“Do you believe in evil?” I ask Guillermo del Toro. He doesn’t even have to think about it. “Human evil? Yes. I think that evil is a spiritual engine in our world, our lives, our universe, that functions in order to create good,” he says. “And it is necessary, an essential part of the cycle of construction and destruction. But I do not believe in it as a sentient force. I do not believe there’s a guy in red goat-feet planning on my demise. And I don’t believe there is a guy rooting for me up in some cloudscape. I believe that we, every day, 24-7, all the days of our lives, we are all of us agents of construction and agents of destruction. That’s how I believe in evil.”
Evil is much in the air, along with a good deal of destruction, in Del Toro’s new movie, Crimson Peak, a richly conceived gothic horror-romance for adults, which Stephen King has already called “gorgeous and just fucking terrifying”. Set somewhere around 1860-70 in a remote and mountainous part of Cumbria, it’s a haunted-house movie dressed up to the nines, teeming with references to landmarks in the genre, from Robert Wise’s The Haunting to Jack Clayton’s The Innocents and Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and drawing visually on rich seams of 19th-century illustrations and paintings, and the literary highlights of the gothic romance genre, from Thomas Love Peacock and Anne Radcliffe to Daphne du Maurier.
Mia Wasikowska’s Edith Cushing meets and marries the dashing young Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and comes to live in his vast, tumbledown baronial mansion, which is Manderley times The House Of Usher times the Overlook Hotel (Del Toro deems The Shining “the Mount Everest of haunted-house movies”), and drenched in the promise of bloodshed.
“The funny thing is that they start falling in love for real after the marriage, when Edith is discovering all the horrors in Tom’s past,” notes Del Toro. Mistress of the house is Jessica Chastain’s Lady Lucille Sharp, Thomas’s grim sister, equal parts the Wicked Queen from Snow White and Mrs Danvers, while Charlie Hunnam plays a scholar infatuated with Edith. The house’s entrance hall is vast, three storeys high with a gaping hole in the roof and blood-red clay oozing from between the floorboards. There are strange noises in certain closets, a child’s ball rolls into shot from nowhere explicable, and certain rooms are permanently locked, pronounced “unsafe”.
Del Toro’s characteristically obsessive sound design is fanatically detailed and multi-layered, full of minute sonic shocks, while his camera, working with colours of almost hallucinatory vividness, is an untrustworthy, unpredictably mobile instrument. It never settles but it is always probing, ready to shock.
Then there is the violence: shocking, deeply upsetting moments that remind us how high Del Toro keeps the stakes. We all remember that wine bottle hammered into a young anti-fascist rebel’s skull in Pan’s Labyrinth…
“There’s a couple of very strong violent moments, that are swift and unadorned,” says Del Toro. “It’s not giallo, it’s not really elaborate or protracted; they’re swift, almost casual. You go, ‘OOOOOFF! Nasty!’ then move on.”
Del Toro is a burly, large man – he is not misnamed – with a greying semi-beard, the waxen, ivory pallor of the keen indoorsman, and a marvellous voice, full of cracks and growls and phlegm, speaking exquisite English in his distinctively, guttural Spanish accent. He is, perhaps, state-of-the-art in his chosen, interlinked genres of monster movies and fantasy-horror. If Peter Jackson is the Cecil B DeMille of this realm, then Del Toro is its Orson Welles. He insists that he is not interested in “reinventing” the gothic romance, as his fans are expecting. He wants to make it palatable to our own more demanding times.
“For the time, gothic romances were shocking – very racy, filled with the promise of violence and sex,” he says. “I wanted to have the shocks and the erotic elements sort of bubble to the surface, because it’s 2015, and you can no longer titillate with a bare shoulder or a pretty ankle. But I actually do my best in the ballroom scenes, which I shot with Visconti’s The Leopard in mind, to make things erotic – the touching of a hand on a shoulder or a waist or neck. I shot them as little moments of mini-intercourse. But I’m not reinventing anything: it is a gothic romance, it’s exactly what it says on the box. But I go hard at trying to design, visually and aurally, a narrative experience. I try to tell you a story with what I call eye-protein, not eye-candy.”
In Crimson Peak, dead insects are everywhere: bees, wasps, and a picnic set amid scores of dying butterflies. One extreme closeup shows ants feasting on a compound eye (“Eyes are nasty!” chuckles GDT delightedly). His love of bugs, which swarm all over his work, is lifelong. I remind him that Luis Buñuel and Claude Chabrol were both keen students of entomology, and he laughs. Seldom has a man warmed to his topic so exuberantly.
“When I was a kid, in a secondhand bookstore, I found the books by Fabre, the famous French entomologist, and as a teenager I found out that they were Buñuel’s favourite books! Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless, they don’t have any human or mammalian instincts. They’ll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There’s no empathy, none. This whole movie is completely ciphered around butterflies and moths: Edith is the fragile butterfly of daylight, and Lucille a powerful, ugly moth of the dark.”
Del Toro says that two books shaped his universe as a middle-class child in a devout Catholic household in Guadalajara. “I’m a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias,” he says. “One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art. I was already seeing Steve Ditko, Virgil Finlay and Jack Kirby, all the pulp illustrators of comics, and now all of a sudden I was very enamoured of Fuseli, Caspar David Friedrich, Piranesi. All these people became to me as much a part of my childhood imaginarium as comic-book illustrators.” I sense this accounts for Del Toro’s ability to balance so deftly the intellectual and the populist strains in his art; to him, they are part of one living continuum.
Startlingly, Del Toro admits at one point that he’ll probably soon be done with making Hollywood blockbusters. “What I can tell you quite safely is, I don’t intend to keep on doing big, giant Hollywood movies for much longer,” he reveals. “Crimson Peak is a great permit for me to work on a smaller scale. I mean, it’s big for a drama, but it’s a much smaller undertaking than Pacific Rim or Hellboy. I can’t say which ones, but I’ve been offered gigantic movies in the superhero genre, but I don’t like the superheroes that are… nice. I like the dark ones, so Blade and Hellboy were right for me. The mechanics of action only interest me when it’s a universe very, very close to my heart, which Pacific Rim is, and I love it. I’m not going to pursue action movies or superhero movies at all any more. I hope I can go back to doing the smaller, weirder ones.”
Like the one he’s been trying to make for years, called Silva, about a Mexican masked wrestler who discovers that all politicians are vampires. I’d pay to see that – and so would you. Silva, which he sees as a black-and-white, low-budget project, was a casualty of the early termination of his film-making career in Mexico; his family fled the country for Toronto after his father was kidnapped and the family paid a ruinous ransom. Del Toro was making Mimic for Miramax at the time, and had never planned on being anything but a Mexican film-maker; now he wanders the world for his projects: the USA, Canada, Spain, New Zealand, a man with two houses, but without a country, uprooted.
In a similar way, he admits, “I’m out of step with the culture a little bit. I’m never ironic, I’m never postmodern, ever. I’m always earnest. For me, irony puts you above your subject. I get high on my own supply. As a film-maker, I’m not interested in working in those dynamics any more. I feel that I gotta do the movies that need me, not the movies I need.”
Crimson Peak is in UK cinemas from Friday 16 October
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