For now, Guillermo’s fears have not materialized. He is a passionate artist working at the height of his abilities. At various times, Guillermo has stood at a creative crossroads, tempted by the sort of success he fears could lead to tragedy. But in each instance, he has drawn a line, claimed himself, seen past the illusory, and chosen his voice, his calling, his singular form of expression.
In building the edifice of his life and work, it’s only natural that he’d erect a structure to hold his dreams and creations—a place called Bleak House.
AT HOME
As I approached Bleak House for the first time, a house with an oddly Gothic air located in a subdivision outside of Los Angeles, I couldn’t help thinking of the opening lines to one of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories:
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
I had come to Bleak House to begin the series of conversations that would form the foundation of this book. The sky was slate and intermittently rainy, and as I drew near the door, the rambling edifice towered over me, the storm clouds sweeping across the dragon weather vane like a leprous hand.
I regarded the heavy iron knocker like Marley’s ghost, raised it, and struck three times. A moment later, the thick oak door swung wide. There stood Guillermo.
“Come in, come in.” His big hand waved me inside.
Across the threshold, I found myself in a realm of wonders. In the foyer was what appeared to be an enormous figure of Sammael, the outrageous demon from Hellboy. To my left was apparently an antique oil of Saint George killing the dragon, to my right busts of Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie. Gleaming wood detailing flanked walls incarnadined as if infected by the mysterious plague from Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” There was a life-size figure of the pinhead from Freaks and of Karloff’s Frankenstein, plus samurai armor, automata old and new, and the skulls and skeletons of creatures real and imagined. And in every square inch, filling room upon room, were framed insects and original art by Arthur Rackham, Bernie Wrightson, Edward Gorey, Drew Struzan, and Basil Gogos, along with first editions of Twain, Dickens, L. Frank Baum, and Andrew Lang, plus rare treatises on magic, the occult, and vampirism, on the monstrous and the dream-born.
It is a collection Guillermo describes as “every book I ever read and most every toy I ever bought,” all of it as meticulously designed as a Tiffany egg. Bleak House is Xanadu, if Charles Foster Kane had been thirteen years old and the most brilliant geek ever.
“The fact is,” Guillermo says, “that what I do is not fan art. My films are not fan films, even if I am immersed in pop culture. That is just one facet of what I do, what I draw upon, and who I am. I am influenced by literature as much as I am by comics, and by fine art as much as I am by so-called low-brow. But I am not trapped by either extreme. I transit between these parameters in absolute freedom, doing my own thing. I try to present myself as I am, without apologies and with absolute passion and sincerity. I study my subjects and plan my work meticulously. Think of Cronos, Devil’s Backbone, or Pan’s Labyrinth and you will see that what I do is not only to recontextualize artistic forms but reflect on the genres or subgenres that they belong to. I try to deconstruct through love, through appreciation, not by referencing, but by reconnecting the material with its thematic roots in a new approach. The vampire film, the ghost story, and the fairy tale are re-elaborated in my work, rather than just reenacted or imitated. I never want to follow a recipe; I want to cook my own.”
As for Guillermo, he likes to call it his “man cave.”
I’ve had this feeling three times before in my life.
When I was seven, I visited the Ackermansion, Forrest J Ackerman’s stupendous collection of monster and sci-fi memorabilia. Uncle Forry’s home was filled with articulated dinosaurs from King Kong, the latex alien hand from The Thing, Spock’s pointed ears, original art by Frank R. Paul and Virgil Finlay, a copy of the robot from Metropolis, and thousands of other items. The second time was when I was in my early twenties and literally crawling through Rod Serling’s attic while researching my book The Twilight Zone Companion. The attic housed heavy leather volumes holding every article and snippet printed about Serling, files with notions finished and unfinished, a box full of unproduced Twilight Zone scripts, and plastic airplane models still in their boxes. The third time was when I visited Ray Bradbury’s canary-yellow house in Cheviot Hills, which overflowed with mementos and touchstones from his miraculous life. From original Joe Mugnaini artwork for Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles to the toy typewriter he’d first started writing on at age twelve, everywhere there was wonder.
“Never throw out anything you love,” Ray said on many occasions. In each of these homes, a brilliant man’s head and heart had seemingly exploded to fill a house, inviting visitors to scrutinize, linger, and be nourished. But Guillermo’s house, by dint of sheer passion and obsession, tops them all.
Guillermo charmingly refers to Bleak House as his “collection of strange crap.” In a more serious mood, he adds, “You’re God as an artist, and it’s really just the way you arrange. I think a director is an arranger. I direct this house, and everything goes somewhere, and I can tell you why, and there are thematic pairings, or there is a wall with all blue on it. There is nothing accidental. And my movies are like my house. I hang every painting, and if the frame shows a clock or a watch, or shows an apple, or shows a piece of furniture, I chose that, and I ask the art director and the production designer to show it to me before, and I walk the set and I say, ‘Take this out’ or ‘Bring this in.’ It really is the beauty of the director, I think, in the way I understand the craft.”
On that first visit, Guillermo led me deeper into the house. I was agog at the cinematic, literary, artistic, and zoological feast—akin to the food piled high to tempt Ofelia at the Pale Man’s table in Pan’s Labyrinth. Wandering Bleak House is a Through the Looking-Glass experience, as if one has actually stepped into one of Guillermo’s films.
Through glass doors leading to the backyard, I spied the life-size bronze of Ray Harryhausen, one of Guillermo’s spiritual godfathers. Then we turned down a hallway lined with wild art, gleaming weird mechanisms—some insectile, others mechanical—tin toys, Pez dispensers, anatomical models, and a miniature of the Time Machine from the eponymous 1960 film by George Pal, another member of Guillermo’s pantheon. Hovering as if in benediction, now tied permanently to a wall as he’d once been strapped to Ron Perlman’s back in Hellboy, was the torso and head of the Russian corpse, a role voiced in the movie by Guillermo himself. Just off the hall were the How to Look at Art volumes that started it all, and at the end of the corridor, in a glass case, was the first Pirates of the Caribbean model Guillermo so lovingly assembled and painted as a child.