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Oscar Horrors continues with Michael on everyone's favorite Guillermo del Toro film
HERE LIES... Pan’s Labyrinth, winner of the 2006 Oscar for Best Art Direction.
I could go through Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth a scene at a time picking out all the brilliant little details that makes its imagery so indelible, but for this post, let’s limit our focus to the film’s most famous scene: The Pale Man. The monster that has a table full of delicious food but only feeds, to use del Toro’s words, “on the blood of the innocent.” There have been thousands of scenes where one form of monster or another stalks the story’s protagonist. It is one of the basic equations of the horror genre. So what do set decorator Pilar Revuelta and art director Eugenio Cabellero do with this one that shakes the viewer on such an elemental level?
Of course it helps to start with one of the all time horrifying creatures in all of cinema. Del Toro instructed the team to imagine an old obese man who quickly lost a lot of weight, and when that proved insufficiently nightmare-inducing proceeded to erase the face of their designs.
But beyond the surface there are many elements to the scene most viewers will only register subconsciously. Like...
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