Guillermo del Toro is not just the fanboy’s fanboy, a comic book collector (“Horror comics, mostly.”) turned Oscar winning horror director.

He rivals his idol David Cronenberg as the reigning intellectual of his genre, a thoughtful, philosophical Mexican who knows horror literature, horror iconography and horror cinema like the back of his hand.

“Sangre del Toro” is an affectionate and revealing dive into what made him who he is, a monster-obsessed movie maker who makes movies that give those monsters personalities, heartaches, fears and agendas that connect to the hallmarks and the failings of humanity.

Yves Monmayeur’s documentary is built around del Toro touring an exhibit — “En Casa Con Nos Monstruos,” “My House of Monsters” — that he co-curated and opened in his hometown Guadalajara’s museum. Walking through its childhood photos, collectible comic displays, gigantic props from his films and collected from others’ classics, he meditates on the nature of horror, his personal obsessions and the (privileged) childhood that informed “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Shape of Water” and even “Hellboy.”

He sat down for chats and held public conversations about his work there, in which del Toro lays out the influences that made him and the threads of his monster horror/body horror filmography that point back to his childhood.

“The Mexican marriage of the sublime and the brutal,” he says of that country’s hybrid “Dia de los Muertos” form of Catholicism, “is very much in me.”

So in “Sangre del Toro” — a play on “Sangre de Cristo, aka Blood of Christ” — del Toro doesn’t just talk about his films and the Buñuel, Cronenberg and George A. Romero movies that shaped his art, or expound on his 15,000 comic book collection of “Tales from the Crypt” and many other legendary horror titles. He notes how the horrific is best experienced “through the eyes of a child,” like the child he once was and kind of still is.

The first time I interviewed him, I grilled del Toro about that, which was the focus of the earliest films he made in America (“Mimic”) or which were distributed here (“The Devil’s Backbone”). Children can be witnesses, victims and heroes in his horror. And once you’ve established you’ll “kill the dog,” (in “Mimic”), a world of horrific possibilities opens up.

Like Spielberg, del Toro obsessed about becoming a film director before he knew there was such a job. “I wanted to be a monster maker!” He designed monsters and makeup and dreamed up scenarios and shot and edited super 8mm films as a young child (age 8, in his case).

Unlike Spielberg, del Toro can talk about the grandmother who helped raise him’s faith, relating a painful, bloody, rending of the flesh horrific anecdote about his grandmother’s lessons about Catholic eternity and purgatory, which involved the injurious application of jagged bottle caps on his tiny feet.

Hey, better than eternal damnation, Granny figured.

“Most of my movies talk about…choice and sacrifice,” del Toro says. And they do, from his earliest works to his “Hobbit” films and “The Shape of Water” to his latest, Netflix’s “Frankenstein.”

We see the long-closed childhood comic book stand where he first tasted horror on the page, which he bought and installed in the museum exhibit. We visit Guadalajara’s Gothic cathedral and its catecombs below, and visit the cemetery in Belen that inspired every cemetery scene ever in a del Toro movie, from “Hellboy” onward.

“Sangre del Toro” is very much a documentary “in his own words,” and thus a portrait of how del Toro sees himself and the destiny he is sure he was born to fulfill. He comes off as introspective, someone who has given some thought to the sort of artist he became and how he got there.

Lacking more outside voices — we hear from Cronenberg and horror manga artist Junji Ito– the film dispenses with others singing del Toro’s praises or criticizing the occasional misstep, or family members, academics and childhood friends doing del Toro’s psychoanalyzing for him. That works for and against the film’s reach for a “definitive” portrait.

But if “Frankenstein” or his more recent series work since “The Shape of Water” has piqued your interest in this grownup cinematic version of R.L. Stine, “Sangre del Toro” makes a fine introduction to the sacrements and stations of the cross of this horror icon — who and what made him who he is.

That grandmother must have been some piece of work.

Rating: TV-MA, gruesome images, violence, nudity

Cast: Guillermo del Toro

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Yves Montmayeur. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26