When it comes to films released by the Criterion Collection, we'd all struggle to narrow our favorites down to only ten, but we probably wouldn't have quite as hard a time as Guillermo del Toro. The director of Mimic, Hellboy, and Pan's Labyrinth characteristically takes it to another level, bemoaning the “unfair, arbitrary, and sadistic top ten practice,” crafting instead a series of “thematic/authorial pairings” (and in first place, a trifecta) for his Criterion "top-ten" feature. The list, whether he meant us to take it linearly or not, runs as follows:



Having already featured a tour of del Toro's man cave and a tour of his imagination by way of his sketches here on Open Culture, it makes for a natural follow-up to offer this tour of his distinctive cinematic consciousness. A director since his childhood back in Mexico (then equipped with his dad's Super 8, his own action figures, and a potato he once cast as a serial killer), he went on to study not filmmaking, strictly speaking, but makeup and special effects design. The resultant mastery of visual richness, especially in service of the grotesque, shows up even in his earliest available works, such as the 1987 short Geometria we posted a few years ago.

Del Toro's next feature, a fantasy adventure set in Cold War America called The Shape of Water and involving a fish-man locked away in a secret government facility, will no doubt make even more use of all the tastes the director's favorite Criterion films have instilled in him: for grand spectacle, for freakishness, for the uncanny, for "mad, fragile love," and for sheer disturbance. May he continue to do "serious damage" to the psyches of his own audiences for decades to come.

Related Content:

Geometria: Watch Guillermo del Toro’s Very Early, Ghoulish Short Film (1987)

Sketches by Guillermo del Toro Take You Inside the Director’s Wildly Creative Imagination

A Guided Tour of Guillermo del Toro’s Creativity-Inducing Man Cave, “Bleak House”

Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.