Echoes of Fairy Tales: Fantasy and Everyday Horror in Guillermo del Toro’s Filmography

Abstract

Guillermo del Toro’s filmography uses recurrently old formulas such as archetypal folk and fairy-tale motifs and characters, adapting them to contemporary culture and society. The fantastic acts as a parallel universe to our logical world. His films describe a supernatural reality that intertwines with the ordinary world, using the archetypes of these narrations in the real world. Del Toro claims the figure of the monster as one of his outstanding characters, showing that the classical monsters are usually represented as vulnerable creatures subjected to the brutality of the human being. His films have a utopian spirit, mixed with fairy tales exclusively for adults, morality, goodness or the capacity of sacrifice of his protagonists, the overcoming of obstacles and the deepening of a state of knowledge and virtue. Fantasy serves the director as a vehicle to introduce political and social issues through a series of metaphors, which are appreciable in films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak or The Shape of Water.