Guillermo Del Toro on Vampires

Guillermo Del Toro on Vampires from Time Magazine
By Gilbert Cruz Wednesday, Jun. 03, 2009

Vampires these days are sorta lovelorn and wimpy. Not Guillermo del Toro's. His will suck you dry with a stinger-tipped tentacle. It's not really the kind of stuff teen girls want to read. But Del Toro, director of the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth — as well as The Devil's Backbone, Blade II and the Hellboy series — isn't trying to appeal to the Stephenie Meyer set with his new novel. The first in a trilogy (co-written with author Chuck Hogan), The Strain opens with a plane that lands in New York City, lights off, windows drawn, everyone seemingly dead. Naturally, it gets worse from there. Del Toro spoke to TIME from New Zealand, where he is currently working on the film version of J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit, about bloodsuckers, swine flu and his childhood hero.

Celebrated director Guillermo Del Toro talks to TIME's Gilbert Cruz about his new vampire novel, The Strain, and how his nosferatu are no tween girl's fantasy

Over the next decade, you've got about five movie projects signed up. How did you find the time to start a trilogy of vampire novels?
I started it actually about four years ago. The idea behind The Strain was to try and marry old Eastern European folklore with an urban procedural feel. Which is very much the way, back in the day, Dracula must have read to contemporary readers. It was a very now, in the moment, modern novel. And I wanted to recapture that a little bit.

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