THOUSAND OAKS (California), Oct 12 — Cue the creepy music; ignore the blazing sunshine. Ring the bell to an unassuming suburban home, hedges neatly trimmed. Spot, out of the corner of your eye, a small sign hidden in the ivy. “Bleak House,” it says.
The door swings open and there, surrounded by blood-red walls, is a hellhound with four hooded eyes and gaping fangs. The head of Frankenstein’s monster floats, disembodied and huge, a story above it. Peering at you from the living room, his fingers paging through a book, is the early-20th-century horror novelist HP Lovecraft. On a Victorian sofa, a demented doll stares down a bronze Gargantua, Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie.
Welcome to Guillermo del Toro’s imagination.
Bleak House is what del Toro, the Mexican filmmaker known for the terrifying fantasy of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and American action-horror series like “Hellboy,” christened this pad, which serves as repository and inspiration. He writes there, and when he is in production, a handful of designers work in the repurposed garage. “We draw, draw, draw,” he said, every frame as detailed as animation.
There are reference libraries for the occult, horror, fairy tales (in a secret room, behind a bookcase), history, Teutonic mythology, anatomy and Gothic romance. That last genre inspired “Crimson Peak,” his film out on Friday, which centers on a haunted house. He and his team designed it, from the oozing basement to the faces hidden in the woodwork. It stars Mia Wasikowska as a young bride, Tom Hiddleston as her mysterious husband and Jessica Chastain as his sister. “I love the idea that when Gothic romance started, they used to call it ‘a pleasing terror,'” said del Toro, who wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins.
“Guillermo has an imagination perhaps more precise and rigorous than any director I’ve worked with,” Hiddleston said. He “finds beauty in the shadows.”
Del Toro of course believes in ghosts, and if any spirit invades his space, it is that of Forrest J Ackerman, a horror and science-fiction writer whom del Toro began reading as a child. They became friends in Los Angeles, talking shop over desserts at the House of Pies. “This house is basically a response to his house,” another fright mansion, del Toro said.
Del Toro, 51, doesn’t live here, or in Bleak House 2 next door; his wife and daughters find them too scary, so they live nearby, in an un-Frankensteined home. But for him, these places are a refuge, and when his family isn’t around, he digs in.
“If we walk through the two houses, you would see not only the movies I’ve done, but the movies I’m going to do,” he said, adding, “It’s everything I accumulated in my head as a young man, and it’s been coming out, slowly.” (Half of his paychecks go toward collecting.)
Among his treasures is a trove of Alfred Hitchcock memorabilia, another hero. “I think what I love is, what he talked about made you want to make movies,” he said.
Del Toro’s fan-boyness can be equally contagious. “I will go fast,” he said, as he gave a tour of Bleak House recently, “because if you’re not completely geeky, you can get bored very fast.” Two hours later, I was still not bored. — The New York Times
