Isn't incredible there.
When a great actor reads your lines, you go, Hmm, I have a good writer.
Yeah, yeah. You're not a good writer.
Know that's a great actor.
Yeah, they can do that with anything. Yes.
Hi, I'm Guillermo Del Toro.
I'm Mike Flanagan.
We will have a series coming up.
Yes, in Halloween. Cabinet of Curiosities
And Midnight Club to. Let's start with you.
Are you basing those the stories on on things you've read
or are they all original?
It's all based on the writings of Christopher Pike
and these are books I'm reading in fifth or sixth grade.
Oh, that's the one. Yeah. Yeah.
And so he had written this book called The Midnight Club,
which was about a bunch of terminally ill teenagers in a hospital.
Yes. Yes.
They meet every night at midnight to tell each other stories. Yes.
And so I thought that was a great chance to do a format that was both an anthology
series, but also have this kind of strong a story to it.
That's the through line, which is beautiful to thread. It's fun.
And then I thought, well, for all of the stories
that they tell each other, how about we use other Christopher Pike books?
Because he wrote like 80 books
dying to hear the next chapter raising
Where did I Leave Off?
So did you directed the episodes?
I directed two of the episodes, the first two, and then I got the joy.
And you're very familiar with this joy of being able
to support incredible storytellers.
That's what they do. It's awesome.
And I imagine something for your series where I felt like these were filmmakers
that were swinging for the fence. That was
the thing I said is
I'm far more comfortable protecting others than than even protecting myself.
You have eight episodes
for Cabinet and you have.
Is it eight different filmmakers? Yeah, eight different things.
Two of the stories I wrote are different.
I know you murmur based on yours, which which was an idea I have
when I was traveling through Europe
and I found what I heard of the birds.
And I remember the birds murmuring in the sky when I was a kid.
Because, you know, normally the myth is birds carry the souls of the dead. Yes.
And I thought, what if there was a meaning to that
and there was a psychophony coming out of recording the birds
you heard a ghost.
And the other one was Lot 36, which occurred to me when I lost a storage.
They send the mail to the wrong address
and they sold all my storage to somebody
and it had all my storyboards and this and that.
And then it took a while to recuperate that.
So I thought,
what if somebody buys the storage and there's something in there
that shouldn't be seen?
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
You call the show Cabinet of Curiosities. Yes.
Which, which, you know, goes back and has a wonderful meaning.
But you don't call it
the cabinet of horror, you know, of terror or anything like that.
I don't believe.
The funny thing is, I have done very few horror movies.
Yeah.
Because I'm interested in the aesthetics, but not in the mechanics.
Right.
That's something that I have a hard time explaining.
Curiosity is the most beautiful thing in fantasy.
If you can acquire the state of a child with wide eyes,
then you're
being healed
We were both scared children. Oh, yes, yes.
I peed often in my crib.
Yeah, that's how scared I was.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, I.
Yeah, I remember being.
Being terrified of getting up to go to the bathroom.
Yeah, me too.
What was your biggest fear as a child?
My biggest fear as a child was being alone in the dark.
My biggest fear as a child was being by myself without any support.
Where I could not comprehend what was around.
Yeah, that was a crippling fear.
I understand that. What was your biggest fear as a child?
I had a recurring dream that it’s still my entire
filmography, because for me, filmography is biography, right?
Yeah, it is.
Basically, I dreamt that
my father went into a train
and I realized that it was a train of the dead
and that he was going to go to the other world.
And I ran into the train and I said, Dad, Dad, don't go.
And I said, Can I go with you?
Wow. And I went in the dream.
I went with him.
And to this day is it’s a monumental fear.
I have. Then I realized it was
the woman.
It came when I lost my father.
But what I love about horror is it brings a world to you.
And horror is a shrine
to imperfection and tells you it's okay.
To be a monster.
We are all monsters.
At the end of the day.
Can we live with that?
One of the things that I realized gradually, the more I expose myself
to horror, to the horror literature and to the television and movies,
was that in the time it took me
to get through a scary page or a scary chapter or scary scene,
I was getting a little braver in these small, controllable increments.
Yeah.
And I started to think the reason I love horror is because as a kid who was scared,
you were scared?
Yeah. I learned how to be braver.
I had these little bursts of exercise in courage,
and it started to make me look at the world a little different.
Because if I could carry myself
through whatever courage I had to summon to make it to the end of it,
you know, to make it to the end of a particularly scary movie.
If I could carry just a fraction of that out into, into real life,
then this genre has actually helped me grow..
Fears like, it's like radiation.
You spend enough time around, enough of it,
and it changes you genetically.
One of the things that I think is so interesting about horror is
that it can be such an effective mirror.
It can. It can be something, isn't it? Right.
Yeah.
And force us to kind of have that moment, that end of life moment
early and in a controlled safe space where we can start to really look
at uncomfortable truths about who
we are, either as a society, you know, as a species.
And I'd love to ask you in that moment, what of your work is the most
frightening to you?
All of them.
I mean, I people think I don't mean it, but even even something as commercial
as Blade two, the story of Nomac is my story.
And I wrote in on my gut as the hero of the movie.
Yeah, and I told that to Wesley. I said, you think of Blade?
I don't think I.
No, man, I believe that there's a simple rule that I found to be truth.
After 58 years in this world, hatred and fear are mirrors.
Love is windows.
Every time you hate somebody, it's a mirror for them.
Your fear somebody is a mirror.
When you love somebody, they're a window to an entire world you don't know.
Like you meet somebody and if you view people
as a window, you can give them that license.
You pour yourself into that and everything is eradicated.
The differences which are all illusions, right?
So horror allows you to recognize you.
This is you
Horror is very healing and that it tells you
there is a whole side they don't tell you about
and in life socially is not
and is a sign that is real.
What do you say to people who come to you and say, I don't like horror.
I don't want to give the genre a chance?
How do you approach them and try to kind of lawyer that you can never make
someone jump onto a roller coaster if they don't like roller?
Righ right Yeah, you know, that's horror is a roller coaster.
And there's certain horror that is on roller coaster.
There's other that is a poetic landscape
and it's a painting that there are frescoes of horror.
You're the direct them to that, to things that are not going to
they're going to show them the most human moving time.
The best horror for me is the one where you come in
feeling you're going to be afraid and you end up crying
and you end up being moving and recognizing yourself and now...
Let me ask you, what monster in any way can be literature or film?
Do you identify with the most?
And why if you can, as a child would identify very much with the vampire
because this was a character that was lonely.
It's a character that was alone. And that was because.
Afraid. Yeah.
This character who even among people could look like a person,
behave like a person, mimic a person, but not be the same,
you know, and have some kind of deep secret, some kind of appetite to them
that would very much disturb the people if they found out about it.
Yeah, that that was something that spoke to me very well.
So you identify with the romantic vampire?
Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's that's a that's a very good distinction.
Yeah. There's a big yes. Yeah, yeah.
And every damn time I tell you I haven't seen interview with the Vampire.
And every time I tell you, you really, really need to see Interview
with the vampire.
You are one of the most famous celebrator of books in literature.
Yeah.
And you have a collection of books that is intimidating, impressive and beautiful.
What is one book that you feel every fan of the genre has to read?
To me is Frankenstein.
I mean, it is the beauty of Frankenstein is that is
written by somebody that is in her late teens.
Yeah.
And the questions it asks are relatable
and in the same way that Milton is relatable
to every existential question, but done with a lot more emotion.
And if you read it at 15 and then you read it at 40,
it's a different book, right?
It's one of those books that changes.
And and it's a miracle.
I was once having dinner with Garcia marquez and he said to me,
there are about ten or 12 characters in literature that are
universal, but
even people that haven't read the book know the characters.
And one of them he said, Pinocchio, Dracula,
Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Frankenstein.
He kept going for a little bit, but but he's one of those.
And those are the big the the big alphabet of the language of humanity.
Can I ask you, is there a chance that we will see Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein?
I would hope so.
I would hope I think that is as in a way, Pinocchio
is is the same story in certain ways, but it's very different.
So hopefully, listen, I want to say
I love meeting fellow filmmakers.
I happen to think that directors should meet directors
because you can talk shop at a level that is really rewarding.
It's very hard to
explain what a director does except to another director.
So I really want to thank you for making the time.
And let's meet on Bleak House and I have two books I want to give you.
I'm over the moon about this.
I can tell anyone about those two books.
No, no, no, no, no.
But yes.
And I want to thank you not just for this wonderful discussion today,
but for stoking my love of cinema. Thank you, man.
And it's just an honor to spend some time with you.
Thank you all for watching.
A friendly reminder that Guillermo del Toro's
cabinet of curiosities will be streaming on Netflix October 25th.
And I thank you.
And I remind you that midnight Club by Mr.
Flanagan is now streaming.