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Oddities From Guillermo del Toro's Macabre Collection Will Be Featured At LACMA
Hundreds of creepy, quirky, and just plain gross items collected by director Guillermo del Toro will be on display for your gawking pleasure at LACMA this summer.
As Remezcla reports, 500 of del Toro's 700 items will be exhibited at LACMA from July to November, with an additional 60 from LACMA's permanent collection. The show is then scheduled to travel to Minneapolis and Toronto, and Guillermo del Toro himself tweeted that there will be additional appearances in Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris, and New York. The collection will include art, books, skulls, life-size figures among other bizarre ephemera, some of which del Toro has been amassing since childhood. We can also expect props, and memorabilia from his own films.
The collection is culled from del Toro's "Bleak House" (named after the Dickens novel), where the director and his collaborators work and draw inspiration—kind of like a macabre man cave. Last year, the New York Times toured the macabre man cave and found, "blood-red walls [and] a hellhound with four hooded eyes and gaping fangs." It continues:
The head of Frankenstein’s monster floats, disembodied and huge, a story above it. Peering at you from the living room, his fingers paging through a book, is the early-20th-century horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft. On a Victorian sofa, a demented doll stares down a bronze gargantua, Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie.
Del Toro also told the Times that half of his paychecks go toward collecting items for Bleak House, so there are sure to be expensive, and extensive curiosities to gape at, including life-size figures of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Frankenstein's monster, and a various assortment of figures from his movies like Hellboy and Blade. Del Toro also commissioned a reproduction of the captain's bed from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. As seen in the video above, Bleak House looks like a haunted mansion/wax museum/steampunk paradise hybrid—think a gorier, less cutesy version of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Here's another peek into Bleak House from the del Toro himself:
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Scattered Bleak House views pt 3 pic.twitter.com/89GlPRlW8i
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) October 29, 2015
Happy Easter from Bleak House!! Felices Pascuas desde Bleak House!! pic.twitter.com/sA2SOolSKt
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) March 27, 2016
According to an interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, here's a typical day in Bleak House with del Toro:
This morning I woke up in the Dickens room, which is a room that is dedicated to Dickens, and all the furniture is Dickensian and Victorian, and it's surrounded by books from the Victorian era (…) and I exited through the Nosferatu corridor by pushing the secret painting on the wall into my kitchen.
"Nosferatu corridor"? Tight.
Lest you think del Toro actually lives in this creepy nightmare world 24/7, rest assured: he and his family live in a "normal" i.e. boring house.
I have two houses for me and one house for my family. I live in the family home and I work in my two houses. The two houses are organized in libraries. There's a library for horror, a library for history, a library for art. I have about roughly eight to nine thousand books. I have roughly about fifty thousand magazine and comics. I have about five hundred and eighty original pieces of art; acrylics, oils….
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Del Toro also helpfully distinguished between hoarder and collector:
It happens to all of us, our house is who we are. Even if people say not to judge a book by its cover, we are what we own. And I know the difference between collecting or accumulating is very, very, very small. A hoarder accumulates compulsively while the collector lives through their objects, every book, every object has a meaning. And that's me.
And finally, we've got to include these photos, proving that it's no coincidence that the Disneyland Haunted Mansion vibes are strong at Bleak House:
Random Images of Uncertain Appeal: A visit to my favorite place in the world. Courtesy of Gary DeO pic.twitter.com/15D8gKUpbG
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) January 25, 2016
[h/t Curbed]
Editor's Note: A spokesperson for LACMA has clarified that, currently, there are only plans for the exhibit to travel to Minneapolis and Toronto.
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