Film-maker Guillermo del Toro, whose new film, "Pan's Labyrinth", is due to open in limited release in the US on December 29th, has talked to SCI FI Wire on a couple of his future projects.

One is a television series called "The Strain" developed for FOX.

"It's horror," del Toro said in an interview last week in Los Angeles. He added: "It would be a really nasty, nasty fantasy. ... My deal is with Fox, and we're in the process of developing the story and seeing if we see eye to eye." Del Toro currently has a development deal with the Fox network.

Del Toro added: "I already wrote the bible and the character arcs for each character and so forth, so I'm doing all the documents on it." But he declined to say much about The Strain. "It's too early on, the very early stages of that."

Anyone who's seen his earlier Spanish language efforts in horror, such as "Cronos" and "El Espinazo del diablo" will look forward to the results. The question is how his some times idiosyncratic ideas will go over with broader audiences and the studio heads.

But del Toro has the itch to develop video games as well.

"I think that that's the where the future of storytelling is going to go to, a hybrid form that encompasses all of the narrative forms that we now know," he said. "TV, video games, movies, all of these into one."

This idea of the multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk is of course not a new one. Those who remember, some fondly, some less so, the brief flowering of full motion video adventure games in the early 90s, will recall that such claims were made for that particular genre. Later 3D based first person shooter and role-playing hybrids with strong narrative elements also strove towards this goal.

But the case has always been that a strong story keeps the game on a very linear path, thereby impairing replayability, while freedom to roam and traditional game elements weakens the narrative flow. Until the advent of a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, where storylines and characters can truly develop organically outside of pre-programmed events, it's doubtful the twain shall ever meet. But again, it'll be interesting to see him try.