Guillermo del Toro

And with each chime, the figure would come up.

And then you wake up, and nothing is there, and you're covered in sweat.

And that's sort of lucid dreaming or waking nightmare states, which are a disruption of the REM cycle on the brain.

But to you as a kid, it's truly harrowing.

Yes, which is why one of the best images in the novel of Mary Shelley's life.

Frankenstein, had never been rendered on film until now, and it was my favorite moment reading it.

At age 11, I read the novel, and it's the moment Victor wakes up from the night of creation, and the creature is standing at the foot of the bed looking back at him.

As a kid, I held my breath.

I was shocked.

And I prayed for decades that I could make that moment come to life on a film before anyone.

And fortunately, nobody did it.

You are absolutely right.

The first film I saw

was William Wyler's Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier.

I went with my mother to a cinema downtown that was super cheap and showed very old movies.

It was really gothic atmosphere with rain and the moors and Olivier.

It's basically a ghost story in many ways, Wuthering Heights.

And I fell asleep full of fear.

I dreamt my dream and woke up in the theater with the movie still playing.

So exactly, my first movie was part of a lucid dream.