Confronting Ghosts: History, Trauma, and Aesthetics in Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno

Abstract

Historically, the presentation of collective trauma has been fraught with moral and aesthetic contradictions. Hollywood, in particular, has long struggled to visually adapt national trauma into a collective whole without rendering it into a spectacle; moreso when it comes to non-Western narratives. Given the indispensability of magic realism in the history of Latin America, it stands to reason that a culture that is so steeped in alternative ways of storytelling would employ such techniques in its national cinema. In light of the sudden boom in the popularity of Latin American cinema, this paper attempts to look at how Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno incorporates elements of magic realism in the fabric of its narrative in order to speak of the collective trauma of the Spanish Civil War.

Keywords

• spanish civil war
• laberinto
• magic realism
• fantasy
• trauma