This week, we descend into the dark fantasy fairytale of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006). Amid the rich craftsmanship of the fantasy world that Ofelia imagines, the film lays bare the horrors of Francoist Spain—all captured through Del Toro's anti-fascist cinema. The calculating evil of Captain Vidal, a devotee of Falangism and a violent patriarch, stands among the most iconic of Del Toro's villains.

With fascist rhetoric disturbingly mainstream in contemporary US politics, Pan's Labyrinth feels less like a historical fantasy and more like a warning. It is a portrait of how fascism seeps into the everyday and how resistance can be imagined and realized, even when hope is in short supply. The film's lush fantasy is always shadowed by real life violence, teaching us that fascism flourishes not in isolation but within the systems of power that capitalism creates and legitimizes.

We wrap things up with a brief discussion of Pinocchio (2022), where Del Toro, ever the mythmaker, recasts a children's tale set during the rise to power of Italian fascism.

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