"Since childhood, I've been faithful to
monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them. Because monsters, I believe,
are patron saints of our blissful imperfection. They allow and embody the
possibility of failing and living." Those were the words that Guillermo
del Toro spoke after winning his first Golden Globe for his directorial work on
The Shape of Water. It was a speech that I connected with and understood
completely. With the Oscars coming up, I want to say a few words on what
Guillermo del Toro and his films mean to me and why I am rooting for him to win
the Best Director award at the Academy Awards.
Growing up, my parents never really censored what my
brothers and I saw on TV or at the movies. As a result, I was exposed to many
of the great horror films at an extremely young age. Slashers were a constant
in our home. Despite how much they scared me, they also fascinated me. Slashers
were the norm for me until around the age of seven when, while still living in Mexico,
we went to the cinema to watch this horror film titled El Espinazo del
Diablo (The Devil's Backbone). I remember it feeling creepy, for
sure, but it wasn't the type of horror film that made me cover my eyes in fear.
I was used to typical slasher tropes, but that’s not the type of movie this
was. While it was fairly easy to take it all in, I felt haunted by this story
long after it had ended in a way that no other horror film up to that point had
made me feel. For days after watching the film, I couldn't get that movie or
its characters out of my head. I remember being around my house and expecting
Santi (the film's ghost) to appear in front of me. Santi, with his head sliced
open and his blood flowing upwards, felt etched into my brain.
The Devil's Backbone was the first
"haunted-house" horror movie that I remember seeing, and maybe that's
part of the reason why it has stuck with me for as long as it has. I was in the
first grade when I first saw it, and though I remembered it often, I would not
see it again until my very last year of college some 15 years later. There are
a lot of concepts and ideas in it that as a kid went right over my head. I didn’t
really gain a full appreciation of it until I was an adult, but I will get into
that a little later.
The 15 years in between my two viewings of The Devil’s
Backbone was when I truly fell in love with horror. The Devil's Backbone
opened up an entire new world of horror for me. In the time after The
Devil’s Backbone, I searched for any type of horror media I could find and
devoured it. Whether it was books, television shows, radio shows or video
games, if it had something to do with horror I needed to have it. And all the
while, horror films were always there. The Devil’s Backbone opened the
door for me to explore other horror sub-genres. It was no longer just slashers.
It was psychological horror, paranormal horror and, of course, monster films. I
looked for the classics and watched everything I could find.
The Hellboy films came at a time when I
was starting to pay attention to the filmmakers behind the movies I loved,
which is how I discovered Guillermo del Toro. While Hellboy isn’t a
horror series, it is heavily influenced by it. I loved and admired the beauty
in the monsters he created. I was always amazed at the amount of attention to
all the little details in the designs of his creations. When I found out that
he was responsible for making The Devil's Backbone, it made perfect
sense in my head.
His films, and the films that his work inspired me to see,
painted a very clear picture to me. They showed me that sometimes the worst
monsters are within ourselves and that we are often responsible for any
misfortune that comes our way. Monsters can represent our fears, our anxieties,
our thoughts. They can represent the repressed and underprivileged just as much
as the bourgeois and the privileged. As ironic as it may appear, monsters are
proof that we are human. Horror can represent both the worst and the best in
humanity. It gives us the ability to give a physical form to the things we fear
most. In doing so, we give ourselves a chance to understand our fears and
overcome them. In the horror genre, monsters are typically made to be
terrifying but what I admire most about Guillermo del Toro films is that he
shows that there is beauty to be found in the things that scare us.
Everything that I learned in those 15 years made for an
altogether different experience when I watched The Devil's Backbone for
the second time. I had a better grasp on the things I didn't quite understand
when I was 7 years old. I was no longer afraid of Santi. I saw him in the same
light that I saw Frankenstein’s monster. They were victims of a cruel,
unforgiving world that unfairly made them out to be monsters. What I found
terrifying was Jacinto, a man capable of incredible rage and destruction. Much
like the missile standing firmly at the center of the orphanage, Jacinto always
seemed one tic away from exploding. When he finally did, the result was as
destructive and violent as any bomb could have been. He was the real monster in
the story.
That’s a theme
that seems to run through all of del Toro’s films. He has an incomparable ability
to make the audience sympathize with his monsters more so than with the humans
in his stories. That ability has never been as effective as it was in his
latest film, The Shape of Water. It is a beautiful story that gives a
voice to the voiceless (both literal and figurative). It’s a story in which a
mute woman and an amphibian creature fall in love with each other. It is
through this love that the heroine, Elisa, finds a voice that booms louder than
the crack of thunder. Likewise with the Creature, it is depicted as a beautiful
thing. The only reason why the humans in the story fear is because they don’t
understand it. Because of her condition, Elisa is sort of an outcast as well
which allows her the ability to see the Creature as more than a monster.
With The Shape of Water, Guillermo del
Toro has managed to do the thing that even his most revered film, Pan’s
Labyrinth, failed to do which is obtaining Oscar nominations in all of the
applicable major categories. 2017 proved to be an unprecedented year for genre
films and The Shape of Water has been placed at the forefront of it all.
Guillermo Del Toro has had a career that’s been largely ignored when it comes
to the Academy awards, but with The Shape of Water he has created a
piece of art that cannot go unnoticed. His films have taught me so much about
horror and monsters. His passion for them shines through every film that he
does. Maybe I’m a bit biased in wanting him to win the Best Director award at
the upcoming Oscars, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t deserving of it.
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