1997 was an unusually busy year for that venerable staple of Hollywood, the creature feature. The Relic saw a Chicago museum terrorised by a rhino-like man-eating monster. Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers offered up an entire planet full of giant insects and ingenious brain bugs.

And then there was Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic, which saw its own breed of terror stalk the sewers of Manhattan. The sophomore feature from Mexican director, and his first movie for a Hollywood studio, Mimic was something of a trial by fire. Subjected to various changes once del Toro came aboard – Mimic was initally planned as a half-hour segment in a three-part horror anthology – the film constantly mutated through its production, largely due to the interference of studio bosses.

I was a fervent admirer of del Toro’s debut, Cronos, a dark vampire fantasy with a surprisingly warm heart, and I remember rushing to my local cinema to watch Mimic back in 1997. The film that unfolded in the darkness was both a thrill ride and a vague disappointment. There were hallmarks of del Toro and his insectoid preoccupations everywhere, but somehow, something appeared to have been mislaid in the trip to Tinseltown. After the stubborn individuality of Cronos, Mimic seemed perplexingly generic.

It was only later that I learned about Mimic’s troubled shoot. Hired by Miramax producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein on the strength of his debut, del Toro’s experience of making Mimic was not unlike David Fincher’s ordeal on the shoot of Alien 3.