“I’m going to sit, because I’m fat. I hope you’re drinking stuff,” Guillermo del Toro said as he took the stage at Portland’s Baghdad Theater & Pub. Ostensibly he was there to read from his new book… but he digressed.

What really happened was this: del Toro talked about his book for like 10 minutes, then opened it up to questions for the next hour or two, talking about everything from the book (conceived “before vampires were teenybopper dreams”), to how the Hellboy comics saved his life while he was shooting Mimic, to Hitchcock (did you know he wrote a book on Hitchcock? Me neither).

[….]

Genius. I especially liked the part about humans being spiritual animals in need of totems & the benefits of naming things & treating the world as if it was alive & magic.