Machen recorded his articles of faith with great zeal as an explorer in a lonely spiritual universe. He abandoned the safety of his humble quarters, the sanctity of his God-given name, and the veneer of metropolitan sophistication to achieve an ecstatic vision. Much like Lovecraft, he believed in the transitory nature of our agency in this world and the unyielding ferocity of the cosmos.

Machen knew that to accept our cosmic insignificance is to achieve a spiritual perspective and ultimately realize that, yes, all is permitted. And that no matter how wicked or how perverse we can be, somewhere in a long-forgotten realm a mad God awaits, leering—ready to embrace us all.

H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890–1937)

One hot summer afternoon (I must have been eleven or twelve years old), I stumbled upon the text of the Lovecraft story “The Outsider.” I was riding in the family car, and the text was included in Spanish in an anthology for my older brother’s lit class. I started to read, and almost an hour later, I was left behind in the car, still reading, oblivious to the inclement heat, mesmerized and moved by this story.

Starting that afternoon, and for the rest of my life, I have devoted more time to Lovecraft than virtually any other author in the genre. His mannered, convulsive prose, so antiquated and yet so full of new ideas, is very compelling to a young writer for the same reason Bradbury’s is—it seems easy to forge. It is so clear, so full of evident quirks, that you long to imitate it, and it is then that you find out how full of secrets his prose can be.

Lovecraft’s crown jewel is, in my opinion, “At the Mountains of Madness.” Reading this tale in my mid-teens was a revelation. I had never been exposed to any literature that so dwarfed our existence and hinted at the cold indifference of the cosmos. I became entirely enamored. Making a film of it became my quest.

“Fear at the Foot of the Bed,” an image that has haunted del Toro since his childhood, as it appears on Notebook 3, Page 28B.

IDEA INCUBATORS

MSZ: These notebooks are very personal, of course. What prompted you to have this material published?

GDT: I started the notebooks a long time ago. More and more, people have heard about them and become curious about them. I started putting a few pages on some of the DVDs of my films because we were running out of extras. I think the first time we put the notebooks on a DVD was Blade II. People reacted very well. At one point I thought, there are a few personal moments in them, but they were moments that were public in some way because I seldom record stuff that is truly personal.

MSZ: I love when there are little personal asides. They give context to all the ideas that are in the notebooks.

GDT: One of the really, really great ones is on one of the first pages of the lost Cronos notebook. It says, “March 3, ’93.” That is the day when Bertha Navarro, my producer, spoke with Imcine, the Mexican film institute, and the guy in charge said, “Cronos is a horrible movie. It will go to no . festivals, it will win no awards, nobody will ever want it, and it will be forgotten soon enough.” And instead of getting angry or whatever, I just wrote it down and said, “This is an important day in case I can ever prove the guy wrong.” And it was 3/3/93, and it’s in that book. But unfortunately, the book got lost.

Losing things is part of the process, too. That’s why, every time I talk publicly, I always say it’s really important in our life to have talismans. Like my car. We call him the Handsome One. Every day, when I’m riding in it, I’ll have a moment where I love my car. I go, “I love you.” You imbue these things with power.

If you have a really great relationship with an object, if something happens to it, it’s part of the story. Because you’re collecting memories, or experiences, and that event becomes part of the tale.

MSZ: That raises a question I’ve had: Who are you writing these notebooks for?

GDT: For my daughters. When they are grown-ups and they have lives of their own, children of their own, or whatever, they can look at the guy that was their father when he was young. I want them to understand that being a grown-up is not being boring. It’s being alive. I want them to know that grown-ups are people, too.

MSZ: Have they seen the notebooks? Have they had a chance to look at them?

GDT: You know, they look at them now and then, but they draw manga-style, so they find my drawings absolutely reprehensible and horrible. But it doesn’t matter. I told them, “I want you to enjoy them if you can."

MSZ: There’s a wonderful playfulness in the notebooks. For example, you write about the need to fill empty space. Is that something that you still do with your notebooks? Do you sometimes just try to fill up the page, to make a beautiful page?

GDT: I do. There are definitely moments when the writing becomes part of the design. I’m very glib about it. I’ll write things like, “This means nothing. It’s just to fill the space."

MSZ: Well, you write, “No doubt the need to fill all available space is Freudian and very serious."

GDT: Yeah, because I do it out of compulsion. Literally, I just say, “I need a line over here,” and I don’t want to wait for an idea to write the line, so I fill the space.

MSZ: Speaking about the composition of the notebook pages: Do you ever sketch something in advance in pencil?

^{The Handsome One, del Toro’s car, which he regards as a kind of talisman.}

^{A spread in del Toro’s fourth notebook (Notebook 4, Pages 37A and 37B) mixes ideas for Hellboy II with a more playful drawing for a series of illustrations del Toro calls “Children with Problems.” Frequently, del Toro skips from project to project in the notebooks, illustrating and writing about a variety of ideas that are at different stages in his creative process.}

^{Del Toro at work on his current notebook in the Comic Book Library at Bleak House.}

GDT: I do. I sketch, write notes in pencil, and then, if I do a drawing, I try to organize the notes around it.

MSZ: So you’re typically writing in pencil, and then you fill it in with ink as it becomes a finished page?

GDT: I draw faster than I write. Like, I might be five pages ahead of the writing with the drawing. So I write around the drawings, which means the images and text connect only tangentially.

Sometimes I’ll even do a drawing just to try a new set of colors, which has become a lot easier. When I started the Blue Notebook after Cronos, for example, I had zero money, and I would draw with four Prismacolor pencils. If I wanted a purple, I needed to shade that purple by combining colors, and if I needed a certain hue of green, I would find a way to do it with the same four pencils. It was very time consuming, you see? But it actually made me appreciate and learn the value of each of the basic colors of the spectrum and now, when I do film color correction, I am fast and precise.

Then, if you look at the Pan’s Labyrinth pages and some of the Hellboy II drawings, you’ll see I used acrylic. It’s a very heavy medium, and you need to put time aside for it, too.