Mythical underworld beasts clash with the real-life monsters of fascism in Guillermo del Toro’s new film. Seen through the eyes of Ofelia, a lonely young girl caught up in the brutal aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth is the most ambitious work yet by the Mexican writer- director of Cronos and Hellboy. Fusing historical drama with horror film, magical realism with political allegory, Del Toro’s eighth film is that rarest of hybrids: a fairytale for adults.

“A fable is a good way to address issues as opposed to addressing them purely as a war movie in a big, selfimportant way,” says the 42-year-old director. “To me, fascism is the moment when all your choices are removed. You are given one single choice to align to, but the idea of the fable is that choice is what makes you free. That’s a very simple parable for me, and the best way to do that was a fairytale. There was something incredibly attractive in creating a world full of creatures and monsters, but making the human characters much more monstrous than them.”

This is not the first time Del Toro has used the Spanish Civil War as a backdrop for a supernatural tale of childhood innocence. His 2001 ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone, drew on the same historical hinterland. Now a part-time resident of Madrid, the director grew up besotted with Spanish literature, cinema and comics. The civil war brought “a fascism that was agreed to be overlooked by the world”. This struck a personal chord in Mexico, where exiled film-makers such as Luis Buñuel fled Franco.

“Mexico is one of the few countries that, during the civil war period, was politically supportive of the Republican side,” Del Toro says. “Many people exiled from Spain to Mexico were extremely influential in the arts — actors, directors, production designers. Many became good friends of mine growing up. I heard things about the war that I didn’t read in For Whom the Bell Tolls, heh heh! It was not a grand adventure of macho bravado. It was a much more human, compelling, brutal and small drama.”

Most of the brutality in Pan’s Labyrinth is embodied in Captain Vidal, played by Sergi López, who evolves from obsessively neat army officer to bloodthirsty ogre. Some of his sadistic acts may border on pantomime villainy, especially a graphic attack on two innocent hunters. But Del Toro insists that this scene was based on verbatim accounts of incidents in the civil war. “Fascism was not subtle in that era,” he says. “Now it’s subtle, heh heh! But I don’t think Vidal is a cartoon. When he makes his speech of what he believes in — a cleaner, younger, new Spain for his son to be born in — I have seen people like that, who believe they are doing the right thing. He is the darkest monster in the movie but I didn’t feel like shading him with fake positive traits.”

Del Toro is admired for his rich visual style, drawing on a range of influences from Symbolist painters and Victorian illustrators to pulp comic books. But Pan’s Labyrinth is his most painterly composition yet, its stylised studio setting at times recalling the work of Goya, Bosch and even Picasso’s Guernica.

“The world in the movie is 100 per cent created,” he nods. “There is not a single real location except the woods. All the rest was designed and created in a matter for 12 weeks. I find myself, with each movie, more and more inspired by paintings.”

As usual with Del Toro, the creature designs in Pan’s Labyrinth took shape in the sketchbook he always carries with him. He brings it to our interview, fingering its leather covers as we talk, bashfully awaiting an invitation to show off his work. Inside are page upon page of beautifully rendered beauties and beasts, part of a 300-page archive that spans his entire film career. “Four hundred pages if I had the Cronos one, which I gave away in a drunken stupor,” he sighs.

Besides its impressive visuals, Pan’s Labyrinth is also a highly personal story for Del Toro. Like The Devil’s Backbone, it is laced with autobiographical vignettes from his own childhood. This is no sentimental journey but an emotionally charged Freudian frightfest.

“I made the movie about a child, but I always thought of it as an adult movie in terms of both the reality and the fantasy being pretty dark,” Del Toro says. “Because my imagination, growing up, was not all nice fairies and unicorns and castles in the clouds. It was very dark imagination, and the character of the girl is very much like I was as a kid. She has another world but it is not necessarily very benign. She is not escaping, just learning to cope the best she can.”

The roots of Del Toro’s macabre imagination lie in his own unhappy childhood. He was born to an artist mother and car salesman father in 1964 and much of his lonely childhood was spent in the care of a grandmother so conservatively Catholic, Del Toro says, she “made Carrie’s mother look like a liberal hippie”.

At Jesuit school he took beatings in the playground and picked bitter fights with the priests over Catholic dogma. “It wasn’t a nice childhood. It was not Dickensian by any means, but emotionally it was not the best time of my life.”

Even as a wealthy and acclaimed film-maker, Del Toro’s adulthood has not been free of horrors. In 1997 his father was abducted and held for 72 days, until a ransom was paid. Fearing for his own safety, the director left Mexico soon afterwards. He still has a house in Mexico, but mainly lives between Madrid and Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.

“I’ve been in exile my entire life,” he laughs. “If I had my choice I would live in Mexico, but I don’t have that choice because of security. We still get threats. It’s not nice.”

All the same, Del Toro can afford to joke about these grim events. His first bruising brush with a Hollywood studio on the 1997 thriller Mimic was, he quips, even more painful than his father’s abduction. What went wrong? He laughs. “Everything. When you start a movie, and the studio is shooting another movie, that’s what went wrong. I was doing Mimic and they were doing Alien 3½.”

Since then, Del Toro has maintained an arm’s-length relationship with Hollywood, which he calls “the land of the slow no”. He directed the comic-book blockbusters Blade II and Hellboy for major studios, but brings more depth and emotional investment to his independent, Spanishlanguage productions.

The forces that shaped Del Toro’s talent are clearly the same that scarred him for life. He says he is haunted by “growing up in a Catholic, macho-oriented culture when you want to read and write and paint”.

All of which may help to explain why Pan’s Labyrinth leaves such a melancholy aftertaste, with a Gothic tone and solemn ending that would be “unthinkable” in a mainstream Hollywood film. But of course, as Del Toro well knows, not every fairytale has a happy ending.

Pan’s Labyrinth is on general release