From his debut feature Cronos to his most recent opus Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s filmography has been anchored by a stylistic throughline. With a healthy dose of gothic imagery and religious symbolism, del Toro tells stories about sympathetic monsters, like a duplicitous carny whose tricks get people killed or a demonic orphan who just wants to fit in.
From Ofelia to Elisa Esposito to Stan Carlisle, del Toro has treated audiences to some of the most complex protagonists in the fantasy and horror genres.
Raleigh Becket
Charlie Hunnam stars in del Toro’s kaiju-infested sci-fi epic Pacific Rim as Raleigh Becket, a former Jaeger pilot who’s called back into action to rid the planet of interdimensional monsters for good. Hunnam makes for a likable lead, but the character himself is pretty one-note.
Raleigh has more of a grizzled edge and world-weariness than the average Hollywood protagonist, but he’s still a conventional blockbuster hero in the mold of Luke Skywalker (another character even tells him, “Don’t get cocky”).
Edith Cushing
One of del Toro’s most underappreciated movies, Crimson Peak, is an ode to the romantic classics of horror literature. Mia Wasikowska’s Edith Cushing is a heroine ripped straight from the pages of gothic horror novels. After being visited by her mother’s ghost as a child, Edith ends up going to an old haunted mansion and contending with specters.
Unsurprisingly, the real stars of the movie are the ghosts – and Jessica Chastain steals the show from Wasikowska as the bitter, resentful, ultimately tragic Lucille Sharpe.
Dr. Susan Tyler
After Cronos made a big splash, del Toro teamed up with a major studio for his first Hollywood movie, Mimic. Mira Sorvino stars as Dr. Susan Tyler, an entomologist who creates a mutant insect to kill disease-carrying cockroaches.
She’s a classic del Toro protagonist: she creates a monster to fight a monster, then the monster made by human hands turns on humanity. The movie itself was hurt by meddling executives, but Sorvino gives a great performance.
Jesús Gris
Del Toro’s debut feature, Cronos, established the defining trope of his storytelling style: the sympathetic monster. Federico Luppi stars as an aging, religiously inclined antique dealer named Jesús Gris who finds a 450-year-old scarab-shaped mechanical device that grants eternal life in the hollowed-out base of an archangel statue.
This was the first of many Federico Luppi performances directed by del Toro, and the first of many compelling antiheroes corrupted by a monster in del Toro’s movies.
Blade
Del Toro didn’t join the Blade franchise until the second movie, but the second one is widely regarded to be the best. In the first film, Wesley Snipes had revitalized the Marvel character and defined many of his most popular traits, like his quippy one-liners.
Blade is pretty complex for a comic book vampire slayer. He’s a half-human half-vampire who wants to wipe out vampires to save humanity from their bloodsucking wrath.
Carlos
After his struggles with a meddling studio working on Mimic, del Toro went back to his roots for his next movie, The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story draped in political allegory.
In the movie’s DVD commentary, del Toro explained that Fernando Tielve’s orphaned lead character, Carlos, is a force of innocence in a deeply corrupt world.
Elisa Esposito
Del Toro’s second big Oscar hit, The Shape of Water, stars Sally Hawkins as Elisa Esposito, a mute janitor at a secret government facility during the Cold War era. Elisa finds a kindred spirit in a unique kind of fellow outcast: an Amazonian fish-man housed in a tank at the facility.
The love story in The Shape of Water shouldn’t work, but Hawkins and del Toro commit so wholeheartedly to the reality of Elisa’s feelings for the Amphibian Man that it works beautifully.
Hellboy
While del Toro was the perfect filmmaker to bring Blade’s vampire-killing antics to the screen, he made his greatest contribution to the comic book movie genre when he spearheaded the Ron Perlman-starring Hellboy franchise.
Hellboy is a quintessential del Toro outsider. He’s an orphaned demon who wants to fit in with humanity as they cast him out to the fringes of society.
Stan Carlisle
Like all great film noirs, del Toro’s latest horror masterpiece Nightmare Alley is a character study with razor-sharp focus on the dark descent of its lead antihero. Bradley Cooper stars as Stan Carlisle, a drifter who finds his calling as a carny.
He takes his mystic show to the big city, where he teams up with a psychiatrist to con people using their own therapy notes against them. The movie beautifully builds to an inevitable tragic ending for Stan in which the whole story comes full circle: “Mister, I was born for it.”
Ofelia
Del Toro’s biggest critical hit before The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth, stars Ivana Baquero as Ofelia, a bright-eyed kid who learns that she might be the reincarnation of a princess from a hidden underworld.
Ofelia is a dark inversion of the Alice archetype who escapes to the fantasy world down the rabbit hole to avoid her sadistic stepfather Captain Vidal’s reign of terror in Francoist Spain.
