‘Sangre del Toro’ Review: Myth, Horror, and the Beauty of the Broken (Netflix)

Horror is the perfect child of the fable, a direct descendant of the fairy tale,” says Guillermo del Toro in one of the interviews that make up this detailed documentary about his work. And his films prove the point: the lines dividing one genre from the other are often faint. “The difference between Snow White and horror is very small,” he adds. Sangre del Toro is not a promotional documentary of the kind one might expect Netflix to release alongside the premiere of Frankenstein. In fact, apart from a few comments at the end about his love for Mary Shelley’s novel, the film barely touches on that specific creature. It focuses instead on many others, because if Del Toro’s cinema is about anything, it is about monsters.

The director of Pan’s Labyrinth builds a singular blend of traditions: horror, fable, Mexican popular culture, and a deeply human outlook toward what is broken, imperfect, and transient. His films use fear not as an end in itself, but as a language inherited from classic fairy tales and popular storytelling—a language that teaches through danger. In Del Toro’s world, the monster is not just a threat: it is a metaphor for everything society chooses to hide or ignore. As in ancestral fables, fear becomes an act of revelation, illuminating abuse, trauma, injustice, and violence that exist in reality. Even when his stories are gothic, sinister, or even brutal, their structure usually mirrors rites of passage: a character—often a child—faces a trial, is transformed by it, breaks, and returns changed.

Through conversations, lectures, and the constant voice-over—wise, articulate, and finely reasoned as usual—Sangre del Toro enters the filmmaker’s way of understanding horror, not just in film but in all forms of art. A major section of the documentary is dedicated to the exhibition he curated in 2019 at the Guadalajara Film Festival, in his hometown, titled “At Home with My Monsters.” The film uses that exhibition as its narrative spine, exploring its rooms and displays while drawing connections to Del Toro’s life, career, and lifelong fascination with creatures some might call grotesque.

Del Toro’s sensibility is inseparable from Mexican culture, which he incorporates into his creative universe in a way that is both broad and intimate. It includes the syncretic celebration of the Day of the Dead—a tradition that embraces death with an almost festive familiarity—as well as the Catholicism that shaped his childhood, and the fears, guilt, and lessons he absorbed painfully from his grandmother. Concepts like punishment, sacrifice, and redemption appear with the ambivalence of someone who grew up inside that world and understands its subtleties. But the films also carry the flavor of Mexican popular culture: horror magazines, bizarre luchador movies, stylistic excess, genre mixing, dark humor, and an artisanal spirit in the making of… well, everything.

The filmmaker is precise and articulate when mapping his passions, obsessions, and how all of it connects to his personal history. The film is not particularly focused on intimate biographical revelations, but rather on his thematic and cultural fixations: his reverence for strange creatures, the fragility of the body (he loves David Cronenberg’s films), and above all, the fear of death. Clips from films such as Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Hellboy, Pacific Rim, The Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth, among others, appear not for plot analysis but to illustrate recurring ideas and obsessions. This is not a critical essay on Del Toro’s filmography, but rather a theoretical framework for understanding it.

One of the documentary’s key interests is Del Toro’s fascination with Japanese culture: manga, ghost mythology, and above all the concepts of kintsugi and wabi-sabi, which celebrate the imperfect and the fleeting. Instead of glorifying invincible heroes—which Del Toro has no interest in—his cinema finds its emotional center in what might be called “the imperfect”: the monstrous, the marginalized, the excluded. The beauty in his films lies not in what remains untouched, but in what has survived. His stories do not celebrate purity or perfection, but that which endures. In Del Toro’s cinema, the true hero is not the one who remains unbroken, but the one who learns to carry on with visible scars.

“You break as a child, usually because of your family, and then you slowly rebuild yourself,” he says near the end of this documentary. And that, more than anything else, defines the cinema of Guillermo del Toro.