Pan's Labyrinth Revisited: How Guillermo del Toro Used Fantasy to Explore Real World Horrors

In Pan's Labyrinth, Captain Vidal represents evil in the real world, while the Pale Man, whom he constantly mirrors, represents the evil lurking below in the fantasy one. What truly sets the film apart is how Guillermo del Toro uses fantasy to explore real world horrors.

In 2006, after Cronos, Mimic, The Devil's Backbone, Blade II and Hellboy, del Toro released his sixth studio feature. Set in 1944, five years after the Spanish Civil War, it follows a young girl named Ofelia who moves with her pregnant mother to live with her cruel stepfather, Captain Vidal. A faun tells her she is the lost princess of an underground kingdom. Who wouldn't love that? Me, because I'm a woman. To return, she must complete three dangerous tasks while Vidal hunts rebels and her mother's health declines.

An allegedly lost and returned notebook pushed del Toro to make Pan's Labyrinth over a blockbuster

Del Toro built his career through a mix of independent projects and studio backed films, and coming just two years after Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth fell firmly into the independent category. After Hellboy's success he was offered any superhero movie, and he debated whether to make Pan's Labyrinth or another big blockbuster. When he allegedly left his notebook of sketches for the film in a cab and the taxi driver returned it, he told God he was going to make Pan's Labyrinth.

He wrote the idea in or around 1993. It began as the story of a pregnant woman arriving at a mansion in Spain, where her husband was restoring the home. She fell in love with a faun in the labyrinth, and the faun later asked for the blood of her firstborn to open the gate to his magical kingdom. As the story evolved, del Toro added her daughter, and little by little realised it was more interesting to tell the magic through the girl's eyes and toss out the love story completely.

The Devil's Backbone companion that 9/11 reshaped

Pan's Labyrinth was intended as a sister story to The Devil's Backbone from 2001, which follows Carlos, a boy sent to a secluded orphanage with an unexploded bomb in the courtyard and a ghostly child in the halls. That film becomes both a supernatural mystery and an allegory for the trauma and corruption left by the Spanish Civil War. The two are set five years apart.

Between 2001 and 2006, the world changed completely after 9/11, and everything del Toro had to say about brutality, innocence, childhood and war changed with it. He became interested in a companion piece reflecting not just a different moment in Spanish history but a different moment in American history. He explores fascism, authoritarian violence, the power of disobedience and the truth telling nature of fantasy, contrasting violence and magic to show how the real world suppresses Ofelia's instinct for imagination.

Del Toro cites a 19th century idea that we should treat children as ambassadors of a higher culture, learning from them rather than reshaping them. To him, adults corrupt what is naturally pure. He encourages you to find your own perspectives in the film, and my favourite framing is the belief that children understand the world in ways adults no longer can.

Finances collapsed repeatedly before a Mexico and Spain coproduction saved the film

How would you even get a Spanish language, R rated film with no well known stars off the ground in America? The 19 million dollar production saw its finances collapse two or three times, including a chief investor pulling out at the last minute. It was eventually saved as a coproduction between Mexico and Spain, but first del Toro began funding it himself, because storyboard artists and designers still had to be paid while he was creating assets such as the photograph scrapbooks.

His producing partner Alfonso Cuarón immediately contributed half the budget. Their agreement was that if the production went over budget, they would give up their producer salaries, and they did. Del Toro also surrendered his director's salary, a decision he says he never regretted. Bertha Navarro, from Tequila Gang, was among the partners, and Spain's Telecinco, through Estudios Picasso, put up most of the money.

US distribution went to Picturehouse, the young joint venture between HBO and New Line Cinema, though even the distributor was unsure how the film would play. President Bob Berney planned a three pronged campaign: TV commercials and San Diego Comic-Con promos for the young male genre audience, editorial and reviews for the art audience, and print ads, Spanish newspaper ads and radio for the Latino audience.

The highest grossing Spanish language film in North America and an awards season smash

The release outperformed every expectation, backed by del Toro's growing fan base, and the film became the highest grossing Spanish language film ever released in North America. One explanation was that its blend of fantasy and political repression made it powerful and emotionally honest. Some point to the creatures being so scary, beautiful or downright perverse; others to the labyrinth as a moral journey. Whatever it was, it made 83.9 million dollars worldwide.

It premiered at Cannes to a 22 minute standing ovation, one of the longest in the festival's history, dominated the technical categories at the 79th Academy Awards, earned three BAFTAs and a Hugo Award, and holds 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 98 out of 100 on Metacritic. Personally, I love it: its visual imagination, its creatures, its blend of fantasy and history.

Obedience is the tool of fascism and disobedience is what makes us human

Del Toro has said he was horrified and fascinated by the brutality of the fascists after meeting Spanish exiles in Mexico in his early twenties. He found a common thread between the real and imaginary worlds in the fairy tale bloodline of choice: "I thought it would be compelling to counterpoint an institutional lack of choice which is fascism with the freedom of choice that the girl faces in the story."

Ofelia disobeys the faun, her mother, the captain and even the Pale Man's rules. Defiance can lead to tragic consequences, but it can also be an act of moral freedom. The Doctor disobeys Vidal to spare a rebel's suffering, knowing it costs his life. Del Toro has acknowledged the idea that the 20 or so paces the Doctor takes into the rain before he is killed are the most profound, liberating moments of his life. If that's true, the film validates his choice. It's still grim, and I like that del Toro offers the idea that fairy tales can still be very, very brutal. It keeps the story grounded in reality, just shadowed by mysticism.

From David Copperfield to A Little Princess, the film is threaded with fairy tale references

A key influence was The Science of Fairy Tales from 1891, which broke down recurring myths: the myth of choice, the ritual of not eating or drinking in the fairy world, and figures like the frog. When Vidal tells Ofelia, "Use the other hand," it directly references David Copperfield, where David offers his stepfather his left hand and is corrected: an adult asserting dominance through arbitrary rules.

The story parallels Andersen's The Little Match Girl, a girl using imagination to survive a violent world, and draws on Wizard of Oz tropes, Alice in Wonderland, Oscar Wilde and Little Red Riding Hood. There's even a stint when Ofelia moves into the attic, something del Toro said he liked in Shirley Temple's 1939 film A Little Princess. In the Pale Man's chamber, she faces the classic choice of three doors and disobeys the fairies pointing to the middle one. The first time she disobeys, it's right; the second time, a fairy gets eaten.

Storytelling itself is central. At Vidal's dinner, Carmen recounts how Ofelia's father, a tailor, died, and we're left to wonder whether Vidal ordered it. For del Toro, tailors and cobblers were historically travelling storytellers, so he made Ofelia's parents part of that lineage. There's also a detail I always overlooked: the magical pollen around Ofelia whenever a mystical creature is near, especially in daylight. As in The Devil's Backbone, he wanted the first encounter with the fantastic in daylight, treating magic as ordinary rather than adding filters or special effects.

The novelization reveals the Sculptor's Promise and the labyrinth's origin

Much of this lore is expanded in Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun by del Toro and Cornelia Funke. In The Sculptor's Promise, a sculptor makes statues of the king and queen hoping the princess will remember who she is. When she never does, he sculpts the faun, wanders Earth searching, then plucks out his eye and turns to stone. That is the eye Ofelia finds at the start of the film. The book also tells of a labyrinth built for a wealthy man's wife found with no memory, implied to be the missing princess. The film doesn't require you to read any of it.

Mirrored keys, knives and mandrakes blur fantasy and reality

What interests me most is where the two worlds mirror each other. The faun's head is branded throughout, even in the banister. The tree echoes both the faun and the fallopian tubes, and its entrance isn't subtle either. Ofelia leaves her dress behind before entering the tree, which del Toro meant as shedding adult concerns. The key and knife play dual roles, with Martín Hernández adding a metallic tone when she grabs the key that returns with the knife. The Pale Man's banquet echoes Vidal's dinner, and the rebels' cave links to the labyrinth's pit.

The mandrake mirrors the unborn child, echoing the mother's movements as she heals, and even appears disguised among the vegetables Mercedes chops. Del Toro wanted ambiguity, but the chalk reinforces that the magical world is not just Ofelia's imagination, though this contradicts Ofelia's ending a bit. In the director's commentary he explains that Ofelia was locked in the attic with guards outside, "So, the answer is she drew the magical door in the wall." Some might argue Vidal saw her talking to no one before shooting her, but del Toro insists that proves it's not in his head. Mercedes once believed in fairies and Ofelia's mother refused to, their disbelief born of harsh reality.

The Pale Man represents the church, and the faun was designed with a rockstar quality

Del Toro wanted the creatures to represent political power. The Pale Man came to represent the church in its consumption of children. Originally an emaciated old man with loose skin, he lost his face, and his eyes went on a platter, like a statue from church in childhood with her eyes on a platter and blood pouring from them. His fingers spread like peacock feathers, and the piled shoes evoke a concentration camp. In the novelization's The Boy Who Escaped, he kills insects, birds, his mother's cats, then his younger brother at 13, later serving a priest of the Spanish Inquisition until his eyes fall out. His silver dagger with a gold handle is the one Ofelia must retrieve.

The faun was harder to design: masculine but not aggressive, sinuous and commanding with a rockstar quality, contrasting Ofelia's feminine energy. Del Toro called these Jungian archetypes. I love that the faun gets younger as the story progresses. The ending was Doug Jones's first day, in the youngest makeup: reddish hair, unclouded eyes, a chest free of roots and moss, straight teeth. Del Toro wanted the faun and fairies to stay neither fully good nor bad; only in America is it called Pan's Labyrinth, since in Spanish it was the Faun's Labyrinth. The fairies, designed by DDT of Hellboy, aren't actual fairies but shapeshift into what Ofelia wants. The frog was a nightmare: too heavy to move, half puppet and half CGI, with the vomit shot revised more than anything else.

Wipes, warm golds and a moving camera separate the two worlds

The first warm colours come through the mother's belly, via a horizontal wipe into the fantasy's golds and scarlets. Vertical wipes, moving left to right like turning pages, keep the two stories separate until they begin to blend. The fantasy is warm, rounded and almost uterine; the real world is cold, rust and grey, all straight lines, its only round shapes being gears tied to Ofelia. Del Toro saturated colours though period films usually desaturate, using Kodak Vision stock and a night filter with a high green component to make the moss glow.

The fantasy world gets more playful, active camera moves than the fascist world, wardrobe and sets create burning wings behind Vidal, and for sound del Toro drew on video games and the prologue of Pink Floyd's Is There Anybody Out There?

A labyrinth about resilience, not escapism

Drawing on Goya, Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, the film shows imagination can carry moral weight. I like that this fantasy isn't escapism but human resilience. Del Toro says a labyrinth "cannot be closed to a single meaning." He also said, "I didn't want the girl to have a safe choice in the movie." She fails two of her three tasks; what matters is her bravery and intact spirit, continuing a tradition of dark stories like A Nightmare on Elm Street that we need in this world.

Do you read Ofelia's magical world as real, as del Toro insists, or as something only in her head?