Four months ago, Guillermo del Toro fired off a tweet teasing a Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) exhibit featuring his collection of creepy, crawly, and just plain terrifying tokens. Finally, on Monday, August 1, Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters will open to the general public, giving the rest of us an intimate look into del Toro’s mind. But more specifically, it’s a journey through del Toro’s workspace, Bleak House. Before the official kickoff, GdT will sign movies and exhibition catalogues at LACMA on July 29 at 5 p.m. local time. The museum suggests you start lining up at 3 p.m.
Temporarily parting with his beloved paintings, drawings, books, figurines, and life-size statues has kind of bummed out the usually jovial director. “I felt very cheerful about the exhibit in the abstract,” del Toro told The Independent. “But on the day they actually came to the house and took the objects away, it was gutting.” So here’s hoping he misses his stuff so much that he drops in frequently during the exhibit’s run between August 1 and November 27.
Presented in a thematic order (Victoriana, Frankenstein and Horror, Death and the Afterlife, and other del Toro-ian topics), the exhibit will feature about 500 of his items, as well as 60 from LACMA’s permanent collection. Britt Salvesen curated the exhibit, but GdT did the collecting. He created Bleak House because he didn’t have enough storage for his knick knacks in his own home. He filled the house with more than 10,000 objects, each more nightmarish than the next. But this isn’t unusual for the horror film director, who once said he loved monsters “like other people love puppies.” His family is almost fully on board with Bleak House. “My wife likes it. We stay at Bleak House when we are in LA together. But my children are, at best, ambivalent. My younger daughter doesn’t like it – she finds the monsters too scary,” del Toro said.
On July 29, LACMA will screen El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) at 7:30 p.m. (Buy tickets here.) LACMA will also screen 7 more del Toro films in October and November. And if you can’t make it out to LA, you may be able to catch his exhibit when it heads to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (February 26–May 21, 2017) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (September 30, 2017–January 7, 2018).
In the meantime, get a better look at GdT’s home:
