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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Photo: Gabriel Rinaldi/Redux\n\nIf you just looove vampires\u2014you know, the kind you can totally fall for\u2014you probably shouldn't watch The Strain. But if you love horror and/or starting the week with nightmares, you're probably already watching it. Which means your Sunday nights are a lot scarier, and grosser, and bloodsucking-er than usual\u2014and all that is thanks to Guillermo del Toro. His new FX show, based on his novel trilogy he co-wrote with Chuck Hogan, is an unsettling twist on the genre that makes for some seriously addictive summer TV. We rang up del Toro to find out why we're so afraid of vampires\u2014and what else we should fear.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nGQ: The Strain's vampires aren't exactly the vampires we're used to today\u2026\n\n Guillermo del Toro: The purpose of a horror show, at least in my memories of watching TV, was to entertain you and keep scared and freaked out a little bit. And my idea in The Strain was to try and give the audience a real biological curiosity. These vampires are very efficient organisms and very much like ticks as they eat: they need to make way for the new food coming in, so they defecate as they eat. These vampires are defecating ammonia and plasma as they are drinking the new victims\u2014that is really, really disgusting and profoundly impolite, you know? But I think it's a very good trait to freak people out.\n\n\u2026and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention aren't our typical heroes.\n\n I wanted to make the series very recognizable by having the tropes of a vampire film: the coffin, the daylight, the silver, the vampire hunter. And hopefully as the series goes along, we'll start disarming those one by one. Having these doctors go at it at first, wanting to find a cure, and then realizing that they may be forced to do something completely against their instincts, which is to destroy the bodies. Not to study, not to preserve. Then having a rat exterminator, a gangbanger, and a hacker join forces as the series goes along; this is not exactly SWAT or the Marines. They're ill prepared; they're not backed up by anyone. The guy from the CDC, at the end of the day, he's a bureaucrat. He has to fill a form to get equipment. I was very interested in that and did it in the books and it was very entertaining, and we can expect to see it in the series a little bit.\n\nSo what's scarier\u2014the vampires or the threat of mass plague?\n\n In order to get scared, we have to lose the confidence in what we know. That's the mechanism by which we scared. If you're alone in your house and you know nobody's there and you hear the faucet in your bathroom open, it's not a terrifying sound, it's terrifying because of the context in which we can become vulnerable again. In order to abandon the make-up of civilized thinking, and become medieval in our thoughts, we need an alibi\u2014the plague, the pandemic, is an alibi by which most modern people adopt a, literally, superstitious stance. I know very few people that can explain to you how a pandemic works\u2014everybody is nevertheless afraid of it. And any epidemic generates a patina of medieval fear in the most civilized, normal people. So vampirism, to make it palatable, you have to make an uncanny and shameless fusion between medieval and really tired tropes of a myth that you've seen a hundred times, and then twist them a little. And the pandemic is the perfect way to twist them.\n\nWere there any vampire tropes you deliberately avoided?\n\n No\u2014you cannot be postmodern about these things. You have to embrace it. You have to embrace the fact that if Pandora doesn't open the box, there's no story to tell. So you have to make sure that you cross every door and every cellar you don't have to go into. And you have to not bet afraid of talking about silver hurting them, them living in a coffin, being allergic to sunlight. Little by little, you will explain why.\n\nWhy are we so afraid of them?\n\n For me, the real answer is that, I think, anthropologically as a species, we have ingrained in our DNA a complete revulsion at consuming another human being. That somewhere in our past, when we were primates, we were carnivores of other primates. And it's inscribed in our DNA to be revolted by the thought of eating another human being, or drinking his or her blood. It's hardwired and it's in our software and our hardware in such a strong way that it allows the vampire to be a myth that exists in every culture on earth.\n\nYou've described the series as a living comic book.\n\n I tried to go for a very saturated palette. Very, very, very, very rich colors. Almost acid-trip colors, you know? I limited the palette of the entire series except when you have the intrusion of the real world, but most of the series is patterned in blue and gold. It's all blue and splashes of gold. And avoided the red entirely, to leave it only for the vampires. And of course you're gonna get red on a fire extinguisher or a patrol car siren, because you cannot avoid that. But if you watch the pilot or the series again, you'll see that we religiously avoid red and we religiously color code this thing in cyans and goldens.\n\nSo what inspired your take on vampires?\n\n Well, I was very curious about the biology of the vampires, but also I was very curious about how easy it would be to take down society right now. I mean, I think it would take no more than sixty days to topple the Western world if a series of attacks were truly coordinated and merciless\u2014you know? I really think we live in a very, very vulnerable world that is very open and very, very friendly in the way that we can order anything from an online catalog and we'll get it the next day. We can bank from the car, we can bank from the cellphone, we can do all this, but we're highly, highly vulnerable. We depend so much on technology. We depend so much on everything working. We've very much become spoiled babies in many ways. And I think that the idea I had was if a thing that has been alive for hundreds of years, even thousands of years, that doesn't care about civilization wanted to destroy us ruthlessly, it could. You know? It could."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/guillermo-del-toro-the-strain-western-world>