Books

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities

In keeping with the enveloping darkness associated with the late winter months, comes the arrival of director Guillermo del Toro’s new book ‘Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections and other Obsessions.’ The quickly exalted release of his summative visual of deep thoughts, intricately scrawled writings, delicately detailed pictures and revelations about his vast inspirations of whom propel him to create so vividly; allow readers to jump inside the mind of del Toro and see what he sees.

Books like this derive from a similar sentiment as those of other genre’s such as Haruki Murakami’s, ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,’ and Stephen King’s ‘Stephen King Goes to the Movies.’ They create mental stimulus for readers, answering questions we may have had about how these genius productions of great work were established, what their creative thought processes are, whether they work in a way which is totally dissimilar to the rest of us and it also takes away a veil of mysticism surrounding seemingly untouchable creative’s.

The book of fantastical daydreams contains in-depth sketches of del Toro’s foundations for acclaimed films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and Blade 2. He also reveals that the idea for the infamous hairless, eye-ball wielding monster from Pan’s Labyrinth came from a thought he had about old men with sagging skin. He cites inspirations being his consumption of vampire books as a child and heralds the work of artists and authors such as; Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, Carlos Schwabe and Arnold Bocklin as rousing his lust for horror and magic-realist cinema.

Slant Magazine who interviewed him about his new work say, “…It allows us to freeze the glorious monsters themselves in metaphoric amber, so that we can regard them at our own pace, without the speed of the motion of a film to keep them potentially at arm’s length.”

The book published by Harper Collins is now available.

Click to comment
To Top