Movies

Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro developed a fascination with vampires. He devoured books on the subject, drew pictures of the bloodsucking creatures and kept detailed notes on their anatomy.

Del Toro has put that knowledge to good use in The Strain, a critically praised new vampire thriller co-written with Chuck Hogan. The book's gory, virus-spreading vampires bear little resemblance to the romanticized versions in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles."

"I wanted to make clear that being sucked by these creatures was not pleasant," del Toro said in an interview earlier this month in New York. "My vampires are not lovable."

Del Toro, director of Blade II, the Hellboy movies and the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth, has spent the past seven months in New Zealand preparing to make two films based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. He took a break to promote the book, the first of a planned trilogy on the vampire legend. Part II is scheduled for publication in 2010 and Part III in 2011.

The Strain opens with a plane full of dead passengers on a runway at New York's JFK airport. The investigation involves a 76-year-old billionaire investor, a Holocaust survivor who runs a Harlem pawnshop and a Centers for Disease Control doctor who's distracted by a custody battle for his son.

New York is also a central character in the story.

"I wanted to show the non-glamorous New York that I see every time I come here," said del Toro, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters when he isn't away making movies. "There's the New York of legend and the New York of everyday life, which is a tough city that could even be blasé about a vampire attack."

Del Toro said he originally envisioned The Strain as a limited-run TV series like HBO's The Wire but changed direction after the Fox network turned him down.

"I went to them with the idea and they said, 'We like it but can you make it a comedy?' " he said. "I quickly validated my parking and got the hell out of there."

Del Toro sought a co-author to give the book a realistic look and sound. Hogan is a former Boston video-store clerk who has written best-selling crime thrillers such as The Standoff and Prince of Thieves.

"The America I portray in my movies is completely fictional," explained del Toro, a rotund 44-year-old whose cherubic face is framed by owlish glasses and a scraggly beard. "My New York doesn't look like New York and my characters don't talk like actual Americans. So I wanted a writer like Chuck whose books are highly believable."

Del Toro said that he and Hogan have a lot in common.

"Like me, he's a very sick individual," the director said, laughing. "Some of the most disturbing stuff in the book came from him, like the rat-catcher."

Del Toro has several other movies lined up after The Hobbit, including a remake of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and new versions of Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So where does he find the time and energy for all these projects?

"I've been working like this my whole life, except for a long time I was doing it anonymously," del Toro said. "When I was filming Pan's Labyrinth, I was already writing (the outline) for The Strain and Hellboy II. I was also revising a 400-page Hitchcock book that was published in Spain and jump-starting an animation company."

"I realized it's better to have two or three irons in the fire because trade announcements are absolutely not money in the bank," he said. "If I made one film for every 20 that were announced, I'd have the filmography of Hitchcock."

Bloomberg News

The Strain

Guillermo Del Toro

and Chuck Hogan

(William Morrow, $26.99)