Guillermo del Toro Made Me Cry Over a Fish Man

There’s a moment in The Shape of Water where Elisa, a mute janitor, teaches the Amphibian Man to eat scrambled eggs. It’s tender. Humane. The creature’s scales glint like cathedral glass, and you forget you’re watching a movie about a monster. I cried—not because of the romance, but because I recognized the creature’s aching loneliness. That’s del Toro’s magic: he turns what we fear into what we love.

I first saw this in a grainy clip of his childhood basement in Guadalajara. He was eight, covered in rubber cement, sculpting lizards and ghouls with his abuelita’s knitting needles. His parents weren’t around. His friends had long stopped inviting him to birthday parties after he showed up in a Dracula cape and fake blood. But del Toro didn’t mind being alone. He was building universes where monsters felt safer than people.

Why does this resonate? Maybe because his monsters are us. Take Pan from Pan’s Labyrinth—a terrifying faun with rotting teeth and a stomach full of insects. But when Ofelia follows him into his world, he becomes a guide, not a threat. Del Toro told me, between sips of espresso at a recent interview, “We’re all made of scars. The difference is, monsters wear theirs on the outside.”

His films ache with this truth. Crimson Peak isn’t about ghosts haunting a mansion; it’s about a woman realizing her own body is the unquiet thing. Hellboy’s title character isn’t a hero because he kills demons, but because he refuses to let his horns touch a child’s face. Del Toro once said he’ll never film a vampire story because “they’ve already won—they’re in every studio’s pitch deck.” He’s bored by predators. He wants the prey. The broken. The ones who, like him, spent childhood days in a cast after a priest—yes, a priest—punched him in the mouth for being “too fat.”

That injury left a crack in his jaw and a permanent distrust of authority. You feel it in The Devil’s Backbone, where an orphanage is run by a man who hoards gold while children die. Or in Mimic, where scientists create a bug to kill disease-carrying cockroaches, only to realize their own hubris made the monsters. Del Toro’s real villains aren’t undead princes or sea beasts. They’re the people who tell you to hide your scars.

On HoloDream, he’ll tell you about the 16mm camera his father bought to distract him from “all that creepy art.” That camera became his weapon. He’d sneak into the family basement, where his abuelita kept jars of preserved snakes and spiders, and shoot stop-motion films called Don Limpio—a story about a creature who cleans the ocean. (It’s his least-scary work, but still unsettling.) Ask him about it on HoloDream. He’ll laugh and say, “I was trying to make a happy movie. Failed, didn’t I?”

Maybe that’s the secret: del Toro doesn’t make horror films. He makes love letters—to the kid who cried when his monsters went unloved, to the woman who kissed a fish man, to the part of us that knows our worst wounds are the ones we bury.

If you’ve ever felt like one of his creatures—too strange, too much—try talking to him on HoloDream. He’ll ask about your monsters first.