CHRIS PIZZELLO
Once there was a boy growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, whose appetite for horror novels and comics was nearly insatiable. Vampiric, even. One day this boy had a job cleaning a swimming pool, but he also had his hands on the unholy grail - a novel by one of his favourite writers, Stephen King.
At 9 a.m., when he was supposed to be checking filters and skimming bugs, he stretched out on a deck chair instead, thinking he'd just read a bit of the novel, maybe a chapter, because it had such an intriguing title: Salem's Lot .
Twelve hours later, the small town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, had been laid waste by vampires, and the boy, Guillermo del Toro, was still clutching the novel in his deck chair, sunburned, with two pale reverse raccoon shadows across his eyes where his sunglasses sat.
So if Guillermo del Toro scares the bathing suits off readers this summer with his own horror novel, The Strain , they can send their thanks - or legal writs - to Stephen King. Or any one of a hundred masters of the macabre who feed the boy's appetite for "summer books" - those gripping, gory stories that you read in a sitting, forgetting to eat or move until you realize the room has gone eerily dark, and you jump up to turn on the lights.
"When that happens with a book, it's so joyful," says del Toro, over the phone during a cyclone promotional tour of England. "You want to be entranced like that."
Until now, del Toro has been famous for projecting his dark preoccupations on to cinema screens, as the director of Hellboy , Mimic and 2006's Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth . Now he's taken a lifelong obsession with the vampire, evident from his directorial debut, 1993's Cronos , and turned it into The Strain (the first in a trilogy, co-authored by thriller writer Chuck Hogan.) It may be his first novel, but it's been percolating for three-quarters of his life, as he collected vampire lore from around the world, and created, in his head, a complex system of vampire biology and sociology. It's not pretty. Think Rabid (David Cronenberg's 1977 take on vampirism, a huge influence on del Toro) rather than Twilight .
In fact, it's best not to mention Twilight ; it's like waving a crucifix.
The just-released novel's opening deliberately evokes the ship-borne evil in Bram Stoker's Dracula : A 777 jet sits on a runway at JFK Airport, its lights out, an inexplicable sense of dread escaping its sealed doors. Everybody on board is dead, and epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather is dispatched to uncover the cause. Think there's something waiting for him? Something that travelled in a huge ebony box filled with dirt?
These are not paperback-variety vampires. For one thing, the main metaphor is contemporary; the monsters' sickness is virally transmitted. It's a thoroughly modern malaise.
"We have enthroned the concept of a pandemic in the same sense that primitive man would have enthroned the idea of an evil spirit - we've made it into a bogeyman," says del Toro. "Except we sound a little more civilized by invoking science. But the panicked, irrational way people react to it is pretty superstitious."
He's been thinking about it even more lately with the threat of swine flu, the H1N1 virus which originated in Mexico and on Thursday was formally declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. To make it even more of-the-moment, there's a not entirely subtle critique of capitalism in that the betrayer of humankind is one of the world's richest men.
Del Toro's diabolical chuckle suggests that this was deliberate. "I tried to press the point that some of the most horrible acts are not necessarily by the vampires," he says. "Lack of choice kind of exonerates you. When a creature is hard wired to be a certain way, it's ingrown in the DNA, but when a person chooses to proceed with ethnic extermination or enforcing his own greed - those are conscious choices."
Ask about his other influences and he responds in flawless, exuberant and somewhat baroque English: He and Hogan were striving for a certain noir sensibility and a thriller's pace, and to achieve those ends they were not afraid to use "the purple prose of Cairo." From the vampire lore he's collected all his life, he appropriated the Polish idea that the creatures don't have fangs, but instead fleshy, tentacle-like stingers; from Mexican mythology, he took the idea that vampires are hairless and hot-blooded, "like Chihuahuas."
Also from Mexico, and Catholicism, too many influences to count: "Have you ever been to an open-casket wake?" he asks, with a nearly audible shudder. "Man, if you have the misfortune to look in, you see the person's not there any more. You just see what used to contain that person."
If lust and horror are the twin fuels of the vampire genre, it's clear which one del Toro finds more combustible. He and Hogan go so far as to render the vampires neuter, in a chilling fashion. (Let's put it this way: del Toro pronounces the obscure but anatomically precise word "cloaca" with great relish.) There are no moony glances in The Strain , no preternaturally smooth skin, no undying puppy love.
"I detest the fact that some vampire fiction has continued to perpetuate this shrine to eternal youth and beauty, which I find truly castrating as an aging, fat, ugly man," he says, and it's pretty obvious he's got the Twilight franchise in his sights.
"It used to be quite iconoclastic to enthrone the vampire as an anti-hero; it had value. I really enjoyed Anne Rice's first novels. But now that there's pre-packaged rebellion in every store that you can order or download, I find it less interesting."
If Salem's Lot was the main literary influence, the cinematic equivalent was Rabid , in which a ravenous Marilyn Chambers gives new meaning to "the pits" (Chambers' character develops an unusually hungry organ in her armpit).
"I love Cronenberg," del Toro says. "All of his early Canadian shock movies were fantastic." Not surprisingly, he originally envisaged The Strain as a multi-part TV series along the lines, believe it or not, of The Wire . He wrote a treatment and went into the headquarters of Fox to pitch it to their TV executives. "And they said, 'We love vampires. Could you put them in a comedy?' So I asked them to validate my parking. As I grow older, I get less patient with people dabbling with my stuff."
He's got a lot of his own stuff to play with right now: There are the next two novels, to be released next year and in 2011, and he's overseeing a competition to create a cinematic trailer to accompany the first novel - the winning directors will see their trailers in cinemas across the land.
Then there's the small - about hip-high - matter of The Hobbit , a Lord of the Rings prequel that he's directing, which he calls a "very beautiful experience; I'm having the time of my life. There are plenty of monsters to keep me happy."
Del Toro has always been interested in the stout-hearted innocent at the centre of a dark tale, and in some ways the journey of Bilbo Baggins is similar to the one taken by 11-year-old Zack Goodweather in The Strain .
"I love Zack," says del Toro. "I'm afraid we take him to some very dark places in the next book." He laughs again at the thought of inflicting torment on his young hero.
Does he realize how diabolical that laugh is? "I know," he says. "I have no other kinds."