‘Working for Your Discomfort’ : Director’s films showcase a taste for the macabre and disdain for conventions.

The moment could not have been more perfect: It was a complete disaster. Dispirited, then amused, Guillermo del Toro lay his head down on a table in the plentiful sunlight of a Third Street Promenade deli. After describing the leitmotifs of corruption, hubris, inversion and imperfection that propel his new horror-thriller, “Mimic,” the 32-year-old writer-director delivered what can be best described as an aria on the poetics of film.

His improvisation, full of mirth, erudition and dark, horrific tableaux, was like a movement in jazz: resonant, inventive and entirely unrepeatable. His attempt had been to pronounce the unutterable, and he succeeded better than he dared to hope, but he then learned that the tape recorder that should have captured his responses had malfunctioned. The playback is gibberish: maddening, mocking and totally hilarious--technology once more gone awry.

“I have been attempting to perfectly articulate imperfection,” he said. “What could be more imperfect than this? The magic of movies occurs when it creates a clash of images like this that is undefinable. Try to explain, for example that image of Bunuel’s in ‘Un Chien Andalou’: razor-eye-moon, and you can’t, and then read Bunuel’s words in the script: ‘The moon is bisected by a cloud.’ Wow. Pure poetry. Can you grasp the depth of that? --that a film sometimes manages to capture a feeling? Capture a feeling! That’s why I hate to explain my images, and in the end they cannot be explained.”

Del Toro is animated once again. His eyes are large and blue, not the blue of water or sky but of lapis lazuli. They are softened, largely by his beneficent expression, his exuberant manner, his extremely light brown hair and the frail spines of his wire-rim glasses.

He is wearing a shirt that is an exact match with his eyes, huge and blue. He is a big man; he claims he will no longer stand on a scale, saying, “I have concluded it is a savage custom to weigh oneself, and I’ve decided never to do it again.”

His moods flash from expansive to introspective. He is in gleeful possession of what critic Susan Sontag once termed “the imagination of disaster.” He is visiting from his hometown of Guadalajara to promote “Mimic,” which stars Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam.

“Images,” Del Toro says, “when at their best, are a cage which can trap the absolute raging beast of our feelings. And whether the feeling is fear or love or hatred, if you manage to capture it on film, it is magic.”

“Mimic” is the Mexican director’s second opportunity to demonstrate the grip and the charms of his magic. His first feature film, “Cronos” (1993), is hailed, even by those, like Sorvino, who don’t care for the horror genre, as a landmark work of the tenderest poignancy and originality.

Like “Cronos,” “Mimic” showcases Del Toro’s luxuriant taste for the macabre and the sacred, his mastery of the optics and grammar of film, his gravedigger’s wit and his subversive disdain for the hard-wired conventions of the horror, science-fiction, noir and suspense genres.

“ ‘Mimic’ is a mainstream film,” Del Toro says, “but I was very much interested in taking the summer horror genre, then twisting it. Doing things that other people don’t do while following the precepts of the summer horror film, if such a creature exists.”

“Mimic” tells the story of good science and good intentions gone bad. Its heroine, Dr. Susan Tyler (Sorvino), is consumed with guilt (and fear) after her heroic efforts to save the children of Manhattan from a morbid epidemic creates a race of super-creatures, called the Judas breed, whose spooky permutations allow them to mimic the form of their most deadly adversary, humankind.

“Mimic” is based on a short story by Donald A. Wolheim and was adapted for the screen by Del Toro and Matthew Robbins.

“It was originally four pages long,” Del Toro recalls. “But it was so full of rich images and possibilities, I was very much interested in making it a movie that would be fast-paced and accessible to an audience.”

The $28-million film was shot in Toronto, doubling for New York. “Canadian society’s actually quite easy to adapt to from a Mexican point of view,” Del Toro says, “because, as Peter Ustinov put it, ‘It’s New York run by Swiss.’ It’s extremely precise: polite, well-run and the Canadians are good-natured in many ways.”

Sorvino, who plays the haunted (and hunted) scientist, is described by Del Toro as “a brilliant actress who humanizes the science in the movie. Mira brings a human dimension to her role that is brave, proactive and vulnerable. But ‘Mimic’ makes all its characters vulnerable.

“One of my ideas,” Del Toro says, “is that once my characters enter a subterranean world, I erase all gender and race issues and make them a nest of humanity--making them all equally vulnerable, regardless of if they are male or female, if they weigh 400 pounds of muscle or are a 100-pound weakling.”

Del Toro aims to build tension in the lives of his frail, reluctant heroes, not only from the plagues and monster hordes that savage their ranks but also from the depths of their psyches, in the pitch darkness of their own private, nether worlds of nightmare, guilt and fear.

For Del Toro, it’s a modern morality fable, but “this is not a matter of good and evil. God has equally created man and these beasts. Perhaps they are even the dark angels of the Lord, coming to take over. But religion has nothing to do with it. This is a brute force of nature; blessed by God, not by good and evil, all that is obsolete.”

Moreover, he sees technology as a fountainhead for society’s amoral and ungovernable dread. “I myself am extremely ambivalent about technology,” he says. “I select the horror genre as my medium because I think in this world there are already many people working for your comfort. I am a guy working for your discomfort. In a world where everything is supposed to be made to look beautiful and perfect, I am the guy who is interested in telling you that it is not.

“There is a basic need for me to show the value in corruption, the value in aging, value in accepting that we are fallible human beings. I want to be the guy reminding you that technology is used by society to anesthetize individuals and separate them from pain and experience. For me, pain has value.”

Del Toro makes a distinction between the aesthetics of pain and the celebration of blood and gore. “I don’t like gore, but I am fascinated by violence. A film can be violent without showing blood. Even in the more extreme death moments in ‘Mimic,’ for example, I try to stay away from blood and make it more about the pain. Pain is both a consequence and a responsibility. But pain is rarely a part of violence in American cinema. So you never see the consequences of that violence.”

Del Toro was a student of the virtues of darkness and pain from an early age. “I was very much into horror films as a very young boy, and I had heard that Alfred Hitchcock was the most terrifying guy on Earth. One night I stayed up late and watched one of his films. Strangely enough, it was ‘I Confess,’ a morality tale. The actual source of the suspense is the vow of silence of a priest. I was absolutely engrossed like never before in my life, never.”

Soon Del Toro’s ballooning weight, his shyness and moody introspection marked him as an outsider. “I really feel a kinship [with Hitchcock] that is more a kinship of the soul. I know what it is like to be young, silent, fat, Catholic and have one of the most dangerous imaginations on Earth while being an absolute lamb on the outside.” He later wrote a critical study of the films of Hitchcock for the University of Guadalajara Press.

It was during his youth that he was first exposed to the sensory world that provides the atmosphere and settings for his films. Confronting his fears, he often discovered corruption and beauty commingled on and beneath the streets of Guadalajara. One of his favorite haunts was the sewer.

“We found beautiful pieces of architecture there, great archways and interior spaces that were beautiful. Also organic things that were undefinable animals, but they were rotting away.” Guadalajara was also his garden of earthly delights.

“My entire childhood is two smells: mimosa and raw earth. My grandmother had mimosa in her garden, and when it rained in Guadalajara, the city smelled like mimosa and raw earth.”

Del Toro began painting and making films before age 9. As an adult, he was a producer-director for Mexican television. He produced his first feature, “Dona Herlinda and Her Son,” when he was 21, then studied the art of special effects with Dick Smith, an Academy Award-winning effects artist.

By his late 20s, Del Toro had founded Necropolis S.A., a special-effects and makeup company in Guadalajara. He is still very involved with the visual tone of his films.

“I am extremely finicky about composition, light and color in film. ‘Mimic’ is the exact continuation visually of all the proposals in ‘Cronos.’ I aspire very much to leave the audience saying at the end of the film that, beyond the story, beyond everything, the images made me feel something special.”

Del Toro has signed with Phoenix Pictures to direct “Mephisto’s Bridge,” to be executive-produced by Martin Scorsese. The tale is Gothic horror and concerns the fate of a gifted billboard designer, the girl he desires and his dark pact with a supernatural being.

“I have had ‘Mephisto’s Bridge’ under my arm for four years, ever since I finished ‘Cronos’ and no studio understood it. So hopefully, ‘Mimic’ will make some money that will allow me to have the freedom and power to go ahead and say, OK, let’s do this one.”