Grimms Märchen (Grimms' fairy tales) influenced El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth)

Del Toro has talked about the Grimms for his whole career, and specifically about wanting the pre-sanitised version: tales in which children are abandoned on purpose, the punishments are physical, and obedience is not rewarded. The film is built on that reading. Ofelia is given three tasks by a creature whose trustworthiness is never settled, the rule she breaks is the fairy-tale rule about eating at the wrong table, and the consequence is immediate and not undone. The underworld is offered as real and as possibly a child's way of surviving a fascist stepfather, and the film refuses to say which. Filed MEDIUM: the debt is to the tradition and its cruelty rather than to a particular tale, and the Spanish material is doing as much work.