Guillermo Del Toro

The granddaddy of fairy tale films remains ‘La Belle et Le Bête’, but lately there has been a resurgence in a genre that Disney demoted to sentimental kiddie fare for so long. When I look through my terrifyingly vast collection of weird movies, I suddenly realise how few Hollywood films there are. From the country […]

  By winning the Oscar for Best Picture, Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape Of Water shifted the status of outsiders to the inside. Its liberal credentials are revealed in a variety of ways, from the fully fleshed out key roles taken by a voiceless woman, a middle-aged gay man and a black cleaning woman to the […]

No Spoilers Guillermo Del Toro and I have a bit of a history; I was there for his first film, he optioned one of my books and for a brief, glorious time we worked together. The Mexican director has the seemingly Latin ability of being able to make a cinematic point within the context of […]

So there I am, standing in the shop window of a bookshop in Bluewater shopping mall of all places, next to a gigantic man dressed in leather stockings, a thong, wings and size 11 court shoes. It was my own fault. I had wanted to write a novel that updated the Faust legend. I thought; […]

NO SPOILERS It should have been a shoo-in for Guillermo del Toro, the director of gothic films like ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ and ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. An American-language big budget stab at High Gothick, complete with fleeing heroine, dastardly baronet and crumbling mansion – but somehow ‘Crimson Peak’ goes terribly wrong. All the elements are in place, […]

Someone asked me online if I’d ever write a sequel to ‘Spanky’ and I suddenly remembered that I’d written one. It’s called ‘Spanky’s Back In Town’ and it’s in my collection ‘Personal Demons’. I seem to recall that it involves Rasputin and an excavation site beside the Thames. Apart from that it’s a bit of […]

Guillermo Del Toro’s wonderful new book has a forward by James Cameron and an afterword by Tom Cruise, and me in it somewhere toward the end. This is the poshest company I’ve ever been in. I was surprised to find myself in ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities’ because the fantasy director’s notebooks, interviews and […]