Resumen de The Spanish civil war through the phantasmagorical lens of Guillermo del Toro
Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is probably best known for his English-language horror and fantasy-genre films. In 2001 however, Del Toro’s work began to move in a new direction, with the release of El espinazo del diablo, a ghost story set in Spain in the final year of the Spanish Civil War. Five years later in 2006 he directed his second Spanish-language film to be set in Spain, El laberinto del fauno, a fairy tale narrative set in the post-war of 1944, foregrounding the horrors of life under fascism and the resistance to the Francoist regime. Given the popularizing and mainstreaming effect of Del Toro’s “magical treatment”, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that his ghost story and fairy tale might have produced a simplistic view of Spain’s conflict. I will argue that such is not the case. Employing the refractionary lens of the phantasmagorical, Del Toro’s representation of the violence and oppression of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath through the eyes of orphaned and traumatized children presents Spain as an incomprehensible and monstrous madre patria, a counter-narrative to any nostalgic or longed for vision of the mother country as a unified and all-embracing nation.
