Guillermo Del Toro Tells Dark Tales, But Tales That Are Nonetheless Filled With Hope

Guillermo Del Toro is a folk alchemist, a practitioner of a transformative art in which archetypes are reconfigured, pulled through his specific Catholic/fabulist sensibility, and reconstituted as a thing that feels new despite its ancient origins. He puts the fable in modern contexts, not as a contrivance or for some notion of “freshness” (I’d argue the opposite to be true), but to share his experience of these stories as he sees them. For him, as they should be for all of us, they are eternally current, endlessly reconstituting as warnings, guides, explicators of traumatic social and personal disruption. Scary stories have always served this function for us as a species: the reason someone didn’t come home from the hunt; the why behind a plague, an eclipse, a flood; the monster that for however scary is still less scary than a malignant, or worse, a meaningless universe. There’s a recognition in Del Toro’s work that science, however advanced, remains insufficient in addressing the world’s wounds. Just the opposite, as we’ve witnessed with the vocal, violent rejection of knowledge during a devastating pandemic. The more mysteries we solve, it seems, the more demons we release. It occurs to me the warning against consuming fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, stealing fire from Olympus, speaking the name of God, flying too close to the sun – that all of these bans are akin to Hercules’ discovery when fighting the hydra. The more heads you chop off, the more heads grow from the neck.

Of the old Universal Monsters pantheon, only the Mummy and The Invisible Man remain without a Del Toro redux, though the argument could be made that both missing archetypes appear as the vaporous Kraus in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. For the others — the vampire, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon — he has assembled a body of work that conventional wisdom would say is doomed for a niche audience under the best of circumstances. Instead, Del Toro is currently one of the few filmmakers to ever follow a Best Picture win at the Oscars with another film nominated for the honor his very next time at bat (Nightmare Alley). He’s hit upon something, tapped a vein, tripped a nerve, and I would argue it’s how he occupies a space as a storyteller in a culture that is fond of telling itself its outgrown them. Del Toro’s work evokes a sense of the wonder and horror of childhood, but it also seeks to move those wonders into a modern, mature context, the better to ease their application to contemporary maladies. I’m not suggesting that’s the intent, I’m saying that’s the outcome. The intent is likely just that these stories are completely current for Del Toro and the nursing of them as real things rather than derelict tableaux morte is the only approach that Del Toro can take with them. He’s a natural, and we’re the beneficiaries.

Start with his forays into the vampire mythos with an understanding that his work tends to overlap with elements of the Christian tradition in particular, various pagan traditions in general. His first feature is the extraordinary Cronos starring legendary actor Federico Luppi as Jesus Gris, the character’s name referencing the Catholic tradition as well as certain West African traditions in which a “gris-gris” is a totem meant to ward away evil spirits. He discovers an ancient clockwork mechanism housing a strange insect, that provides for the user eternal youth. It also engenders a kind of vampirism among other mortifications of the flesh. Of the many readings possible for the film are the troubles of worshiping false idols as the godly Jesus discovers the abomination in a statue of an archangel and believes, at the end after a mortal sacrifice, that it’s the Christian God who has spared him – though Del Toro leaves the question of whether Jesus has actually been spared a mystery. It could also be read as a morality tale warning about the dangers of greed and vanity. Materialism and earthly power are represented in the film by the cool, industrial spaces occupied by the villain who has been searching for this gold bug while Jesus is seduced for a while by his lustrous hair and increased libido. 

Del Toro returns to vampires in Blade II in which Blade (Wesley Snipes), a half-vampire/half-human “daywalker” vampire hunter faces off against a mutant variation of vampires called “reapers.” He’s forced to align with vampires in this endeavor, much to his dismay, motivated mainly by his desire to rescue his friend and mentor, Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). A story of the Prodigal Son in which Blade’s journey is paralleled by a vampire princess and the leader of the reapers, find here, too, an early Del Toro trope of the celebration of the preciousness of difference. He is interested in the “last” of things and the passing of the old into a denuded now – even if the thing being destroyed is conventionally “ugly,” even dangerous. The vampires are drawn as tradition-bound, honoring, appropriately enough, the sanctity of their bloodlines – a thing that a mongrel like Blade offends. Yet it’s the marriage of worlds that Blade represents that gives him an advantage over both sides of his “family” tree. Blade II is the best of the three Blade films not just for the crispness and the beauty of its images, or its unabashed delight in its copious and inventive bloodletting, but for the strength of its allegorical mythmaking.

Next, Del Toro paired with Chuck Hogan to write a book series called The Strain in an apocalyptic tale of a global pandemic that married elements of virology, parasitology, the zombie movie, and of course vampirism. Turned into a four-season F/X television series for which Del Toro directed the pilot, its indicated by the multiplicity of ideas and sources that collide in it (one of its heroes is an elderly Holocaust survivor in a subtle call out to Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort), and by its willingness to claim literally millions of victims in the course of its run.

In a recent interview with NPR, Del Toro describes the first time he saw James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931): “This monster crossing the threshold, this anomaly seemed to embody everything that I thought was ‘wrong’ with me, in a beautiful way, it was like a patron saint being discovered for me.” His own version of the film starring Doug Jones as a monster inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s wraith-like conception was scrapped in the eleventh hour after creature designs and pre-production had already begun. A similar fate greeted his expensive vision for H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness that would have paired Del Toro with Tom Cruise in a story about the discovery of elder gods in an abandoned base in the arctic – ditto his proposed Hellboy III that would have seen, allegedly, the fulfillment of his antihero’s destiny to bring about the end of the world. Each project a personal expression for Del Toro, each failure devastating in its own way and the product of a certain short-sightedness by producers concerned about the cost/return of fostering Del Toro’s expansive visions.

In a way, Del Toro did get the chance to explore the Frankenstein mythos with his studio-bowdlerized Mimic – the story of a brilliant entomologist, unable to have children of her own, who “creates” an insect, a “Judas Strain,” in order to eradicate the cockroach population that is the primary carrier for a polio-like child-killing virus. Mira Sorvino plays the scientist/mother to a monster that eventually mutates into a mimic able to simulate New York’s homeless population for the purposes of human predation. Adding to the depth of a piece that Del Toro disdains, but that I adore even in its pared down form, there is an Italian cobbler (Giancarlo Giannini) and his autistic son who have a Geppetto/Pinocchio dynamic as his boy descends into the belly of the beast, resulting in his father having to follow him, complete with a flickering lamplight, into the underneath. Del Toro’s upcoming stop-motion Pinocchio will be an expansion on the theme of fathers and their sons, and boys undergoing trials in order to become men.

Del Toro’s gothic ghost stories The Devil’s Backbone and Crimson Peak carry heavy allegorical burdens as well. For the first, it’s his tribute to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, an all time classic of the world cinema in which the horrors of the Spanish Civil War are told through the eyes of a young rural girl, obsessed with Frankenstein, who sees the world through that film’s lens of misunderstood creatures and the madness of crowds. The Devil’s Backbone is ravishing. It’s set in an orphanage during wartime, an unexploded bomb in its courtyard, and the unquiet spirit of a child taken by the conflict representative of the atrocity of war, of course, but also the usefulness as a symbol of lost children for their preciousness and their innocence. Federico Luppi rejoins Del Toro as the orphanage’s doctor, Casares, who is carrying on an affair with headmistress Carmen (Marisa Paredes) – the discovery of their imbroglio a source of some minor titillation among the boys but also signaling a coming-of-sexual-awakening subtheme that will appear again in Crimson Peak and most explicitly in The Shape of Water.

With Crimson Peak, Del Toro presents his most self-conscious homage to another filmmaker in a picture loosely described as “gothic romance” that resolves as a shrine to the Italian master Mario Bava. It’s visually astonishing, every frame a stunner, a The Whip and the Body supernaturally-tinged, incestuous lust-triangle between proper Victorian woman and aspiring author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) – her name a portmanteau of perhaps Edith Wharton and the Hammer horror movie actor Peter Cushing. Edith falls in love with dashing Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) but when she marries and joins him in his ancestral home, she finds herself on the wrong side of Thomas’ disapproving sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Full of large emotions and dazzling period flourishes, Del Toro demonstrates a particular gift for empathizing with the “outsider,” transferring Edith’s sense of otherness to Thomas, and then finally to the monstrous Lucille who only finds completion of her sense of self in the “platonic” company of her cross-gendered twin. 

Del Toro’s answer to his own question of “what would happen if the Creature from the Black Lagoon and his human quarry fell in love?” is the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water that finds outsider/outcast cleaning woman Elisa (Sally Hawkins) falling in love with a mysterious gill-man (Doug Jones) kept prisoner by evil spook Strickland (Michael Shannon) at a research lab. Elisa’s friends are gay painter Giles (Richard Jenkins), lonesome and isolated and pining for a terrible young man (Morgan Kelly) who works at a diner, and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) who responds heroically to protect Elisa’s sudden-acceptance by a thing most would find alien and repulsive. Her courtship of the Creature begins with giving him hardboiled eggs from lunch – a callback to the image of young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) from Pan’s Labyrinth feeding something to a giant toad squatting at the base of a gnarled tree in the dark wood. There’s a ritualistic quality to it, of course, and there are layers to unpack from the fertility symbols of eggs and their offering. Attached to the love story is a tale of Russian spies that I disdained upon first viewing as being a relic of a gratefully-retired past only to find that Russia has become our enemy again, in the world, and has infiltrated the highest ranks of our government while we were sleeping. This fable about misfits finding purpose and love in the middle of a Cold War is sadly prescient though Del Toro would protest he’s merely dealing with eternal cycles. 

His gift for melancholy is what I take mostly from his two Hellboy pictures, culminating in the lovely, unrequited romance in the second film between Hellboy’s (Ron Perlman) partner Abe (Doug Jones) and the elf princess Nuala (Anna Walton). When things go bad between Hellboy and his girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), he and Abe commiserate by getting drunk and listening to Barry Manilow. It’s corny in the best possible sense of the word. It’s so heartfelt, so earnest, that it highlights how chilly and reserved so many mainstream films have become.

The film’s highlight, though, is in the destruction of an Earth Elemental – the last of its kind, ambivalent villain Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), Nuala’s brother, tells Hellboy. And really at the end of the day, isn’t the Elemental more like Hellboy than the humans for whom Hellboy works? What works best about these films is Del Toro’s empathy for how people who have been rejected by “normal” society, build a family of their own. The loneliness Del Toro describes as a child is the thread that runs through all of his pictures, the suture that binds us to his visions of woebegone monsters trying to be acceptable to a society that will never truly accept them. Even his Kaiju epic Pacific Rim centers on a man (Charlie Hunnam) who has lost his brother with whom he had something of a “blood harmony” – a near-subliminal connection that allowed them to pilot the giant robot “Jaegers” the humans have assembled to battle an endless stream of enormous beasties. For all the beautiful bombast, the film is a myth created to explain the natural disasters destroying our climate-compromised world. It’s not a complicated conceit, but it’s a gloriously effective one that depicts the massive scale of the task before us, but offers some hope that a collective effort could solve our ills. It’s a fantasy about a way forward and, for that, it’s a kindness.

His latest film, Nightmare Alley is a reconstitution of an entire subgenre of the noir, the carnival picture. Based on Edmond Goulding’s all-time 1947 classic starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell, itself based on a William Lindsay Gresham novel, it reminds, too of bleak fair like Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, the hall of mirrors conclusion of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, the tunnel of love sequence from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Freddie Francis’ carny anthology Torture Garden, and even of the opaque malevolence of Christopher Speeth’s cult curiosity Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood in which it’s revealed that a mysterious traveling show is run by a vampire and his minions. Nightmare Alley is a different kind of haunt, though, as drifter Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), after the death of his father, joins a carnival run by foul Clem (Willem Dafoe) and featuring sideshow acts like Molly’s (Rooney Mara) electricity girl and poor drunken Pete’s (David Straithairn) mentalism gag. Seeing a way to get a little bit ahead for once in his life, Carlisle steals Pete’s how-to book, adds a bit of his unctuous Okie charm, and breaks the only cardinal law in the business by predating on a grieving man’s (Peter MacNeill) desire to talk to a dead wife. Carlisle is a born loser, destined to be a geek at the bottom rung of the carny ladder, and Del Toro paints it all in the gaudy grease paint of a different time that never was, and place there never could be. Eye-splittingly gorgeous, the saturated sepia nighttimes of the film resolve in the end at a wintry, spectral series of pathways that erupt in Del Toro’s trademark, shocking, gore.

The film is stolen, though, by Cate Blanchett’s shrink Dr. Lilith Ritter – a character who uses electricity, top-of-the-line technological snoop devices, and a library of syndromes and secrets that Carlisle would like to use to grift the big fish running things from behind-the-scenes from the penthouses of Del Toro’s astonishing Gotham. Lilith is terrifying. She is sex and promise, sophistication and aspiration, vicious and morally loose. It’s Blanchett’s best performance and functions in Nightmare Alley as the one character who is entirely in control from beginning to end. She’s been victimized once, we learn, and she’ll never be on the bottom again. 

That leaves Carlisle, the creep, the outsider through his own faithlessness and thus deserving of Del Toro’s contempt. He’s a cautionary tale. He is Eve and Icarus, Prometheus stealing knowledge and sentenced for it by an eternity chained in the Caucasus, an eagle eating a liver that regenerates to be eaten again and again and again.What does Nightmare Alley say about us? It says that we’re at a moment of crisis but we still have choices. The temptation to sin is great, but the road to salvation is clear. It’s saying that trauma doesn’t need to define us, though it does. That money is the root of all evil, that it is a deadly illness to fear criticism and desire praise. It’s Del Toro understanding how the secret to the future is in the stories we’ve always told ourselves and so he tells this story like he’d found it printed on old vellum, watermarked and stained, thin like an onion skin in a trunk in your grandmother’s attic. It smells like the ozone of heat lightning on one of those endless summer nights when a dark carnival fires into infernal life. It’s one story with one ending, but the magic of Del Toro’s films – like the Troll Bridge sequence in Hellboy II that has a thousand astounding images to fuel a lifetime of new stories – is that his worlds are pregnant with crossroads and paths not taken. He tells dark tales, but his films are about hope. We need it. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.