Show the Monster: Guillermo del Toro's Quest To Get Amazing Creatures Onscreen

The size of the collection was disconcerting; it was as if the 40-Year-Old Virgin had been handed a three-million-dollar decorating budget. Del Toro owned more than five thousand comic books and several puppets of Nosferatu. On a shelf, a posed plastic figurine of Leatherface, from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” battled Edward Scissorhands. A life-size statue of Boris Karloff, in the guise of Frankenstein’s Creature, lurked in a corner of the dining room. At one point, del Toro issued the apt warning, “This is the room where I keep most of my aliens.”

By Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker