Pan's Labyrinth: The Fairy Tale as Resistance

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

There is a moment in Pan’s Labyrinth that tells you what kind of film you are watching, and it has no monster in it at all. A captain of Franco’s army sits at his dinner table, brings a glass bottle down onto a peasant’s face, keeps hitting until the face is ruined, and then goes back to his meal. No score swells. The camera does not flinch or cut away for mercy. Guillermo del Toro stages the worst violence in his 2006 film in the daylit, wallpapered world of grown men in uniform, and he reserves his tenderness for the toad under the tree and the faun in the maze. That is the whole argument of the picture, made in one gesture: the fantastical is the safe place, and the human world is where the real horror lives.

The Devil's Backbone: Del Toro's Ghost of the Spanish Civil War

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

“What is a ghost?” A voice asks it at the start of The Devil’s Backbone and answers itself: a tragedy condemned to repeat, an instant of pain, something dead that seems alive, an emotion suspended in time like a blurred photograph or an insect trapped in amber. Guillermo del Toro puts that definition at the front of his 2001 film because the whole picture is an argument for it. This is a ghost story where the ghost is the least frightening thing in the building, and where the real horror is the war grinding toward the orphanage gates. Made in Spanish after del Toro’s bruising experience on the Hollywood studio picture Mimic, it was his return to the personal register, and it remains the purest statement of the idea that would run through his entire career: the monster in the corner is a wounded child, and the true evil wears a human face and wants the gold.

Spanish Civil War - vo.rs

Pan's Labyrinth: The Fairy Tale as Resistance

The Devil's Backbone: Del Toro's Ghost of the Spanish Civil War