Violence In Pan's Labyrinth

Introduction

In a genre that has been dominated in recent years by the same cheap jump scares and unnecessary gore, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has breathed life into horror again by combining it with elements of fantasy and historical fiction. In many of his iconic films, del Toro immerses his audience in stories where terrifying monsters are outshined by the cruelty of humans. Utilizing this aspect, he often provides a commentary on politics, in particular the subject of fascism, interwoven into his films. Examining his career, no film defines Guillermo del Toro’s proficiency as a both director and a writer more than his 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth. This movie explores the time-honored plot of good versus evil though a haunting intermingling of fantasy and reality. Pan’s Labyrinth is clearly Guillermo del Toro’s magnum

Men, women, and children were caught in the crossfire and sometimes even deliberately murdered by both sides. del Toro does not sugarcoat the brutality of the Spanish Civil War as even the first image the audience is shown is of a dying and bloody child. Indeed, much of the violence in the movie is experienced by the young and innocent. In The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, it is suggested that the violence in the movie “is commensurate with the brutality of certain fairy tales in their original form and also with a realist vision of the cruelty of war that uses the figure of the child to create greater empathy and affect the spectator”(Davies 192). While much of the cruelty in Pan’s Labyrinth is very graphic, it is the explicit nature of what is experienced by children that makes the movie hard to watch for some. The Pale Man’s lair is littered with murals depicting him eating babies, Captain Vidal is very abusive towards Ofelia when she displeases him, and the Faun wishes to use a knife to prick Ofelia’s baby brother with the intention of spilling