Guillermo Del Toro explains why he avoids jump scares: “The thing that concerns me most is a sense of loss”
In a career that’s spanned more than 30 years, Guillermo del Toro hasn’t made a single movie that isn’t rooted in the fantastical in one way or another, and his status as one of Hollywood’s top talents has blown away the snobbish beliefs that making scary, supernatural, and chilling features is somehow a lesser form of cinema than prestigious dramas.
The director has a trophy cabinet full of accolades to showcase that it hasn’t done a thing to prevent him from reaching the summit of the industry, with del Toro the one and only filmmaker in history to have won Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Animated Feature’, which he accomplished by remaining firmly in his most beloved wheelhouse.
From the intimate terrors of Cronos to the haunting dreamscape of Pan’s Labyrinth via the gothic trappings of Crimson Peak and the spiralling madness of Nightmare Alley, del Toro has always traded in the broad strokes of horror without resorting to cheap jump scares. He prefers his spine-tingling moments to be an organic by-product of the story he’s telling and the visuals he’s using to tell it, which means he’ll never resort to having a random cat walking across piano keys for the sake of it.
As a director, jump scares simply hold no appeal whatsoever, although that doesn’t apply to projects where he’s involved in a producorial capacity only. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, The Orphanage, Antlers, and Netflix anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities all boast their fair share of moments designed explicitly to shock an audience, but del Toro has a reason why he won’t apply the technique to films where he’s the one behind the camera.
Telling the Directors Guild of America what everybody already knew, del Toro dropped the shocking bombshell that he “loves and studied genre films like crazy.” In another staggering revelation, he admitted that he’s “dedicated my life to the study of the fantastic, but I don’t totally fit into any genre.” All true and all very well-known, but he nonetheless spelled out why jump scares aren’t part of his DNA.
“When I do horror, I’m interested in the look of a horror film, not the trappings of one,” he said. “The thing that concerns me most is a sense of loss. I have that in me, and it’s in what I do.” To illustrate that point, he named giant monsters vs. giant robots epic Pacific Rim as proof that it’s in every single thing that he does, with Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh Becket coping with the loss of his brother, his former career, and potentially all of humanity if he doesn’t get the finger out.
Unsurprisingly, though, del Toro highlighted Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone as the two most prominent examples, which “embody that feeling” he distils to “a loss of innocence, a loss of essence.” For his next movie, he’ll be trading in those themes all over again, with the Oscar winner living out his lifelong dream of taking a crack at Frankenstein.
