Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim hits Blu-ray today , which is reason enough to celebrate, but the fanboy favorite also has a great new book out coming later this month (just in time, appropriately enough, for Halloween) called Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions . It’s a 260-plus page coffee-table tome full of nightmarish visions of beauty, taken straight from the filmmaker’s own notebooks, drawings, and private collection.

That combined with the arrival of the Kaiju-vs-Jaegers epic Pac Rim in the usual array of home video options (Blu-ray 3D Combo Pack, Blu-ray Combo Pack, DVD, and Digital HD) means that GDT fans will be quite busy for the rest of the month.

I jumped on the phone last week to chat with del Toro about the Blu-ray, the book, and a bunch of other topics. But after leafing through Cabinet of Curiosities, I knew exactly what my first question was going to be…

A life-size sculpture of H.P. Lovecraft watches over the Horror Library of GDT's Bleak House. (From Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions)

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Del Toro on the set of Pacific Rim

[Laughs] You commission it! I commissioned it to an artist called Thomas Kuebler. Him and Mike Hill are two artists that I admire, and I commission stuff from them. If you saw those couple of figures for the house, he did the little Hans the midget from Freaks. I wanted him looking down the corridor with the razor blade, so I sent him the measurements of the corridor and measurements of the library for H.P. Lovecraft, so that when you come in he’s looking at you. It’s great! You walk in, and you have a nice foot-tall head of James Whale’s Frankenstein’s monster. You turn to the right, and H.P. Lovecraft is looking at you!You know, when I was a kid, I used to love reading any interview with any person that loved the fantasy or horror genre. It really gave me a lot of hope that there were other people interested in the genre in the same way I was. So when I was a kid, I wrote a letter to Forry Ackerman to adopt me, because I really felt very out of place. In a way, I just hope to tell people, “Look, you can really, really make efforts into not just knowing the B-movies or knowing the genre as a genre that people think is a quick cash machine, you can actually love, respect and endeavor yourselves into making beautiful art, with a hammer.” In a way, that can only happen when you can see how serious it is -- not only my passion for the genre, but also the depth of it, the depth of the genre itself, that you can find it in literature spanning the centuries. You can find it in art. Then you think the only way to communicate it is with books like this or the collection I am curating for Penguin Horror, which represents the classics for people to read. I think there is no danger in talking about the things you love.I try to put the very best features on Blu-rays and DVDs. There is as much as we could cram in it. We have all the capsules that were available on the Internet, plus more. We have a very comprehensive, interactive feature that allows you to really get behind the process of making the movie. I did my commentary track, as most times on the DVDs or Blu-rays I do. I end up doing my commentary tracks two or three times, because every time I do it, I take it very seriously, but I spend a couple of days thinking about it, and I go to my producer Javier [Soto] -- he’s always tearing his hair out because I always go back and say, “I want to do it again.” So there’s a lot to be found. Hopefully, people will find that we have it packed to the gills. It’s a very beautiful transfer and an incredibly beautiful sound mix, so it’s the best presentation I could do.I’m very happy. Out of the top 10 titles of the summer, we were perhaps the one that was not dependent on a star name or a pre-established property, and I think that’s really, really good. The passion with people that saw the movie and raved about it was great. What was troubling was that we didn’t achieve -- and the tracking was clear -- we were not being exposed beyond the core. The core was reacting to the movie, but people on the street were not hearing about it in the right way. I cannot decipher that because that’s exactly what the numbers indicated. It’s sort of a head-scratcher, but when we opened we were in very low awareness, which means we were not being rejected or accepted. That was not the issue. The issue was we were not on the radar.

Guillermo del Toro Gives an Update on Dark Universe/Justice League Dark

I truly tell you, I cannot spend much time analyzing that, because as I said, it’s a head-scratcher in many ways. I know that, also, it became very clear this summer that it was a huge agglutination of titles. After a certain point, the pocket of the audience stops. It doesn’t matter what the date is, effectively, what matters is how late in the summer you come out -- if people have already spent their real-world money that exists in every family budget to go out to the movies in the summer, you know?