The Dark Fantastic of Guillermo Del Toro

The Dark Fantastic of Guillermo Del Toro
Author: Morgaan Sinclair
Publisher:
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2016
Genre: Archetype (Psychology)
ISBN: 9781369661699

The Dark Fantastic of Guillermo del Toro explores the myths, folkloric story forms, and Jungian archetypal images in three of his films, Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, and Pan's Labyrinth, with a view to illumining how Del Toro constructs cinematic tapestries. They are collages of numinosity, mythic-archetypal gestalts crafted of mythic fragments, folkloric story forms, and archetypal figures, events, symbols, and motifs. His tapestries are woven upon a loom of the Dark Fantastic, a subset of the literary (and later cinematic) horror genre into which emerged the monstrous images, in distorted form, of the supernaturalism and the dark face of the self-archetype repressed in the West by the Protestant Reformation. These films are suffused with alchemical and Christian imagery; in each film Del Toro crafts at least one character, often the protagonist, as the Christ-figure, a symbol of the self-archetype. In each, the heroes and heroines confront fascist antagonists: in Cronos, a corporate fascist; in The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, fascists as they appear in the Spanish Civil War. Del Toro hybridizes characters and genres, melding vampire story, ghost story, and fairy tale with both horror and war genres, and often reverses the presenting face of always-bivalent symbols. With jarring, horrific, and terrifying images, unusual character presentations, and unexpected use of genre combinations, Del Toro shakes the psyche loose from its moorings in the service of one subversive, anarchic endeavor, his grand theme: the anti-fascist, anti-Establishment, theopolitical re-mythologizing of imagination in a demythologized world, meant to counter, with spiritual imagination, the dark imagination of ever-threatening ur-fascism.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood's Guide to Dangerous Fairies

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood's Guide to Dangerous Fairies
Author: Guillermo del Toro
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2011-08-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1423164229

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood’s Guide to Dangerous Fairies is a dark and disturbing illustrated novel based on the world of Guillermo del Toro’s film “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.” Taking place a hundred years before the movie begins, the book chronicles the travels and explorations of Emerson Blackwood, a young and ambitious natural scientist who quickly discovers there is a mysterious world beyond what his education and peers understand. Follow Blackwood as he travels, discovering more and more about this secret world and the creatures that inhabit it -- creatures that Blackwood quickly realizes are just as interested in him as he is in them, particularly a long-lived and dangerous group of beings that have had centuries of encounters with humanity, creatures that live by eating enamel and bone.... The book, co-written by del Toro and the award-winning Christopher Golden, features illustrations by the director of “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” Troy Nixey.

The Strain

The Strain
Author: Guillermo Del Toro
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 615
Release: 2010-06-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061558249

In one week, Manhattan will be gone. In one month, the country. In two months . . . the world. At New York's JFK Airport an arriving Boeing 777 taxiing along a runway suddenly stops dead. All the shades have been drawn, all communication channels have mysteriously gone quiet. Dr. Eph Goodweather, head of a CDC rapid-response team investigating biological threats, boards the darkened plane . . . and what he finds makes his blood run cold. A terrifying contagion has come to the unsuspecting city, an unstoppable plague that will spread like an all-consuming wildfire—lethal, merciless, hungry . . . vampiric. And in a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem an aged Holocaust survivor knows that the war he has been dreading his entire life is finally here . . .

The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro

The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro
Author: A. Davies
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2014-10-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137407840

Offering a multifaceted approach to the Mexican-born director Guillermo del Toro, this volume examines his wide-ranging oeuvre and traces the connections between his Spanish language and English language commercial and art film projects.

The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs

The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs
Author: Lauren Wilford
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1683352963

The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs is the only book to take readers behind the scenes of the beloved auteur’s newest stop-motion animated film. †‹Through the course of several in-depth interviews with film critic Lauren Wilford, writer and director Wes Anderson shares the story behind Isle of Dogs’s conception and production, and Anderson and his collaborators reveal entertaining anecdotes about the making of the film, their sources of inspiration, the ins and outs of stop-motion animation, and many other insights into their moviemaking process. Previously unpublished behind-the-scenes photographs, concept artwork, and hand-written notes and storyboards accompany the text. The book also features an introduction by critics and collaborators Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, and a foreword by critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The fourth volume of the New York Times bestselling Wes Anderson Collection, Isle of Dogs stays true to the series with its rich design and colorful illustrations, capturing Anderson’s signature aesthetic vision and bringing the series's definitive study of Anderson's filmography up to date. Isle of Dogs tells the story of Atari Kobayashi, 12-year-old ward to corrupt Mayor Kobayashi. When, by Executive Decree, all the canine pets of Megasaki City are exiled to a vast garbage-dump called Trash Island, Atari sets off alone in a miniature Junior-Turbo Prop and flies across the river in search of his bodyguard-dog, Spots. There, with the assistance of a pack of newly-found mongrel friends, he begins an epic journey that will decide the fate and future of the entire Prefecture. The film features the voices of Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Kunichi Nomura, Akira Takayama, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, F. Murray Abraham, Tilda Swinton, Akira Ito, Yoko Ono, Mari Natsuko, Harvey Keitel, Courtney B. Vance, Ken Watanabe, Scarlett Johnasson, Fisher Stevens, Nijiro Murakami, and Liev Schreiber.

The Hollow Ones

The Hollow Ones
Author: Guillermo del Toro
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1538761734

A horrific crime that defies explanation, a rookie FBI agent in uncharted territory, and an extraordinary hero for the ages: an investigation spirals out of control in this heart-pounding thriller. Odessa Hardwicke's life is derailed when she's forced to turn her gun on her partner, Walt Leppo, a decorated FBI agent who turns suddenly, inexplicably violent while apprehending a rampaging murderer. The shooting, justified by self-defense, shakes the young FBI agent to her core. Devastated, Odessa is placed on desk leave pending a full investigation. But what most troubles Odessa isn't the tragedy itself -- it's the shadowy presence she thought she saw fleeing the deceased agent's body after his death. Questioning her future with the FBI and her sanity, Hardwicke accepts a low-level assignment to clear out the belongings of a retired agent in the New York office. What she finds there will put her on the trail of a mysterious figure named Hugo Blackwood, a man of enormous means who claims to have been alive for centuries, and who is either an unhinged lunatic, or humanity's best and only defense against unspeakable evil. From the authors who brought you The Strain Trilogy comes a strange, terrifying, and darkly wondrous world of suspense, mystery, and literary horror. The Hollow Ones is a chilling, spell-binding tale, a hauntingly original new fable from Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro and bestselling author Chuck Hogan featuring their most fascinating character yet.

Guillermo Del Toro

Guillermo Del Toro
Author: Keith McDonald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501308610

A critical exploration of one of the most exciting, original and influential figures to emerge in contemporary film, Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art is a major contribution to the analysis of Guillermo del Toro's cinematic output. It offers an in-depth discussion of del Toro's oeuvre and investigates key ideas, recurrent motifs and subtle links between his movies. The book explores the sources that del Toro draws upon and transforms in the creation of his rich and complex body of work. These include the literary, artistic and cinematic influences on films such as Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, Cronos and Mimic, and the director's engagement with comic book culture in his two Hellboy films, Blade II and Pacific Rim. As well as offering extensive close textual analysis, the authors also consider del Toro's considerable impact on wider popular culture, including a discussion of his role as producer, ambassador for 'geek' culture and figurehead in new international cinema.

In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories

In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories
Author: Alvin Schwartz
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 68
Release: 1985-10-02
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0064440907

Creak... Crash... BOO! Shivering skeletons, ghostly pirates, chattering corpses, and haunted graveyards...all to chill your bones! Share these seven spine-tingling stories in a dark, dark room.

Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone

Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone
Author: Matt Zoller Seitz
Publisher: Insight Editions
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-11-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781683831082

Explore the creation of Guillermo del Toro’s early masterpiece through this visually stunning and insightful look at the spine-chilling classic. Released in 2001, Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone announced the director as a singular talent with a unique ability to mix the macabre with the sublime. A spiritual companion piece to his Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), the film shares similar themes and is also set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, a brutal conflict that turned ordinary men into monsters. Through a series of in-depth and extremely candid interviews with the director, this deluxe volume not only explores the shooting of the film but also delves into a range of other topics with del Toro, including his influences, his uniquely nuanced approach to filmmaking, and the traumatic personal events that colored the creation of The Devil’s Backbone. The book also draws on interviews with key contributors in the film’s creation, including cinematographer Guillermo Navarro and composer Javier Navarrete, to give readers an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at how this gothic horror masterpiece was crafted. Featuring a wealth of exquisite concept art and rare unit photography, Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone is the ultimate behind-the-scenes look at an unforgettable Spanish-language classic.