‘My vampires are not pretty boys’

Oscar-nominated Mexican director and script-writer Guillermo Del Toro, best known for Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy series of films, has turned novelist. He is penning a vampire trilogy, whose first installment, The Strain, released in India recently. In an interview with G Sampath, he talks about his fascination for vampires, fiction-writing and his next film, The Hobbit.

What made you move from directing/scripting films to writing a novel? Usually, isn’t it the other way around — novelists turning into scriptwriters?
I have written or co-written 15 screenplays and I have only seven movies. I find it frustrating when you write a screenplay and it lives, but you don’t get it produced (which is a lottery) and it exists in a limbo that does not allow it to become public. A filmmaker will never be known by the movies he left in the drawer. Unlike a musician, a painter or a poet, nobody is going to open a box after I’m gone and say, ‘Oh, look, another great movie that he didn’t make.’ Also, writing a novel is a different challenge. I love the short story form as a reader, but if a novel has a terse structure I find it far more immersive and fulfilling.

For The Strain you’ve collaborated with Chuck Hogan. How did you guys divide the work? Who did what?
It was a true collaboration. I had created a “bible” for the book which contained most of the structural ideas and characters. Chuck then took his pass on it and invented new characters and ideas. Fet (one of my favourite characters) was completely invented by him. And then I did my pass, writing new chapters or heavily editing his pass, and then he did a pass on my pass and so on and so forth. This is the way I have co-written in the past. I loved Chuck’s style and ideas from reading his books and I specifically wanted him as a partner because he had a strong sense of reality and had never written a horror book. I knew we would complement each other. What surprised me is that he came up with some gruesome moments all on his own. He revealed himself to be a rather disturbed man!

Your vision of vampires seems to be very different from the Stephanie Meyer kind, where they have romances and stuff. How did you come up with a new variation on the idea of the vampire for The Strain?
Vampires never go away; the idea of the self-consuming, cannibalistic monster is a staple in human imagination. The consumption of our essence by a human monster lends itself to so many variations. The romantic vampire is right at the Big Bang of the myth in literature. And so is the brutal depiction of the undead corpse that needs to feed, which is the most horrifying one. The romantic one is perfectly valid and has produced really good pieces, but that’s not the one I was hooked on as a kid. I was hooked on the idea of an undead creature inhabited by an eternal spirit that hungers for your life. The vampires of The Strain are not ‘emo’ pretty boys, not with skin that, on close inspection, reminds one young human character of a “pickled pig fetus” I saw back in science class. The idea is to keep reminding people that these are undead things. To start with biology and then also help the audience make sense of all the vampire traits that they already know.

Your imagination, from what I can make out, is darker, while Peter Jackson, with whom you are collaborating for The Hobbit, is catering to a more mass-based audience. Given your divergent approaches, what has it been like, to collaborate with Peter Jackson?
Oh, we get along. Much before I met Peter [Jackson], I wrote an article for Fangoria’s 20th Anniversary magazine in which they contacted some directors and said: “Talk about your favourite horror film,” and I wrote an article about Bad Taste. This is years before we met, before I even predicted we would ever meet. One of the reasons why I like Lord Of The Rings — and I don’t normally like fantasy movies — is because texturally the eye Peter has for decay and corrosion comes from a horror film eye. He is almost like a Hammer film art director into the world of Sauron and, you know, the decaying towers, and all that... there is a sense of menace in the way he art directed those movies that comes only from watching horror movies. So the aesthetics of that immediately viscerally connected with me.

Every big catastrophe story seems to be set in New York. Why did you too set The Strain in New York? Why doesn’t anyone set a vampire novel some place like Mumbai or Kolkata?
It comes from my first trip to New York as a child. I was walking around Central Park, and I saw one of these expensive apartment buildings. At the top was a Gothic tower, and I said to my mother, “A vampire lives there.” I wasn’t being metaphorical. Then we went into the subway and — wow! For a guy from Guadalajara, the subway is mythical. The underground of the city is like what’s underground in people. Beneath the surface, it’s boiling with monsters.

Kill ill
The Strain opens like a typical Hollywood thriller: Flight 753 from Berlin lands in New York’s JFK airport. It taxies towards the terminal, and then shuts down completely — radio contact is lost, and all the lights go off, with the crew and passengers still inside.
When they finally prise the plane open, it is discovered that all the passengers are dead. A new disease is suspected and biohazard expert Ephraim Goodweather is called in to investigate. Thus begins this vampire-cum-disaster saga, set in New York (where else?). Soon enough, the dead passengers start disappearing from the city’s morgues, putting the Big Apple in grave danger of being swiftly consumed by a fast-multiplying breed of the undead. 

A lot of space in the narrative goes into depicting how families are torn asunder when one member is ‘infected’ by the deadly ‘strain’ — daughters turn against fathers, wives against husbands, and the only way to stop the undead is to, well, ‘kill’ them. All the elements of Hollywood fare are there, including a conflicted hero battling — when he’s not busy vampire-hunting — with his estranged wife for custody of his son who he loves as only Hollywood fathers can. Someone like Harrison Ford (if he’s still young enough for the role) would make a good Goodweather — not a typical muscled action hero, doctor-type looks, yet capable of throwing punches if required.

Given that an entire city’s population is rapidly turning ‘ill’ and starting to binge on blood instead of beer, there is a lot of gratuitous killing happening — you kill the ‘ill’ so that they don’t kill the healthy and turn them into the ill who will in turn kill (whew!). The way Del Toro and Hogan develop this theme, the war on vampires almost becomes a metaphor for the ongoing war on terror — the return of the repressed collective unconscious, perhaps. The vampires are hunted and tracked exactly the way terrorists are, and the war against them splits families, turns friends into foes and makes killers out of pacifists.

But forget about the metaphorical, at the literal level, it’s a bloody page-turner, and what more do you need to keep you occupied till the next sunset. 

— G Sampath