Guillermo del Toro almost lost his movie memorabilia in a wildfire

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Many fled when wildfires devastated Los Angeles earlier this year, but Guillermo del Toro rushed back in, determined to save his lifelong collection of horror memorabilia. It's the same loyalty that finds him making another tough decision to protect the items he loves like family: letting some of them go. Del Toro partnered with Heritage Auctions for a three-part auction to sell a fraction of a collection that is bursting at the seams. Online bidding for the first part on Sept. 26 started Thursday and includes over a hundred items, with more headed to the auction block next year. "This one hurts. The next one, I'm going to be bleeding," del Toro, 60, said of the auction series. "If you love somebody, you have estate planning, you know, and this is me estate planning for a family that has been with me since I was a kid." Del Toro is one of the industry's most respected filmmakers, whose fascination with monsters and visual style will shape generations to come. But at his core, the Mexican-born horror buff is a collector. The Oscar-winner has long doubled as the sole caretaker of the "Bleak House" — which stretches across two and a half Santa Monica homes nearly overflowing with thousands of ghoulish creatures, iconic comic drawings and paintings, books and movie props. The houses function not just as museums, but as libraries and workspaces where his imagination bounces off the oxblood-painted walls. "I love what I have because I live with it. I actually am a little nuts, because I say hi to some of the life-size figures when I turn on the light," del Toro told The Associated Press, sitting in the dining room of one of the houses, now a sanctuary for "Haunted Mansion" memorabilia. "This is curated. This is not a casual collection." The auction includes behind-the-scene drawings and one-of-a-kind props from del Toro's own classics, as well as iconic works like Bernie Wrightson's illustrations for "Frankenstein" and Mike Mignola's pinup artwork for "Hellraiser." A race to save horror history In January, del Toro had only a couple hours, his car and a few helping hands to save key pieces from the fires. Out of the over 5,000 items in his collection, he only managed to move about 120 objects. It wasn't the first time, as fires had come dangerously close to Bleak House twice before. The houses were spared, but fear consumed him. If a fire or earthquake swallowed them, he thought, "What came out of it? You collected insurance? And what happened to that little segment of Richard Corben's life, or Jack Kirby's craft, or Bernie Wrightson's life?" An auction, del Toro said, gives him peace of mind, as it ensures the items will land in the hands of another collector who will protect the items as he has. These are not just props or trinkets, he said, but "historical artifacts. They're pieces of audiovisual history for humanity." And his life's mission has been to protect as much of this history as he can. "Look, this is in reaction to the fires. This is in reaction to loving this thing," del Toro told the AP. The initial auction uncovers who del Toro is as a collector, he said. Upcoming parts will expose how the filmmaker thinks, which he called a much more personal endeavor. The auction isn't just a "piece of business," for him, but rather a love letter to collectors everywhere, and encouragement to think beyond a movie and "learn to read and write film design in a different way. That's my hope." A house full of "unruly kids" Caring for the Bleak House collection feels like being on "a bus with 160 kids that are very unruly, and I'm driving for nine hours," del Toro said. "I gotta take a rest." The auction will give the filmmaker some breathing room from the collection's arduous maintenance. The houses must stay at a certain temperature, without direct sunlight — all of which is monitored solely by del Toro, who often spends most of his day there. He selects the picture frame for every drawing, dusts all the artifacts and arranges every bookshelf mostly himself, having learned his lesson from the handful of times he allowed outside help. One time, del Toro said, he found someone "cleaning an oil painting with Windex, and I almost had a heart attack." "It's very hard to have someone come in and know why that trinket is important," he said. "It's sort of a very bubbled existence. But you know, that's what you do with strange animals — you put them in small environments where they can survive. That's me." Each room is organized by theme, with one room dedicated to each of his major works, from "Hellboy" to "Pacific Rim." Del Toro typically spends his entire work day at one of the houses, which he picks depending on the task at hand. The "Haunted Mansion" dining room, for instance, is an excellent writing space. "If I could, I would live in the Haunted Mansion," he said. "So, this is the second best." Building a mini Bleak House In selecting which items to sell, del Toro said he "wanted somebody to be able to recreate a mini version of Bleak House." Auction items include concept sketches and props from del Toro's 1992 debut film, "Cronos," all the way to his more recent works, like 2021's "Nightmare Alley." The starting bids vary, from a couple thousand dollars up to hundreds of thousands. One of Wrightson's drawings for a 1983 illustrated version of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is the highest priced item, starting at $200,000. The auction also includes art from comic legends like Richard Corben, Jack Kirby and H.R. Giger, whose work del Toro wrote in the catalog "represent the pinnacle of comic book art in the last quarter of the twentieth century." Other cultural touchstones in illustration that are represented in the auction include rare images from the 1914 short film "Gertie the Dinosaur," one of the earliest animated films, and original art for "Sleeping Beauty" by Eyvind Earle and Kay Nielsen. "As collectors, you are basically keeping pieces of culture for generations to come. They're not yours," del Toro said. "We don't know which of the pieces you're holding is going to be culturally significant ... 100 years from now, 50 years from now. So that's part of the weight."