Director Guillermo del Toro has been a Comic-Con mainstay for many years, bring horror, sci-fi and Hellboy – who is a little bit of both – to the masses. But this year he’s bringing something else with him as well: hand-selected props from his upcoming horror movie Crimson Peak.
Related: Crimson Peak – On the Set with Guillermo del Toro
CraveOnline took a guided tour of the Crimson Peak experience available to convention-goers at the Legendary Booth (#3920), where he revealed the film’s unusual and creepy butterfly fetish, and hinted at the story these props tell all by themselves. (No spoilers, he promises.) Guillermo del Toro also explains why this movie is so affecting to him personally, and also why his English-language films have – until Crimson Peak, at least – typically been broader than his sensitive Spanish-language horror tales.
Also available at the Legendary booth is a firsthand experience of Oculus Rift, the virtual reality experience that attempts to bring audiences into the movies or, potentially, the video games. The demonstration on display brought CraveOnline into a sequence from the world of Pacific Rim: Jaeger Pilot, where you pilot a Jaeger and duel with the powerful kaiju known only as “Knifehead.”
Unlike the Crimson Peak tour, the experience in the Oculus Rift could not be filmed. But from firsthand experience we can say that the effect of operating a camera with our own head movements was fascinating… but needed a little work. Although an Oculus Rift representative assured us that the version of the technology being test-driven was not running at its full resolution, the computer graphics in the demo at Comic-Con 2014 are relatively low-resolution compared to current generation video games (they approximately on par with a giant-screen PSP), and they fogged up William Bibbiani’s glasses. But the Oculus Rift representative also said that the technology to adjust the video to match the viewer’s vision was being developed.
Guillermo del Toro isn’t done with Comic-Con yet. CraveOnline will keep an eye on his movements, the announcements at the Legendary Pictures panel in Hall H on Thursday, and hopefully some news about Pacific Rim 2.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
