Guillermo del Toro auctions off part of his Bleak House horror collection
Top item sells for $325,000 as part of a three-part Heritage Auctions series; two more installments planned for next year
A portion of Guillermo del Toro's horror memorabilia collection was auctioned Friday, with the highest-ticket item selling for $325,000. Del Toro's Bleak House — two and a half Santa Monica properties housing thousands of ghoulish creatures, iconic comic drawings and paintings, books and movie props — formed the basis of the live sale in Dallas in partnership with Heritage Auctions. The event included more than 100 items from a collection that totals about 5,000 pieces, and two additional parts of the auction series are scheduled to go live next year.
Del Toro, 60, said he felt compelled to let some of his sprawling collection go following a close brush with the Los Angeles wildfires this year. “This one hurts. The next one, I’m going to be bleeding,” the filmmaker said of the auction series. “If you love somebody, you have estate planning, you know, and this is me estate planning for a family that has been with me since I was a kid.”
The highest-selling item Friday was a painting by H.R. Giger, part of the concept design created for an unproduced script titled “The Tourist.” It set an auction record for any artwork by the Swiss artist. The $325,000 price includes the buyers premium attached to all auction items for the house that sells it. “I feel like a good guardian — knowing fully that these, and future, artifacts have now found loving hands,” del Toro wrote after the sale.
Popular among the results were works by comic luminaries like Jack Kirby and Richard Corben, as well as exclusive pieces from Del Toro’s own films. Original Bernie Wrightson artwork for the 1983 illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sold for $250,000, while Wrightson’s cover art for Meat Loaf’s Dead Ringer album went for $187,500. The trench coat worn by Ron Perlman in the Hellboy films sold for $50,000, and two screen-used drivesuits from Pacific Rim fetched $75,000 each. A handful of favorites, including the “Big Baby” shotgun from Hellboy, did not sell in the live auction but remain open for online bidding.
Bidders who did not secure items Friday can continue online bidding through Oct. 6. Heritage Auctions noted that the Bleak House collection encompasses thousands of pieces and that the remaining items reflect Del Toro’s long-standing interest in horror art, design and film history. The two remaining components of the three-part series are scheduled to go live next year, with additional items from the Bleak House collection expected to hit the block as part of the ongoing estate-wide sale.
Del Toro has described Bleak House as a testament to a life spent collecting across cinema, comics and design, and the sale marks a rare public auction of a filmmaker's personal archive. The events offer a window into the broader world of genre memorabilia, drawing fans, scholars and collectors who track the intersection of film art and popular culture.