In this article, we are going to talk about a director who, thanks to his visionary aesthetic research and recently won prizes, has become one of the most discussed filmmakers of recent times: Guillermo del Toro.
Guillermo del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, on 9 October 1964from a bourgeois family with a strong Catholic character. Since he was a boy he became interested in the dark world of the occult through the reading of numerous books and comics (among which Lovecraft‘s stories stand out), but also thanks to the family Catholic education in which he revisits all that mystical universe made of dogmas, prophecies, and demonic temptation. The young and inexperienced Guillermo, fascinated by these fantastic and imaginary worlds, decides to approach the cinema by shooting his first crazy stories with an old inherited Super 8of his father. Between one reading and another, Del Toro, now a boy, specializes in film make-up and graduates from the Istituto de Ciencias and even founds his company called Necropia. Already from this little information, it is easy for us to understand where the love for monsters comes from that the Mexican director has always shown by coordinating elements of artisan make-up to more sophisticated digital graphic interventions.

In 1993, after shooting some shorts and having participated in some television writing experiences, his first film, Cronos, arrived in which it is very easy to find the elements that will be the constant throughout his cinema: there is love for the ancient artifacts, there is the transformation of the human into subhuman and there is a maniacal care for the scenography and the make-up.
His first film experiment immediately received an incredible critical success, winning the Mercedes-Benz Prize for the best film of the Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival. From there, the pitch for launching in Hollywood cinema is short and in fact, his second work, Mimic is produced by Miramax. But the real launch in the American cinema happens when he decides to move to Los Angeles. It is in fact from this moment on that the director realizes his most successful commercial works starting from The Devil’s Backbone, a film set in a mysterious orphanage in Francoist Spain whose themes and colors will be filmed a few years later in his masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth. Precisely in these years Californians that Del Toro turns many films from comics, such as the film adaptation of Blade(famous Vampire hunter from Marvel) and Hellboy(comic independent of the Dark Horse Comic, the same of 300and Sin City). But despite all these films certainly known to the majority of readers, what truly consecrated the Mexican director to the Olympus of Hollywood cinema will be its last creation, its flagship: The Shape of Water. I would like to start from this film, which won the Golden Lion and four Academy Awards, to analyze the poetics of the director. The Shape of Water is a very simple story of love and discrimination, in which a silent attendant falls in love with a rare marine creature from the Amazonia. A very simple plot, even trivial if we want. But how this film won all these prizes and to consecrated Del Toro as director of the year? Well, we must point out that the film deals with issues very dear to contemporary societies, such as the xenophobia, dear both to Trump’s America and to the Mexican director. But in The Shape of Water, there is not only this. It would be extremely reductive.

First of all, we find “the monstrosity” that in Del Toro’s cinema is a recurring element, but perhaps never as much as in this film. One of the two protagonists is, in fact, an amphibious creature, apparently wild but endowed with a great humanity. The inhuman becomes more human than humans themselves, who imprison and torture him in the name of scientific progress. The love for fantastic creatures is revealed above all by the aesthetic care that is in the realization (inspired by the Creature of the Black Lagoon, an iconic film of ’54). Another distinctive element of Del Toro’s cinema is the setting. In fact, the Mexican director likes to contextualize his fantastic stories in a historical period of history. In this way, the viewer is drawn in a dreamlike and alienating universe. Once again we find a strong contrast: reality and fiction, the harsh history of a scholastic textbook and literary fantasy in its purest and most innocent form. If in The Shape of Water the story takes place in America, in the middle of the Cold War (1962), in the Devil’s Backbone and in the Pan’s Labyrinth, it took place in a desolate Francoist Spain.

Guillermo del Toro’s cinema is well-kept entertainment, but despite this, it manages to be raw and violent, up to move our most intimate souls, to us, that we are an audience of dreamers.

Guillermo del Toro’s Filmography:

Cronos (1993)
Mimic (1997)
The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
Blade II (2002)
Hellboy (2004)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Hellboy: The Golden Army (2008)
Pacific Rim (2013)
Crimson Peak (2015)
The Shape of Water (2017)