In Bleak House, I have built a temple to them, and within I have built devotional shrines.” He was raised Catholic, in Mexico. They are not effigies collected for profit or due to a completist mania. In his foreword to the exhibition catalog, del Toro writes: “Monsters are, to this day, true family to me. It’s essentially a boy’s macabre playhouse, stuffed with horror memorabilia, including life-size effigies of famous creatures like Frankenstein’s monster and famous writers like Poe and Lovecraft (which are only slightly less alarming). Most of the exhibit consists of the actual contents of a house-called Bleak House-that the director keeps in a suburb of Los Angeles. “At Home With Monsters” is, in a way, a look inside del Toro’s own peculiarly configured consciousness. “Monsters are, to this day, true family to me.”
#The highbrow full#
In the poem “Children Selecting Books in a Library,” Randall Jarrell writes, “Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres / Because their lives are: the capricious infinite.” That’s where the best moments of del Toro’s films always seem to be taking place-in the capricious infinite as it is apprehended, warily, in the mind’s eye of a child. It’s fear mixed with fascination, a childlike wonder at the strange shapes reality can take. All horror traffics in fear, but the fear in del Toro’s work isn’t simply the something’s-out-to-get-you feeling of conventional scare pictures. (And, okay, their common girth: They are rotund men.) I think it’s fair to say that both filmmakers transformed their chosen genres by bringing to them a more personal intensity than the weary old forms had been accustomed to. Hitchcock and del Toro aren’t similar artists at all, really, except in their common dedication to purely visual, and visceral, storytelling.
Just as Alfred Hitchcock-about whom he wrote a short book as a young man-was the master of suspense, del Toro is as close as we’ve got right now to a master of horror. This isn’t exactly world domination of the sort that the villains and monsters in The Strain and his 2004 film, Hellboy, crave, but for a filmmaker who has directed only nine movies in 23 years, the reach of his name as a guarantee of a certain kind of genre entertainment is pretty impressive. Next year, the museum show will travel to Minneapolis and Toronto.
#The highbrow series#
In December, Netflix will stream the original animated series Trollhunters, produced by del Toro and based on a 2015 young-adult novel written by him and Daniel Kraus. In recent months, an exhibition called “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters” opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a boxed set of his Spanish-language horror films, Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), has been issued by the Criterion Collection, just in time for the holidays (Halloween and Day of the Dead, that is).
#The highbrow tv#
His sumptuously gruesome vampire/plague TV series, The Strain, is currently in its third season. The director Guillermo del Toro won’t have a feature film out in 2016, but his brand-and his spirit-seem to be everywhere.
0 kommentar(er)
