Guillermo del Toro knows Gothic. The writer-director’s films almost all have some of that ethos, with Crimson Peak (pictured above) being a full-on Gothic experience.
In a recent interview with Vulture, del Toro talked about many things, including the Gothic fiction he’s read that has informed his artistic perspective.
“I guess I started reading it really, really early, because some people consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to be Gothic. I would take a little bit of exception to that, but it doesn’t matter,” del Toro said, adding that by the time he was 11 or 12, he’d already read lots of Jane Austen as well as The Monk by Gregory Lewis and 1764’s The Castle of Oranto by Horace Walpole.
While he was still young, the Gothic novels by Ann Radcliffe became available in Mexico, and del Toro inhaled them. “I got addicted to the sort of askew cemetery poetry of those novels, their exoticism and all the coruscated romances,” he shared.
Other works that the director touted include the 1864 novel Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, which was adapted into a film that he called “one of the great masterpieces.”
He also praised the works of Daphne du Maurier. “In her short stories, there are many more elements that cross into the uncanny, at least. Rebecca is atmospheric and is haunted by an absence, which does not completely qualify it as a Gothic romance, but there are elements of it in the work.”
Unfortunately, del Toro wasn’t asked to expand on why he doesn’t think that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is Gothic. He did say, however, that his upcoming film, Frankenstein, would be quite Gothic indeed.
