Guillermo Del Toro Is the Master of Highbrow Horror

How the childlike fervor of Guillermo del Toro’s imagination turns genre films into art.

- Terrence Rafferty

The director Guillermo Del Toro won’t have a feature film out in 2016, but his brand—and his spirit—seem to be everywhere. His sumptuously gruesome vampire/plague TV series, The Strain, is currently in its third season. In recent months, an exhibition called “Guillermo Del Toro: At Home With Monsters” opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a boxed set of his Spanish-language horror films, Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), has been issued by the Criterion Collection, just in time for the holidays (Halloween and Day of the Dead, that is). In December, Netflix will stream the original animated series Trollhunters, produced by Del Toro and based on a 2015 young-adult novel written by him and Daniel Kraus. Next year, the museum show will travel to Minneapolis and Toronto. This isn’t exactly world domination of the sort that the villains and monsters in The Strain and his 2004 film, Hellboy, crave, but for a filmmaker who has directed only nine movies in 23 years, the reach of his name as a guarantee of a certain kind of genre entertainment is pretty impressive. Just as Alfred Hitchcock—about whom he wrote a short book as a young man—was the master of suspense, Del Toro is as close as we’ve got right now to a master of horror.