Guillermo del Toro - Cabinet of Curiosities

“Spiritual blindness and physical blindness, I’m afraid of both,” Guillermo says. Whether it’s the Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth , the Angel of Death in Hellboy II , or the other myriad characters who choose to see or not see what is right in front of them, Guillermo invites us to consider the conscious and unconscious choices we ourselves make.

Interestingly, while existential dread has been a major theme in Guillermo’s work, a different kind of fear attends his career. “The thing I’m most afraid of is success. The second thing I fear the most is failing. But I think success is more scary. I tell you, and I’m being completely honest—people may think this is PR or me bullshitting—but the day I didn’t win the Oscar for foreign film for Pan’s Labyrinth , I was happy. It’s not a reflection about the Oscar. Any prize that I don’t win fuels the fire, and every prize I win quenches it. I always say, when you’re young and unsuccessful, you don’t have the money, and if you’re not careful, when you’re old and successful, you don’t have the passion. To be put in either of those two positions is a tragedy. I think one of the toughest times in any man’s life is his twenties, because in your twenties you’re fiercely screaming who you are, but you have only half a notion of who you are. Then as you grow older, you whisper who you are, but people are closer to you, and they listen. By that time, you have half a notion, a quarter of a notion, of who you are. I think the tragedy is when you finally have all the people that you need surrounding you, and you have nothing left to say.”

For now, Guillermo’s fears have not materialized. He is a passionate artist working at the height of his abilities. At various times, Guillermo has stood at a creative crossroads, tempted by the sort of success he fears could lead to tragedy. But in each instance, he has drawn a line, claimed himself, seen past the illusory, and chosen his voice, his calling, his singular form of expression.

In building the edifice of his life and work, it’s only natural that he’d erect a structure to hold his dreams and creations—a place called Bleak House.

As I approached Bleak House for the first time, a house with an oddly Gothic air located in a subdivision outside of Los Angeles, I couldn’t help thinking of the opening lines to one of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

I had come to Bleak House to begin the series of conversations that would form the foundation of this book. The sky was slate and intermittently rainy, and as I drew near the door, the rambling edifice towered over me, the storm clouds sweeping across the dragon weather vane like a leprous hand.

I regarded the heavy iron knocker like Marley’s ghost, raised it, and struck three times. A moment later, the thick oak door swung wide. There stood Guillermo.

“Come in, come in.” His big hand waved me inside.

Across the threshold, I found myself in a realm of wonders. In the foyer was what appeared to be an enormous figure of Sammael, the outrageous demon from Hellboy. To my left was apparently an antique oil of Saint George killing the dragon, to my right busts of Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie. Gleaming wood detailing flanked walls incarnadined as if infected by the mysterious plague from Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” There was a life-size figure of the pinhead from Freaks and of Karloff’s Frankenstein, plus samurai armor, automata old and new, and the skulls and skeletons of creatures real and imagined. And in every square inch, filling room upon room, were framed insects and original art by Arthur Rackham, Bernie Wrightson, Edward Gorey, Drew Struzan, and Basil Gogos, along with first editions of Twain, Dickens, L. Frank Baum, and Andrew Lang, plus rare treatises on magic, the occult, and vampirism, on the monstrous and the dream-born.

It is a collection Guillermo describes as “every book I ever read and most every toy I ever bought,” all of it as meticulously designed as a Tiffany egg. Bleak House is Xanadu, if Charles Foster Kane had been thirteen years old and the most brilliant geek ever.

“The fact is,” Guillermo says, “that what I do is not fan art. My films are not fan films, even if I am immersed in pop culture. That is just one facet of what I do, what I draw upon, and who I am. I am influenced by literature as much as I am by comics, and by fine art as much as I am by so-called low-brow. But I am not trapped by either extreme. I transit between these parameters in absolute freedom, doing my own thing. I try to present myself as I am, without apologies and with absolute passion and sincerity. I study my subjects and plan my work meticulously. Think of Cronos, Devil’s Backbone , or Pan’s Labyrinth and you will see that what I do is not only to recontextualize artistic forms but reflect on the genres or subgenres that they belong to. I try to deconstruct through love, through appreciation, not by referencing, but by reconnecting the material with its thematic roots in a new approach. The vampire film, the ghost story, and the fairy tale are re-elaborated in my work, rather than just reenacted or imitated. I never want to follow a recipe; I want to cook my own.”

As for Guillermo, he likes to call it his “man cave.”

I’ve had this feeling three times before in my life.

When I was seven, I visited the Ackermansion, Forrest J Ackerman’s stupendous collection of monster and sci-fi memorabilia. Uncle Forry’s home was filled with articulated dinosaurs from King Kong , the latex alien hand from The Thing , Spock’s pointed ears, original art by Frank R. Paul and Virgil Finlay, a copy of the robot from Metropolis , and thousands of other items. The second time was when I was in my early twenties and literally crawling through Rod Serling’s attic while researching my book The Twilight Zone Companion. The attic housed heavy leather volumes holding every article and snippet printed about Serling, files with notions finished and unfinished, a box full of unproduced Twilight Zone scripts, and plastic airplane models still in their boxes. The third time was when I visited Ray Bradbury’s canary-yellow house in Cheviot Hills, which overflowed with mementos and touchstones from his miraculous life. From original Joe Mugnaini artwork for Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles to the toy typewriter he’d first started writing on at age twelve, everywhere there was wonder.