This week, Mia opened its highly anticipated show “Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters,” about the innovative Hollywood director, his creative process, and the things that inspire him. But what if you’ve never heard of him? What if you stopped thinking about monsters in third grade? What if you could never imagine watching a movie called Hellboy?
For all your questions, Chris Grap has answers. By day, he’s the Senior Manager of Experiential Entertainment and New Marketing at Mall of America—the person behind the Twizzard, a “snowfall” of soap and water in the mall triggered when a thousand people tweeted #Twizzard over Thanksgiving weekend a couple years ago. (He won a Webby Award for that, joining Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres.)
By night, Grap is a serious fan of movie genres not always taken seriously—especially horror. He worked in Hollywood, and got to know del Toro. He collects obscure movie trailers, and will screen them before showings of del Toro’s films at Mia. Here, he explains why people like him are obsessed with movies like del Toro’s, and what the rest of us could learn by paying attention.
Guillermo del Toro (left) and Chris Grap in slightly younger years.
What kind of kid were you, and how did movies play into that?
I was a VHS kid, growing up in La Crosse, Wisconsin. When you went to the video store, sometimes the movie you wanted to rent wasn’t available, so you rolled the dice. If I peddled my bike across town and wanted to rent Police Academy and it wasn’t there, I checked out something else. Through the circumstances of the medium, I was forced to discover things.
You went to work in Hollywood in the late 1990s. What was that like?
One of my first gigs was working as a production assistant on Unsolved Mysteries, the final season co-hosted by Robert Stack and Virginia Madsen. Cool, right? And the thing I really liked about it is that each mystery had a different producer and director, so in the course of a show you’d have four to six segments, and I got to know all these different people. All my employment history can be traced to networking from Unsolved Mysteries.
Eventually you worked on horror films.
Even as a kid, I was fascinated by monsters. They felt kind of off-limits, and I always wanted to pull back the veil a bit, to learn about the effects and people behind them. In L.A., I met those people, and got work in those films. Hellraiser V, VI, VII, VIII. Mimic II and III. There was a period of time when, if there was a horror movie with a Roman numeral in the title, chances are I worked on it.
And that’s how you met Guillermo?
I first met him at a signing at a bookstore. He was open and honest, like we were just a couple people talking about movies, and I hadn’t encountered that before. And then one of my friends became his personal assistant, and we ended up seeing each other more. I always felt he was one of us who made it, he was true to himself and pushed that forward and turned it into a great and prolific career.
How does that passion come across onscreen?
He knows how everything works in the worlds he creates, whether it’s shown onscreen or not. He’s thought of every detail. That world-building is important—you fall into the story much easier when there’s a sincerity to it. He does that better than anyone else working today.
He’s very sympathetic to monsters.
What makes his villains compelling is that they believe they’re right—their point of view makes the utmost sense to them, no matter how at odds it is with society’s norms. So you can feel sympathy for that perspective. They’re not wrong, in a sense, they’re just going about it in a way that’s unacceptable.
Do you often find yourself having to defend the kind of movies you like?
Absolutely. As a kid growing up in Wisconsin who didn’t care about football, I found all kinds of things to relate to in these movies, these characters who are misunderstood or have no desire to be understood by the masses, or have no choice in the matter and are dealing with persecution. There’s very relevant social commentary in these films that’s often dismissed because of the genre.
Yet they’re now very popular.
Comic books and zombie movies are some of the things that got my ass kicked in high school. You were the outsider, the weird one for liking this stuff. And now they’re driving the box office.
You collect and show movie trailers, but not just any movie trailers.
My friend Tim Holly and I have collected the weirdest B-movie 35mm trailers we can find for a long time now—we have about a thousand of them. We’ve screened them as Trailer Trash. It’s like going to a concert, every couple minutes there’s another surprise for people. Tim calls it a cinematic mix-tape, and that’s what it is.
Are you still inspired by B-movies, or is it just good fun?
Things have changed. The B-movies of my youth still had a love and sincerity in the craft. I was interested in ideas and stories, and a lot of the time I was more intrigued by what people could do with limited resources than what people did with vast resources. I remember the night I saw Chopping Mall and it truly changed my life. I thought, “This is attainable, this is something I can do.”