The “perversely believable” horror movie Stephen King called “a work of brilliance”
Most filmmakers who directed a horror movie that won praise from Stephen King would wear it as a badge of honour, making it somewhat ironic that he spoke so highly of a film that its director has openly called one of the worst experiences of their professional life.
Every auteur goes into every production with the best of intentions and in the hopes that they’re making something special, but cinema is nothing if not an unpredictable beast. Things can always go wrong, and in this case, it had nothing to do with the person creating it, but the people who were footing the bill.
After making waves with his feature-length debut, 1992’s Cronos, it would be another five years before Guillermo del Toro’s sophomore flick was released in cinemas. Between those two points, he wrote and directed Mimic, which was promptly butchered beyond recognition by the Weinstein brothers.
In fact, the three-time Academy Award winner loathed every minute of his time working on the sci-fi horror so much that when he was asked if it was worse than the time his father was kidnapped and held for ransom, he said that “The Weinsteins, hands down,” took the cake for causing him emotional distress.
Trying to fight a losing battle against two of Hollywood’s most notorious bullies was a fool’s errand, with Harvey threatening to remove del Toro from his position as Mimic‘s director, and one of the producers compared the tense shoot as akin to “being a prisoner of a war camp.” Even when principal photography was over, he wasn’t given final cut, and he distanced himself from the theatrical release.
Based entirely on how much he loathed the process, you suspect that del Toro would prefer if people he admired, idolised, and looked up to didn’t lavish the movie with praise. Unfortunately, one of horror’s foremost icons thought it was phenomenal, with King celebrating Mimic in his book, Danse Macabre.
“Guillermo del Toro’s first American film, and a work of brilliance and complexity,” he wrote. “It plays on our fear of dark places, environmental mutation, science out of control… and killer insects that can look like people. Perversely believable, with great FX and great performances by Charles S Dutton and Mira Sorvino.”
To be fair, del Toro would probably agree with those points, since his issues with how the Weinsteins cut his legs out from under him had nothing to do with the visuals, the special effects, or the performances, which were three aspects of the picture that he was genuinely happy with; it was just everything else that got under his skin.
It’s not a bad film by any stretch, and del Toro even managed to right some of the perceived wrongs when his director’s cut arrived in 2011, but it wasn’t even his preferred vision that King found so brilliantly complex. If that’s how he felt about the theatrical edition, then maybe he loved the superior cut even more.
