8 Guillermo del Toro Creatures With More Soul Than Humans

Creatures and monsters are the essential staple of Guillermo del Toro’s movies. We can’t imagine his movies without them. And for a good reason. Every time he presents us with one of them, he is not giving us just a spectacle (and they are all magnificent spectacles), but he is giving us a parallel that shows us who we are.

These creatures have emotions, they feel things, they reason, and they envy. They are all overwhelmingly relatable if we know where and how to draw the parallel. They come in many forms: a forlorn ghost, a half-demon, a gentlemanly amphibian, an ancient spirit, or even a grotesque and malevolent critter.

Don’t mistake this list for the most terrifying monsters. Some of them are indeed scary and abhorrent, but that’s not the point of this list. Here, we have tried to explore the monsters in whom we can see ourselves, for all the good and the bad that we have in us. Consider this list a tribute to the humans in mystical, unearthly forms.

Let’s explore, then, the eight of del Toro’s most soulful (also soulless) creations, where claws, scales, horns, pain, kindness, and malice coexist beautifully.

8 Human-Like Monsters from Guillermo del Toro’s Movies

1. Hellboy (Hellboy, 2004)

Portrayed by: Ron Perlman | Created by: Mike Mignola

Born of a demon father and a human mother, Hellboy is prophesied to bring about the end of the world. Instead, he chooses to nurture it while fighting on humanity’s side. His sarcasm, dry humor, and sentimentality can be attributed to the fact that he was raised by humans. Raised quite well, indeed.

He is extremely touchy about his half-demon heritage; I mean, he has chopped off his demon horns, symbolically rejecting his demon side. But that alone doesn’t make him human. What makes him human is his vulnerability. What this rough and tough, monstrous beast truly wants is actually very simple. He just wants to belong. Belong with “his people.” Humans. Emigrants worldwide, struggling to blend in, might be able to understand his plight.

2. Abe Sapien (Hellboy, 2004)

Portrayed by: Doug Jones | Created by: Mike Mignola

Abe is a truly exceptional creature. By definition, he is an amphibious empath, and his superpower is his telepathic ability to connect with the pain of others. He may look like a ghastly animal, but he is defined by his gentlemanly and suave personality, inside and out. He is an intellectual, capable of profound thought and logic. But, at the same time, he is deeply introverted and shy. Sounds familiar? He is a sweet nerd.

Despite being an integral part of the force that fights evil on various fronts, Abe stands drastically apart from his boisterous and arrogant colleagues and friends, including Hellboy. Why? Because of his gentle soul, emotional intelligence, and sheer ability to listen. A good listener and a kind-hearted empath—he is not only more human than humans, but he is also literally better than them.

3. The Faun (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006)

Portrayed by: Doug Jones | Created by: Guillermo del Toro

The Faun is neither good nor evil. He is morally ambiguous. His primary role in the story is to set up a series of high-risk tasks that will test Ofelia’s (Ivana Baquero) character, courage, and spirit. But he is also not indifferent towards her, in the way that he attempts to shield her innocence.

In the human world, we could equate him with a mentor. A task-focused mentor. A good mentor neither mollycoddles nor disregards a mentee. And yet, we can detect a fatherly/motherly instinct that makes them want to see their prodigy thrive in the real world. In the same way, the Faun’s quiet, unspoken belief in Ofelia’s purity makes him profoundly human.

4. The Pale Man (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006)

Portrayed by: Doug Jones | Created by: Guillermo del Toro

The Pale Man is arguably the most memorable and haunting character in Pan’s Labyrinth. With his white, sagging skin, face with no eyes—instead, they are placed on his palms, he sits at a lavish feast like a statue; all this visual is hard to forget. He is a part of one of the tasks that the Faun has asked Ofelia to get through. He only wakes up when Ofelia eats from the feast, something she was advised against.

Unlike all the characters we have explored so far, the Pale Man represents the bad aspects of humanity. He is sitting at a sumptuous banquet that he can’t eat, but doesn’t allow others to eat as well; that’s human greed. His eyes are not where they are supposed to be, and the use of the ones on his palms is optional; that’s moral blindness. He bears our worst impulses–apathy, gluttony, and savagery rooted in pettiness and petulance.

5. The Kaiju Otachi (Pacific Rim, 2013)

Portrayed by: Motion Capture & CGI | Created by: Guillermo del Toro & Travis Beacham

Otachi is one of the most fearsome, mountainous, and acid-spitting sea monsters. What sets Otachi apart from her kind is that she is perceptive and adaptable. She improvises and fights strategically, using flight, speed, and shrewdness. In one of the scenes, her maternal instinct is revealed when she protects her unborn baby.

This maternal instinct immediately uplifts her from being a mere force of destruction to an emotional level and gives her “character” depth. She is not just fighting to destroy and kill; she is acting on instinct, the instinct to survive and protect. When she dies, she becomes the symbol of nature that we fail to understand and end up destroying.

6. Amphibian Man (The Shape of Water, 2017)

Portrayed by: Doug Jones | Created by: Guillermo del Toro

With Amphibian Man, del Toro managed to bridge the gap between his creatures and humans on a romantic level. While he is captured and experimented on by the U.S. military, an unexpected bond develops between him and a mute janitor, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who tries to rescue him.

Unlike most other creatures, he is neither free nor a fighter. He is a captive and a victim. But that’s not all that he is. Despite the gruesome, inhumane fate he suffers under humans, he doesn’t let his animal (or monster) instincts take over. He patiently and unconditionally loves. The weaker he appears on the physical level, the stronger he emerges as an emotional being. It’s hard to be more human than that.

7. Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, 2022)

Portrayed by: Gregory Mann (Voice) | Created by: Carlo Collodi

We know Pinocchio as a cheerful puppet who runs after adventure and is skittish about his nose getting longer if he lies. Del Toro reimagines him as a fragile creation of grief. After Geppetto (David Bradley) creates him, naive and endlessly curious Pinocchio gets in conflict with the fascist world around him. It’s quite ironic: Pinocchio, the puppet, refuses to obey the oppressive rules of a system that expects everyone to behave like a puppet.

His moral clarity makes him deeply human. He defies conformity, questions authority, but also forgives those who hurt him. He cannot be cruel, even though he is surrounded by cruel humans. We remember Pinocchio because, while humans around him forget to be humans, he rises above them.

8. The Creature (Frankenstein, 2025)

Portrayed by: Jacob Elordi | Created by: Mary Shelley

The Creature, a product born out of humans’ vanity, arrogance, and disregard for nature, is tragically cursed with loneliness and worse, conscience. Put in the cruel world against his will or knowledge, and abandoned to survive on his own, he desperately longs for death. When his fate denies him death, he longs for a companion. That doesn’t happen either. This defines the aptness of the word “wretched” that is so famously associated with him.

Del Toro might have borrowed this monster from literature, but he binds him in one of his own signature themes: a real horror lies not in monsters, but in humanity, which callously rejects what it fails to understand. The Creature is in every one of those who are lonely because they are different.