Del Toro unleashes the demons of his mind

The result of del Toro's tinkering was a chase sequence that left audiences gasping. Likewise, Jones gets to inhabit the body of another terrifying beast in "Hellboy II," the dazzling Angel of Death.

"The eyes in the wings of that creature were so frightening," said Selma Blair, who co-stars as Hellboy's girlfriend, a woman who can control fire. "I barely looked at the face of the Angel of Death. I couldn't stop looking at the eyes on the wings."

While del Toro uses computer animation for some creatures, including his swarm of tooth fairies and a giant plantlike monster, most of the life-size beasts were built by effects wizards as real costumes for human actors.

"Within possibility, I wanted to make a handmade film that felt crafted rather than churned out by a machine," del Toro said.

So what monsters scare del Toro the most?

"They're all politicians," del Toro joked. "Other than that, I'm deathly afraid of spiders."

His favorite movie monsters are the creature from James Whale's "Frankenstein" and "The Bride of Frankenstein," the Gillman from "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" and the demon Chernabog from the "Night on Bald Mountain" segment of "Fantasia."

Del Toro includes a nod to Whale's creation in "Hellboy II," showing a snippet from "The Bride of Frankenstein" in which Boris Karloff's monster states that he and his prospective mate should not be allowed to continue living.

"It's as good as any other immortal line in cinema. ... ‘We belong dead.' The fact that the guy that is saying that is the monster and the fact that he is not stating the fate of the others but his own, it's a protean moment for the creature, because he is transforming into the most human of all the characters in the film.

"That is essentially what I tried to do with all the monsters in the movie. I tried to make them superhuman types. They represent the perhaps darker, the perhaps less-pleasant parts of our souls, but magnified times 10."

It's critical to keep monsters alive for what they represent in a mundane world of shopping malls, traffic jams and monthly mortgages, del Toro said.

"I have dedicated my entire life to the love and study of monsters," del Toro said. "I really love that they symbolize something larger in our life. The moment we stop dreaming about angels and demons and monsters is the day we stop dreaming about things that are larger than us, and we become smaller."

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