Guillermo del Toro: ‘When you see a UFO, it causes a crack. The mystery of the universe rushes towards you’

The celebrated Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, is currently in England to receive a BFI fellowship, a prestigious honor. While in the country, he also plans to purchase a haunted house, a testament to his lifelong fascination with the supernatural. In an interview, del Toro shares his thoughts on gods, ghosts, monsters, and a near-disastrous encounter with the Weinsteins. He also divulges his peculiar cinema-going habits: he always buys three seats. “I’m an expansive fellow,” he explains, occupying a generous portion of a sofa in a London hotel library. “Between the popcorn, my elbows, and my girth, I need more than one seat. But I also appreciate the feeling of being in company yet alone. While many praise cinema as a collective experience, I find I enjoy it most when it’s not crowded. I prefer being semi-alone.” These extra seats might prove useful if any spectral presences happen to be nearby. Ghosts and del Toro share a long history. The director, a multi-Oscar winner, first encountered a spectral presence at his family home in Guadalajara, Mexico, at the age of 11. He believes it was his late uncle, who had promised the young horror enthusiast that he would return from the afterlife to signal if there was anything beyond. Del Toro later recalled hearing a persistent sighing in his deceased uncle’s room – a detail that inspired Santi, the sighing ghost-boy in his 2001 horror film, “The Devil’s Backbone,” set during the Spanish Civil War. Years later, while scouting locations in New Zealand for “The Hobbit,” a project he co-wrote, del Toro experienced what he described as a “cacophonous uproar of a murder in full swing,” audible in a surround-sound effect in his hotel room. Although he didn’t encounter a ghost per se during the filming of “Frankenstein” two years ago in an early 19th-century hotel in Aberdeen, he felt an “oppressive vibe,” which he promptly shared with his over two million followers on Twitter. Currently, he is actively seeking to buy a haunted house in the United Kingdom. One can only imagine his search is being conducted through a specialized real estate platform, perhaps akin to “Frightmove.”