Crew
Director – Yves Montmayeur, Producers – Jad Ben Ammar, Damien Le Boucher & Sean O’Kelly, Photography – Raphael Aupy, Nicolas Bozino, Vincent Gonon & Yves Montmayeur, Music – Yoko Higashi. Production Company – Brilliant Media Group/Kador/Brainworks/SofiTVCine 13.
With
Guillermo Del Toro, Eugenio Caballero, David Cronenberg, Junji Ito
Guillermo Del Toro is a sensational figure within genre cinema. Del Toro grew from a director making horror films on the festival circuit with the likes of Cronos (1993) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001), moving over to mainstream success with Mimic (1997), Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004) to increasing wider acclaim from the arthouse hit of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and the likes of Pacific Rim (2013), Crimson Peak (2015), The Shape of Water (2017), Nightmare Alley (2021) and Frankenstein (2025).
Sangre Del Toro is a Documentary about Del Toro from Yves Montmayeur, a French director who has been making documentaries about films and filmmakers since the early 2000s. These include Ghibli: The Miyazaki Temple (2005), In the Mood for Doyle (2007) about cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Johnnie Got His Gun! (2010) about Hong Kong director Johnnie To, Pinku Eiga: Inside the Pleasure Dome of Japanese Erotic Cinema (2011), The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Maddin (2015) about Guy Maddin, Dragon Girls (2016) about the heroines of Hong Kong cinema, Citizen Kitano (2020) about Takeshi Kitano, and Mad in Belgium (2022) about the making of Man Bites Dog (1992).
The occasion of Sangre Del Toro is an exhibit held by Del Toro in his hometown Guadalajara, Mexico entitled En Casa con Mis Monstruos (At Home with My Monsters) in 2019. The exhibit consisted of 953 items from Del Toro’s own collection (he talks of having tens of thousands of comic books alone) and other museums, including props from Del Toro’s films, artwork, sculpture and collectibles. (There had been an earlier exhibition Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters that toured various parts of North America). Sangre Del Toro was shot just after Del Toro had made The Shape of Water and premiered at the same Venice Film Festival that Frankenstein did.
The documentary is a fascinating delve into the mind of Del Toro, showing his influences and especially his imaginative process. I came away from it with an even greater understanding and admiration for Del Toro than before. Del Toro has some very unique takes on monsters – the claim “the monsters live in us” – and these make the backbone of Sangre Del Toro. The film focuses on his relationship with and reverence for the various monsters of cinema, fiction and art. He loves the beauty of the dark artistry of this imagination. “The distance between ‘Snow White and a horror tale is very small,” he says at one point, talking of seeing monsters through the eyes of children – an element that regularly features in his work.
Del Toro discusses his own childhood and how he was rent with fears about mortality, disease and aging. It is these that became the formative soil for his obsession with comic books, horror artwork and especially films. He talks about being left all day at the local cinema by his parents and watching Universal monster movies and somehow getting in to see Night of the Living Dead (1968) at a young age. He talks of the Catholicism that he grew up with (but no longer believes) and takes us on a tour of the town and its heritage of artwork from seeing his first dead body in the catacombs at the local church to frescoes of sin and damnation at the local collages and monasteries.
Del Toro is the only interviewee on screen for almost the entire time of Sangre Del Toro. There is brief footage that Montmayeur shot in France of an exhibition by David Cronenberg – Del Toro speaks of admiration for Cronenberg and how he would have loved to make some of his films like The Fly (1986). The other two interviewees are Japanese comic-book artist Junji Ito, known for works like Tomie and Uzumaki, and Eugenio Caballero, Del Toro’s production designer on Pan’s Labyrinth.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2025 list).
Trailer here