A specialist in fantasy and the supernatural, Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro was born in Guadalajara in 1964. He worked as a special effects makeup designer, before making his directing debut with 1993 vampire story Cronos. He went on to make two highly acclaimed supernatural films in Spain – ghost story The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, which sets a fantasy mythology against the background of the Franco dictatorship. His work in Hollywood includes two Hellboy films, Japanese-themed robots-v-monsters epic Pacific Rim and gothic drama Crimson Peak. The Shape of Water (2017), a love story about a woman and an amphibian being, won multiple awards including Oscars for best picture and best director, and the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.

He is preparing a stop-motion version of Pinocchio, with voice artists including Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor. He also recently launched Wizards, the third of the Tales of Arcadia trilogy of children’s CGI animation series, currently screening on Netflix. And he has just published a new fantasy novel, The Hollow Ones, written in collaboration with Chuck Hogan, his co-author on book trilogy The Strain, which also spawned a TV series. Set in modern-day Manhattan, the early 60s deep south and Elizabethan England, The Hollow Ones introduces immortal occult detective Hugo Blackwood – named in tribute to the fantasy writer Algernon Blackwood.

Del Toro talked about the novel and other projects over the phone from Toronto, where he has just resumed work on his feature film Nightmare Alley, production having halted in March because of the coronavirus lockdown. Starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett and Willem Dafoe, it is based on the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, and tells the story of the relationship between a crooked carnival worker and a psychiatrist.

The Hollow Ones is a very strange genre hybrid. It starts off feeling like a Jack Reacher crime thriller, but then you bring in your character Hugo Blackwood, a Van Helsing-style demon hunter.
This is a mix that goes back quite a while, starting with the [19th-century] Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who was one of the best ghost story writers. He came up with a character called Dr Martin Hesselius, who was in certain ways an occult investigator. Then Algernon Blackwood created a genre with John Silence, a physician slash psychic detective, for the first time merging procedural and supernatural happenings. That continued during the pulp literature era – it’s a very strange subgenre in horror fiction.

You’ve dedicated the book to old-school horror/fantasy writers – Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen. What is it about the Edwardian/Victorian imagination that excites you?
What I like about Blackwood is that in his stories, the supernatural is a given – unlike, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles, where you have a very eerie atmosphere and legend and lore, but then you discover the more natural, prosaic causes of the case. With Blackwood’s John Silence stories, you’re not going to discover that it was a band of smugglers disguised as ghosts – you’re going to face the actual supernatural.

There’s a note at the start of your book claiming that grave robbing is a major phenomenon in New Jersey. Really?
Yes, that was the origin of this whole thing. I saw a newspaper story that detailed how they found human remains in a cauldron in a garage, and the police were linking it to grave robbing. I started researching, and found that grave robbing for occult purposes was almost reaching epidemic proportions in New Jersey. I thought, this is interesting – we can bounce back between that and Mesopotamian entities and a detective that you can summon on Wall Street in modern times.

Your story deals with certain difficult areas of American history – the deep south, slavery, the Klan. Given the heightened sensitivities around such themes at the moment, do you worry people might feel that these are not topics best suited to genre fiction?
Well, we started writing it five or six years ago. I think [African American FBI man] Agent Solomon is a really strong character in the book. The book is talking about evil in many forms, not just the supernatural form, but the human perception of it. I think fiction can work to address the real world. You have to be mindful of these things; the combination has to be done carefully – the horror and the idea of an America that is still characterised a lot by these things in the past.

You’re a very active Twitter user, mixing your cultural enthusiasms with political comments. For example, you’ve mentioned the recent death of Giovanni López, killed after being arrested for not wearing a face mask in the state of Jalisco.
That is sadly not an isolated case, it has happened in other states in Mexico. The reality that it’s revealing is a very tragic fact that we live with every day in Mexico, which is the meshing of the police with the criminals – it’s almost a complete symbiosis. The way you react in Mexico to the police is with immense wariness and distrust. This is just one of the cases that evidenced the almost insane paradox of somebody during a pandemic being hurt or killed by people who are supposed to be enforcing health laws.

What do you enjoy about social media?
You have to use it carefully. In my life, I’ve fused those things that I love artistically with the things that I believe politically – that’s true of my movies, it’s true of my Twitter account, it’s true of my daily life. I think what I have to do with social media is to point people in the direction of plays or movies or images or image creators that can enrich them, and that may not be well known. I try not to participate in chipping in on scandal or divisive pillorying. I try to use it as a positive, enriching platform.

You’ve recently tweeted about rereleased silent films, new Mexican movies… What have you been watching of late?
I could tweet 20 times a day – I’m very careful not to, because there’s a part of your life that needs to remain only for you. But a couple of days ago, on Gene Kelly’s birthday, I watched four of his movies, and not the ones you’d imagine – The Pirate, For Me and My Gal… Much of my time is spent rewatching – say, a Douglas Sirk melodrama or thriller, like Sleep, My Love. With the pandemic, my habit has been to screen at least three movies a day. I was in lockdown for many weeks in Toronto first, completely quarantined and socially distancing, and then in California, for an equal amount of time. Without having to go to the office, you have 18 hours, and you can dedicate nine hours to work, and nine hours for three movies, and still have time to take care of your basic needs. It’s a blessing to have the time. I’m very lucky to be able to work from home, so I try not to waste it.

What about your animation series, Tales of Arcadia? What led you into that area?
I wanted to cater to a family viewing experience, the way I had it when I was a kid. I grew up with the anime of Osamu Tezuka – in Mexico in the 60s, we were invaded by Japanese anime. I remember watching Astro Boy – it’s a very melancholic story, you know, and Tezuka in general has that feeling. I thought, could we do the classic “hero’s journey”, but use it to talk about loss?

You’re also adding your stop-motion Pinocchio to a long list of versions of the tale. And you’re well known to be fascinated with Frankenstein – so will your Pinocchio be a kind of Frankenstein story?
To me, they’re not exactly the same, but they’re similar. They are both creatures that are created and thrown into a world that they have to figure out on their own. They both have a moral, spiritual journey. I thought Pinocchio could be a great opportunity to talk about disobedience. Obedience isn’t a virtue, it’s a burden. Disobedience is the seed of reason – it’s a desirable way to gain your own soul. I thought this could be an interesting background for Pinocchio, if we set it during the rise of Mussolini – an interesting time for a puppet that refuses to obey.

What can we expect from Nightmare Alley?
There was a moment in American letters in which this underbelly of modern America started to be addressed – a lot of that congealed around noir writing, the pulp detectives and novels. But there are other pieces of writing, like The Day of the Locust, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Nightmare Alley, that address this intersection of the modern and the visceral in a very interesting way. The original novel, when it was written, was right at the crossroads of the modern notion of psychoanalysis, kind of jamming that with the occult powers of the tarot, and the idea of travelling carnivals and spiritualism used to defraud the gullible.

It’s a really interesting mixture of things – I don’t like things straight, I like to combine things that in theory should not go together. Like a post-civil war struggle in Spain and fairytale; or a mix of a Douglas Sirk melodrama with an amphibian god and a sexual-awakening love story.

• The Hollow Ones by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan is published by Del Rey (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15