When Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, snooty overpaid twerps responded with overwhelming revulsion. Granted, the film is about a woman (Beatrice Dalle) who hooks up with a quartet of randos, each of whom she subsequently butchers and eats; few such events on this planet feel foundationally appropriate as a debut stage for a picture like that. Cannes in particular was, at the time, the unlikeliest and most ill-fitting stage for Denis to show Trouble Every Day. Go back and read the reviews. You’d think the barbarians were at the Croisette’s gates.
What’s especially hilarious about all the contemporaneous pearl-clutching is that Denis wasn’t the first filmmaker to have exhibited a splattery horror movie at Cannes. Sam Raimi, of all people, screened The Evil Dead at Cannes out of competition at Marché du Film in 1982; and Andrzej Żuławski beat her by 20 years, having premiered Possession, his masterpiece, at the festival’s 34 edition the year prior. It’s not as if Denis introduced horror to a demographic previously unfamiliar with it. Critics, the French ones most of all, just weren’t acculturated to horror, and perhaps considered themselves too refined and sophisticated to be caught enjoying genre cinema in public. Mon dieu!
That horror had A Moment at Cannes last month, then, feels like a massive progression of taste and sensibility among the folks who attend the world’s most expensive, and one of its five most prestigious, film festivals. Horror was all over the place, and much of it performed well; Yeong Sang-ho’s (Train to Busan) Colony and Jane Schoenbrun’s (I Saw the TV Glow) Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma met positive receptions; notices for Na Hong-jin’s (The Wailing) Hope and Nicholas Winding Refn’s (The Neon Demon) Her Private Hell were considerably more mixed, though “thumbs up” reactions to both make them sound like my kind of good time. That’s saying nothing of the Blood Window Showcase, the festival’s platform for Latin and Ibero-American horror, fantasy, and sci-fi films, which first kicked off at Marché du Film in 2014. Horror, if I may use a grating modern cliché, has arrived in the movies’ most rarified strata.
If horror is the vibe of the 2020s, Cannes tuning into that wavelength was inevitable. But this development only germinated within the last eight or so years, when films like Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance received high honors in competition during their respective runs at the festival. (Ducournau’s Palme d’Or win is a major milestone, whatever your feelings may be about that weird, disgusting, achingly lovely movie.) The seed was planted long, long ago, neither by Żuławski nor Raimi in the 1980s, nor by Denis in 2001, but rather by Guillermo del Toro in 2006–the year that Pan’s Labyrinth, his sixth picture, enchanted Cannes’ audiences.
Del Toro is known for a great many things, not only his work as a filmmaker but his championship of cinema as a medium, his advocacy for and mentoring of his younger peers in the industry, and his warmth and wisdom as an artist and a human being. Each of these qualities presents itself in his overarching body of work, whether in franchise action movies (Blade 2, Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Pacific Rim), folk tales (The Devil’s Backbone, Cronos), seedy neo-noirs (Nightmare Alley), romances (Frankenstein, The Shape of Water), or spooky metatextual ghost stories (Crimson Peak). Del Toro loves the movies. He loves his monsters, skeletons, spirits, and haunts, and even in his ill-intended human antagonists; if he can appreciate the humanity in a baroque manifestation of the Angel of Death, then surely he feels the same for Bradley Cooper’s shameless 1930s conman in Nightmare Alley, or Michael Shannon’s fascist pigheaded G-man in The Shape of Water–or Sergi López’s vicious Falangist ogre in Pan’s Labyrinth.
Unlike Titane or The Substance, Pan’s Labyrinth won no awards at Cannes, or enjoyed even a single nomination. But unlike Pan’s Labyrinth, neither Titane nor The Substance enjoyed the longest standing ovation in the festival’s history; the latter’s audience could only be bothered to applaud for half the amount of time given by del Toro’s audience in 2006. Compare that to the revolt poured upon Trouble Every Day in 2001, though the comparison isn’t completely fair; Trouble Every Day is a significantly gorier film, Pan’s Labyrinth’s Pale Man sequence and Vidal’s routine displays of merciless brute violence notwithstanding. There’s charm and whimsy in Pan’s Labyrinth that played better for the Cannes crowd, and which clearly worked wonders on American awards associations come 2006’s awards season, during which Pan’s Labyrinth raked in a range of accolades including several Academy Awards, British Film Academy Awards, Goya Awards, Saturn Awards, and Ariel Awards.
Del Toro’s rah-rah boosting of the movies in general, and horror cinema specifically, gained traction in the years that followed, even if it took box office smashes throughout the early 2010s leading into the massive impact of Jordan Peele’s Get Out in 2017 for the industry to catch on. Horror movies are in fact movies, and thus worthy of consideration and acknowledgment on glitzy platforms. Horror doesn’t need all of that to justify itself as a storytelling tradition, of course. The genre’s admirers and adherents have known for ages what narrative horror fiction can reveal about our societies and ourselves. Frankly, the more mainstream horror becomes, the more of its identity it stands to lose, because so much great horror is, to steal a phrase from the late Pauline Kael, great trash, and to discard great trash is to write off the bulk of what comprises horror in the first place.
Pan’s Labyrinth straddles the gap between trash and art the same way that Jean Claude Van Damme once straddled the gap between two Volvo FM trucks on the runway at the shuttered Ciudad Real International Airport. (In a single take, even!) On one hand, the film presents a crisp study of Francoist Spain from the point of view of a child, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), now married into a family with Vidal, whom she fears and loathes and generally avoids recognizing as her stepfather. Her life, and here I must reach deep into my bag of brainy euphemisms, sucks. The bright spots are her mother, Carma (Ariadna Gil); the imminent arrival of her baby brother; her friendship with Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), Vidal’s housekeeper and double agent for the Spanish Maquis; and, last but not least, the Faun (voiced by Pablo Adán, embodied by the great Doug Jones), who believes her to be a reincarnation of the long-lost fairy princess Moanna, and thus represents to her an escape from the hell of her life. Magic, period drama, and a girl’s coming of age make a tantalizing potion for the horror-averse.
Which is good, because the horror in Pan’s Labyrinth lives up to the name. The Pale Man (also played by Jones, that unbelievable slacker) remains one of horror’s singularly terrifying big-screen figures in this century, and arguably deserves membership on the all-timer’s list beside the likes of the Thing, Regan MacNeil, Pinhead, the xenomorph, and so on. And while Vidal is a mortal man, he looks like a monster in his own right by the movie’s end, a rampaging savage with half a Glasgow smile and Ofelia’s blood quite literally on his hands. The Pale Man devours children, as seen in gruesome murals that adorn the walls of his lair. Vidal murders them without hesitation. Both, it goes without saying, are bad. One can’t claim that Vidal is the worse of the two, though, and that the Pale Man is simply acting according to his nature, because Vidal’s nature–all he knows, all he is–is cruelty. (Jones, del Toro, his makeup effects supervisor David Martí, and artist Sergio Sandoval rightly get the glory for their collaborative efforts in bringing the Pale Man to life, but spare some for Lopez’s staggering portrait of a man twisted into a beast by an alluded to unhappy relationship to his father.)
Del Toro, of course, knows cruelty too. It’s a cornerstone of his movies. But he also knows beauty, both aesthetic and emotional, and how to dovetail those traits with the stuff of nightmares as well as life’s vicissitudes. That he has gone on to become an awards ceremony mainstay is as surprising as it isn’t; he isn’t so much the beneficiary of shifts in the taste writ large, but a driver the taste’s shifting. Before directors like James Wan, Peele, Ari Aster, and Robert Eggers convinced the general moviegoing public that they’re horror fans just like 90s kids raised on Tales from the Crypt are horror fans, del Toro sculpted a vision of horror accessible to both of these demographics, by delivering the goods–the Pale Man, the Faun, the barbaric face smash scene–then grounding them in his preoccupations as a filmmaker, and scaffolding the plot through timeless fantasy.
