Guillermo Del Toro's monster memorabilia hoard to go on display in travelling exhibition

'At 51, I live the life of a well-financed 12-year-old,' the Pan's Labyrinth director admits

Del Toro with Pan, the title creature of his 2006 classic, Pan's Labyrinth (REX FEATURES)

Fantasy film-making virtuoso Guillermo Del Toro has famously accumulated a vast collection of bizarre movie memorabilia over the years. Now, he intends to share the contents of his personal house of curiosities with fans in a new exhibition in Los Angeles, which could travel to as many as seven major cities, including Toronto, Mexico City and Paris.

The Mexican director of films including Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, Hellboy and Pacific Rim stores the artefacts of his lifelong obsession with monsters and the macabre at a personal museum near his LA home. He conducted a video tour of the premises – which he calls “Bleak House”, after the Charles Dickens novel – which was posted on YouTube in 2012.

The exhibition, Guillermo Del Toro: At Home With Monsters, is set to make its public debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in July, and will include some 500 items, most of them from Del Toro’s own collection. After leaving LA in November it will move on to Minneapolis and Toronto - and then, it is hoped, to Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and New York.

Speaking to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Del Toro said Bleak House contains up to 9,000 books, 50,000 magazines and comics, 580 original artworks and “thousands upon thousands” of toys and collectibles. “I have secret passages behind bookshelves. I have a room where it rains all day. At 51, I live the life of a well-financed 12-year-old,” he said.