Time magazine has posted an interview with Guillermo Del Toro, in which the filmmaker discusses his first novel, a vampire story co-written with Chuck Hogan and titled The Strain. Del Toro talks about his preference for old-fashioned vampires (i.e., re-animated corpses rather than “beautiful people of the night”), his love of folklore and fairy tales, and what about LORD OF THE RINGS made him want to direct THE HOBBIT.
You’ve said that you were never a huge fan of fantasy and fantasy fiction. What was it about the Lord of the Rings films that made you think The Hobbit was something you wanted to direct?
The scene that hooked me was the moment where the Ringwraiths are right above the hobbits, who are hiding under the roots of a tree. You see the bugs, the insects crawling out and dropping onto the Hobbits. There’s such great atmosphere. I think that’s the key for me. When [other] directors were rendering fantasy movies, they had all this shiny armor and shiny castles. And Peter came from a horror aesthetic. He rendered that fantasy world in the way that either a historian or a Hammer film fan would do it. They were very texturally rich and dark. And that’s what hooked me into the trilogy.