Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro (born October 9, 1964, Guadalajara, Mexico) is a Mexican director, screenwriter, and producer who is known for imbuing horror and fantasy films with emotional and thematic complexity.

Del Toro developed an interest in both film and horror stories as a child. He began making short films while in high school and later studied filmmaking at the University of Guadalajara. He subsequently learned the art of movie makeup from legendary film makeup artist Dick Smith. Del Toro spent much of the 1980s working as a special-effects makeup artist, and he cofounded Necropia, a special-effects company.

Del Toro wrote and directed several episodes of the 1988–90 television horror series Hora marcada before creating and helming his debut feature film, Cronos (1993). The movie, about the effects of a device that confers immortality, won nine Ariel Awards from the Mexican Academy of Film—including best picture, best director, best screenplay, and best original story—and also received the International Critics’ Week grand prize at the Cannes film festival. His next movie was an American Miramax production, Mimic (1997), starring Mira Sorvino. He followed it up with a ghost story set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, El espinazo del diablo (2001; The Devil’s Backbone). Del Toro won more widespread notice with his comic-book adaptations Blade II (2002), starring Wesley Snipes, and Hellboy (2004), which he also had a hand in writing.

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The visually dazzling and thematically intricate fantasy El laberinto del fauno (2006; Pan’s Labyrinth), which del Toro both wrote and directed, won Academy Awards for makeup, art direction, and cinematography. He then cowrote and directed Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and the sci-fi action film Pacific Rim (2013), which proved to be more popular worldwide than in the United States. The gothic horror film Crimson Peak (2015) met with mixed reviews. However, the bewitching fantasy romance The Shape of Water (2017), for which del Toro wrote the story and cowrote the screenplay, was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and won 4, including for best picture. In addition, del Toro garnered the Oscar, the Golden Globe Award, and the BAFTA Award for best director.

His next directorial effort, Nightmare Alley (2021), was a film noir about a scheming carnival worker (Bradley Cooper) who meets a manipulative psychoanalyst (Cate Blanchett). It was based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, and del Toro cowrote the script. In 2022 he codirected and cowrote Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, a stop-motion animated drama featuring C. Collodi’s classic literary character. The dark tale is largely set in 1930s Italy during the reign of fascism in the country. Ambitious and visually stunning, the film won the Oscar for best animated feature.

Del Toro also contributed to the screenplays for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and its two sequels (2013 and 2014). In addition, he created the TV series The Strain (2014–17) and Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia (2016–18)—based on novels that he wrote with Chuck Hogan and Daniel Kraus, respectively—as well as a sequel to the latter, 3Below: Tales of Arcadia (2018–19). Del Toro also created the Netflix anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022– ). Each episode was directed by someone chosen by del Toro and features a different macabre tale.