MORAL HORRORS
IN GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S
PAN'S LABYRINTH, THE SUPERNATURAL
REALM MIRRORS MAN'S INHUMANITY TO MAN
BY MICHAEL ATKINSON
S fiUlI.LF.RMO DEL TORO A FOLK
artist? Not "folk" in the sense
of, say, Sergei Paradjanov,
invoking the antiquated forms,
spirits., and textures of preindustrial native
arr. But rather, a toiler in the fields of fable,
animist anxiety, symbolic trial, the fragility
of "good.," the ambivalence of "evil," and
vice versa?
Or is he mere pulp? Well, let's suggest a
differential between rhe rwo labels, without
which del Toro's six films, from Cronos
(93) ro Pan's Lalryritith., could he unjusrly
junked in wirh "new primitives" as dis-
parate as Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, the
vogue in spandexed-superhero passion
plays, and the new school of rortiire proce-
durals. You draw your line wherever you
like, but my sense of it is ethical, respecting
still tbe toe print left hehind hy rhe contro-
versial literary dictates of Jobn Gardner's
On Moral Fiction. Pulp, as it's heing perpe-
trated in tbe new century, plays strictly to
the desires of the young, wbereas folk art
takes our baser instincts as a given and
plays rheir consequences our for us like
ordeals by imagination. Wbereas pulp is
wholly concerned with the moment of vis-
ceral experience—be it dazzlcment, nausea,
sadistic thrills—folk art could be said to be
more concerned with the totality of the
yarn told, within a self-contained narrative
universe fraught with moral tension. This
defines the no-man's-land between the pop-
ular cinema that will last in the puhlic skull
and in discourse, and tbat wbich will van-
ish unmourned into our dated, campy,
can't-believe-we-ever-liked-it past. This is
why, for instance, classic film noir is folk,
but the modern action film isn't.
Del Toro, of course, lives in the main-
stream, and has marched with one boot in
each camp. It might help to claim that all ot
bis films—even Blade ii (02}—are fairy tales,
even when thev're science fiction, horror.,
50 I FILM COMMENT I January-February2007
straight fantasy, or some coyote admixture
therein. His sensibility is Grimmian, horn of
an urban-Mexican culture steeped in native-
art crafts, poverty, simmering civil discon-
tent, and American pop. Pan's i^lryrinth in
particular—-a hot-tempered yet methodical
tall tale in which fantastical tribulation runs,
gasping, hand in hand with monstrous
human destruction—has the matter-of-fact
magic and fearless relationship with histori-
cal blood of a Singer or Marquez story. Del
Toro may have been seduced into the
graphic-novel blockbuster illuminati of New
Line and Sony because of his Grand Guignol
sense of visual brio, hut his storytelling is just
as apt to be modulated, conceptual, full of
contemplation and quiet frisson. He's as
much a descendant of Borges, mad for
ancient anti-science and reflective labyrinths,
as he is an heir of KC comics.
H I S IS N O T T O C A I . I . H I M A
subtle filmmaker—del Toro
loves vampire shock and
archetypal nightmare experi-
ence far roo mucb, not to mention his ardor
for tbe class insecta, for tbeir biophysical
creeps, their disquieting mutabilit>', and their
shadowy resemblance to macbinery, rain-
coat-clad strangers, faeries, and demons.
Cronos came as a disorienting surprise: a
Mexican horror film that summarily
ignored its own el-cheapo genre heritage,
and decided in its calcified bones not to go
for scar)'. Instead, del Toro's Algernon-
Blackwood-translates-"Tbe Gircular Ruins"
tale constructs a sui generis 14th-cenrury
alchemy-vampirism backstory that's quickly
shuttled into the modern age, where it
hegi[is to resonate iike a funeral bell with the
social dynamics of AIDS, drug addiction, class
warfare, the folly of the rich, aging, and the
not-so-simple preadolcscent questions of
Reality check: Pan confers with Ofelia
right and wrong when it comes to matters
of self-fulfillment and the exploitation of
your fellow man.
Cronos^s MacGuffin-catalyst is a Black
Death-era, gold-plated, palm-sized mechani-
cal egg that contains a mysterious creature
that lives on blood. It turns up in a fusty
Mexico City antique shop and proceeds to
make addicts of Ets victims and lure tbe sus-
ceptible with tbe promise of immortality.
The familiar forking path of the vampire
dilemma—darkness and infernal hunger in
exchange for eternal living death—is an irre-
sistible metaphysical conundrum for de!
Toro; Bkide ii agonizes explicitly over the
soul damage done, while even The Devil's
Backbone (01) and Pan's Lal7yrinth ponder
the price and rewards of the afterlife. Del
Toro's story unpacks wirh the logical, unhur-
ried progression of a morality tale, a particu-
larly vivid peasant cuento passed from one
generation to the next in order to illustrate
tbe unknowable dangers of worldly business
and the folly of forsaking the simple life.
Del Toro's twice-told approach has a
child's innocence to it—no abstruse plot-
ting, and no interest in point-of-view fancy
dancing—and unsurprisingly his best films
pivot on the perspectives of children.
(CroHOs's masterful central image is wor-
thy of Goya: when Federico Luppi's
undead and rotting antique-store propri-
etor returns to his grandJaughter's house,
the little girl rucks him in, complete with
teddy hear, inside her toy chest.) Mimic
(97) and Blade II, rhe former an urban
monster movie and tbe latter a mano-a-
mano vampire superhero sequel, remain
pulpy on the outside and chevvily anxious
and phobic on the inside, but they're less
symptomatic outside of their hug iconogra-
phy. (In interviews, the filmmaker is con-
flicted, wanting to auteur-own all of his
babies hut often admitting tbat he has "a
schizophrenic career," that Mimic was
manhandled hy Miramax and padded with
second-unit material he refused to sboot,
and the obvious fact that The Devil's Back-
hone and Pan's Labyrinth are personal voy-
ages that began emotionally in his youth.)
Hellboy (04) is the brood's crazy bastard
child, another graphic-novel fantasy that
presents an unusually ricb store of ironic
genre material, stemming from Cronos-
csque historical roots (a mid-war Nazi hlack
mass opens up Hell's ditch just long enough
to spit out the eponymous, scarlet-skinned
urchin) and a supernatural secret reality'
52 I FILM COMMENT 1 January-February 2007
Strange daze: Cronos (top) and Hellboy
roiling beneath the streets of modern-day
New York. The action involves an occult
federal bureau, a reincarnated Rasputin, a
depressive pyrokinetic goth-girl (Selma
Blair), an army of evil squid minions, and
tbe mytho-Judeo-Christian detritus of two
stormy millennia. Del Toro's enthusiasm for
the comic's kitchen-sink ethos bits you in the
eye—rhe film is an everything bagel of per-
sonality gags, sploogey band-tu-hand com-
bat, bleeding hearts, wry patter, and poetic
parodies of Romantic imagery (Goya, Blake,
Fuseli, Gericault). The balance of character-
based humor and adolescent-misfit patbos
makes it easily the most full-bodied comic-
book-to-movie transference yet, and a savvy
commentary on the ripe cliche cheese com-
monly served up in botb superbero sagas and
return-of-Satan thrillers.
iILL, HELLBOY iS A MTTl.t TOO
M^nsational, too attendant on
ephemeral excitement, and it
lacks tbe soulful investment to
be found in Cronos, The Devil's Back-
bone, and Pan's Lairyrinth, whicb together
form a kind of trilogy of haunted human
strife. In each film, paranormal chaos
serves to backlight and in fact confront
human venality. (Ghosts, vampires, and
goblins do not hy themselves a story
make.) The latter two are distinctive: hav-
ing grown up in a Mexico perpetually on
the edge of civil conflict in tbe wake of the
1968 student massacre known as the
Night of Tlatelolco, del Toro has found
textual sympathy with rbe tragic, idealistic
arena ofthe Spanish Civil War—a modern
sort of "children's crusade," insofar as rbe
conflict seems from tbe outside to possess a
clear-cut, right-versus-might purity. Back-
bone is one of the most child-centric
horror films of recent years outside of
Japan, set entirely in an isolated, hombing-
traumatized Castilian orphanage where a
little hoy's ghost insistently warns rhe
innocents of further cataclysms to come.
As a ticking, unexploded air-raid shell pro-
trudes from the courtyard, and the left-
wing adults in residence hrace themselves
for the encroachment of the Fascist army,
a young orphan (Fernando Tielve) strug-
gles with a dozen kinds of half-knowledge
(overheard mumblings, superstitions, bul-
lying threats, secret caches, sigbing spirits)
in a landscape where armed slaughter
lurks beyond the hills.
It's a pungent trope: from a child's sub-
jective perspective, a bloody civil conflict
appears as it is in its essence, a beavens-fall
contest between family victims and neigh-
horhood monsters, in which the children
underfoot bear the greatest cost (suggesting
rhe Nigerian proverb that wben elephants
fight, it is the grass that suffers). Returning
ro this dynamic with a vengeance. Pan's
Labyrinth revisits the scrap end of the war,
as a homicidal Fascist captain (Sergi Lopez)
occupies an abandoned mill witb his pla-
toon in order to root out Republican resis-
tance figbtcrs in the surrounding mountains.
Fie brings with him his wan pregnanr wife
(Adriadna Gil) and a dreamy stepdaughter,
Ofelia (Ivana Baquero). The Him is the
fatherless Ofeha's via dolorosa, as she grad-
ually struggles to understand two parallel
realities: one in which her stepfather is a
bloodthirsty- killer wbo cares little if sbe
lives or dies, and another in which she may
be the reincarnated princess of a subter-
ranean realm that she discovers tbrougb the
garden maze adjacent to the mill. A hidden
"feast," a secret key, and visions of blood-
letting in one world are reflected in the
otber. Visually, del Toro makes no great
transitional distinction between the coun-
tryside, gore-soaked and seething with
secrets as it is, and the Gothic netherworld
presided over by a "faun"—a smooth-
talking, goat-headed man-thing who seems
scarcely more trustworthy than tbe men in
uniform, and wbo insists she endure a series
of trials to prove her true, mystical lineage.
Spanish history provides del Toro with
fresh versions of such fairy-tale archetypes
as the hrutal governess, the evil woodsman.
Baba Yaga the child-killing witch, and the
trickster figure. But Ofelia's trial doesn't
follow a classic folk-myth through-line. Motion Picture Arts Gaiiery
The passage from innocence is ridden with
stops, starts, and longueurs, and tbe faun's EXPERIENCED IN THE ART OF THE MOVIES
assignmenrs are thoroughly inscrutable,
culminating in a mission to tbe lair of a
90 Oak Street, East Rutherford, New Jersey 07073
naked, baby-eating demon whose eyes are
located in the palms of its hands and whose
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victims' riny shoes lie in a heap. (So much
20th-century horror coalesced into one go-
for-the-throat tableau.) Of course, self-
sacriHcc is the key; for ali of its pagan
ingredients, del Toro's Him has rhe stark
structure of a saintly passion. But the pagan
totemism—a little Ernst, a little Redon, and
a little Myst—is hypnotic, from the man-
drake root ("'the root tbat dreamt it was a The Motion Pioture Arts Gallery was
man") that kicks and mews like an infant founded in 1982, on the belief fhaf motion
and tbe stick insects that moh into faeries,
picture art —especially film and movie
to tbe circular garden staircase corkscrew-
ing into rhe bowels of the earth. posters —is timeless and enduring. Our
inventory consists of more than 20,000
Ofelia may be escaping an unbearable
original movie posters and lobby cards
reality, drawing her own doorways with
chalk, and the mossy realm into which she
spanning 100 years of cinema.
plunges may play like the movie she
prefers to life in a killing Held, but ber sal- n ih* toil*
vation lies m active resistance. By way of
her waist-high viewpoint, everyrbing in
Pan's Labyrinth is metaphorically political
and suggests a distinctly un-Hegelian
reading of revolutionary history—people's
rebellions and socialist movements are
subordinated to the patterns and ordeals
of a hero's quest and the archetypal ago-
nies of traumatized childhood. Call ir folk-
loric materialism. As it is, most of del
Toro's new film is actually far more
embroiled in the real-world visitations ¥\
that rupture the family's unbalanced uni-
verse. A pair of bloody near-miscarriages f rVkUNB"
endured by Gil's nine-months-on mama, POWER
as seen from Ofelia's level, supply the
film's most unsettling moments, but they iniK KLEEN HEif' GOUIDIW
also underscore the relentless hattlefield BLONOEa EBAY mm JE&°S:

sadism. Amidst tbe Fascists' tactics of

summary executions, torture, and mutila-
Please visit our website with its
tions, del Toro has found an evil that
mythologizes itself in the eyes of the
Monthly Features, Collecting and
young—an ogre no one needs to imagine. Film Noir sections.
Like all folk lirerarure, ir's timeless. D
New acquisitions are added daily,
so visit us today at:
Michael Atkinson is the author of four
hooks, including Ghost in the Machine:
www.nipagallery.com
Speculating on the Dark Heart of Pop
Cinema, as well as the editor o/^Fxile Cin-
ema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Holly-
wood, forthcoming from SVNV i-'ress.

January-February 2007 I FILM COMMENT I 5 3