Stick To Your Obsessions Until Everyone Shares Them

Director Guillermo del Toro has always rooted for the monsters. Now he hopes the rest of us are ready to fall in love with one.

- Carl Swanson

GUILLERMO DEL TORO finally got to live with his monsters nine years ago, when he was 44 and moved into what he calls Bleak House, in Thousand Oaks, a planned community with a golf course about an hour outside of Los Angeles. It serves as his office—he lives in a similarly anonymous home nearby—but also as a personal retreat, a private museum, and a “man cave,” as he puts it, filled with a reference library of books about his various interests (vampires, fictional; vampires, real; gothic romance; anatomy). Every surface is systematically covered with models and drawings and pictures and relics and props from the darkly enchanted horror-world of his films. It’s “a place that the neighbors don’t know what I do,” he says, greeting me in the foyer under a large painting of Saint George slaying a dragon, a statue of a fanged hellhound frozen mid-stalk behind him.

The only window in his office is a fake one modeled after the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland; when turned on, it gives the impression of a gloomy, perpetual rain. “It’s really soothing,” he assures me, as we sit down on his beige sofa. This is where he says he does his writing, with a life-size statue of a seated Boris Karloff in perpetual tea-sip over his shoulder. Usually there are more creatures and things on the walls, but, he notes, “most of the stuff in this room is traveling in the museum show”— an exhibition called “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters,” currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario. “I miss Schlitzie from Freaks coming down the stairs,” he says, shaking his head. “I do miss him.”