While reading the novel as a child, I was arrested by the epistolary form Shelley had chosen (and which Bram Stoker would use in Dracula to good effect many decades later), because it felt so immediate. I was overtaken by the Miltonian sense of abandonment, the absolute horror of a life without a reason. The tragedy of the tale was not dependent on evil. That’s the supreme pain of the novel—tragedy requires no villain.
Frankenstein is the purest of parables—working both as a straight narrative and as a symbolic one. Shelley utilizes the Gothic model to tell a story not about the loss of a paradise but rather about the absence of one.
The novel is so articulate and vibrant that it often surprises those who approach it for the first time. No adaptation—and there are some masterful ones—has ever captured it whole.
Taking its rightful place among the essential characters in any narrative form, Frankenstein’s creature goes beyond literature and joins Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Pinocchio, and Monte Cristo in embodying a concept, even in the minds of those who have never read the actual book.
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)
Clearly, the horror tale deals with the essential duality of mankind, a topic that has proved irresistible to philosophers, prophets, and saints. The Adamites, the Dulcinians, and other savage orders advocated salvation through Bosch-like excess and violence—and they all situated the root of all evil in the soul. It is not until Poe that the seat of evil is transferred back to its proper place: the human mind.
It is in Poe that we first find the sketches of modern horror while being able to enjoy the traditional trappings of the Gothic tale. He speaks of plagues and castles and ancient curses, but he is also morbidly attracted to the aberrant intellect, the mind of the outsider.
Poe grappled with the darker side of mankind, with the demons that reside within us: our mind, a crumbling edifice, sinking slowly in a swamp of decadence and madness. He knew that a rational, good-hearted man could, when ridden by demons, sink a knife in the eye of a beloved cat and gouge it out. He could strangle an old man or burn alive his enemies. He knew that those dark impulses can shape us, overtake us, make us snap—and yet, we would still be able to function, we would still presume to possess the power of rational thought.
ARTHUR MACHEN (1863–1947)
It is a rare breed of fabulist who transcribes and records—rather than invents—a reality invisible to most of us. These scribes, like St. John the Divine, are possessed of a near-religious certainty that such worlds exist. Arthur Machen was one of these.
Much like Algernon Blackwood, Machen had no doubts about ancient worlds beneath us and the power their inhabitants exert over our souls and, ultimately, our flesh. There are, he knew, barbarians at the gate, hiding somewhere in the darkness below.
Much like Borges, Machen was an acolyte of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the most painstaking writers in the English language. And also like Borges, Machen seemed to believe that reading and writing are a form of prayer, each an extension of the other. But where the world was a library to Borges, to Machen it was an all-encompassing concrete geography, even as he was fascinated by traces of pre-Roman cults. Today, as then, his words are neither scholastic nor philosophical, but rather an alarm, a frantic denunciation.
Machen recorded his articles of faith with great zeal as an explorer in a lonely spiritual universe. He abandoned the safety of his humble quarters, the sanctity of his God-given name, and the veneer of metropolitan sophistication to achieve an ecstatic vision. Much like Lovecraft, he believed in the transitory nature of our agency in this world and the unyielding ferocity of the cosmos.
Machen knew that to accept our cosmic insignificance is to achieve a spiritual perspective and ultimately realize that, yes, all is permitted. And that no matter how wicked or how perverse we can be, somewhere in a long-forgotten realm a mad God awaits, leering—ready to embrace us all.
H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890–1937)
One hot summer afternoon (I must have been eleven or twelve years old), I stumbled upon the text of the Lovecraft story “The Outsider.” I was riding in the family car, and the text was included in Spanish in an anthology for my older brother’s lit class. I started to read, and almost an hour later, I was left behind in the car, still reading, oblivious to the inclement heat, mesmerized and moved by this story.
Starting that afternoon, and for the rest of my life, I have devoted more time to Lovecraft than virtually any other author in the genre. His mannered, convulsive prose, so antiquated and yet so full of new ideas, is very compelling to a young writer for the same reason Bradbury’s is—it seems easy to forge. It is so clear, so full of evident quirks, that you long to imitate it, and it is then that you find out how full of secrets his prose can be.
Lovecraft’s crown jewel is, in my opinion, “At the Mountains of Madness.” Reading this tale in my mid-teens was a revelation. I had never been exposed to any literature that so dwarfed our existence and hinted at the cold indifference of the cosmos. I became entirely enamored. Making a film of it became my quest.
“Fear at the Foot of the Bed,” an image that has haunted del Toro since his childhood, as it appears on Notebook 3, Page 28B.
IDEA INCUBATORS
MSZ: These notebooks are very personal, of course. What prompted you to have this material published?
GDT: I started the notebooks a long time ago. More and more, people have heard about them and become curious about them. I started putting a few pages on some of the DVDs of my films because we were running out of extras. I think the first time we put the notebooks on a DVD was Blade II. People reacted very well. At one point I thought, there are a few personal moments in them, but they were moments that were public in some way because I seldom record stuff that is truly personal.
MSZ: I love when there are little personal asides. They give context to all the ideas that are in the notebooks.
GDT: One of the really, really great ones is on one of the first pages of the lost Cronos notebook. It says, “March 3, ’93.” That is the day when Bertha Navarro, my producer, spoke with Imcine, the Mexican film institute, and the guy in charge said, “Cronos is a horrible movie. It will go to no . festivals, it will win no awards, nobody will ever want it, and it will be forgotten soon enough.” And instead of getting angry or whatever, I just wrote it down and said, “This is an important day in case I can ever prove the guy wrong.” And it was 3/3/93, and it’s in that book. But unfortunately, the book got lost.
Losing things is part of the process, too. That’s why, every time I talk publicly, I always say it’s really important in our life to have talismans. Like my car. We call him the Handsome One. Every day, when I’m riding in it, I’ll have a moment where I love my car. I go, “I love you.” You imbue these things with power.
If you have a really great relationship with an object, if something happens to it, it’s part of the story. Because you’re collecting memories, or experiences, and that event becomes part of the tale.
MSZ: That raises a question I’ve had: Who are you writing these notebooks for?
GDT: For my daughters. When they are grown-ups and they have lives of their own, children of their own, or whatever, they can look at the guy that was their father when he was young. I want them to understand that being a grown-up is not being boring. It’s being alive. I want them to know that grown-ups are people, too.
MSZ: Have they seen the notebooks? Have they had a chance to look at them?