guillermo del toro

A curse befell Jacob Elordi when he was a child. It happened in the aisle of a Blockbuster Video. The culprit for the incantation was the image of the now emblematic Pale Man from “Pan’s Labyrinth,” flaunting eyes on his palms on the back cover of the DVD.

“My mother remembers this,” an energetic Elordi tells me in a Hollywood conference room. “I came running through the corridor and I was like, ‘I need this DVD.’ And she was like, ‘That’s so much blood and gore. You can’t watch it.’”

“She told you, ‘I’ll get it if you promise never to work with that director,’” Guillermo del Toro, the filmmaker behind the Oscar-winning dark fantasy, chimes in, sitting next to Elordi.

His wish granted, Elordi watched “Pan’s Labyrinth” at a young age. The fable set against the Spanish Civil War forever changed him. “From that moment, because of the way that Guillermo wills magic into the world and into his life, I feel like there was some kind of curse set upon me,” the actor says. “I do genuinely believe that, as out there as it sounds.”

Now, Elordi, 28, has become one of the Mexican director’s monsters in his long-gestating adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (in theaters Friday, then on Netflix Nov. 7). Under intricate prosthetics and makeup, Elordi plays the Creature that arrogant scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) breathes life into — an assemblage of dead limbs and organs imbued with a new consciousness.

Elordi with writer-director Guillermo del Toro on the set of “Frankenstein.”

(Ken Woroner / Netflix)

Receptive to tenderness but prone to violence, the nameless Creature now has, in Elordi, a performer suited for all its unruly emotions. “It was the innocence in Jacob’s portrayal that kept getting me,” says makeup artist and prosthetics designer Mike Hill. “The Creature could snap on a dime like an animal.”

Capable of complex thought, Del Toro’s version of the monster ponders the punishment of existence and the cruelty of its maker. “They’re almost like John Milton questions to the creator,” the director says of the Creature’s dialogue. “You have to give it a physicality that is heartbreakingly uncanny but also hypnotically human.”

The imposingly lanky, gracefully handsome Elordi, born in Australia, has risen in profile over the last few years, thanks to roles in the hit series “Euphoria” and the psychosexual class-climbing thriller “Saltburn.”

“It came from some other place,” Elordi says about the pull to the role of the Creature. “It felt like a growth, like a cancer in my stomach that told me that I had to play this thing.”

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

“Frankenstein,” however, seems to have been calling his name for a long time.

“Early in my career, I had been reading what folks on the internet would say about me and someone had written after my first film, ‘The only thing this plank of wood could play is Frankenstein’s Creature. Get him off my screen!’” Elordi recalls. “I went, ‘That’s an absolutely fantastic idea.’”

The thought reentered Elordi’s mind while making Sofia Coppola’s 2023 “Priscilla,” in which he played a moody, internal Elvis Presley to Cailee Spaeny’s title character. Long before he was offered the part, the hair and makeup team on “Priscilla” shared with him their next job was, in fact, Del Toro’s “Frankenstein.”

“I looked at [hair designer] Cliona [Furey] and I said, ‘I’m supposed to be in that movie.’ And she said, ‘Did you audition?’ And I was like, ‘No, but I’m meant to be in that movie.’”

“It came from some other place,” Elordi further explains. “It felt like a growth, like a cancer in my stomach that told me that I had to play this thing. I’ve heard stories about this from actors, and when you hear them, you kind of go, ‘Sure, you were meant to play this thing.’ But I really feel like I was.”

Due to scheduling conflicts, Andrew Garfield, originally cast as the Creature, dropped out in late 2023. With production set to start in early 2024, Del Toro had limited time to find a new actor. When Elordi finally heard he was being considered, he had to read the screenplay within hours of receiving it, and be willing to dive into the darkness.

“I had a few weeks to prepare, but I was lucky to have also had my whole life — and I mean that sincerely,” he says, a grin crossing his face. “Playing this was an exploration into a cave of the self, into every experience with my father, with my mother, my experience with cinema, my scraped knees when I was 7.”

Del Toro says he knew Elordi would make the perfect Creature from speaking with him over Zoom. He remembers immediately messaging Isaac, his Victor, convinced that Elordi could play both “Adam and Jesus,” which are the two facets that the creature represents for the director.

Jacob Elordi as the Creature in the movie “Frankenstein.”

(Ken Woroner / Netflix)

“I don’t think I’ve experienced miracles many times in my life,” Del Toro says. “And when somebody comes to your life in any capacity that transforms it, that happened here. This man is a miracle for this film.”

As he typically does for all the actors in his films, Del Toro sent Elordi several books ahead of working together. Elordi’s deep-dive reading list included the bedrock Taoist guide “Tao Te Ching,” Stephen Mitchell’s well-regarded translation of the Book of Job and a text on the developmental stages of a baby.

The most complex element of the performance, Del Toro believes, is playing “nothing,” meaning the blank, pure state of mind of a living being in infancy. “A baby is everything at once,” Elordi says. “It’s deep pain, deep joy, curiosity. And you don’t have chambers for your thoughts yet.”

Right before “Frankenstein,” Elordi had been shooting Prime’s World War II miniseries “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in Australia, an experience he describes as “grueling,” one that involved losing substantial weight. He repurposed his body’s subsequent fragility as a dramatic tool.

“My brain was kind of all over the place,” he remembers. “I had these moments of great anguish at around 3 a.m. in the morning. I’d wake and my body was in such pain. And I just realized that it was a blessing with ‘Frankenstein’ coming up, because I could articulate these feelings, this suffering.”

Aside from being an outlet for his exhaustion, the transformation also helped Elordi to recalibrate. “Frankenstein” arrived at a time where he found himself wrestling with a crisis of purpose.

“At that time in my life I really wanted to hide,” Elordi says. “I really wanted to go away for a while. I was desperate to find some kind of normalcy and rebuild the way that I acted and how I approached making movies,” Elordi says. “And when the film came along, I remember being like, ‘Ugh, I really wanted to go away right now.’ And I realized immediately the Creature was where I was supposed to go away to. I was supposed to go into that mask of freedom.”

Was he trying to escape the pressures of dawning fame? Elordi says it was much more philosophical than that.

“Who do I think I am? Who do I present myself as? What do I like? What don’t I like? Do I love? Can I love? What is love? Every single thing of being alive,” he says with a radiant smile. “The unbearable weight of being.”

“At that time in my life I really wanted to hide,” Elordi says of the moment just before taking on Del Toro’s version of the classic. “I really wanted to go away for a while. I was desperate to find some kind of normalcy and rebuild the way that I acted and how I approached making movies.”

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

The part entailed physically burying himself in another body. It allowed Elordi to renounce any hang-ups, surrendering to a fugue state of mind. Every moment felt like a discovery.

“I was liberated in this makeup,” he adds. “I didn’t have to be this version of myself anymore. In those six months, I completely rebuilt myself. And I came out of this film with a whole new skin.”

Elordi sat for 10 hours in the makeup chair on days that required full body makeup — only four if they were only shooting the Creature’s face. “Jacob wanted to wear the makeup and he knew it would be grueling,” Hill says.

“It was nothing short of a religious experience,” Elordi says. “The excitement I had even just getting my body cast — I was buzzing.”

Hill believes that the decision to make the Creature bald for the scenes where he is a “baby” is what makes Del Toro’s take unique within the “Frankenstein” mythos.

“Instead of what happens in cloning where a baby grows, Victor literally did make a baby, just a big one,” says Hill. “The Creature learns quickly because its brain and its bodies have already lived once. God knows what this Creature knew before he forgot and needed to be reminded.”

As for the skin, Del Toro envisioned a marble-statue look that he had been pursuing in earlier movies like “Cronos,” “Blade II” and “The Devil’s Backbone.”

“Mike took it and made it incredibly subtle: flesh with the violets and the purples and the pearlescence,” Del Toro says. “He bested every concept I’ve ever imagined by making it look like parts of exsanguine bodies. That was so brilliant.”

“It was the innocence in Jacob’s portrayal that kept getting me,” says makeup artist and creature designer Mike Hill, here seen working on a model for “Frankenstein.”

(John P. Johnson / Netflix)

A Frankenstein’s monster with rainbow-colored flesh, Hill says, could only exist in the context of a Del Toro picture.

“He had to look beautiful, like a phrenology head or an anatomical manual,” Del Toro adds. “We agreed — no scars. No sutures. No vulgarity.”

Del Toro’s casting of Elordi was fully validated when the actor walked on set for the first time in full makeup. “The whole process was anticipation,” Elordi says. “And then I opened my eyes and he was looking back at me, and it was exactly what I thought it would be when I first read the screenplay.”

For Hill, it was watching Elordi doing an interview, where his limbs seemed loose and relaxed, that convinced him he was the right actor to sculpt the Creature on. “I was like, ‘Look at those wrists.’ And then he turns, and he has these lashes,” Hill says. “Big eyes are beautiful for makeup. And structurally, Jacob has an unassuming nose, so you can build on that.”

“And he has a big chin,” Hill continues amid Del Toro’s boisterous laughter. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to glue one on.’”

Amused at his anatomy being dissected in front of him, Elordi claps back, mock-defensively: “He was grotesque to look at, but he was somewhat gifted. A deformed skinny freak.”

By the time Elordi got out of the makeup chair, he says, the electricity in his body had shifted. He stepped on set physically depleted but in the ideal headspace to embody the creature as it navigates an inhospitable reality.

“He’ll forever be fused into my chemistry,” Elordi says. “He was always there and now I have a little place for him. But I can’t rationalize him.”

Whether by curse or by miracle, Elordi’s Creature lives. And the actor feels reborn.

Movie fans come to Toronto to get an early peek at the year’s awards heavyweights. I didn’t see a knockout punch, but I saw some strong contenders — and in a couple cases, I just got bludgeoned.

Directors Benny Safdie (“Uncut Gems”) and David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) faced off with competing docudramas about the sufferings of two professional brawlers whose careers peaked in the ’90s — i.e., new “Raging Bulls” for today’s nostalgists. “The Smashing Machine” is a solo effort from the younger Safdie brother after making a string of energetic cult hits with his sibling, Josh. It stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as MMA fighter Mark Kerr, who could beat almost anyone inside the octagon but struggled to conquer his own demons at home with his then-wife, Dawn (Emily Blunt).

Based on the names and talent involved, I was expecting anything other than what I got: a conventional biopic. Its one bit of flair is a commitment to looking as though it was filmed on VHS. But projected in Imax, it just looked dreary (as did Johnson’s hairpiece). I’ll go another round with it in a more apropos ring.

Michôd’s “Christy” shares several of the same touchstones — the bloodrush of victory, a bruising domestic life, a distracting wig — but gender-flipped. Sydney Sweeney throws a convincing jab as Christy Martin, the first female boxer to make the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” A lesbian from a conservative West Virginia family, she was pressured to hide her sexuality by wearing pastel pink in the ring and marrying her much older, emotionally abusive male coach, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). The script only has a few ideas under its belt, but they’re effective, particularly our dawning recognition that while Christy thinks she’s fighting to prove her worth, she’s really fighting for the patriarchy.

Sweeney is good, even when the leaden dialogue does her a disservice. It’s her first substantial, serious part since 2023’s underseen “Reality” and she seizes the opportunity to be talked about as something other than the internet’s most polarizing ingenue. (Social media is forever singling out one young actress to be damned now and redeemed later, sigh.) As for Foster, who first snagged my attention as the pathetic loon in “Alpha Dog,” he knows how to play a hiss-worthy heel. You spend “Christy” aching to see him get socked in the face. If you need him to take more punishment, he’s just as vile in another TIFF title, “Motor City.”

Tessa Thompson in the movie “Hedda.”

(Prime Video)

At this year’s festival, ladies in corsets did more damage than gals in padded gloves. My favorite mean girl — perhaps even my favorite film of the festival — was Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” a devilish and dynamic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” in which the lead character (played by a fantastic Tessa Thompson) starts firing off her daddy’s old pistols as soon as the opening credits. DaCosta, who also adapted the play into a script, restages the action so that the chaos all takes place during a giant, drunken bacchanal at a rented mansion Hedda can’t afford. Thompson’s scheming newlywed manipulates the other characters with the confidence of a queen who controls all the pieces on the board, but every so often she simply has to flip the table over. The spirit is faithful; the subtext is fresh.

“Mārama,” a striking feature debut by Taratoa Stappard, bills itself as a Māori gothic and the combination works. In 1859 England, a white-passing woman from New Zealand named Mary (Ariāna Osborne) has sailed halfway around the world seeking information about her parents. The globe-trotting lord Sir Cole (Toby Stephens) strong-arms her into becoming his niece’s governess, calling the Māori a “magnificent people” while amusing his guests with parlor room reenactments of whale-hunting expeditions done with massive puppets. “Mārama” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a good ride with first-rate cinematography and production design and a story with one or two more surprises than we expect.

Similarly, “Honey Bunch,” co-directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, is another manor-bound thriller that toys with familiar tropes. An amnesiac bride (Grace Glowicki, a go-for-broke oddball who always gets my attention) arrives at an isolated and secretive trauma center where everyone seems to be screwing with her memories, including her shady husband (Ben Petrie). Straightaway, we have our suspicions about how this is going to go. The first half of the film doesn’t deviate from the formula — it’s a little dull — but the second half is a superb right hook.

Guillermo del Toro’s grisly, occasionally great “Frankenstein,” shot in Toronto and the U.K., hews more faithfully to Mary Shelley’s novel than the 1931 Boris Karloff classic, scrapping the mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers and salvaging the wraparound story of an ambitious explorer marooned in the the Arctic ice. But it’s still very much Del Toro’s own monster. One of his smartest adjustments is retooling the romantic heroine, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), from the ideal childhood sweetheart to a science-loving pacifist with limited patience for egomaniacs like Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein. Costume designer Kate Hawley makes Goth look like an exotic beetle with antenna-ish plumes sticking out of her hair.

Jacob Elordi as the Creature in the movie “Frankenstein.”

(Ken Woroner / Netflix)

Jacob Elordi’s creature amps up the pathos a tad too much for my taste, but there’s no denying how much he’s invested in the role, or how well Del Toro’s critiques about narcissistic inventors suit the present day. Still, Del Toro knows there’s a time and place to boast: At the film’s Toronto premiere at the Princess of Wales Theatre, he playfully accused his local below-the-line crew of being too humble and made them stand up for applause. “Stop being so Canadian,” he teased.

Del Toro told the audience that when he first saw Karloff’s creation as a boy, he thought to himself, “That’s my messiah, that’s the guy I’m going to follow like Jesus.” But the prize for the most idol-worshipping film in the festival belongs to Baz Luhrmann’s “EPiC,” which stands for “Elvis Presley in Concert.” Constructed from hours of previously unseen live footage from Presley’s stint in Las Vegas, its rapturous showing felt like attending the church of Elvis.

Luhrmann insists that “EPiC” is neither a concert film nor a documentary. I don’t see the issue with calling it either, but it’s also fair to consider it a companion piece to Luhrmann’s 2022 “Elvis.” It certainly shows that Austin Butler’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the King wasn’t one rhinestone over the top. Here, the real Presley is charismatic as hell, and looks great beaded in sanctified sweat. Whenever he throws a damp scarf into the audience, the women go so crazy you’d think it was the Shroud of Turin.

Luhrmann continues to be outraged that Col. Tom Parker constricted Presley’s artistic growth by parking him in the city of buffet tables rather than letting him tour the world. Presley only did one week of international concerts during his entire career: five shows in Canada, two of them just a 10-minute drive from my theater. You can hear Presley’s resentment toward the better-traveled (and at the time, better-respected) artists stealing his spot on the charts. “It’s so dry in here, I feel like I’ve got Bob Dylan in my mouth,” he jokes. Later, he slings a guitar around his neck to strum “Little Sister,” and then speeds up the tempo and starts belting the Beatles’ “Get Back,” a subtle dig that the boys from Britain weren’t always that original.

A scene from the movie “A Useful Ghost.”

(TIFF)

Speaking of, I can’t wrap up my final dispatch from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival without mentioning the most creative Oscar contender I saw all week: “A Useful Ghost,” which won the Grand Prix of Critics’ Week at Cannes and will be Thailand’s entry for an Academy Award. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s arch hybrid of horror, comedy, romance and political thriller starts when a self-described “academic ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) discovers that his new vacuum cleaner is possessed. From there, the movie defies prediction at every turn.

I ducked into “A Useful Ghost” on a whim, wondering how it would pair with TIFF’s world premiere of “Dust Bunny,” a nice and nasty Roald Dahl-esque adventure in which a little girl hires Mads Mikkelsen to battle a man-eating monster under her bed. I came out of the theater abuzz with energy. Even though some of this season’s noisiest awards hopefuls are rooted in classic genres, there are still directors making movies that feel entirely new — and still audiences delighted to cheer for a big swing.

TORONTO — Welcome to a special daily edition of the Envelope at TIFF, a newsletter collecting the latest developments out of Canada’s annual film showcase. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Christina House, our staff photojournalist, continues to kill it with her portraits out of the Toronto International Film Festival. In the last day alone, she’s seen Angelina Jolie, Jacob Elordi and the cast of “Frankenstein,” Jodie Foster and more.

Or maybe you’d rather watch a video interview with Angelina Jolie and the cast and director of the inspiring fashion film “Couture?” Follow us on Instagram for all of our daily posts.

‘Blood will be shed. Possibly even a tear’: Our critic on Rian Johnson’s new ‘Knives Out’ mystery

Josh O’Connor, left, and Daniel Craig in Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.”

(Netflix)

Amy Nicholson had fun with “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.”

She’s also noticing a fair amount of Canadian pride at her screenings. It’s been an unusually loaded moment for foreign relations with our neighbors to the north.

Amy weighs in on the scene from the first four days, her favorite (and less-than-favorite) movies at TIFF and a few surprises.

The day’s buzziest premieres

‘The Smashing Machine’

Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson in the movie “The Smashing Machine.”

(Ken Hirama / A24)

Sunday saw the TIFF schedule loosen up its restrictions regarding films that premiered at other festivals and audiences started to see more major titles from competing fests.

Take for example the Monday night premiere of “The Smashing Machine,” which just won the directing prize at Venice for Benny Safdie.

Making his solo debut apart from brother Josh — their most recent collaboration was “Uncut Gems” — Benny turns in a surprisingly heartfelt sports story based on mixed marital arts fighter Mark Kerr.

Taking the leading role is none other than wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne Johnson, in a part seemingly tailor-made to play off his own career arc and give him a prestige boost he has never had before.

Add Emily Blunt to the mix, as Kerr’s supportive partner, along with boutique studio A24 and the film seems like it should land the right combinations. — Mark Olsen

‘Exit 8’

A scene from the movie “Exit 8.”

(TIFF)

Ever fear that you’re racing around but going nowhere — that you’re in such a rush to make your way through the world that you’re barely seeing it?

Japan turned that feeling into a best-selling video game in which commuters are condemned to roam an underground subway station until they learn to pay attention to their surroundings.

Now Genki Kawamura has transformed that game into a movie. In Kawamura’s emboldened adaptation, our main player, the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya of the pop band Arashi) is an aimless young slacker who is stuck both physically and emotionally.

If he ever wises up and escapes, he’s got to make better choices.

I’ve got a few quibbles with the film’s mechanics, but “Exit 8” is a moving metaphor for the art of giving things a close, appreciative watch. On day five of a film festival, we could all use a reminder to look sharp. — Amy Nicholson

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 managed to move only 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 re-create 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 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 Disney’s “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.”

Luna writes for the Associated Press.