When people have a sonorous, resonant voice, or are particularly captivating speakers, the tired adage is to say “Oh, I could listen to them read the phone book.” If we modified this saying to be “I could listen to them read the phone book…if the phone book were about monsters and stuff” then that’d be true for Guillermo del Toro. Nobody speaks as passionately or as intelligently about monsters and supernatural things as he does, which is why getting to see him sit down for a melding of ideas with James Cameron in this clip for the latter’s AMC series Story of Science Fiction is such a delight.
Del Toro has been the biggest proponent of the horror idea that any monster is just us in some fashion, which is why in most of his most acclaimed films–including his Oscar-winning Best Picture The Shape of Water–the “monster” is the hero, or at least the sympathetic one, and it’s the vindictive, though also quite damaged, human that’s the real villain of the piece. “The only thing that can confirm the existence of angels is demons,” del Toro says when asked why we need monsters. They “confirm the otherness” and opens us up to a vaster world. Amazing.
And then we get to the UFO story. It seems del Toro–who used to talk to the monsters who lived under his bed–saw a very stereotypical Hollywood UFO when he and his friend were going to the middle of nowhere to hang out. He saw it BEFORE he’d had any beer, so we can’t blame intoxication. But maybe if you’re more open to the otherworldly, you see it more often. It doesn’t take much to start believing there’s something bigger.
Image: Criterion Collection
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He is the writer of 200 reviews of weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!
More of the stuff you love!
- Guillermo del Toro will make an anthology horror series for Netflix!
- Fox has given del Toro leave to more monster movies!
- And don’t forget he once played a werewolf in an Alka-Seltzer commercial!
