GUILLERMO DEL TORO: INFLUENCES at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West) from Friday (September 29) to December 13. tiff.net/gdt
THE FILMS OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West) from October 11 to November 24. ago.ca
NIGHTMARE ON DUNDAS STREET MOVIE NIGHTS at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West) from October 6 to December 8. ago.ca
Guillermo del Toro’s love for genre cinema is so vast that it can’t be contained to a single venue.
Sure, the AGO is hosting his collection of creature memorabilia, Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters – which opens Friday (September 30) and runs into the new year (and which we’ll be covering online at nowtoronto.com). With it comes two film series at Jackman Hall.
The Films Of Guillermo del Toro offers five of his more recent features on select Wednesday and Friday nights, while the Nightmare On Dundas Street Movie Nights devote a late-night Friday slot to 10 of the scariest movies ever made.
But wait! There’s more! Over at TIFF, starting this week, Guillermo del Toro: Influences offers Toronto’s favourite adopted son carte blanche to pick nine films that he counts as part of his creative DNA, spanning half a century of world cinema.
No one could possibly attend all of these screenings – not even del Toro himself, since he’ll be spending some of the fall doing press for December’s The Shape Of Water – but here are the 10 films we absolutely insist you see in a theatre.
Guillermo would want it that way.
1. Halloween
(AGO, October 27, 10 pm)
John Carpenter’s nerve-shredding slasher movie is horror stripped down to its most basic elements – a babysitter (Jamie Lee Curtis, of course) stalked by a maniac in a quiet little town – and presented with merciless style. Even the musical score attacks you. Oh, and Donald Pleasance’s crazy old Dr. Loomis? He’s right about everything, which makes the movie even scarier.
2. Crimson Peak
(AGO, November 22 and 24, 7 pm)
I’ll go to bat for del Toro’s glorious salute to the Gothic romance genre – with Mia Wasikowska as a turn-of-the-century Buffalo naïf spirited away by an English gentleman (Tom Hiddleston) to live with him and his weird sister (Jessica Chastain, magnificent) in a haunted house – as one of the decade’s most unfairly neglected films. It knows exactly what it’s doing, and it does it beautifully.
3. The Night Of The Hunter
(AGO, October 20, 10 pm)
Charles Laughton and James Agee take Davis Grubb’s Southern Gothic novel about a malevolent preacher who invades a family and turn it into a cruel, gorgeous fable about two children whose innocence is destroyed by a monster. Robert Mitchum is the best he’s ever been as loathsome charmer Harry Powell Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish are pretty great, too. An all-timer.
4. The Spirit Of The Beehive
(TIFF Bell Lightbox, October 13, 9:30 pm)
It’s no surprise to see del Toro include Victor Erice’s allegorical masterwork on his list of influences the seeds of both Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape Of Water are carried within it. A tale of a little girl in 40s Spain whose life is forever altered by a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein, it’s an eerie, beautiful story about limited perspectives and unexpected empathy, and how monsters might look different if you really, truly see them.
5. Repulsion
(AGO, December 1, 10 pm)
Roman Polanski’s suffocating study of a woman coming apart during a weekend alone in her London apartment has lost none of its unsettling intimacy over the decades, thanks to the twin triumphs of Catherine Deneuve’s shattering performance and Gilbert Taylor’s suffocating black-and-white photography. Never seen it? Now’s your chance.
6. The Devil’s Backbone
(AGO, October 11 and 13, 7 pm)
Set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, del Toro’s moody, idiosyncratic tale of orphans and ghosts was an art-house hit that saved him from a career in horror-for-hire. It’s also creepy as hell, a quality that only truly works when you’re locked in the dark with it.
Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the must-sees in the AGO’s del Toro retrospective.
7. Pan’s Labyrinth
(AGO, October 25 and 27, 7 pm)
Another waking nightmare set during the Spanish Civil War, del Toro’s 2006 triumph explores the plight of a little girl (Ivana Baquero) who flees from her fascist stepfather into a magical underworld of fauns and fairies ready to hail her as the lost heir to their kingdom. Del Toro constructs an allegorical wonderland as rich as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia or Tolkien’s Middle-Earth… but never lets us forget that the real world is even scarier.
8. Onibaba
(November 18, 8:45 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox)
Kaneto Shindo’s tale of a love triangle between three fairly awful people in feudal Japan envelops the viewer in a dark, mysterious nightmare involving misplaced trust, raging passions and a really creepy demon mask. And by the time you figure out what’s really going on, it’s too late to escape.
9. Brazil
(Saturday, September 30, 8:15 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox)
Terry Gilliam is the only director cited twice in del Toro’s Influences series, and it’s easy to see why. Both filmmakers build worlds in order to wander around inside them. Brazil is perhaps Gilliam’s finest expression of that, a bureaucratic dystopia “somewhere in the 20th century” where Jonathan Pryce’s fantasy-prone paper-pusher falls for plucky rebel Kim Greist. Delightfully tactile and scarily believable, and a major step up after the silly/scary Time Bandits – which launches the TIFF series Friday (September 29) at 9:15 pm.
10. Great Expectations
(TIFF Bell Lightbox, November 22, 6:45 pm)
David Lean’s 1946 adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic seems like an odd choice for del Toro’s Influences series – until you look at it. Lean and cinematographer Guy Green stage the story as an expressionist nightmare, trapping the characters in their circumstances as well as their environments. Much of its imagery would be seeded through the Hammer horror films that followed a decade later, and reprocessed in del Toro’s own Crimson Peak. This one’s screening in an archival print, which should be splendid.
See more on Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters at nowtoronto.com/art-and-books.
