Latest / Film Moon Stone - Film Reviews and Recomme / S01 - Gothic Labyrinths, Clockwork, and the Tragic Poetry of Dark Fairy Tales

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S01 - Gothic Labyrinths, Clockwork, and the Tragic Poetry of Dark Fairy Tales · Film Moon Stone - Film Reviews and Recomme

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A crumbling limestone labyrinth hidden beneath the dark pine canopy
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: of northern Spain. The rhythmic metallic ticking of a cracked
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: pocket watch counting down the seconds in the dead of night.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: A pale creature with eyes set directly into the palms
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  Speaker 1: of its hands sitting motionless at a banquet table piled
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: high with forbidden fruit while above ground real world fascism
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: marches through the shadows. Tonight, we descend into the ruined
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: arches of modern Gothic cinema in Bristow, where the monsters
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: lurking in the dark are far more merciful than the
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: men wearing military uniforms.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: This is Phil Moonstone. I am Alberto Van Stone. Welcome
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: back into the screening room, my friends.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Before we unlock the stone gates of the labyrinth tonight,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: a quick and heartfelt bow to our community of midnight cinephiles.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Over on Instagram, Handel at Celluloid Gothic sent in a
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: stunning frame analysis of dark fantasy lighting from the early 1980s.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Thank you for that brilliant breakdown.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: On YouTube, Marcus in Prague commented that these deep dives
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: into film history have become his favorite midnight companion at
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: his editing desk. And on Facebook, Eleanor Vance wrote that
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: she longs for cinema that treats adult grief and childhood
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: fear with genuine literary elegance. Our standout comment this week,
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: across all platforms, with over 8,400 likes on YouTube, came
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: from a dedicated viewer, Handel at GothicReal06. And they asked, Alberto,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: why do films like Pan's Labyrinth hurt so beautifully? Why
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: do the greatest dark fairy tales always balance wonder right
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: on the razor edge of profound tragedy? That question, my friend,
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  Speaker 1: is the master key that unlocks the entire labyrinth, because
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the great storytellers understood that a fairy tale without danger
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  Speaker 1: is not a story at all.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: It is merely an illusion.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Today's chapter is called Gothic Labyrinths, Clockwork, and the Tragic
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Poetry of Dark Fairy Tales. Let us return to the
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: year 2006, when Mexican visionary director Guillermo del Toro released
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Pan's Labyrinth, For nearly a century, commercial Hollywood cinema had
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  Speaker 1: taken the European oral tradition and scrubbed it sterile. Generations
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  Speaker 1: of moviegoers were raised on the comfortable lie that fairy
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: tales were supposed to be pastel-colored morality plays with dancing
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: teacups and tidy.
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  Speaker 2: Cheerful resolutions.
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  Speaker 1: Del Toro understood something far older and far more dangerous.
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  Speaker 1: He looked back to the original 19th century literary masters,
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  Speaker 1: the unvarnished folklore of the Brothers Grimm, the tragic poetry
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  Speaker 1: of Hans Christian Andersen, and the dark, tangled pen-and-ink illustrations
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  Speaker 1: of Arthur Rackham. He understood that ancient fairy tales were
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: never designed to comfort children into docile sleep. Fairy tales
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: were armor. They were psychological maps forged by vulnerable human
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: beings to help them survive a violent, unpredictable, and indifferent world.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Set in the year 1944, in the suffocating aftermath of
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: the Spanish Civil War, the film presents us with two
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: parallel realities. In the physical world, we have Captain Vidal,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: an authoritarian commander stationed at an abandoned mountain mill, hunting
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the remaining anti-fascist rebels in the forest. Notice how del
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Toro constructs Vidal's world through cinematic technique.
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  Speaker 2: It is entirely mechanical.
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  Speaker 1: It is cold slate grays, sterile steel blues, straight razor lines,
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  Speaker 1: and razor blades. Vidal lives by the relentless ticking of
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  Speaker 1: his dead father's pocket watch. The glass of the watch
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  Speaker 1: face is cracked, yet he cleans it obsessively. To Vidal,
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  Speaker 1: existence is not about love, wonder, or connection. It is
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  Speaker 1: about control, hierarchy, and precision. His cruelty is frightening precisely
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  Speaker 1: because it is clean, bureaucratic, and devoid of empathy. And
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  Speaker 1: directly against that cold mechanical machinery stands Ophelia, an imaginative
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: 11-year-old girl arriving with her pregnant, ailing mother, clutching a
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  Speaker 1: leather-bound book of fairy tales to her chest. When she
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: discovers an ancient, overgrown stone labyrinth sleeping in the woods,
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  Speaker 1: she is not seeking a playground. She is seeking a
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: moral universe that makes sense. And what an astonishing marvel
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: of physical craftsmanship that subterranean world is. Del Toro famously
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: refused to shoot his creatures and sets against sterile green backdrops.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: Notice the visual contrast.
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  Speaker 1: While Vidal's world is cold, blue, and linear, the underground
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  Speaker 1: realm is painted in deep ambers, rich crimsons, and fertile
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  Speaker 1: mossy greens. It is curved and organic, resembling an ancient
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: subterranean womb. And then, you meet the fawn. Portrayed by
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: the legendary creature performer Doug Jones, the faun required five
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: grueling hours in the prosthetic makeup chair every single morning.
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  Speaker 2: His horns were hand sculpted to resemble gnarled tree branches.
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  Speaker 1: His legs were mounted on custom mechanical stilts that forced
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: his body into the unsteady trembling gait of a wild animal.
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  Speaker 1: His animatronic ears twitched with genuine biological subtlety. The faun
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  Speaker 1: is not a gentle guardian angel. He is ancient, unpredictable
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  Speaker 1: and dangerous, smelling of wet autumn earth, dead leaves and
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  Speaker 1: crushed beetles.
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  Speaker 2: He speaks with a.
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  Speaker 1: Low, gravelly rasp, testing Ophelia's courage and reminding us that
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: ancient magic always demands a sacrifice. And then, we arrive
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: at the banquet hall of the Pale Man. That five-minute
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: sequence remains one of the most terrifying, masterfully constructed vignettes
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: in cinematic history. Examine the visual metaphor. The table is
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: overflowing with roasted meats, silver platters, and ripe red fruits,
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  Speaker 1: yet the monster sitting at the head of the table
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  Speaker 1: is skin, bone, and starvation. On the walls behind him
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  Speaker 1: are frescoes depicting him devouring innocent children. Del Toro borrows
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: directly from the nightmarish painting Saturn Devouring His Son by
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Master Francisco Goya. The pale man does not represent a
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  Speaker 1: fantasy beast from outer space. He represents institutional greed. He
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: is the church, the state, and the military elite that
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  Speaker 1: feast on the labor of the vulnerable while children starve
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  Speaker 1: in the cold. When Ophelia succumbs to the temptation of
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  Speaker 1: two grapes and the monster slowly presses those glass eyes
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  Speaker 1: into the palms of his hands, the horror suffocates us
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  Speaker 1: because our subconscious mind recognizes the cruelty of the real
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: world staring right back at us, And this brings us
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  Speaker 1: to the profound climax of the film. Fairy tales do
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  Speaker 1: not teach children that monsters exist. Children already know monsters exist.
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  Speaker 1: Fairy tales teach children that monsters can be defeated through
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  Speaker 1: moral disobedience. When the Fawn commands Ophelia to surrender her
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  Speaker 1: newborn baby brother so that a drop of innocent blood
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  Speaker 1: may open the gates.
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  Speaker 2: To the Golden Kingdom, she refuses. She chooses death over complicity.
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  Speaker 1: In the physical world, Vidal's bullet cuts her down, and
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: she bleeds quietly into the stone well beneath the full moon.
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  Speaker 1: Yet in that exact same heartbeat, her spirit ascends to
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  Speaker 1: a magnificent sun-drenched throne room where her true parents welcome
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  Speaker 1: her home. And on the surface, a tiny white rose
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  Speaker 1: blossoms from a dead wooden branch. Del Toro leaves the
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  Speaker 1: final question in our hands. Was the labyrinth real, or
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  Speaker 1: was it the dying dream of a child seeking meaning
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  Speaker 1: in a brutal reality?
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  Speaker 2: The answer is that it does not matter, because Ophelia's
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: choice was real. Her refusal to obey cruelty was real.
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  Speaker 1: And that is why dark fairy tales will outlive every empire,
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  Speaker 1: every tyrant, and every passing cinematic trend. They remind us
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  Speaker 1: that inside the human spirit, there is a fierce, incorruptible
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  Speaker 1: light that no darkness can ever extinguish. Thank you for
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: listening to Film Moonstone. Make sure to follow the show
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. Leave your thoughts in the
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: comments and keep your wonder alive in the dark. I
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: am Alberto Vanstone and I will see you on the
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  Speaker 1: silver screen.