There is a long article on Guillermo del Toro in the March/April 2009 issue of The Believer. That’s an upscale arts and culture magazine published by McSweeney’s. Charles Burns did the cover, so you know it’s a cool magazine. The article, “Cathedral Head,” is by Victoria Nelson. The title refers to a painting of a monster in one of GdT’s notebooks, which is reproduced here, albeit quite small.

There’s nothing on The Hobbit. Instead, Nelson sets out to analyze how gothic tendencies work their way through Guillermo’s films. She defines the term in two ways:

(1) What I like to call “Gothick,” the post-Enlightenment popular entertainments (bookended by Horace Walpole’s 1764 The caste of Otranto and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820) that have morphed, through Victorian ghost stories and early twentieth-century pulp and comic-book horror, into today’s plethora of subgenres, including film, video games, “lifestyles,” and even new religious movements, and

(2) The actual historical period of the European Middle Ages, first dubbed “Gothic” (a word redolent of nasty barbarian Huns) by Renaissance architects anxious to distinguish their own work, inspired by Greek and Roman antiquity, from medieval sacred architecture.

Nelson argues that Guillermo mixes both kinds of gothic(k) in his films, mixing quotes from the man himself liberally through her text. It’s a fascinating analysis, concentrating mostly on the Mexican films: Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth. For those of you just catching up with Guillermo’s earlier films, either for their own sake or to get hints of how he might approach The Hobbit, her article makes for a good read. For GdT fans, it’s a must. I think Nelson helps explain how some of the distinctively eerie quality of the films works.

The article is only available in its entirety in the print version. The Believer shows up on magazine racks in chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble. You can also read the opening portion and order a copy online here. This is “The 2009 Film Issue,” and it also includes articles on Jonas Mekas, The Exorcist, Polish film posters (many of which looks like they were designed for GdT films), Mike Leigh, and others, as well as a DVD of short films by or about Jean-Luc Godard.