Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak is horror with a painterly look

Guillermo del Toro has a bizarre request for his travel agent: book him, if possible, in haunted hotels. There was the five-star one in London, known for its regular ghost sightings. And then one in New Zealand, where del Toro stayed while scouting locations for The Hobbit films, when he had an other-worldly visitation.

"I heard a murder at 1am, a woman screaming horribly. And then I saw a man sobbing with regret. It was off season and we were only eight people staying in the hotel and I was the only one in that wing. I was super scared. I was watching The Wire on DVD, not invoking ghosts with a candle. I put my earphones on, watched the entire season, and didn't sleep a single minute."

Del Toro's love of the occult, which stems from his earliest childhood, is evidenced in many of his films, from the creepy Pan's Labyrinth to the outright terrifying Mama, about two young girls abandoned in a desolate forest cabin.

The award-winning filmmaker may have his older brother to thank for his affinity with all things scary: the two of them were watching a TV show called The Outer Limits, an episode called The Mutant, about a big-headed giant-eyed monster. Later that night, del Toro's brother stuck some pantyhose over his head, put rubber eggs into his eye sockets, and crept into his younger sibling's room, screaming.

"I literally lost control of my bladder," he says. "Psychologists talk about a mechanism that occurs in childhood where you identify with whatever scares you and you end up sometimes enshrining it. For me, it happened with monsters. I've always been in love with them."