Comic-Con Fan Favorite Guillermo del Toro Discusses ‘The Strain’ Season One

Guillermo del Toro The Strain Interview
Guillermo del Toro at the 2014 San Diego Comic Con (Photo by Richard Chavez/ShowbizJunkies)

Guillermo del Toro always pulls in a huge crowd when he participates in panels at the San Diego Comic-Con, and the 2014 sold-out fanfest was no exception. One of the main projects del Toro was promoting was FX’s The Strain, a vampire tale that has nothing whatsoever in common with Twilight, True Blood, or any other recent vampire film or TV series. And in our roundtable interview, the award-winning filmmaker spoke about the origin of his vampires and the transition from book to the small screen.

How did you cultivate this particular breed of vampires?

Guillermo del Toro: “When I was a child, I started collecting not only horror fiction but horror fact. I started collecting folklore and mythology from all over the world. I was a child in the 1970s so it was a heightened point of the weird overtaking literature. People were re-evaluating Charles Fort. You have Erich von Daniken. You have Colin Wilson. You have Jacques Verges in France. And there was a lot of explosion of deep mythology, strange mythology.

There was an author that particularly influenced me called Bernhardt J. Hurwood and he put out a gorgeous book called Passport to the Supernatural. In it, he had collected myths of vampiric lore from China, India, America, Europe, and he recommended a few readings that I tracked down religiously. In pre-internet time it was a true hunting expedition, like the books of Dom Augustin Calmet, Montague Summers. They were both church officials or priests that were interested in the occult. One of them chronicled the vampiric lore that had happened in his time and before his time trying to specifically address different types of vampires in Eastern Europe. The other one did The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, The Vampire In Europe, went deep into werewolf mythology and so forth.

I continued collecting vampiric facts. I have a whole room. You know I have a library that is two houses. That’s my library. It’s 11,000 square feet of books and I have one whole room dedicated to vampire and werewolf mythology. Not fiction, just mythology. I can talk to you about the variations between Indian vampires, Filipino vampires, the Pennangalan, the Strigoi, the Upir, and each of them is different. The Mexican vampire which is hairless like a Chihuahua, each of the countries reinvents the vampire. Like the dragon represents something really deeply ingrained in us, my theory is that it represents a collective memory of a time when we were cannibalistic apes and we ate each other and we started to try to mythologize those tendencies to werwolf and vampire myth.

Anyway, what you see on The Strain is decades and decades of studious, completely obsessive lore and fact and biology, imagination on my part. I’ve been reading on how vampires are turned for decades. When I was working for my father on a real estate business, I would work from eight in the morning to like four in the afternoon, selling apartments and I would sit in the model home with a pile of vampire lore just making notes about Strigoi and stingers under the tongue. I worked there for three years and a lot of the notes came out of that period.”

Will you publish all of those notes some day?

Guillermo del Toro: “Well, they are published in a book, part of them, called Cabinet of Curiosities. They published some of my notebooks. Some of them are that old. The other thing that was important is I also was obsessed about the idea of religion and vampirism. Some of it made it into Cronos, some of it makes it into the third book of The Strain.”

Did the Dieter de la Guardia character in Cronos inspire the Eldritch Palmer character?

Guillermo del Toro: “Of course. They’re the same character. Rich people have no concept of the real world when they get too rich. I don’t f*cking understand how someone can have billions of dollars and think that is even reasonable. I just don’t understand it. The same way that they would like to live forever no matter what the f*ck happens to the world. So I find it really, really disgusting that someone can really continue accumulating billions and it’s just a number on a piece of paper. They’re not going to spend it. They’re not going to get laid more. They’re not going to buy another house. They’re not going to get another yacht. There’s no possible reflection in the real world for how their lives are affected by that amount of money.

And the same is true of the desire of immortality. Why the f*ck do you want to live forever? Who wants to live forever? What do you have to offer to the world that would make you feel you deserve to live forever? The perfect character to answer that is a billionaire who is as obscenely thirsty of life as he is obscenely thirsty of money. So, they are the same and I tried to make them the same. I tried to make them hollow, that they have somebody else’s kidney, that they are being scooped out and they’ve been filled with the organs of other people to represent what I feel about those characters. Now this said, it’s done in the spirit of the genre but that’s the way I read those characters myself. It’s like the character in Cronos says, ‘That f*cker does nothing but sh*t and piss all day and he wants to live longer?’ That’s what Ron says about his uncle.”

Can you talk about the path The Strain took to becoming a TV series?

Guillermo del Toro: “I pitched it to Fox in ’06. I pitched it with the airplane arriving and these passengers. Before then I created a bible of an arc of three acts. It could go from three to five seasons. They read it, we went up the food chain, all the way up and then they said, ‘We don’t like it. Would you turn it into a comedy?’ I said no, so I go and grabbed my little bible and I met with Chuck Hogan and I said, ‘Let’s write it 50/50. You write some chapters, I write some others.’ He said yes and we did it on a handshake deal. We didn’t do papers, we didn’t do contracts. We just went, ‘Let’s do it.’

He wrote, I wrote. We didn’t go to a publisher. We ended up going to Harper Collins with the book finished and they said, ‘We’ll buy it.’ Then what happens is it comes out, the three books did very, very well and we didn’t want to sell it to TV until we finished the third book so we wouldn’t be careful about what we wrote. There are scenes in the first book, people think stuff that’s aired is disturbing, Chuck had much more disturbing stuff on his side of the chapters if you’ve read it.

At the end of the day, we came back full circle, adapted it as a comic book in Dark Horse. If you read the comic, we are involved on every decision in that comic, the story, the line work, the inking, the covers, the color work, the writing, everything. So after doing that, we shopped it around and one day we shopped it around all the cable networks and all of them wanted it. All of them wanted it and then we went with FX. [John] Landraf had read the three books, understood it perfectly, and wanted to offer it.”