Guillermo del Toro has that unusual reputation of being a favourite director of both horror fanboys and art house patrons alike. Pan’s Labyrinth was greeted with gushing praise, while his unrestrained enthusiasm for the work of Mike Mignola earned the respect of Hellboy fans. Here was a director who courted good favour with audiences on either side of the taste divide that he straddled. When he was given the nod to direct The Hobbit, this was greeted with sighs of relief. New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson had been involved in several rounds of disputes over profits from the previous Tolkien adaptation, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There were even rumours of Sam Rami (then fresh from the loathed Spider-man 3) being handed the film instead of the Kiwi visionary. Thankfully, a deal was eventually struck, and with Jackson back on board as a producer, del Toro was handpicked to introduce his unique sensibility to the Tolkein’s bucolic fantasy world.
Then it all went wrong.
del Toro was fired from the production, for reasons that remain unclear, although some suspected it was Jackson’s need for a hit after the relative failures of King Kong and The Lovely Bones. Then the Mexican director began a bizarre round of rubber-stamping his name on countless projects that failed to materialise, as either a producer or director. The prospect of a third Hellboy film was mooted by Mignola himself, and out of the various promised movies, the Australian-filmed production of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, helmed by Troy Nixey, was one of the few to actually arrive on cinema screens. Whatever goodwill had been generated by the Oscar-nominated Pan’s Labyrinth was beginning to evaporate.
During this tumultuous period in del Toro’s career he published two novels out of a proposed trilogy with the assistance of crime writer Chuck Hogan. The first book, The Strain, was a best-seller, with immediate speculation that the series would form the basis of a series of films from the director, placing his own spin on the current vampire trend.
What is problematic about The Strain is that despite the upfront credit to Chuck Hogan, the series is being marketed on del Toro’s name and yet there is little evidence in it of his own writing. If anything, it reads like a rather generic and predictable thriller, heavily derivative of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot if one exchanged a rural community for Manhattan island, albeit with a hint of del Toro imagery. Instead of a partnership between the two creators, The Strain feels like it comes with a meager del Toro glaze.
This unfortunately also shines an uncomfortable light on the overall style of del Toro’s work in film. Many of the images employed in The Strain should be familiar to fans of his movies. The vampires are a further elaboration on the ‘Reaver Strain’ identified in Blade II, and in fact an entire action sequence involving a UV explosion is repeated beat for beat in the book. On the commentary for that movie, David Goyer complained bemusedly about how many drafts del Toro made him go through until it fell into alignment with what he envisioned. The balding, marble-skinned vampires resembled feral takes on Max Schreck’s Count Orlok (of Nosferatu fame). They reappear in The Strain with the leaden, exposition-filled prose outlining the biological structure of these fictional creatures, described as a virus made manifest. Vampirism is portrayed as a process of metastasising organs that transform the host into a walking disease vector. The entire approach del Toro and Hogan take to the material feels overly familiar, almost fetishistic in its detail. There are one or two moments that possess a hint of the level of creativity we expect from someone of del Toro’s reputation, such as a vampire hunter keeping a severed heart in a jar that remains animated due to his feeding it droplets of blood every day for over thirty years. Overall though, The Strain is a disappointment, a vapid and stodgy page-turner lacking in characterisation.
Del Toro’s enthusiasm for his work cannot be doubted, however. In his interviews, he seems consistently personable despite the highs and lows of his career. In the current issue of the Australian cinema industry publication if Magazine, Glenn Melenhorst (creative director of Illoura, which was hired by del Toro to work on Don’t be Afraid of the Dark) is quoted as saying “There’ll always be a story-point reason he doesn’t like it, never technical, because he’ll trust us to do what we do best…so basically he gave us the confidence to do that while he related to the film purely from a creative story point.” Now, there’s every indication he was wonderful to work with and Melenhorst’s words confirm that. However, my personal opinion is that amiability is not a key trait of a director, or indeed any leader. Instead of taking a hands on approach to the film, it seems to me as if Del Toro prefers the ‘creative’ standpoint of being a visionary, a source of inspiration for the imagery employed by the crew making his film, as opposed to more actively involving himself in the process.
There is an increasingly obvious throughline in his pictures, an attempt to evoke the images and horror properties that
scared the director as a child. Again, this is a point of concern, as the post-Tarantino era of cinema rewards directors for their indulgence in pop trivia and nostalgia. Del Toro is no different, having crossed the line from post-modern references (Blade adopts the pose of a Hammer Horror Van Helsing, at one point using an improvised cross against a vampire enemy) to outright sentiment (*that* singalong session in Hellboy 2 – particularly off-putting given the fatalism of Mignola’s writing). His arty pictures The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth were also notable for their fantastical settings taking place during the Spanish civil war. This tendency to mix history and fantasy reaches its nadir with The Strain, where the malevolent Master (also referred to at one point as the ‘Dark One’, thusly ticking off as many cliches in a single sitting as possible) chooses New York because he is drawn by the immense tragedy of 9/11. It is then revealed that the Master was also present in Nazi concentration camps, linking the Holocaust and the September 11th attacks through the medium of an eight-foot tall, bald creature of fantasy. This riffing on genuine historical tragedies for the purposes of a vampire novel leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. If The Strain were to be made into a film, the concentration camp scenes alone – Schindler’s List, but with vampires! – would go down like a lead balloon.
The question needs to be asked – is del Toro as a creator sufficiently self-aware to judge when he is caught up in adolescent fancies instead of genuinely imaginative inspiration? Or has he, like (arguably) Tarantino, or Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith, allowed his muse to become subsumed by immature indulgence?
Tags: Blade II, Chuck Hogan, comic booked, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Guillermo del Toro, movies, Pan's Labyrinth, Peter Jackson, The Hobbit, The Strain, vampires
I think I would put del Toro into a similar category as M. Night Shyamalan. Good, but for some reason under-rated (because everyone has such high hopes)
I’d rate Del Toro higher in fact. At the very least he does not insert himself into the storyline [LadyintheWater, LadyintheWater]. Still I get what you mean – both directors aim very high and I question whether either of them hit their targets.
Great article! Del Toro does have some hits and misses but I think he is much better than M. Night. I think you may have hit the nail on the head when you state that he is “rubber stamping” his name on different projects. Often times, I feel that these creative people are over extending themselves and/or are not welcoming constructive feedback on their works. I find it hard to believe that not one person was able to tell M. Night that The Village and Lady in the Water were poorly written stories.