The Dark Fantastic of Guillermo del Toro

Abstract

The Dark Fantastic of Guillermo del Toro explores the myths, folkloric story forms, and Jungian archetypal images in three of his films, Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth, with a view to illumining how Del Toro constructs cinematic tapestries that are collages of numinosity, mythic-archetypal gestalts crafted of mythic fragments, folkloric story forms, and archetypal figures, events, symbols, and motifs. His tapestries are woven upon a loom of the Dark Fantastic, a subset of the literary (and later cinematic) horror genre into which emerged the monstrous images, in distorted form, of the supernaturalism and the dark face of the self-archetype repressed in the West by the Protestant Reformation.

These films are suffused with alchemical and Christian imagery; in each film Del Toro crafts at least one character, often the protagonist, as the Christ-figure, a symbol of the self-archetype. In each, the heroes and heroines confront fascist antagonists: in Cronos, a corporate fascist; in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, fascists as they appear in the Spanish Civil War.
Del Toro hybridizes characters and genres, melding vampire story, ghost story, and fairy tale with both horror and war genres, and often reverses the presenting face of always-bivalent symbols. With jarring, horrific, and terrifying images, unusual character presentations, and unexpected use of genre combinations, Del Toro shakes the psyche loose from its moorings in the service of one subversive, anarchic endeavor, his grand theme: the anti-fascist, anti-Establishment, theopolitical re-mythologizing of imagination in a demythologized world, meant to counter, with spiritual imagination, the dark imagination of ever-threatening ur-fascism.