Elves and Killer Beanstalks From Director’s Personal ‘Hell’

The common thread running through the films of Guillermo del Toro, from his 1993 horror feature debut, “Cronos,” to his 2006 Oscar-winning parable, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” is his deep affection for gruesome-looking beasts. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than creating fables about monsters, human or otherwise,” Mr. del Toro said in a recent phone interview from London.
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His latest movie, “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” which opens Friday, gave him plenty of new monsters to play with. In the follow-up to his 2004 comic-book adaptation, he imagines a collision of the natural world and a world of magic hidden in the fringes of urban life. “What if tooth fairies were illegally imported in containers to work menial jobs in garbage collection?” Mr. del Toro said. “What would happen if trolls were just bag ladies collecting stray cats for eating?”
The result is a tale of good versus evil in which Hellboy, a heroic demon who works for a secret government agency, squares off against a ruthless elf prince determined to destroy humanity.
The creatures of “Hellboy II” did not spring fully formed from Mr. del Toro’s head; they began as drawings in his diaries, accompanied by annotations in Spanish (he was born in Mexico) and English. He has kept similar journals for all his films (except for his forthcoming adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Hobbit,” whose characters are controlled by the author’s estate; for legal purposes he confines those sketches to loose papers or napkins).
Someday, Mr. del Toro said, he may publish his artwork, or he may pass it along to his daughters, Mariana, 12, who also appreciates monsters, and Marisa, 6, who prefers Hello Kitty — “which I still think is a hydrocephalic mutant of a cat,” Mr. del Toro said.