Over the summer I had the pleasure of checking out the Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Del Toro, the Mexican master of the macabre, has devoted his life to conjuring and collecting monsters. The LACMA show wasn't just a celebration of his work, but also a peek inside his brain, and a healthy sampling of the horror and occult artifacts he has accumulated. It was a joy to see so much pleasure culled from the darker corners of the imagination.
That joy continues with Criterion's release of Trilogía de Guillermo del Toro, a DVD and Blu-ray collection of del Toro's three seminal independent films: Cronos (1993), The Devil's Backbone (2001) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006). Del Toro has dipped into English language genre filmmaking, most recently with 2015's Crimson Peak, but these three films, all in made in his native Spanish, remain his masterpieces. They're lush, lovingly rendered nightmares that reflect del Toro's reverence for past horror masters.
Like so many of those masters, del Toro knows you need human monsters to go with the supernatural kind. Both The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth unfold against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War; their true evil resides in the greed and power-mongering of fascist minions. Indeed, in these films, the monsters - vengeful ghosts, chatty fauns - are more likely to align themselves with, rather than against, the children who hold the moral center of del Toro's films.
In one of the set's many features del Toro offers the viewer a tour of Bleak House, the house of horrors from which many of the LACMA pieces were borrowed. It is del Toro's personal museum, a place to catalogue and soak in the thrill of fear. He loves this stuff, and his passion resonates onscreen in each of his ghouls, goblins and things that go bump in the night.
