I suspect most fans of folklore are to some extent a fan of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, if not overtly then at least in secret. I certainly am. I wanted to look at the film to see what ideas I could spot that derived from other tales, and what might be learnt from the story and its telling that might reinforce my understanding of fairy lore.
In doing so I’d be taking a cue from my folklorist heroine, Katherine Briggs – primarily to keep a critical eye out for a descent into whimsy, prettifying the creatures, simplifying their morality and denying their capriciousness.
Seeing as I had already watched the film a number of times before deciding to examine it in this manner I already knew what to expect, so I thought I’d cast a similarly critical eye over Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which I was watching for the first time.
Surely the summer superhero blockbuster would provide a far shallower and more whimsical vision than the relative oddity of the foreign language fable that owed so much less to Hollywood?
THEMES – CHOICE, DISOBEDIENCE AND FERTILITY Del Toro claims the film has themes of disobedience and choice. He says in the director’s commentary that each of the characters are at a crossroads in their lives – a claim that is easier to see in some than others. This claim may have a metaphorical significance too though – in folklore crossroads are places where the connection to the spirit world and reality is thin, and where death and the devil hold an influence. That the choices that many of the characters will make will lead them to evil acts and/or the ends of their lives surely feeds back to this idea that they are at a crossroads, even though it is not a literal feature of the film.
The book Ofelia, the heroine, reads is referred to as “The Book of Crossroads”. The book outlines the three tasks she is to complete in order to reclaim her right to live as a fairy princess, and also warns her of danger to her mortal mother – who falls very ill and nearly miscarries her unborn child.
Disobedience is a theme that features in many myths and legends. Ofelia’s inability to perform some of the tasks set before her does not invalidate her position as a heroine, and the creatures whose rules she violates decide to offer her further opportunities to make amends. Her success is not judged to be as important as the spirit in which she carries out the tasks. She is a rather quiet and modest heroine – and perhaps it is her humility that spares her from hubris. Were she Icarus she would fly too close to the sun, but such an act would not necessarily doom her because she is not boastful.
Many tales involving fairy lore make fertility a central issue of the story, and Pan’s Labyrinth deals with it explicitly – in particular there is a theme of difficult birth, both of Ofelia giving birth to her self as the heir to a magical royal family and of her mortal mother’s troubles in bringing her baby brother to term.
The fairy realm is given a strong visual connection to wombs and birth canals. The colour palette used in scenes such as the Pale Man’s dining room is one of placental reds and pale flesh, the old fig tree in which a giant toad hides resembles the shape of a uterus and pair of fallopian tubes, with the crevice by which Ofelia enters the tree looking somewhat like a gaping vulva. Cascading pollen also accompanies magical scenes and appears whenever the uncanny impresses upon the real.
CREATURES OF PAN’S LABYRINTH – A BOTANICAL BIAS I was waiting to come across some evidence that Pan’s Labyrinth contained an environmental message, though it wasn’t something del Toro broached in his commentary (though he did touch upon it in Hellboy II). I do perceive a very subtle (perhaps even subconscious) environmental sympathy in the film, which I perceive from the fact that there seems to be such a strong connection between the fairies of Pan’s Labyrinth and the plant world.
The cascading pollen mentioned earlier foreshadows this, but all the creatures and fairytales mentioned in Pan’s Labyrinth strike me as involving a botanical connection.
The first fairy encountered in the story is a diminutive green sprite initially disguised as a stick insect (an insect that disguises itself as part of a plant). Ofelia, guessing at some sort of hidden nature to the fairy, shows it an illustration of what she believes fairies should look like – a rather whimsical drawing owing a deal to Victorian flower fairies. The insect undergoes a metamorphosis into a shape that resembles the drawing, though one of the details it doesn’t quite manage to reproduce is the wings – instead of the insect wings of the original it sprouts two pairs of leaves with which it flies.
Ofelia is introduced to the faun a short while later. The creature also has a strongly botanical appearance, at first appearing to be nothing more than some tangle of overgrown wood. The skin of the faun resembles the bark of an Ash tree and it creaks like wood as it moves its joints. Moss and ferns adorn it like an old statue left out in the rain. The faun also is seen eating raw meat – something del Toro claims makes it seem more morally ambivalent (is he a vegetarian I wonder).
The giant toad that Ofelia is required to confront in order to pass her first task is not a plant, but it does threaten the life of a fig tree in whose roots it has nested and who it has poisoned.
Ofelia is also clearly not a plant, but seems to interact with the plant world in an almost symbiotic way. When Ofelia is asked to improvise a story to tell her unborn brother she riffs on the botanical theme, describing a rose upon a hill that was an object of desire – conferring immortality on the person who picked it – a task made impossible by the thicket of poisonous thorns that surrounded it. Ofelia is made a significant present of a green dress, and her carelessness with it contributes to her mother’s illness, which Ofelia attempts to assuage by feeding her own blood to a mandrake root. It is Ofelia’s consumption of fruit which makes a disaster of her mission to the Pale Man’s dining room. When she dies Ofelia is reborn in the magical realm as a fairytale princess, and leaves form a part of her family’s heraldry. In the real world a white flower grows as a sign of her passing.
The botanical motifs may be no more than a way to stress the otherness of the fairy creatures in the films – but the fact that threats to the plant world are associated with the more obviously adversarial creatures, and the health or reproduction of plants with the more benign ones, may indicate an idea that these creatures are avatars of the natural world and protective of it (or I could just be projecting my own ideas).
AN OGRE OF ORGANISED POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS The Pale Man is the most memorable creation of Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro apparently claimed that creating a good monster should give you a hard-on – in which case he must have been painfully priapic on the day he invented the Pale Man.
Del Toro claims the Ogre is meant to represent faceless politics and religion. It sits at a sumptuous feast in a dining room that echoes an earlier scene in which the fascist captain sits at the head of a table. The Ogre has access to a great deal of delicious looking food – but seems only interested in eating kids and fairies.
The religious allusions are more interesting to me than the political, and contribute far more to the look of the creature. Holes in the hands echo the stigmata of Christ, and the eyes placed on the platter are a tribute to the passion of St Lucy. It’s not just Christian symbology at work here, as the manner in which the Pale Man snacks on the fairies it captures is inspired by Goya’s painting of Saturn eating his children.
The Pale Man seems to be all about rules and the punishments we are threatened with for violating them. Perhaps it is a deliberate irony then that one of the film’s few obvious debts to widely understood folklore is shown in this scene, the ‘rule’ that eating food in the fairy realm leads to disaster. Ofelia’s consumption of a few grapes does not trap her in fairyland (the typical punishment for this act) but awakes the Ogre and imperils her quest. Rather than trapping her in the fairy realm, Ofelia's consumption of fruit effectively forces her out - and so a reference to traditional folklore is made and subverted, which reinforces the film’s theme of choice and disobedience.
Sit Down by the Fire can be found on Should I Fall From Grace With God by The Pogues, the LP was their biggest chart success (reaching #3 in th UK charts and #88 in the US) and spawned their most famous song (and - FACT! - best popular Christmas song of all time) - Fairytale of New York. Anyway, Sit Down by the Fire seems to be very well informed as to certain aspects of fairy folklore (and has a nice bit of rude bathos at the end).
Sit down by the fire And I'll tell you a story To send you away to your bed Of the things you hear creeping When everyone's sleeping And you wish you were out here instead
It isn't the mice in the wall It isn't the wind in the well But each night they march Out of that hole in the wall [1] Passing through on their way Out of hell [2]
They're the things that you see When you wake up and scream The cold things that follow you [3] Down the Boreen [4] They live in the small ring of trees on the hill [5] Up at the top of the field
And they dance on the rain And they dance on the wind They tap on the window When no-one is in And if ever you see them
Pretend that you're dead Or they'll bite off your head They'll rip out your liver And dance on your neck They dance on your head They dance on your chest They give you the cramp And the colic for jest [6]
They're the things that you see When you wake up and scream The cold things that follow you Down the Boreen They live in the small ring of trees on the hill Up at the top of the field
They play on the wind They sing on the rain They dance on your eyes They dance in your brain [7]
Remember this place It is damp and it's cold The best place on earth But it's dark and it's old So lie near the wall And cover your head Good night and God bless, Now fuck off to bed
[1] The holes that can sometimes be found in planks of wood are occasionally referred to as elf-bores, reflecting the belief that a piece of wood from which the knot has dropped out was the operation of the fairies. It is sometimes said that to look through an elf-bore is to view fairy-land (and such voyeurism was not considered wise).
The elf-bore features in one famous folktale in particular, commonly known as The Boggart, in which one of the children teases the creature repeatedly by shoving a shoehorn through “a large knothole” in a closet wall “behind which the Boggart lived”. This action angered the Boggart so that one day he took the shoehorn and threw it so violently at the young man that it “hurt him badly” and (according to his father) “almost killed” him.
[2] Fairyland is often thought to be part of an underworld that also includes Hell and fairies sometimes seem to have a symbiotic relationship with Hell, or are indebted to it in some way. This indebtedness leads to the teind – a payment the fairies have to make every seven years to the devil. A variety of reasons are given for this, including theories that fairyland might be an area of hell that the Fairies had loaned off of the devil.
A third belief held that they were a class of "demoted" angels. One popular story held that when the angels revolted, God ordered the gates shut; those still in heaven remained angels, those in hell became devils, and those caught in between became fairies. Others held that they had been thrown out of heaven, not being good enough, but they were not evil enough for hell. This may explain the tradition that they had to pay a "teind" or tithe to Hell. As fallen angels, though not quite devils, they could be seen as subject of the Devil.
[3] Certain fairies are described as cold, especially those who have something in common with ghosts. The Cauld Lad of Hylton strikes me as a particularly notable example. In fact it is a gift of clothes that finally exorcises him. A summary of his story can be found on wikipedia.
[4] A boreen is an Irish term for a narrow, rough, unsurfaced road, or a small, narrow urban road.
[5] I’m not too familiar with any obvious links between rings of trees and fairies, though obvious links between mushroom rings and fairies exist, or stone circles and fairies.
Having said that, the few times I have visited ancient earthworks on hills they have been notable for having trees upon them, whilst often the surrounding land is rocky and barren. I suppose that when earth is moved onto an otherwise barren hill trees and bushes can take root there whereas the surrounding earth is too shallow for them. So perhaps this line might infer an old barrow or hill fort.
Quite besides that it seems fitting for a natural landmark, such as a spinney, to provide a home for the fairies.
[6] The infliction of various ailments was often blamed on fairies, and cramp and colic are particularly associated with them. Fairies are described as inflicting aches, pains and ailments on people by pinching or by flinging small sharp stones known as elf-shot.
[7] Hallucinogenic visions and mental illnesses are also associated with fairies. They seem to me to have long been blamed for the effects of eating the wrong variety of wild mushroom, or for things like dementia, alcoholism, post-natal depression, strokes and suchlike.
And - at the end of the day - Shane MacGowan is currently about as close as a human gets in terms of sound and appearance to some sort of Bogle or Hobyah, and he parties like a Cluricane. Huzzah for the Pogues!
It’s been a couple of weeks since I watched The Orphanage and I’m still sometimes finding myself checking dark nooks and crannies for spooky kids as I move about the house after dark.
In other words, it was an awesome horror movie and I’m overjoyed that I got to see it. I used to be terrified of scary films as a kid (to the extent of fleeing the house rather than finish watching a film even as naff as Alligator), but I thought I had gotten jaded in the years since, most horror movies just strike me as either icky, a slightly nauseating experience like being forced to handle slugs, or shocking - but cheaply so, like the dream sequences in the remake of The Omen, they’re good at making me jump but as I don’t have any religious beliefs what’s there to provoke any sort of uneasy thoughts beyond the initial shocks and violence?
So horror movies either left me feeling unmoved, or left me acknowledging that they had shocked me, but not for any thought-provoking reason. Rather just because they had used the same crass tricks as a ghost train, or someone who knows when to shout “Boo!” Slasher movies never did anything for me because documentaries about killers are so much more disturbing, movies that rely on demons and devils never move me because I’m not a believer in heaven and hell – but a good ghost story can still do it for some reason.
The Orphanage was clever, and it left me feeling genuinely spooked for the first time in years. In most horror movies I find I stop sympathising with the protagonists if they persist in examining weird lights and rustling bushes, but in The Orphanage you knew why the heroine had to persist in roaming around her sprawling, creaking, shadow-filled house. Instead of thinking “oh don’t be so stupid” all I thought was “oh – you are being really brave!”
My favourite thing about the film was that is eschewed the use of “evil” (as in an inborn-maliciousness or a deliberate defiance of a commonly understood morality) as a motivator for its antagonists or as an explanation for their behaviour. Even the most irredeemable of the characters (some are more vindictive and unreasonable than others, of course) win some sympathy, and even though some the acts committed in the film are very cruel, injurious and unjust – the circumstances leading up to these acts render them, in the wider picture, understandable to a certain degree.
The worst thing about stories you enjoy tends to be the ending, but the resolution to the film was also satisfying. For a while it looked like it might be unremittingly grim with no sort of resolution, but it also threatened to resolve things with a happy ending. However, it managed to negotiate a bittersweet compromise, which felt apt.
Still, I was rather interested in what it was about the film that left me feeling quite so disturbed. I came across this review in the Guardian that I think may be on to something.
A sinuous modern twist is applied to the classic ghost story form by screenwriter Sergio Sánchez and director Juan Antonio Bayona. Their chiller, set in contemporary Spain, is involving and disturbing, and revives the genre's great theme: our profound yet unacknowledged fear of children. We are afraid of their vulnerability, which is our vulnerability, and the mysterious otherness of their private, mental worlds.
And this in turn got me thinking about the most disturbing of acts blamed on fairies, and a theme of the Skriker and also something that may go on to give some form of explanation for (or at least provide an influence to) the tale of Yallery Brown, which I was puzzling over a month ago.
In her essay for Fairies and the Folklore of Disability Susan Schoon Eberly discusses Changelings and how myths surrounding them may have derived from stories of child sacrifice. In particular she mentions that “the tale of Yallery Brown may in fact tell of a child left to die under a stone”, and talks about how in certain points in Britain’s history children may have been killed or abandoned in order to perform such services as the placation of fertility spirits or other sacrificial functions. Roman historical records apparently mention how deformed children, or those that display signs of congenital disability, might even have been set aside and raised so that an emergency human sacrifice would be on hand the next time there was a natural disaster or bad harvest. I’m certain the pre-Roman tribes of the British Isles hardly treated disabled offspring with greater care.
On Peta Jinnath Andersen’s blog there is a in-depth discussion of some of the details Eberly raises, as well as interesting thoughts on Changelings in general. There’s far more there than I want to go into now but of particular interest to the Yallery Brown story is the examination of the characteristics of various congenital disabilities and how they compare to the reported descriptions of various types of fairy.
Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which physical aspects of aging are greatly accelerated, and few affected children live past age 13. About 1 in 8 million babies are born with this condition. It is a genetic condition, but occurs sporadically and is usually not inherited in families.
Andersen’s blog post also mentions that fairy lore may have existed as a kind of covenant between members of poor communities in the past. They provided a way to educate people about poisonous plants and dangerous environments, or to encourage everyone in the community to be hygienic and hard working. As these people didn’t have the benefit of a modern education, and as ancient religious texts may not have given advice literally relevant to some of the situations a society faced in the past, perhaps putting “the fear of the fairies” into people was a good way to enforce a relevant set of values and behaviours. The bible may not literally tell you to keep your milk churn clean or your coulter sharp, so let’s invent and tell some tales that do.
One of the situations that probably sorely tested a poor community in the past was the prospect of raising a disabled child, and this may have been another root of tales about Changelings. In poor communities it may have been seen as socially acceptable (if not socially responsible) to blame a sickening or disabled child on the fairies, to the extent of accusing them of replacing the child with one of their own, and so rid yourself of the child by subjecting it to the ordeals that fairy lore proscribes in such circumstances – ordeals that almost certainly end with the death of the unwanted baby.
In short, beliefs about Changelings may well have been used to justify the murder of children.
I have mixed feelings about pondering on academic explanations for beliefs about fairies, not because I believe in fairies (I find a stated belief in fairies either deceitful and cynical or extremely naive) but because I think it might do something to the appreciation of the stories. At the end of the day I think it’s important to remember that Yallery Brown was a story told by a labourer to Mary Balfour, a collector of Lincolnshire folktales, therefore we can only infer in the vaguest manner about what might have provided the inspiration for the story. The web is full of references to Yallery Brown being a Yarthkin who didn’t receive proper sacrifices in the past, and so became bitter – but there is no evidence for this being the case, it is simply an attempt by people who figure that such a lack of respect might turn a Yarthkin bad in the same way that mistreated Brownies are said to become malicious.
The startling thing about the tale is Yallery’s malice and how relentlessly he seems to punish Tom Tiver. Because his malice is so remarkable it is tempting to find a reason for it, but I don’t want to loose sight of the fact that, as far as I am aware, all a modern audience knows about Yallery Brown is as a result of the record of the labourer’s tale.
Perhaps it was a tale handed down throughout the years that has, at its root, a story of a young child suffering from Progeria being abandoned. It may even carry a warning about refusing to abandon such children (the life of someone who tries to care for a child with a congenital illness in such an environment is probably going to be one of unrewarded toil).
Just as easily though it could be a spooky tale told by a teller canny enough to know about how audiences react to portrayals of the childlike juxtaposed against the tales of the uncanny – just like the makers of The Orphanage (presuming, of course, that the makers of the film had no ulterior motive or message that I have managed to miss).
This turned into a huge and somewhat incoherant ramble - and I'm not even sure what the whole point of it is. I suppose I will try and sum it up by saying that whilst it is very satisfying to try and think up real world reasons behind folktales the evidence behind such reasoning is scant and I feel that it is overly bold of some commentators to treat it as an open and shut case.
I suspect most fans of folklore are to some extent a fan of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, if not overtly then at least in secret. I certainly am. I wanted to look at the film to see what ideas I could spot that derived from other tales, and what might be learnt from the story and its telling that might reinforce my understanding of fairy lore.
The Pale Man is the most memorable creation of Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro apparently claimed that creating a good monster should give you a hard-on – in which case he must have been painfully priapic on the day he invented the Pale Man.