Welcome to Pan's Labyrinth

#ScreenArt Welcome to Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro's film "Pan's Labyrinth" draws on the canons of traditional folk tales, where the hero must pass three trials, but in the eerie vein of the Brothers Grimm and the works of Charles Dickens.

The Faun's appearance visually echoes the black goat in Francisco Goya's painting "The Witches' Sabbath," and the overall atmosphere of cruelty reflects the same artist's series of etchings "The Disasters of War." The Faun himself and his labyrinth harken back to Roman and Greek myths of forest deities and the god Pan.

Del Toro himself has called Pan's Labyrinth a thematic continuation of his earlier film about children, The Devil's Backbone, set during the Spanish Civil War.