Guillermo del Toro treats fear as a form of faith. His stories believe in what frightens us because it's often what defines us.
The Mexican director builds ornate, allegorical worlds where the monster is never merely monstrous. His films are lush with detail and charged with melancholy, transforming horrors into empathetic fables. In Pan's Labyrinth (2006), he follows a young girl navigating fascist Spain through a maze of moral and mythical danger. A decade later, he reimagined a Cold War experiment recast as a love story between a mute woman and an amphibious creature in The Shape of Water (2017). Through del Toro's lens, beauty and brutality are part of the same spell.
For around 25 years, del Toro has carried one story with him: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He's called it his "favorite novel in the world." Finally, after many attempts, the director completed his dream project, with Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein's Monster. After a theatrical run that kicked off on October 17, Frankenstein (2025) premiered on Netflix last Friday. Staying true to the novel, he splits the film into two parts: telling the story first from Victor's point of view, then hearing the Monster out. The result is a tender chronicle of dueling compassion and ambition.
In 1969, del Toro's father won the lottery when he was 5 years old. From then on, the director recalls living a "mysterious life in an enchanted castle," in a recent interview with NPR. As a child, he experimented with making films with his Super 8 camera, and by the start of his feature film career, he had completed roughly 10 short films. The only two made available to the public are Doña Lupe (1985) and Geometria (1987). His first feature was supposed to be a stop-motion animated film titled Omnivore, which would have told the story of a lizard-man surviving a cruel world. This project came to a halt when vandals broke into his studio and destroyed the set.
Out of the wreckage came Cronos (1993), a damning story about eternal life and greed. His career jumped from sci-fi horror Mimic (1997) to comic book adaptations of Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004), both undeniably fitting for the director. When del Toro released Pan's Labyrinth in 2006, he smashed the standards for fantasy and horror. For many, including myself, this is his magnum opus.
It is tough to wrap up the 2010s for del Toro. Each time I revisit Pacific Rim (2013), I'm shocked by its adrenaline-pumping action -- and the fact that del Toro sacrifices no creative vision. On the other hand, Crimson Peak's (2015) plot buckled under the weight of its sumptuous design. There is no denying that The Shape of Water (2017), a monstrous love affair, propelled del Toro to new heights, winning the Golden Lion at Venice and Best Picture at the Oscars.
In the 2020s, del Toro has brought two of his longtime passion projects to life. Before Frankenstein, the director finally realized Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022), originally announced in 2008. This rendition resituates the classic fable in Fascist Italy, where a grieving father's wooden creation becomes a meditation on loss and love. Looking ahead, the director has said he wants to complete a few more live-action projects before dedicating himself to animation. Perhaps one day we might see Omnivore as the director continues to check off his labors of love.
For this edition of Playback, I'm rolling back the tape on del Toro's filmography, whose tender devotion to creatures invites us to see beauty in the grotesque.
Cronos (1992)
In Cronos (1993), an antique dealer, Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), discovers a gilded scarab that grants eternal life by piercing the skin and drinking blood. Del Toro's first feature paints immortality as a curse of the greedy. Its horror lies in the slow erosion of humanity as the high price of desire.
This alchemical device works because of a vampiric insect entombed within the relic. Soon after finding the device, Jesús is pierced by its needle, rapidly regaining his youth. This catches the attention of a dying industrialist, Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook), who has searched for the golden scarab for decades. His only companion is his nephew, Ángel (Ron Perlman), who despises his uncle's obsession and dreams of claiming his inheritance. Their fraught partnership turns violent once they learn Jesús possesses the device, setting off a struggle where greed and mortality contend.
What follows is a quiet horror, more tragic than terrifying. Jesús' rejuvenation is bastardizing into craving. Del Toro damns anybody foolish enough to fall prey to their vanity; that life can be stolen without a price. It introduces almost every one of his fascinations: the monster, faith, sociopolitical injustice, and a devoted, romantic vision of decay.
The Devil's Backbone (2001)
The Devil's Backbone (2001) reminds us: the dead never leave, they linger until remembered right.
At a crumbling orphanage in the final days of the Spanish Civil War, a boy named Carlos (Fernando Tielve) encounters a spectral child whose death is tied to the school's buried secrets. The headmistress and an aging doctor work tirelessly to keep the place running as supplies dwindle. In the courtyard, an unexploded bomb looms over the school. As Carlos searches for the truth behind the ghost child's death, the orphanage becomes its own battlefield.
The bomb becomes the film's emblem of suspended trauma. It refined del Toro's belief that ghosts are metaphors for memory and loss. After his English-language Hollywood film, Mimic (1997), the director's return to the Spanish language also marked a spiritual precursor to his definitive masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth.
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
In the woods of Francoist Spain, a young girl follows a faun into a labyrinth where innocence and obedience are tested against brutality. Pan's Labyrinth (2006) becomes del Toro's most devastating fairy tale, one where imagination and defiance are the same act.
Del Toro introduces us to 10-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), as she travels with her pregnant mother to meet her new stepfather, a fascist officer hunting Republican rebels. One night, she follows a faun into a stone labyrinth, away from the tyranny of her new household. There, the faun presents her with three perilous tasks, mirrors of the real-world decay created by the war. Aided by the housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), who secretly aids the resistance, Ofelia simultaneously resists Vidal's tyranny as fantasy and reality collapse into one.
This unflinching epic is del Toro at top speed. His painterly sensibilities are on full display. It's a story that balances enchantment with the macabre with such grace that they feel one and the same. The director's political dissent, refracted through these grisly worlds, feels most precise and potent here.
The Shape of Water (2017)
A government lab in Cold War Baltimore hides a captive amphibious god until a janitor falls in love with him. With The Shape of Water (2017), del Toro turns a monster movie into a story about tenderness surviving surveillance.
This film follows a mute janitor named Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who works the night shift at a government lab in 1962 Baltimore. On one of her shifts, she stumbles upon the amphibious humanoid (Doug Jones), found in the Amazon by scientists and now brutally experimented upon. Unable to watch this cruelty, Elisa determines to save him with the help of her alcoholic neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins). In the process, she falls in love with the amphibian man.
Somehow, del Toro crafts this romance with such convincing assuredness that it extinguishes all doubt and fully immerses you into this fantasy. This is because the story is a vessel for del Toro's vision of empathy, how the monster mirrors the brutality of otherness in human society.
Where Pan's Labyrinth stands as the director's best film, The Shape of Water is perhaps his most mature. Here, he perfected his own romantic gothic aesthetic. It stands as a testament to the monster, an emblem of empathy. Winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, it cemented del Toro as one of the best storytellers of his generation.
Frankenstein (2025)
After decades of sketches and rewrites, Frankenstein (2025) finally brings del Toro's oldest obsession to life. His version of Shelley's myth promises a creation story steeped in grief, asking what kind of love can exist between maker and made.
The premise of the film mirrors the novel. The Monster (Elordi) and Victor Frankenstein (Isaac) play a cat-and-mouse game in the Arctic before the doctor is saved by the captain of an ice-locked ship (Lars Mikkelsen). Momentarily diverting the Monster by sinking him in the ice, the ship captain hears Victor's story.
The story starts in his childhood. The son of a stern surgeon, Victor lives under his mother's (Mia Goth) protection. However, his mother dies in childbirth, and for the rest of his life, he carries an Oedipally-driven desire to cheat death.
Isaac delivers a remarkable Victor, almost driven mad by his ambition. He is expelled from medical school for momentarily bringing life to a corpse. At whatever cost, Victor will pursue what he wants. This includes his brother's fiancée, Elizabeth (Goth, again). On the other hand, when he succeeds, harnessing life in the Monster, we see his folly, his inability to nurture the life he wanted to create.
The second part of this epic tells the story of the Monster, from his point of view. It's a fitting arena for del Toro's obsessions: the ache of creation, the solitude of being unchosen. We follow this macabre coming-of-age, in which a father's rejection becomes a baptism by fire, his first lesson in cruelty and consciousness.
Del Toro reminds us that monsters aren't born to scare us but to be understood. In their reflection, we find the parts of ourselves still learning how to love what we fear.