The TV series Guillermo del Toro wants to delete from history: “It’s absolutely, horribly bad”
For the last 30 years, Guillermo del Toro has been solidifying his reputation as modern cinema’s master of the macabre, alternating between smaller-scale stories, sweeping Hollywood blockbusters, and no small amount of films that deliver the best of both worlds, an aesthetic that’s been in place since his feature-length debut.
1992’s Cronos introduced several of the artistic and stylistic flourishes that would soon become known as his filmmaking signatures, and they’ve remained firmly in place throughout noble misfires like Mimic, batshit comic book flicks like Blade II, his ‘Best Picture’-winning The Shape of Water, his foray into animation with Pinocchio, and his most recent passion project, Frankenstein.
Whatever he makes, del Toro will inevitably find himself toeing the line between horror and fantasy, with his narratives typically overflowing with tragedy, a protagonist caught in the eternal struggle between good and evil, and more than likely, at least one intricate contraption that works on a system of clockwork and gears.
His first movie may have laid down the template, but his first brush with spine-tingling storytelling often goes forgotten. After making several short films in his native Mexico, del Toro made his biggest leap yet when he was recruited to write and direct three episodes of the horror anthology series, La hora marcada, between 1986 and 1989, as well as helming another instalment that he didn’t write the teleplay for.
With three Oscars to his name, you’d think he was the most decorated auteur to cut their teeth on the show, which was billed as a spiritual successor to The Twilight Zone. However, the series marked the first time that future four-time winner Alfonso Cuarón had directed for film or television, with eventual three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki also making his lensing debut.
It’s become something of a collector’s item, but as del Toro admitted to The AV Club, he’d rather you didn’t see it at all. “Whenever we’ve been able to secure a copy, we watch it, and it’s soooo bad,” he confessed, sharing that he and the Cuarón siblings occasionally find themselves drawn to revisiting La hora marcada.
“It’s absolutely, horribly bad,” he continued. “It’s interesting, in almost an anthropological way. We were so young, so inexperienced, and we were doing them so fast that it would only be for the most diehard completionists out there.” The bad news for del Toro, and the Cuaróns, is that there are plenty of diehard completionists out there, and it’s impossible to see all of their work without the TV show where they cut their teeth.
Every director has to start somewhere, and it’s undeniably fitting that del Toro would begin his career on a production that melded sci-fi with horror, seeing as those two genres have defined almost everything that he’s made since.
He was only in his 20s when he directed them, so it’s not as if he arrived on the scene as a ready-made maverick that everyone knew would eventually take world cinema by storm, but it’s entirely in the eye of the beholder as to whether or not his La hora marcada deserve the “absolutely, horribly bad” moniker that was given to them by the guy wielding the megaphone.
