Before del Toro came along, that sort of playfulness, that dark exuberance, had been missing from horror for too long (with sporadic exceptions like Kathryn Bigelow’s hallucinatory vampire road movie of 1987, Near Dark). Because fear is such an easy emotion to evoke in a movie audience, horror can be the most cynical of genres. Any filmmaker with a bit of technique can get a nice satisfying reaction out of us—a shudder, a scream, or a heartfelt “Ewwww!”—without much effort, and after a while (if not sooner) a certain contempt for the audience can set in. The fright becomes mechanical, just an exercise in stimulus and response; the horrors are engineered rather than imagined.

That’s never the case in a del Toro movie. The ghastly sights he puts on the screen feel as if they’ve sprung from his dreams. (What nightmares a sleepover at Bleak House might induce … ) His images are irrationally, often surreally, awful. The vampires in The Strain, for instance, do their killing not by delicately sinking fangs into a victim’s neck, but by extruding a disturbingly long, thick, purplish tongue, forked at the end like a snake’s. The heroine of Pan’s Labyrinth, who is played by an 11-year-old, at one point finds herself in the lair of a thin, pale, hairless creature that has no eyes in his face but sometimes has eyes in the palms of his long-fingered hands. It’s a tough image to shake.

And that’s just as it should be, in horror. At its infrequent best, the genre is more about imagery than narrative, closer to poetry than to fiction. What we remember from horror movies are moments of keen, concentrated fear; flashes of appalling beauty; and of course the monsters, whose function is to incarnate forces that cannot be understood. Del Toro takes great care with his monsters, that “true family” of his. (He once studied with the great special-effects makeup artist Dick Smith, of Exorcist fame.) They come in different shapes and sizes, from the nasty bug in Cronos to the massive Kaiju of Pacific Rim, which rise from the ocean and can level cities. He favors creatures that sport nonhuman extensions of the body—tendrils, tentacles, tails, all kinds of appendages that reach and probe and disturb the air. There are things with horns and things with wings. He looks at these fantastic beings as the children in Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth look at them: with some fear, and more curiosity.

His sensibility isn’t, perhaps, to everyone’s taste, but it is, I think, an artist’s sensibility, and it’s unmistakably his. Del Toro is one of those fortunate moviemakers, like Hitchcock, who happened on a popular genre that suits his deepest, oldest preoccupations—all the childish things he never cared to put aside. Hitchcock’s obsessions are a shade more grown-up, but just a shade—adolescent anxieties in which sex and guilt and the possibility of punishment are all jumbled up together and find their clearest expression in the taut, nervous form of the thriller. Horror is for those whose sense of dread is more primitive, or less mundane. It’s for people who never outgrew their belief that the world is infinitely mysterious, and that its unknowability is the source of both terror and pleasure. It’s for people like Guillermo del Toro.