How Francisco Goya shaped a Guillermo del Toro monster
When Guillermo del Toro was mentally plotting Pan’s Labyrinth, he took to jotting down ideas in a notebook. By the time production began, it was rain-weathered and full of scribbled notes, and nestled somewhere in the pages was one crucial name: Francisco Goya. The last of the Old Masters, Goya, was famous for creating hellish visions of human cruelty after being profoundly affected by war. His paintings were a perfect starting point for del Toro, given they often depicted political corruption and fantastical beats, both of which are heavily featured in the 2006 film.
Del Toro, writing in The Guardian, said Goya was an “obvious reference”, his blend of surreal darkness with the lightness of fantasy lending itself to his distinctive eye for almost grotesque beauty.
Although he could have picked virtually any Goya work from the Black Paintings series, one painting became a guiding visual force. “Specifically with regards to the character of the Pale Man,” explains del Toro. “There is a scene in which the Pale Man bites the heads off the fairies. That comes straight from Goya’s painting of Saturn devouring his son.”
Goya had painted it directly on the walls of his house as he became increasingly deaf, ill and disillusioned. Saturn Devouring His Son was inspired by the Greek myth of Titan Cronus, otherwise known as Saturn in Roman mythology, who became so afraid his children might topple his power that he ate each one when they were born. The visuals are stark, the crazed eyes of Saturn wide open, fully taking in the horror as he bites in hunks of flesh.
His hunching form and shockingly pale skin informed the initial sketches of the Pale Man, which were brought to life by concept artist Sergio Sandoval, who was aiming for “a head without any kind of faction on its face”. The Pale Man was laboriously crafted with a mixture of practical and digital effects engineered to achieve the uncanny freakishness of Goya’s paintings, the darkest of which combine inherently human fears with mystical imagery.
Goya had a natural appeal to del Toro because “fairytales pit harsh circumstances against a fantasy world,” which he intended to do when he explored Francoist Spain during the 1940s with the moralistic tone of a twisted fairytale.
“Pan’s Labyrinth is no different,” he continued. “Fairytale logic is not linear; it’s random. When people ask, ‘Why does the Pale Man have his eyeballs in his hand?’ I say: ‘Hey, because that’s the way things are.’ I suspect that the linear, logical mind is going to have a tough time with Pan’s Labyrinth.”
However, fans of the darkest works of Goya, which more than qualify as some of the most horrific in art history, will have no problem with it.
