Fright night: Guillermo del Toro at LACMA

Before They Run Amok!

“Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters” on view at LACMA

I’m not sure how this happened, but a few years ago the Hollywood film industry received a mighty boost from three superb Mexican filmmakers, all born in the early 1960s: Alfonso Cuarón (“Gravity”), Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”), and Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy”). If past is prologue, the next couple of decades will continue to see fine work from all of them.

In recent years, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has figured out how to present compelling, world-class exhibitions devoted to filmmakers, specifically Stanley Kubrick, Tim Burton, and Gabriel Figueroa. Prior to this century, few people could have imagined a successful marriage between a populist art form (that usually requires darkness and a wide screen) and the more staid tendencies and requirements of an institution devoted to surveys and retrospectives of mostly dead painters and sculptors. At best, they’d get Ian Birney to program a related film series, but (with some exceptions) the weekend film series dried up quite a while back.

Well, times changed, attitudes changed, and emerging technologies (small, high-def monitors, etc.) opened a few doors. So, that’s the road we’ve traveled to get to “Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters,” the sort of exuberant exhibition that merges high culture with low and is all the better for it.

Influences and inspirations

As a filmmaker, del Toro tends to be good rather than great, although “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001), “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2009), and possibly the first “Hellboy” (2004) are each four- or five-star movies. Less so, but certainly enjoyable, would be the more recent “Pacific Rim” (2013) and “Crimson Peak” (2015), plus “Cronos” (1993) and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (2008). That said, del Toro loves the texture of visual detail, and this is apparent in everything he gets his hands on.

While video screens throughout “At Home with Monsters” stream selected scenes from the films, the focus of the show is on del Toro’s personal history, inspiration, and artistic development by way of what he’s amassed over the years and placed or installed in Bleak House, a modern-day, house-sized cabinet of curiosities or private gallery that bears some comparison with the Soane House in London or even the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City.

It’s the sort of in-depth collection a teenage boy might dream of, or envy, and del Toro’s success as a filmmaker has allowed him to indulge in and fulfill that dream. However, unlike many people who collect knickknacks or trinkets of whatever value, del Toro has done so with the eyes of a connoisseur. Thus it is that LACMA, from this treasure trove of pleasurably horrific objects, has selected and curated (in collaboration with the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario) a show that is as formidable as it is delicious.

Not surprisingly, del Toro happily embraced supernatural, horror, fantasy, and science-fiction books, films, and other media as a child growing up in Guadalajara, where he was born in 1964. He had a wide-ranging collection of comics, and one of his reasons for learning English was so that he could understand the often painful puns with which Forrest J. Ackerman peppered the photos in his very influential “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine. If it wasn’t the first, it was certainly the most significant “monster magazine” published during the 1960s; and because it often featured the work of special effects animator Ray Harryhausen (“The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” etc.), it motivated a rising battalion of writers, artists, and filmmakers.

In most cases, and this is certainly true of Guillermo del Toro, the love of creature features was only a springboard. “The worst thing that you can do is be inspired solely by movie monsters,” he told the New Yorker 2011. The filmmaker’s influences have included Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, the Belgian fin-de-siècle artist Félicien Rops, the ghost stories of Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft, makeup artist Dick Smith, and other visual artists as diverse as Richard Corben and Francisco Goya.

One of del Toro’s strengths is his ability to absorb and synthesize these many and diverse influences. But when it comes to onscreen monsters, del Toro appears to be highly sympathetic, realizing that “the monster” (and Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is a good example) is usually that which is the Other, the Outsider, or one who is simply misunderstood. Todd Browning’s “Freaks” (1932) is another poignant example.

“All my movies are about two things,” he has said, “family and past: They are the two things that rule my life. On a day-to-day basis I am destroyed or sustained by family. I am a man of fifty-two that is still dealing with his first ten years of existence. I am trying to recuperate from those first ten years.”

If one has detected a wistfulness in any of his films, that could be the reason. If there’s a sense of longing or regret, it could well be “because I am a melancholic man and because melancholy is a Romantic trap, and the Romantic trap is that we are defined by the past.”

While I feel that his latest feature, “Crimson Peak,” was a slightly overcooked gothic tale, there’s an excellent chance that del Toro’s sensibility and passion will yield more subtle but still ghastly supernatural endeavors in the future. He has said that there’s “a great deal of Edgar Allan Poe in ‘Crimson Peak,’” but Poe is like a hot sauce where even a few drops can be too much. Anyway, “The Martian” and “Gravity” and “Cloverfield 10” have proved that science-fiction or horror films can be taken as seriously as straight drama, and del Toro is where we can pin our hopes.

A peek inside his head

Like many people, I’m sure, I’d have liked a brief tour of Bleak House (named after the Dickens novel) before most of the items (there are 500 in the show altogether) were packed up and hauled over to LACMA. However, judging from the pictures in the hardcover volume that accompanies the exhibition (which is not a catalogue, per se), del Toro is a tireless collector of books as well as items that range from fine art to kitsch.

In the photos we see books on shelves and books piled high on tables, and we can even pick out some of the titles. They seem to range from magic and alchemy, with lots of gothic horror novels from the latter 19th century to the present, and perhaps a few too many Stephen Kings. I’m guessing that the Victorian era in particular has been a huge influence, although not one he’d have liked living through: “The myth of that era in contrast to its grainy reality is of great interest to me.”

The items on view include scale models, life-size models, costumes, props from del Toro’s movies, with additional objects on loan from the three institutions. Among the most interesting of these are the filmmaker’s personal notebooks, which contain drawings and his thoughts or working notes on many subjects relating mostly to film: “What is great is that they are a diary of ideas and they allow you to talk to yourself when you were twenty-nine years old.”

In a larger sense, the exhibition is like a peek inside del Toro’s head and a glimpse at the turning wheels of his imagination. There’s an entire world in there, and it’s fascinating.

Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters, curated by Britt Salvesen, is on view through Nov. 27 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., at Fairfax, in Los Angeles. The book that accompanies the show is published by Insight Press and is edited by Salvesen, with Jim Shedden and Matthew Welch, and it contains contributions by del Toro himself, Keith McDonald, Roger Clark, and Paul Koudounaris. Several of del Toro’s films are being screened at the museum over the next month: Hellboy on Nov. 4; Hellboy II: The Golden Army, on Nov. 5; Pacific Rim on Nov. 12; and Crimson Peak on Nov. 18. All screenings in LACMA’s Bing Theater, beginning at 7:30 p.m. (323) 857-6000 or go to lacma.org. ER

Comments:

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.