“The horror film is a very political genre,” writer/director Guillermo del Toro said in an interview with Time magazine in 2011.
He was speaking from a place of experience. Del Toro’s creature-filled Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) showed the horrors of Franco-era Spain. In his cable-TV series The Strain, a ruthless, politically well-connected businessman is as much a villain as any of the tyrannical vampires. Even del Toro’s big-budget, robots-versus-monsters action flick Pacific Rim (2013) doubles as an anti-pollution story.
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