Guillermo del Toro: "Historical wounds like the Conquest or the Civil War live with us like ghosts"

Guillermo del Toro (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1964) shoots the

he doesn't want to talk about.

Now, the filmmaker who won the Oscar for

and eternally concerned about the shape of the monster appears to talk about his book.

In a rigorous and more than justified sense.

With

, with the same author with whom he wrote the

now publishes The Hollow Beings.

(AdN) an agile and dark work of hidden detectives through which

parade

Indeed, the evils that humanity accumulates always return and always do so in a monstrous way.

Are those murderous, cruel, and formless beings that the title speaks of an undigested representation of our past?

Answer by email to a battery of questions.

He ignores those focused on issues such as the monsters of historical memory (that of the Civil War, which he himself dealt with in Pan's

and in

, but he dares with everything else.

"If past mistakes are not honestly addressed and corrected, dark spirits spring from open wounds ...", it reads at the end of The Hollow Beings.

What exactly is the character Blackwood referring to by this phrase that is almost a declaration of intent?

Are hollow beings the monsters of our memory? This idea of ​​the insatiability of evil is what moves the book: the difference between hunger and voracity.

The first is genuine, cyclical, and vital;

the second is monstrous, without meaning or proportion and, regrettably and historically, part of our social structure.

An insatiable and voracious hollow being causes wasting.

But he did not want to use Judeo-Christian cosmology, but rather an older, created myth.

This voracity, this hatred, if it is not faced and solved, it comes back with other faces and other names ... But it comes back.

If I asked you to draw a hasty metaphor, who are those hollow beings that threaten us today: fake news, racism, xenophobia, machismo, intolerance, pandemic ...? The interesting thing about symbols is that they have values variables.

They are not figures in an equation with an assigned value.

The parables carry, it is true, an encrypted message, but by encrypting it in symbols, that message is opened.

For example, the vampire.

Who wants only to interpret this universal being as a lateralization of the sexual impulse, omits the versatility of this being in basically all the mythologies of the world.

The vampire can be the vertigo of the eternal, the obsession with youth, a metaphor for the insatiable, representative of capitalism, etc.

I could close the reading with my interpretation, but the story opens that game to the reader Do you think that Donald Trump, for example, can be that new face that says and has been a president who has awakened all the hidden monsters of history from the United States?

What should be done to appease the anger of these hollow beings?

Because in a system, which is the human equivalent of a circuit, the face of the monster is, at some point, our own.

We are fused with that system and we want to deny it.

As in any circuit, it is up to us to activate one polarity or the other.

We see evil in others more easily than in ourselves.

Trump invokes and evidences things that were already there.

Don't believe, reveal.

This is the terrible thing: seeing that the world was much more backward than many of us thought. The Trilogy of Darkness drew directly from the vampiric tradition to update it and give it shape in the current world.

This new series is closer to the world of the occult, it is more gothic and Blackwood is still a peculiar type ...

Algernon Blackwood, one of my favorite writers, created John Silence, a great undercover detective;

William Hope Hodgson, to Carnacki;

Seabury Quinn, Jules de Grandin ... And there have been others of a minor tone or modern meanings of this type of character.

For me, Kolchak, the reporter played by Darren McGavin in Dan Curtis' TV movies (which somehow inspired The X-Files) was always an influence.

But Algernon Blackwood is a believer in the strange, the alien, the darkness that lurks.

In his writing there is an absolute certainty of a pagan world, alien and lurking.

If you think of MR James or Arthur Machen or Lovecraft, each has that certainty differently, but they all seem to share the certainty that we are a diminishing point of light in a dark universe.

I remember that when my father was kidnapped, an entire universe, an underworld that I knew existed but had not recognized as real, opened up at my feet.

Being a very different situation, to Odessa [the agent of the novel] the world is split in two, and in Blackwood she finds the perfect guide to travel through the darkness. How do you divide the work between the two? It depends on the book.

Mostly we meet in person for several days (and if possible several times) to plan the plot and the itinerary, the anecdote of the story, its parts, chapters, format and characters.

We discuss symbols and do field research: we go to the sites described in the novel, we rummage through newspaper archives, and we do reading work for myths and context.

Then we share chapters and exchange them. Why this eternal and unfailing obsession with the monster? Because it is an essential engine of human imagination, it is not simply a generic element.

The Bible is full of monsters, the Gilgamesh saga, the story of the Monkey King, etc.

We need monsters to explain what the universe revealed and encrypted by science does not give us.

What does literature have that cinema does not have from the point of view of creation? It is hilarious not to have a budget or limits.

A phrase, a rhythmic change, an adjective can elevate or land a paragraph or even an entire book.

Cinema shares a certain discipline with literature, but it is nurtured and audiovisually adjective.

I have to put together an adjective with light, movement and sound.

Right now you are rolling.

Is the consumption of cinema on the platforms in these times of confinement going to change the shape of cinema forever?

Nobody knows.

What will emerge from this pandemic will only be known in half a decade or so.

At the moment all the scenic, the collective, the tribal is on hold: theater, dance, sport and, yes, the cinema, how do you think that everything we experienced during this pandemic of hollow beings and virus viruses is going to change our lives You already did.

If we look around us, the abyss has already opened:

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