home to Los Angeles. A statementwas released: In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming The

Hobbit, I am faced with the hardest decision of my life. After nearly two years of living,

breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkiens Middle Earth, I must, with great regret,

take leave from helming these wonderful pictures.

A week later, I met with del Toro in a restaurant on New Yorks Lower East Side. He

was a bit sheepish, perhaps because his sudden departure raised the question of whether he

had been fired. Since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won eleven Oscars,

Jackson had made two overblown messes, King Kong and The Lovely Bones.

Revisiting Tolkien would allow him to rebound. And with Jackson in charge, The Hobbit

could be presented to investors as a no-risk product. Though the studios initially announced

that another successor would be found, Jackson soon signed on himself, and the green light

came. Steve Cooper, one of the heads of M-G-M, said, Under Peters direction, the films

will undoubtedly appeal to fans of the original L.O.T.R. trilogy.

At the restaurant, del Toro had trouble squeezing into the booth; he had gained weight in

Wellington. He was adamant that he had left The Hobbit of his own accord, but his

language seemed careful. The visual aspect was under my control, he said. There was no


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interference with that creation. In collaboration with Jackson and two screenwriters, del

Toro had completed drafts for Parts 1 and 2. But final revisions were still to come, and he

noted that any strong disagreements between him and Jackson would have occurred when

they debated which scenes to film and which to cutYou know, I want to keep this. I

want to keep that. But, he said, he had quit before that impasse. I asked him if there had

been creative tension. At Weta, he said, the production delay had made everyone anxious,

and he could not distinguish between a real tension and an artificial tension.

He admitted that there had been discomfort over his design of Smaug. I know this was

not something that was popular, he said. He said that he had come up with several

audacious innovationsEight hundred years of designing dragons, going back to China,

and no one has done it!but added that he couldnt discuss them, because the design was

not his intellectual property. I have never operated with that much secrecy, he said of his

time at Weta.

Del Toro said that it had hurt like a motherfucker to leave the production, but I got the

sense that he had found it even more painful to be away from L.A. I really missed my man

cave, he said. In an attempt to approximate his collections at Bleak House, assistants had

shipped two dozen boxes of duplicate material to Wellington, but del Toro still felt as if he

were in a sensory-deprivation tank. A different kind of man would have enjoyed being close

to the New Zealand Alps, but del Toro, the ultimate indoorsman, rarely left Wellington.

Being stuck in New Zealand caused him to lose important creative opportunities. He had

agreed to launch a new animation label at Disney, Double Dare You, specializing in scary

movies for kids, but the deal foundered during his absence.

The most difficult part, he said, was making peace with the fact that somebody else is

going to have control ofyourcreatures,yourwardrobe, and change it, or discard it, or use it.

All options are equally painful. He added, The stuff I left behind is absolutely gorgeous.

Im absolutely in love with it. He suddenly became animated, waving his hands in the air

like a conductor navigating a treacherous passage of Mahler. We created a big exhibit in the

last few weeks, in preparation for a studio visit. I had color-coded the movie: there was a

green passage, a blue passage, a crimson passage, a golden passage. In Tolkien, there is aclear season for autumn, winter, summer, spring in the journey. And I thought, I cannot just

stay in four movements in two movies. It will become monotonous. So I thought of

organizing the movie so you have the feeling of going into eightseasons. So a certain area of

the movie was coded black and green, a certain area was crimson and gold, and when we

laid out the movie in a big room, we had all the wardrobe, all the props, all the color-coded

key art. When you looked and saw that beautiful rainbow, you could comprehend that there

was a beautiful passage. His scheme would probably be abandoned, he said later: Not

much is going to make it. Thats my feeling. Would his art be returned to him? I hope to


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get maquette visitation rights. But he was grateful not to have them already at Bleak House;

they would be a torment.

At the restaurant, he reminded me that the subtitle of The Hobbit is There and Back

Again. He said, There was a moment in the screenplayI dont know if its going to

survive or notwhere it was made clear that the purpose of the journey is for Bilbo to know

that he wants to be home, to say, I understand my place in the world. For me, the journey

to New Zealand was like that.

Del Toro had gone on a quest, but he came home with no treasure. The triumph of Pans

Labyrinth was now five years old. He needed a comeback project. In Wellington, he hadnt

been able to film the proof-of-concept video for Frankenstein. That could be next. But he

was thinking of taking an even bigger risk, and pursuing the adaptation of Lovecrafts At

the Mountains of Madnesshis Sisyphean project. He had begun sketching images for

an adaptation in 1993 and had completed a script in 1998. But the project had seemed too

daunting; digital effects werent yet good enough to render creatures that changed shape far

more radically than Transformers. Then, while del Toro was in Wellington, Avatar was

released, and its landmark effects made Madness seem plausible. Crucially, James

Cameron, a friend, had agreed to be a producer for Madness, sharing his expertise in

designing strange worlds. And del Toro was now less wary of making digital monsters. At

Weta, he had experimented with a virtual camera, which allows a director to maintain a

sense of physicality when filming a C.G.I. creature. They lay out the animation, you grab a

camera, and you can change the angles within that virtual environment, he said. One day, I

ended up dripping sweat from handling the virtual camera on the motion-capture stage. This

camera would be very handy on Madness.

The movie would not be an easy sell, though. Del Toro envisaged Madness as a hard

R epic, shot in 3-D, with a blockbuster budget. Creating dozens of morphing creatures

would be expensive, and much of the film needed to be shot somewhere that approximated

Antarctica; one of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecrafts novella is that the explorers

are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first

horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production. But a tent-pole horror film, as delToro put it, hadnt been made in years. High-budget productions such as Alien and The

Shining had been followed by decades of cheaper thrills. The natural flaw of horror as a

genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, its a clandestine genre, he said. It lives and

breathesTexas Chainsaw Massacre, the first Saw, The Blair Witch Projectin dark

little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.

He mentioned Hitchcocks The Birds: It was a major filmmaker using cutting-edge

optical technology and special effects. It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head

designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the


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polished aspects of a studio film.

Del Toro thought that nearly all his previous movies had conveyed sympathy for the

monsters. With Madness, he said, he would terrify the audience with their malignancy.

First, though, he needed to make Universal executives feel that, in allowing del Toro to

design a creature-filled world, they werent being recklessrather, they were

commissioning a variation on Avatar, the most successful film in history. Studios look

backward, del Toro said. Filmmakers look forward.

o anybody who owns thousands of comic books, At the Mountains of Madness is as

central to the American canon as Moby-Dick. H. P. Lovecraft, who was born in 1890

and died in 1937, wrote densely interlinked stories that convey cosmic horror. More than

one tale features a giant tentacled alien named Cthulhu. Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu several

times in Madness, and del Toro, in writing his script, had devised a way to integrate the

iconic beast into the climax. (Its membranous wings extend, filling the horizon, itsabominable head silhouetted by lightning in the clouds!) Del Toro could create a totemic

god.

Although Lovecrafts work was dismissed in his lifetime, contemporary writers

including Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates have celebrated him as the heir to Edgar

Allan Poe. Lovecrafts prose may have the highest adverbial density in English: I saw the

freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those

headless bodies and stank obscenely. But, like an outsider artist, he is so committed to his

lunatic visions that they achieve a strange grandeur.In Madness, twenty Edwardian scientists sail from Tasmania to Antarctica in search of

geological samples, and they discover a mountain range that dwarfs the Himalayas. On one

summit is a hidden, ruined city whose bizarre architecture suggests that its inhabitants were

not human. As the scientists explore the ice-encased structures, they discover pictorial

friezes revealing an awful secret. Hyper-intelligent aliens, the Old Ones, landed on earth

millions of years ago. Creating organic life forms as tools, the Old Ones fashioned every

creature on the planet, including human beings. One of their inventions, shape-shifters

known as Shoggoths, were intended as slaves; but the Shoggoths rebelled, slaughtering the

Old Ones. After the explorers accidentally thaw a few surviving Old Ones, a hidden army of

Shoggoths emerges from the shadows, and the humans find themselves caught in an alien

war. Del Toro loves the story, in part because Lovecraft combines terrorthe panicked effort

to escape the creatureswith metaphysical horror: The book essentially says how scary it

is to realize that we are a cosmic joke.

This past summer, Universal gave del Toro seed money, allowing him to create an art

room for Madness. Once again, del Toro was designing creatures without a green light.

By the end of the year, he would present his vision to the studio. If Universal executives said


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yes, he would start filming by June; if not, he would have provided more support for the

parental claim that monsters dont really exist.

I met with del Toro in Los Angeles on the first day of preproduction. He had hired five

artists to engage in ten weeks of design promiscuity at Lightstorm, James Camerons

production company, which is in Santa Monica. Parts of Avatar had been designed in the

same suite of offices. Corkboards were covered with constellations of silver pushpins; in an

interior room, Avatar maquettes were still on display.

Del Toro had transformed his own silhouette. He had lost twenty-seven pounds in three

weeks, after undergoing sleeve-gastrectomy surgery. They take three-quarters of your

stomach out and throw it out! he said. I feel great. That day, he had eaten a light lunch

with his daughter Mariana, and in an elevator they had played a family game: Guillermo

aimed his belly and crushed her, gently, into a corner. In Spanish, she lamented, This game

wont be fun when youre no longer fat. Mariana, who is slender, has the flinty confidence

of Thora Birch in Ghost World; she was toting an iPad, upon which she had sketched an

apple-green, lizardy creaturea monster leavened with Nickelodeon cheer.

For the first few days, del Toro wanted his Madness artists to draw without precepts.

These men had been sketching Shoggoths since junior high school. What had Lovecraft

made them see? Lovecraft is actually really stringent about describing the Old Ones, he

noted. And his design is really hard to solve, because they are essentially winged

cucumbers.

He wanted the creatures in Madness to be fascinating, not disgusting. He said,

Normally, creatures are designed in the same way that gargoyles were carved in

churchesfor maximum shock value. He cited Ray Harryhausen, a master of stop-motion

animation, who designed the effects for the 1981 Clash of the Titans: He used to say,

Whenever you think of a creature, think of a lionhow a lion can be absolutely malignant

or benign, majestic, depending on what its doing. If your creature cannot be in repose, then

its a bad design. When you see our creatures, youre not going to say, Oh, what a great

movie monster. Youre going to say, What aquarium, what specimen jar did that thing

come from? They need to look entirely possible in their impossibility. Hed been watchingnature documentaries. The worst thing that you can do is be inspiredsolely by movie

monsters. You need to be inspired byNational Geographic,by biological treatises, by

literature, by fine painters, by badpainters.

At Lightstorm, del Toro met first with Callum Greene, a British producer. Greene warned

him that, without discipline, his budget could easily exceed Universals limit of a hundred

and twenty-five million dollars. Greene had identified thousands of moments in the script

where special effects would be employed.

Most of them, del Toro declared, required C.G.I. Animatronic effects dont look good in


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daylight, he noted, and much of the movie would be shot in foggy snowscapes. He would

be adopting an Eastern palette, in which whiteness connoted death. Also, a physical

approach doesnt lend itself to the way I want to depict the creatures that much, because I

want them to look very heavy. Youd have to do multiple core molds, andyou know how it

isthe heavier the puppet is, the easier it breaks down. On set, you always end up saying,

Do not hit the deadly monster too hard, or it will break! When possible, del Toro said, he

would initiate a shock sequence with physical objects, to ground the viewer in something

real. The Old Ones are first seen as corpses, and Mike Elizalde could make those at Spectral

Motion.

Del Toro wanted to shoot in Canada, which offered tax rebates. Greene proposed filming

outside Vancouver: Youre looking at mountains covered in snow every day. But, he

warned, every night with two hundred people on per diem in a hotel is money.

Were going to shoot there for a longperiod of time, del Toro insisted. Otherwise,

you take away the scope instantly, and then you are doing a fucking Hallmark movie-

of-the-week. He also insisted on having two weeks to shoot landscapes in Antarctica,

where, he noted later, scientists had recently mapped a massive mountain range hidden under

ice.

He told Greene that digital-effects houses needed to understand that each Shoggoth had

at least eight permutations. He said, Lets say that creature A turns into creature A-B,

then turns into creature B, then turns into creature B-C. And by the time it lands on a guy its

creature E. He discussed one grisly Shoggoth transformation: Its like when you grab a

sock and you pull it inside out. From his mouth, he extrudes himself.

Del Toro then visited his art teamguys who nodded in unison when someone said,

You know how sea cucumbers puke their insides out to evade predators? The veteran was

Wayne Barlowe, a mild, bespectacled man in his fifties; he had collaborated with del Toro on

Hellboy and had helped define many of the creatures in Avatar, including the Great

Leonopteryx, the flying beast that Jake Sully tames on the planet Pandora. Barlowe still

draws with pencils, and he sat in a sunny corner room. He had been sketching Cthulhu in a

surprisingly soft hand. In his rendition, many appendages emanated from a central verticalcolumn; it had the majesty of a redwood tree. When del Toro looked at it, he said, I love the

idea of the floating things! Cthulhu was surrounded by satellite parasites, just as some

sharks are haloed by schools of fish. Barlowe said that he was going for a regal look, and

pointed at the creatures neck. Its like an Elizabethan collar! del Toro said, smiling.

Great.

The groups gross-out specialist was Guy Davis, the author of The Marquis, a graphic

novel that features, as del Toro put it, awesome genitalia-like monsters. Davis, a sweet

man with a downturned smile and a thinning buzz cut, showed del Toro a Shoggoth


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mid-transformation.

Really nice, del Toro said. Its sort of like a tapeworm.

Yeah, Davis said. When its forming, instead of just forming eyes, maybe its

bubbling like mud, or pudding, so you have these sockets forming but no eyes yet. Then it

gets one eye and has this cavernous companion. Mummies always freak me out because they

have sockets but no eyes.

I hadnt noticed, del Toro teased. Lovely.

Allen Williams was the neophyte; del Toro had hired him at Comic-Con, in July, after

seeing his illustrations on display. Several of Williamss sketches were inspired by marine

life: a morphing Shoggoth looked like giant jellyfish sliding across the Antarctic ice. It

would be especially creepy, Williams said, if the viewer could see innards vaguely moving

under membranous material. Del Toro nodded. Pointing at a creature with a profusion of

fins, he said, I like this, because its very much like a lionfishone of the weirdest

inhabitants of a coral reef.

Though del Toro was enthusiastic about Williamss work, he admonished him for

incorporating too many signs of infection or disease. These creatures are like Ferraris,

del Toro said. He sliced the air with his hands, suggesting aerodynamic contours. The Old

Ones didnt create shitty machines.

Peter Konig, who also designs characters for video games, sat in a pitch-dark room,

before a glowing screen. His work was sharply etched, like Egyptian hieroglyphs. He had

been playing around with symmetry, and showed a Shoggoth that appeared to be perched on

spindly legs. With a click, he flipped the image upside down, and the legs became long arms,

like those on a monkey.

The silhouette works both ways, del Toro said.

Next, Konig showed a Shoggoth whose tentacles were surging from what resembled a

long, retracting foreskin. The creature had dozens of eyes, randomly placed, like those on a

potato.

Dude, del Toro said, laughing. Its like a botched circumcision! He told Konig that

he was banning phallic imagerythe most obvious sign that an alien was designed by anerdy Homo sapiens.

Del Toro told me that the group was off to a great start, but he was eager to impose

discipline. I will ruin their lives, he joked. There is no rhythm, and everything is too

busy.

Even though del Toros team had three months to experiment, the challenge was

immense. The frozen city, for example, could emerge only after the artists had settled how

the Old Ones moved, ate, and slept. If you spend enough time strolling in the streetseeing

a cathedral, seeing a door opening and closing in a building or a caryou understand the


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ergonomics of human beings, he said. With a few key shots, del Toro needed to conjure,

wordlessly, the lives of the aliens.

He also had to master 3-D. He had been studying Avatar on his laptop, and praised the

crystalline depth that Cameron had created for Pandora. He said, What is really great

about 3-D is not what comes at you but the depthwhat I call the aquarium effect.

The digital spectacle of Madness was worlds away from the days of collodion scars

and rubber suits. I asked him if technology was effacing his art. The great consolation

always comes in the form of Hitchcock, he said. Hitchcock did 3-D, wholeheartedly, with

Dial M for Murder. He would try every gimmick, every lens, every camera mount. Hes the

patron saint for my proclivities. With some embarrassment, he noted that, at Comic-Con, he

had introduced a line of Pans Labyrinth figurines. Hitchcock would have gone to

Comic-Con, he said. He would have signed collectible shower curtains. He was a

showman andan auteur.

n early December, on the evening be fore del Toro presented his vision for Madness to

Universal, he was fretting at Bleak House. The mansion had been expanded since the

summer. The French doors had been dismantled, and a new hallway led to the Rain Room, a

red parlor whose sole window was not a window at all. Old-school effects behind the

glassa mirror, a projectorinsured that it was always a dark and stormy night.

The effect mimicked a similar window in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. A few

months earlier, del Toro had announced plans to develop a feature film based on the

attraction. Like Frankenstein, a haunted-house movie was something he had contemplatedfor years, but he wanted both projects to be realized afterMadness. He said, Seriously,

Ive been in preproduction between The Hobbit and Madness for two and a half years.

He could handle only so much foreplay.

Del Toro was pallid, and it did not look as if he had continued losing weight: he was still

wearing black sweats. He went into the kitchen and rummaged through the freezer. Want a

Popsicle? he said, taking one for himself. His lips were soon stained red.

The designs created at Lightstorm had been delivered to Bleak House, and del Toros

assistants had prepared presentation boards. They were on a kitchen counter, and del Toro

began going through them.

The aquarium look that he had spoken of at Lightstorm had clearly become a governing

metaphor. I wanted the whole city to be like an abandoned coral reef, he said. He showed

me an image of a cavernous interior space. Everything was tubular and encrusted with

skeletal remainsabandoned tools. A coral reef is a shitload of skeletons fused together,

right? All the technology those creatures have, all their technology is organic. You and I use

metals, plastics. These creatures dont have weapons or chisels. They create othercreatures

as tools.


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The architecture of the Old Ones was based on curves and cylinders, he said. There

are no steps, no ramparts. And the edifices are not at all human. Theres no balconies or

doorways. The city resembled a labyrinth of pneumatic tubes.

As del Toro had promised, the citys form intimated the silhouette of the Old Ones.

They are essentially suppositories, he said. They sort of torpedo through the tubes. But

didnt Lovecraft write that they had wings? Del Toro smiled: wings and tentacles had been

hidden inside the ovoid silhouette. An Old One opened up like a Swiss Army knife.

The oceanic motif was particularly evident in the design of the Old Ones. Del Toros

enthusiasm for the lionfish had endured, and the aliens wings echoed their flamboyant fins.

In motion, he explained, the Old Ones would appear buoyantunbound by gravity. As the

camera tracked them caroming around the city, the viewer would feel disoriented, like a

panicked scuba diver inside a cave. We designed the creatures in such a way that they can

go forward or backward, or hang, or be vertical, and they still make sense, he said.

Beckoning me into the Rain Room, he opened his laptop and showed me a rough digital

rendering of an Old One. As Peter Konig had done at Lightstorm, he flipped the image

upside down; then he flipped it on its sidein all formations, locomotion was plausible. It

has no forward and no backward, he explained. If this moves forward or backward in a

way that I can recognize, its boring. Have you seen a Spanish dancer move in the water?

They go like thishis hand made an undulating motion. Its muscular and creepy.

The Shoggoths, he said, performed an even more fluid transformation. Creating them

would push digital technology to the limit: you werent just tweaking a polygon; you were

ditching one polygon for another. Del Toro had commissioned several maquettes from Mike

Elizalde. The cast-resin monsters rested on beds of artificial snow, and hovering Shoggoths

were held aloft with thin metal poles. The models were poignant relics of twentieth-century

technology, but they helped connect del Toros current vision with the tradition of Forrest

Ackerman. These were the next Famous Monsters of Filmland.

The Shoggoths had a racecar sheen. They are pristine, he said. They are functional.

They are notasymmetric. Symmetry is efficiency. And these guys need to be efficient. He

wasnt sure yet if the Shoggoth palette should be pearlescent or circulatoryreds andblues. Since the Shoggoths could mutate into anything, there was no fixed silhouette, but

many would feature a protoplasmic bowl, an abdomen-like area from which new forms

could sprout. One maquette was a disorienting twist on classic Lovecraftian form. It looked

like a giant octopus head with tentacles jutting from the top andthe bottoma fearful

symmetry. Thats my belly in the middle, del Toro joked.

In another maquette, the Shoggoth had sprouted two heads, each extending from

brontosaurus-like necks. Their skulls could be smashed together to destroy victims. The

idea is to create craniums that function as jaws, he said. The Shoggoths would often create


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ghastly parodies of human forms; as they pursued the humans, they would imitate them,

imperfectly.

Having read the script, I knew that the body count would be high. (BAMMMMM!!!!! A

massive Shoggoth explodes out from the tower!!!!! It grabs and devours Gordon in

mid-sentence!) But del Toro promised that the film was not gory. Victims would be

absorbed by the aliens in ways that were eerie and scary. He explained, When you

watch a documentary of a praying mantis eating the head of its mate, because of the

complexity of the mouth mechanism, youre fascinated. Its a horrible act, but youre

fascinated. Though he wouldnt be spattering blood, he said that he needed to fight

Universal for an R rating, to have the freedom to make it really, really uncomfortable and

nasty.

The meeting at Universal, he said, was at ten-thirty: Ive never been this nervous going

to a meeting. This invested. He added, There are certain rules to dating a movie. You try to

fall in love when its a reality, and try not to be completely head over heels on the first date.

But Im hopelessly in love with the creatures.

Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley, the top executives at Universal, would attend, as

would James Cameron. Del Toro said, Hes supporting what I want. He said to me, You

did this with five guys in ten weeks? Thats astounding.

Del Toro indicated that he would not be willing to make radical adjustments to his

vision. I dont want to make a movie called At the Mountains of Madness. I want to make

this movie. And if I cannot make this movie Ill do something else. He paused. Itll behorrible.

Fogelson was impressed with the presentation. The sense of scope, the sense of danger,

and just the sheer popcorn commercial appeal of the creatures that he was presenting to us

were a sight to behold, he told me. At each step, he wowed us, and, to be candid, he

knew and we all knewthat a wow was required to keep this movie moving forward.

Its a big bet. Still, Universal wasnt quite ready to give the project a green light. Del Toro

went to another meeting, and then another. As of late January, the project remained potential

energy. Del Toro was confident that his creatures would one day roam the multiplex, but Iremembered that he had called Hollywood the Land of the Slow No.

On that December night at Bleak House, I noticed that del Toro had moved some of his

journals from the bathroom safe to a shelf in the Rain Room. I asked to see early sketches

for Madness.

The notebook was from 1993. He turned the pages, stopped, and smiled. Look! he

said. It was an image of one of the explorers falling into icy water. An inky creature lunging

at him looked breathtakingly similar to the Shoggoth with symmetrical tentacles. Del Toros

monsters had inhabited his mind for nearly two decades. From the beginning, del Toro had


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imagined that his creatures, unlike Lovecrafts, would have a fatal vulnerabilityone that

explained why the horrible beasts had remained trapped in Antarctica. Salt water: it

dissolved a Shoggoth like a slug.

PHOTOGRAPH: JOSEF ASTOR

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guillermo del toro’s amazing creatures : the new yorker

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