A custom-made box holds stereoscopic photographs of the maquettes from the as-yet-unmade At the Mountains of Madness, a memento of eight months of intense artistic development and preproduction planning. The original sculptures are too large for the Rain Room. “I’d need a whole Lovecraft room—which I’ll build if we make the movie,” says Guillermo.

The Rain Room also displays the original Good Samaritan gun from Hellboy and Big Baby from Hellboy II, along with Kroenen’s mask and Professor Broom’s rosary.

Not every memento and artwork on the walls recalls the occult. “That’s by a painter from my hometown,” Guillermo explains, indicating a serene painting. “That’s exactly how the light falls in the afternoon in the area where I had my office. So it brings great memories from home.”

And why a room with a storm that goes on forever? “It makes me happy,” Guillermo says. “That’s all I know. I just love the sound.”

CASA DEL TORO

^{JOHN LANDIS}

FORREST J. ACKERMAN, the creator and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, lived in a big house in the Hollywood Hills known as the “Ackermansion.” There he worked surrounded by his huge collection of books, cinema posters, stills, and movie props. Visiting Forry’s house was a pilgrimage made by thousands of fans over the years, including a certain young Mexican whose visit clearly made a deep impression.

My friend Guillermo del Toro’s passion and enthusiasm for fantasy, horror, and science fiction burns as brightly now as it did when he was a child in Guadalajara. And like the five-year-old Guillermo, who read Famous Monsters of Filmland and made models of monsters to decorate his room, the adult Guillermo continues to create and collect images of the fantastic.

Guillermo now lives with his beautiful wife and daughters in a very nice home in a lovely neighborhood in Southern California. Just a couple of blocks away is another respectable suburban house in which his very large and constantly expanding collection of strange and wonderful objects—books, paintings, drawings, toys, movie props, sculptures, intricate clockwork dolls, and wax figures—dwells. A plaque on the front door reads “Bleak House.”

^{Del Toro’s early drawing of Hellboy’s crib from Notebook 3, Page 10B.}

From the exterior of Bleak House, the only hint of what is inside would be the full-scale working replica of the satanic automobile from the insane 1977 Universal picture The Car, which is parked in the driveway. And there is that life-size bronze of the great Ray Harryhausen standing by the swimming pool in the backyard.

Guillermo’s own notebooks, which he has meticulously kept for many years, reveal the complex del Toro thought process and aesthetic. Drawings, diagrams, and ideas recorded in da Vinci-like detail. And like his notebooks, his collection is in constant evolution. There are works by famous painters, production designers, illustrators, prop makers, and makeup artists; one-of-a-kind statues of every size; mass-market action figures; and garage kits. Every classic monster is represented, plus denizens from Guillermo’s own films and many creatures that only exist within the walls of Bleak House.

There is an entire room to honor the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland. It is filled with Haunted Mansion memorabilia and, like the original, is rigged so that it is always a dark and stormy night outside its windows. A dark and stormy night complete with lightning, thunder, and rain!

Guillermo was an early patron of the extraordinary sculptor Mike Hill, who created the amazingly lifelike, full-scale tableau of Boris Karloff sipping tea while being transformed into the Frankenstein monster by makeup maestro Jack Pierce. Hill’s work is disturbingly realistic, as is the work of Thomas Kuebler, whose sculpture of the midget Hans from Todd Browning’s Freaks lurks at the end of a long hallway. Kuebler posed this exact duplicate of actor Harry Earles so that he is holding an open straight razor. Trust me, this is not something you want to stumble on unawares.

Guillermo’s fascination with the work and career of men like H. P. Lovecraft, Walt Disney, and Ray Harryhausen is profound, and his collection is a riot of both high and low culture. He has taken the inspiration of Forry’s Ackermansion and created Bleak House, his own private kingdom filled with items both sacred and profane. That Mexican kid has grown up into an author, artist, and world-class filmmaker. Forry would be proud.

^{The Art Room is watched over by Thomas Kuebler’s sculpture of Johnny Eck from Freaks.}

THE ART ROOM

As everywhere, the Art Room contains items both expected and unexpected. True to its name, this is where Guillermo keeps books on art and photography; one cabinet also holds biographies. Guillermo ticks off the accretions gathered from auction catalogues and galleries around the world, then he points to a sculpture and explains, “This is a Victorian casting of an old lady’s skull made in bronze. These are masonic lenses, to read their secret documents.”

^{Big Baby has its own chair in the Rain Room.}

A few items from Guillermo’s own work are sprinkled into the room’s arrangement. “This is the Abe Sapien box in Hellboy,” he notes, “and that’s a mask for Hellboy II that was never used in the movie.” Nearby rest the seed that hatches the elemental in Hellboy II and a maquette of an albino penguin for the as-yet-unmade At the Mountains of Madness.

Throughout the house, these juxtapositions and arrangements provide tangible evidence of the dance in Guillermo’s life between his inspirations and formative experiences and what he himself creates. These influences span from childhood to the present day. “This is the original art by Richard Corben for a poster I had on my wall as a kid,” Guillermo points out. “I really loved it, and I hoped to one day own the original art.”

The guardian of the Art Room is Thomas Kuebler’s hyper-realistic sculpture of Johnny Eck from Tod Browning’s Freaks. Though in its totality the house seems filled with spirits and presence, Guillermo says this was literally true for one particular object: “This cabinet came with a ghost. It was here for a while. So my mother cleansed the house, and now it’s gone.”

THE STEAMPUNK ROOM

Adjacent to the Art Room is what Guillermo calls the Steampunk Room. Here, he gestures to another familiar figure from Freaks: “That’s Koo Koo the Bird Girl.” Nearby is Hans, the homicidal dwarf, from the same movie, both sculpted by Thomas Kuebler.

The Steampunk Room contains a supernatural bestiary: Along with a figure of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and a morlock from George Pal’s The Time Machine is a superb figure of Oliver Reed as the Werewolf, from the Hammer Films production. “My favorite werewolf in history,” Guillermo notes. “Roy Ashton’s design is almost like a cubist painter’s. It has that square head. There’s something ridiculously beautiful about it. And savage—Oliver Reed is an animal.”

Here, too, are Hellboy’s original coat and Rasputin’s robe from Hellboy, plus art by Mike Mignola for Pan’s Labyrinth. Prints by the brilliant French artist Moebius grace the wall and more art books line the shelves. “At the bottom,” notes Guillermo, “are all the symbolists,” and perhaps most important of all, “the encyclopedia of art I read as a kid.”