A suversive or conservative fair y tale?: Monsters, Authority, and Insubordination in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth can be understood as a reinterpretation of the post-civil war period inSpain from a supernatural perspective. There have been conflicting viewpoints among critics regarding the suitability or not of this use of the supernatural in the specific historical context of the post-civil war. Many critics highlight the film’s subversive nature for its use of some fairy-tale and gothic horror conventions to challenge and expose the horrors of the war and the repression that followed, particularly the patriarchal power structure established inSpain by the Francoist regime.

However, some other critics see some ambiguities, even contradictions, in the narrative structure of the film, which defy the film’s interpretation as a prime example of the transgressive dimension of the fantastic. This essay explores the interrelation between both narrative structures in the film, and the historical and the supernatural, to examine to what extent the horror and fairy-tale conventions re-inforce or mitigate the social and political message in Pan’s Labyrinth.