In 1926, Forrest Ackerman, a nine-year-old misfit in Los Angeles, visited a newsstand and bought a copy of Amazing Stories—a new magazine about aliens, monsters, and other oddities. By the time he reached the final page, he had become America’s first fanboy. He started a group called the Boys’ Scientifiction Club; in 1939, he wore an outer-space outfit to a convention for fantasy aficionados, establishing a costuming ritual still followed by the hordes at Comic-Con. Ackerman founded a cult magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and, more lucratively, became an agent for horror and science-fiction writers. He crammed an eighteen-room house in Los Feliz with genre memorabilia, including a vampire cape worn by Bela Lugosi and a model of the pteranodon that tried to abscond with Fay Wray in “King Kong.” Ackerman eventually sold off his collection to pay medical bills, and in 2008 he died. He had no children.

But he had an heir. In 1971, Guillermo del Toro, the film director, was a seven-year-old misfit in Guadalajara, Mexico. He liked to troll the city sewers and dissolve slugs with salt. One day, in the magazine aisle of a supermarket, he came upon a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He bought it, and was so determined to decode Ackerman’s pun-strewed prose—the letters section was called Fang Mail—that he quickly became bilingual.

Del Toro was a playfully morbid child. One of his first toys, which he still owns, was a plush werewolf that he sewed together with the help of a great-aunt. In a tape recording made when he was five, he can be heard requesting a Christmas present of a mandrake root, for the purpose of black magic. His mother, Guadalupe, an amateur poet who read tarot cards, was charmed; his father, Federico, a businessman whom del Toro describes, fondly, as “the most unimaginative person on earth,” was confounded. Confounding his father became a lifelong project.

Before del Toro started school, his father won the Mexican national lottery. Federico built a Chrysler-dealership empire with the money, and moved the family into a white modernist mansion. Little Guillermo haunted it. He raised a gothic menagerie: hundreds of snakes, a crow, and white rats that he sometimes snuggled with in bed. Del Toro has kept a family photograph of him and his sister, Susana, both under ten and forced into polyester finery. Guillermo, then broomstick-thin, has added to his ensemble plastic vampire fangs, and his chin is goateed with fake blood. Susana’s neck has a dreadful gash, courtesy of makeup applied by her brother. He still remembers his old tricks. “Collodion is material used to make scars,” he told me. “You put a line on your face, and it contracts and pulls the skin. As a kid, I’d buy collodion in theatrical shops, and I’d scar my face and scare the nanny.”

Del Toro filled his bedroom with comic books and figurines, but he was not content to remain a fanboy. He began drawing creatures himself, consulting a graphic medical encyclopedia that his father, an unenthusiastic reader, had bought to fill his gentleman’s library. Del Toro was a good draftsman, but he knew that he would never be a master. (His favorite was Richard Corben, whose drawings, in magazines such as Heavy Metal, helped define underground comics: big fangs, bigger breasts.) So del Toro turned to film. In high school, he made a short about a monster that crawls out of a toilet and, finding humans repugnant, scuttles back to the sewers. He loved working on special effects, and his experiments with makeup grew outlandish. There is a photograph from this period of del Toro, now overweight, transformed into the melting corpse of a fat woman; his eyeballs drip down his cheeks like cracked eggs. (“It’s a gelatine,” he recalled. “It looks messy, but it’s all sculpted.”)

He attended a new film school, the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Cinematográficos, in Guadalajara, and after graduating, in 1983, he published a book-length essay on Alfred Hitchcock. (Discussing “The Birds,” del Toro notes that “in the terror genre, an artist, unbound by ‘reality,’ can create his purest reflection of the world—the cinematic equivalent of poetry.”) In 1985, he launched Necropia, a special-effects company, making low-end bogeymen for films being shot in Mexico City. “Producers would call me on Friday and say, ‘We need a monster on Tuesday,’ ” he said. In 1993, he released his first feature, “Cronos,” about a girl whose tenderness for her grandfather deepens after he becomes a vampire. The girl has her abuelo sleep in a toy box, not a coffin, and pads it with stuffed animals. The grandfather doesn’t want to kill, and his predicament is captured with grim humor; at one point, he licks the results of a nosebleed off a bathroom floor.

“Cronos” won an award at Cannes, and del Toro began working in Hollywood, where monster design was in a torpid state. The last major period of innovation dated back to 1979, when the Swiss artist H. R. Giger unveiled his iconic designs for Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” The titular beast’s head resembles a giant dripping phallus, and for years afterward monster designers emulated Giger’s lurid sliminess. In 1982, the effects technicians Stan Winston and Rob Bottin slathered the spastic creatures of “The Thing” with Carbopol, a polymer used in personal lubricants; four years later, in “The Fly,” Jeff Goldblum’s skin sloughs off, revealing the gelatinous insect within.

Del Toro embraced the cliché with his first studio feature, “Mimic” (1997), in which oozing giant insects overtake the New York subway system. But his subsequent monsters were strikingly original, combining menace with painterly beauty. Starting in 2004, he made two lush adaptations of the “Hellboy” comic-book series, which is about a clumsy horned demon who becomes a superhero and battles monsters. The vicious incisors of “tooth fairies” were offset by wings resembling oak leaves; the feathers of a skeletal Angel of Death were embedded with blinking eyes that uncannily echoed the markings on a peacock. A del Toro monster is as connected to a succubus in a Fuseli painting as it is to the beast in “Predator.” His films remind you that looking at monsters is a centuries-old ritual—a way of understanding our own bodies through gorgeous images of deformation.

The dark, sensual fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), del Toro’s most heralded film, is not what is typically conjured by the phrase “monster movie.” As is often the case in del Toro’s work, the worst monsters are human beings. In the violent aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a defiantly imaginative girl, Ofelia, recoils from her harsh life—her stepfather is a Fascist captain who tortures dissidents—and descends into a ravishing underworld of sprites and satyrs. Though she barely evades the jaws of a famished ogre, she ultimately finds comfort in this spectral realm. For del Toro, who jokes that he “never willingly goes outside,” fantasy, even violent fantasy, is a refuge. The story of Ofelia inverts the usual scheme of horror; it’s as if one of the teens in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” had fought to remain trapped inside the world of dreams.

Many contemporary filmmakers seem embarrassed by the goofiness of monsters, relegating them to an occasional lunge from the shadows. Del Toro wants the audience to gawk. In the Mexican film industry, he told me, “it was so expensive to create a monster that, even if it was cardboard, they showed it a lot.” For del Toro, one of the key moments of horror cinema is in “Alien,” when Harry Dean Stanton “cannot run because he is in awe of the creature when it’s lowering itself in front of him. It’s a moment of man in front of a totemic god.”

Del Toro has battled to get his opulent vision of monsters onscreen. Miramax, which financed “Mimic,” found del Toro tediously arty and commissioned a second-unit director to add what del Toro calls “cheap scares.” He returned half his salary for “Hellboy,” and his entire salary for “Pan’s Labyrinth,” because he insisted on creature effects that his backers considered too expensive.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, but del Toro refused to reposition himself as a highbrow auteur. His next film was the hectic “Hellboy II.” As del Toro has put it, “There is a part of me that will always be pulp.” He may be proudest of his schlockiest creations, such as the vampire Nomak, in “Blade II” (2002), whose toothy mouth folds open sideways, like labia, forming the ultimate vagina dentata; or the behemoth plant of “Hellboy II” (2008), which ravages Lower Manhattan like a greenhouse Godzilla. The plant monster’s demise is one of the most memorable in movie history: it spurts emerald blood that covers everything it touches in a lush carpet of moss. Del Toro does not worry that such fancies will sully his reputation. “In emotional genres, you cannot advocate good taste as an argument,” he said.

Although del Toro makes suspenseful movies, he often seems less like a disciple of Alfred Hitchcock than of Hieronymus Bosch. “I don’t see myself ever doing a ‘normal’ movie,” del Toro said. “I love the creation of these things—I love the sculpting, I love the coloring. Half the joy is fabricating the world, the creatures.” The movie that he most longs to make is an adaptation of a grandly ridiculous H. P. Lovecraft novella, “At the Mountains of Madness,” in which explorers, venturing into Antarctica, discover malevolent aliens in a frozen, ruined city. Some of the aliens mutate wildly, which would allow del Toro to create dozens of extreme incarnations. He said, “If I get to do it, those monsters will be so terrifying.”

Del Toro, now forty-six, owns a mock-Tudor mansion in Westlake Village, a sterile suburb northwest of Los Angeles. The house, which is a three-minute drive from an equally large house where he lives with his wife, Lorenza, and their two daughters, functions as his office, but it’s also a temple to his obsession with collecting—Forrest Ackerman’s mansion reborn.

Even outside, there are ghoulish touches. A weathervane on the roof is a dragon, and the front windowpanes are darkly tinted, suggesting a serial killer deflecting the postman. A sign on the lawn announces the estate’s formal name: Bleak House. Del Toro calls the place his “man cave.”

I knocked, and an assistant hollered for me to come in. When I opened the door, a rectangle of California sunshine invaded the dark entryway, landing on the hideous face of a large, lunging demon. It was a life-size cast-resin model of Sammael, from “Hellboy,” standing where a decorator would have placed a welcoming spray of flowers. Behind it, French doors offered a shimmery view of the back-yard pool. Sammael was far from the only model on display. Del Toro had filled the house with dozens of monster maquettes from his films—scale models created by special-effects shops during the early design phase, allowing the imaginary to become palpable. Del Toro had given Sammael, who has a lion’s mane of writhing tentacles, a subtle motif of asymmetry; one front limb is slightly longer than the other, setting his gait off balance, and he has an extra eye on the right side of his snout. Doug Jones, a mime turned actor who has played creatures in dozens of films, including “Hellboy” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” says that, in the subculture of monster design, del Toro’s creatures are couture. “It’s because he’s a fanboy,” he said. “He knows exactly how fanboys critique movies. He anticipates the ‘That wouldn’t really work!’ response.”

“My next poem is written in the shape of a woman’s body.” Facebook

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I heard a heavy shuffling sound: del Toro, who at the time weighed more than three hundred pounds, was coming from a back room. (As Doug Jones observes, “Guillermo doesn’t pick up his feet when he walks.”) Del Toro gave me a genial slap on the back, his hand like a bear paw. Bleak House, he said, had been “inspired by Forry Ackerman,” who had been his “hero of heroes.” He said, “He was so nice! If you called him in advance, he would let you come to the house. Then he’d take you out for a slice of cherry pie.” Del Toro wore black sweatpants, a black T-shirt, and an unzipped black hoodie, all of which had been laundered so many times that they had faded into clashing inky shades. He had large ice-blue eyes, round glasses, and the rubbery cheeks of a kindergartner. An unruly brown beard, touched with gray, grounded him in manhood. A film of perspiration on his forehead trapped strands of hair that were supposed to be combed to the side.