World War I inspiration shaped Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II monsters

Asked by a fan on r/movies how he dreams up his creatures, Guillermo del Toro traced one of his most nightmarish designs back to a century-old image. While working out the anatomy of the vampire “Reapers” in Blade II, he kept returning to World War I photographs of people who had lost the lower half of their faces and jaws — not for the gore, but for the eerie emptiness.

“I thought, Oh, the negative space is really scary. In designing, it ’s not always what you put in the creature, but what you take out. If you think about it, the fact that the Pale Man has no eyes, and then has eyes in his hand. The Angel of Death has no eyes, but the wings have the eyes. It’s what you don't put where. You have to play with that,”

del Toro wrote in his reply, explaining how absence — the idea of negative space — became the organizing principle for the Reapers’ split-jaw horror and for other signature creations.

Design playbook

He also sketched out the visual language behind his monsters, citing old-world illustrators and Mexican ornament as the backbone of his style, and pointing to specific textures that make fear feel tactile: porcelain fragility, carved decoration, and the way eyes migrate to unexpected places.

• Classical illustrators (Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, John Bauer) — a foundation for silhouettes, line, and fairy‑tale menace.
• Mexican ornamental traditions — pattern, carving, and folk art folded into creature shapes.
• Pacific Rim — Alebrije-like influences in the kaiju forms and detailing.
• The Devil’s Backbone — a ghost rendered with a porcelain, almost cracked-glaze delicacy.
• Negative-space examples — the eyeless Pale Man with eyes in his hands; Hellboy II’s Angel of Death with eyes in its wings.

On AI and “image illiteracy”

That same respect for hand-made imagery fuels del Toro’s skepticism about AI. At the BFI America dinner in Hollywood, he warned that as tools automate more of the picture-making process, audiences risk becoming detached from the human craft embedded in every frame.

For del Toro, the stakes are cultural as much as technical: he argues images carry emotional and communal meaning that a machine can’t replicate, and has cautioned that the spread of AI could lead to “image illiteracy” and “cinema illiteracy” as viewers drift further from the people behind what they see.