The last time Guillermo del Toro was in competition in Venice, in 2017, he won the Golden Lion with The Shape of Water, a declared homage to the Universal classic Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The film would later also be consecrated by the Academy. More recently, with the anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022), which he produced, the Mexican director guided viewers through a kaleidoscopic journey into the many faces of horror: alien creatures, ghosts, demons, with several episodes inspired by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. That same year, he completed the painstaking production of Pinocchio, a stop-motion animated film that relocates Collodi’s tale to Fascist Italy in the aftermath of World War I.
The trauma of war, which here robs Geppetto of his son, is a recurring theme in del Toro’s cinema, present since his early successes The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), both set in Francoist Spain and centered on child protagonists. Fascinated by fantasy cinema from a very young age, del Toro has managed to imprint the genre with a strong authorial signature, creating visionary and original works. His long apprenticeship as a special effects artist enabled him to develop a personal and unmistakable imagery, made up of dreamlike and surreal worlds that serve both as a refuge from and a counterpoint to the horrors of reality.
In a world traversed by light and darkness, a man defies nature to create the unnatural. The Creature is born, and with it, a tragedy. Guillermo del Toro reinterprets Mary Shelley’s masterpiece with the tragic grace of a Miltonian parable: the focus shifts from the act of cr...
An alchemical device grants eternal life, turning its victim into a vampire.
A ghost story set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.
A fantastic realm inhabited by mythological creatures offers escape from human cruelty.
A Gothic horror film with all the classic ingredients of the genre.
At the height of the Cold War, a love story between an amphibian creature and a mute young woman fleeing the brutalities of the world.
A mentalist, a carnival, and enigmatic characters caught in a vortex of deception and violence.
