When Guillermo del Toro goes to the cinema, he doesn’t just buy a ticket. he buys a perimeter. He reserves three seats—one for himself, and two for the popcorn, his elbows, and what he calls his “girth.” It is a practical arrangement for an expansive man, but it also serves a psychological purpose. In the dim light of a theater, del Toro enjoys the paradoxical sensation of being “semi-alone”—embedded in a collective experience, yet shielded by a buffer of empty velvet.
This preference for the periphery, the liminal space between the known and the unknown, defines not only his viewing habits but his entire cinematic language. Sitting in the library of a London hotel, dressed in a black Ralph Lauren jumper with a bedhead of tufty grey hair, the 61-year-old director looks less like a Hollywood titan and more like the curator of a haunted museum. He is currently in the UK to receive a BFI fellowship, an honor that places him in the lineage of Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa, but his presence in England is also deeply personal. He is, quite literally, hunting for a haunted house.
For del Toro, England is the “land of ghosts,” a place where the veil is thin. While he describes himself as a skeptic, he admits to experiences that “dislocate your sense of self.” These include a childhood encounter with the spirit of an uncle in Guadalajara and a UFO sighting at age 14 that he maintains was witnessed by a friend. “When these things happen, it causes a crack,” he explains. “You feel the mystery of the universe come rushing toward you.”
The Architecture of the Monstrous
Del Toro’s career has been a lifelong exercise in filling those “cracks” with creatures. While the modern film industry is dominated by the polished, predictable arcs of superheroes, del Toro finds them alien. He identifies instead with the monster—the misunderstood, the grotesque, and the tender. This sensibility has resonated far beyond the horror community, finding an unlikely champion in Taylor Swift. The singer, a self-described fan of The Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth, echoed del Toro’s imagery in her hit “Anti-Hero,” casting herself as a “monster on the hill.”
This obsession with the outsider began in his youth in Guadalajara, where he ran a film society and acted as projectionist, ticket seller, and critic. At the time, his belief that horror and fantasy could function as “audio-visual poetics” was considered unfashionable. When he prepared his 1992 debut, Cronos, he was warned that he might be “pegged as a genre filmmaker”—a label that, at the time, was intended as a professional death sentence.
The road to legitimacy was not without its casualties. Del Toro recalls a period of professional volatility involving producer Bob Weinstein, who attempted to fire him during the production of the 1997 film Mimic. “The Weinsteins almost destroyed me,” he says, the usual sparkle in his eyes dimming. “I was on the verge of being unbankable, and unhirable.” Yet, it was this brush with professional oblivion that solidified his resolve to never accept “work for hire.”
A Legacy of Refusal
Del Toro’s filmography is as defined by what he refused to make as by what he did. His commitment to his own vision led him to turn down some of the most lucrative franchises in cinema history. He passed on X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—the latter of which he persuaded his friend Alfonso Cuarón to direct. The two had met decades earlier while working on a low-budget Mexican anthology series that Cuarón aptly dubbed “The Toilet Zone.”
Even The Chronicles of Narnia was rejected on a point of thematic principle. “I didn’t want the fucking lion to be resurrected,” del Toro says. “What is the worth of that sacrifice if he knows he’s coming back?”
| Project | Status | Reason/Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Cronos | Completed | Debut feature; challenged “genre” stigmas. |
| Mimic | Completed | First US film; fraught with producer conflict. |
| Prisoner of Azkaban | Declined | Recommended Alfonso Cuarón instead. |
| Narnia | Declined | Disagreed with the narrative of resurrection. |
| At the Mountains of Madness | Unrealized | Long-gestating Lovecraft adaptation. |
From Frankenstein to the Buried Giant
The BFI fellowship comes at a moment of transition. Del Toro has spent a significant portion of his life preparing to adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a project that is now behind him. His 2025 adaptation, featuring Jacob Elordi as the Creature, draws heavily from the Hammer Horror legacy and the work of Terence Fisher. Del Toro specifically cites the 1974 film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell for its depiction of a “delicate Creature” and a purely villainous Baron.
With Frankenstein complete, del Toro describes a feeling of “emptiness,” though he clarifies it is a serene one. “All pain comes from desire,” he says. “And if you simply want to breathe, that’s a very good place to be.”
He is now channeling that serenity into a new, ambitious project: a stop-motion animated adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Set in a post-Arthurian Britain where ogres roam the landscape, the film will be R-rated and devoid of songs. Del Toro intends to push the medium of animation by focusing on “inefficient” micro-gestures—the natural fidgets and stumbles of human movement—to create a visceral, twitchy realism similar to that seen in his 2022 Pinocchio.
This focus on the “inefficient” and the “mystery” extends to his reflections on his own father, a man who won $6 million in a 1969 lottery but remained perpetually restless. Del Toro views art not as a tool for massive societal shifts—referencing Steven Soderbergh’s skepticism about whether Shakespeare can prevent genocide—but as a means of correcting lives by modest degrees. “There is a mystery to cinema,” he says, the sparkle returning to his eyes. “I hope it never goes away.”
Audiences can revisit the director’s origins this month, as Cronos returns to cinemas starting May 15, coinciding with a retrospective season of his work running at BFI Southbank in London through May 31.
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