If Guillermo del Toro hadn't become a film-maker, he may well have gone into the bank robbery business.

A specialist in films about ghosts, mutants, vampires and other horrors, the 42-year-old director might have become an evildoer himself had he not found an outlet for his darker impulses in making movies.

"I'm the kind of guy who looks for the cameras and the security in banks and thinks about ways of stealing the money," he said with a laugh in a recent phone interview with TODAY from Los Angeles. "But I don't have the nerve to go through with it. So, I put it into a film."

Del Toro may have six full-length movies to his credit, three each in Hollywood and in his native Mexico, but he has yet to produce a heist film to rid him of that particular fantasy.

Still, the twisted tales he has turned out - the latest being Pan's Labyrinth, which is out now in Singapore - suggest the world is a lot better off for his decision to exorcise his demons on screen.

Since making his feature film debut with the 1993 horror fable Cronos, a prizewinner at Cannes and the recipient of nine Mexican Academy Awards, del Toro has peered into an ever-growing number of hellish realms.

Among the settings for his films are those where giant insects hunt human prey (1997's Mimic), malevolent spirits stalk the inhabitants of an orphanage (2001's The Devil's Backbone) and a demon defends the earth against monstrous creatures of the occult (2004's Hellboy).

His latest offering may have its feet more squarely in the real world than most of his past efforts - it is set in the aftermath of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, when Spain's rebel Republicans fought a losing battle against dictator Francisco Franco's Nationalists - but it is still very much the product of a mind consumed with monsters of both the human and supernatural kind.

"Pan's Labyrinth is about what is, to me, the worst horror you can have which is fascism," del Toro said. "Like my other films, it's a fairy tale, one about what fascism costs in terms of lost innocence and about the choices we make that tell us who we are."

The magic of nasty stories
Fairy tales might be an apt description for the kinds of movies del Toro makes, but with their heady themes, violent imagery and human and otherworldly creatures that are the stuff of nightmares, they're certainly not the sorts of stories parents would choose for their children at bedtime.

Ironically enough, however, it's exactly these types of stories - in the form of episodes of TV's The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, horror classics by the likes of novelist H P Lovecraft as well as the dark-tinged tales of the Brothers Grimm - that were del Toro's preferred pop-culture diet while growing up.

"The thing about fairy tales for me is: It was never about the kinds of tales where you're scared of something - where the story was meant to instill fear - but the crazier, more anarchic ones where it's not sanitised, it can even be nasty, but behind it is the magic that the didactic sorts of fairy tales don't have."

Even more so than in his previous films, del Toro's formative influences are on clear display in Pan's Labyrinth.

The film begins with the precocious Ofelia (12-year-old Spanish actress Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant but sickly mother (Ariadna Gil) visiting the countryside estate of her stepfather - Franco-devotee Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) - where she is tested not just by the sight of the shocking brutality he is capable of but also by the tasks set for her by a mythical faun (Doug Jones).

Her encounters in the world where this towering, vaguely devilish goat-like creature lives - one that is at once entirely unlike and eerily similar to the one she inhabits - include run-ins with a tree root-dwelling giant toad and child-devouring Pale Man (also played by Jones) whose eyes are set like stigmata in the palms of his hands.

While it might not seem obvious that a movie set almost 70 years in the past featuring creatures that could've come out of a 19th-century Goya painting is steeped in the here and now, del Toro said Pan's Labyrinth was in part his response to post-911 world events.

"I started thinking about making this movie when I was working on Hellboy," he said. "And about the changes in the world that had happened and how things were politically. The creatures came out of that and the idea that power could be so easily abused."

Although del Toro admitted that the faun is a mainstay of Western mythology, he noted that his interpretation of the creature - if not of the titular labyrinth where pivotal scenes in the film take place - is entirely new.

"Satyrs are mischievous creatures in myths," he said, using the generic term for beings like the faun. "Here, he's setting a test for Ofelia to find out her true self in a place (the labyrinth) where moral choices are made."

Paying his dues
As much as the encounter with the faun in the labyrinth was a reckoning of sorts for Ofelia, the making of the film represented something similar for del Toro at a time when the director was questioning his raison d'etre.

Now well established in Hollywood thanks to the success of Hellboy - a sequel is due out next year - del Toro has nonetheless had his fair share of frustrations while working under its constraints and remains bitter about the studio interference that he feels compromised his US film debut.

"Shooting Mimic was the worst experience of my life," the director said matter-of-factly of his introduction to the American film industry. "And even though things are better for me, I think there's still not much vision there, not much room to do original work. In a way, Pan's Labyrinth was about me getting the film I wanted to make up there on the screen."

Describing the making of the movie as a life-changing experience, del Toro said future plans include trying to raise enough money to do an American film independently and to continue to work with the likes of Pan's Labyrinth producer and close friend Alfonso Cuaron, the director of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, among other fellow Mexican film-makers such as Babel's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

It's hard to argue with his success so far, with Pan's Labyrinth having earned a 22-minute standing ovation at last year's Cannes Film Festival and the creative freedom del Toro was given by Cuaron helping it to a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film and a likely nod in the same category when the Oscar nominations are announced later this month.

"I talk to him every day, which is more often than I talk to my mother," del Toro said with a laugh. "So, yes, I'm sure we'll work together again."

As for what's on the horizon beyond Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, which will see the director reunite yet again with frequent collaborators Jones and Ron Perlman, del Toro remains confident that his long-time dream of bringing Lovecraft's horror classic At the Mountains of Madness to the screen may yet come to pass.

"I'm planning to shoot a trailer next year that Warner Brothers has agreed to finance," he said. "So, it's getting closer. It's my Lord of the Rings."

Considering how many millions those films made, del Toro the wannabe robber may break the bank yet. - TODAY/st