On August 1st, 2016, LACMA will present filmmaker Guillermo del Toro's first museum retrospective, At Home With Monsters, a peek into the personal corridors of a director who would blanch at being called an auteur, who loves Hitchcock and made Hellboy. Inspirations from his other films like Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, Blade II and Crimson Peak are among the 500 objects displayed. Anchored by the notebooks which have always served as his guide and amulet to this day, the exhibit is divided into vignettes where his themes of childhood, magic, Victoriana, horror, monsters, films and comics, as well as death and afterlife hold keys to this marvelous movie mind. The recreation of a thunderstorm in Rain Room at LACMA puts the participant in the midst of an art installation. Assuming the show displays the kind warmth and dazzling intelligence I was lucky to experience during my conversation with del toro, visitors to LACMA are in for a deeply engaging double feature. —Gwynned Vitello

Gwynned Vitello: This exhibit is more than the filmography of Guillermo del Toro, isn’t it?
Guillermo del Toro: Yes it’s on stuff I have at Bleak House, basically an exploded view of my brain and the influences I have. It’s created on pure love and passion for the paintings, sculptures, movies, comic book artists, everything I’ve loved and collected. The spirit behind it is my immense, natural curiosity, from mermaids to medical oddities, and the curiosity of the macabre and strange: freaks, childhood memories, monsters. It is a walk through the pieces of my collection.

When you say “exploded view,” given your many interests, there’s a lot to anticipate. How many rooms is Bleak House?
It’s two houses next to each other, organized as a research library, so there are 13 libraries throughout, including Victoriana, forensics, literature, horror, comics, art books, fairytales and folklore. Each room is thematically organized. I am in love with books.

I love them as objects too.
Books have the particularity that they not only contain stories, characters, and plot, but they are in the most essential sense, talismans. In the early days of magic, books of power were instruments that the magicians, scientists and scholars wielded, and had much value. When castles got ransacked, they’d take the books. To this day, whether it’s a paperback Catcher in the Rye you read at age 14 in the sunshine of your backyard, or the finely bounded short stories of Chekhov you read on the train, it doesn’t make a difference. The fact is those books hold that knowledge and intimacy with you. All the objects in Bleak House are iconic in the religious way, the iconography of monsters, which signify a lot for me, an inventory of saints and religious imagery. I happen to be a man who loves the fantasy genre with a spiritual passion.

Growing up Catholic, I remember the heavy symbolism, especially the stigmata and crown of thorns.
In my church, when I was a kid, I remember vividly the lifelike Christ figure had bruising around the wounds, burst capillaries, the knees peeled back to the bone. I was very religious as a boy, the spokesperson for the Congregation of the Virgin Mary. I had a very strange childhood with my grandmother, who would take me to church, and also used to put bottle caps upside down in the bottom of my shoes in order to mortify the flesh. In Mexico, the saints were depicted decapitated or with their eyes on a platter, which I used in Pan’s Labyrinth. Even if you are a lapsed Catholic like I am, you are always affected with the iconography and its purging of guilt through pain.

My childhood fantasies visited at night in my bedroom. Were you afraid of the dark?
I was visited by monsters at night. I watched things like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone as a kid and used to see strange creatures in and around my bed. I have very few interesting dreams now. When I was a kid, I had lucid dreams and night terrors, and it was really scary to think that those things were real. But I never dreamt of Catholic imagery ever, although, as a kid, we used to congregate together to talk about the Virgin Mary. For whatever reason, in Guadalajara, there is a church built completely in the Gothic style with catacombs. It was three blocks from my home and I spent a lot of time there as a child. One day, they opened the niches and we saw the feet of a dead person. The curious thing is that I never saw monsters in a bubblegum pop culture kind of way.

When I was a child, they were revelations to me, truly sublime creatures, they were creatures of the ether. The only time I was scared of them, in a way, was with the movie, Alien. I get a jolt of glee through the love of monsters, this life of imagination and dreams, that is kind of fascinating. My collection reflects that point of view in many ways. 

Do you enjoy spending time alone?
When I was a child, I felt very lonely, but I now know tremendously the difference between lonely and alone, and I enjoy being alone. I don’t feel lonely. I think that comes with age. At Bleak House you must have plenty of time to be alone.

Yeah, the only place I get a little scared of is the second floor. I don’t know why. I’m very afraid of long corridors because when I was a child in my grandmother’s house, there was a very long corridor to go to the bathroom. I would have to walk down the hall barefoot, and it would be very scary. In the bathroom, I always thought that when I came back there’d be something at the end of that corridor. I didn’t know what, but imagined something malignant that shouldn’t be there.

Guillermo del Toro's "At Home With Monsters" will be on display at LACMA from August 1—November 27, 2016. He will be signing the exhibition catalog at LACMA on Friday, July 29, from 5-6:30pm.

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Originally published and full interview in the August 2016 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, on newsstands worldwide and in our webstore.