Del Toro and the old stories: folklore in his films

Guillermo del Toro builds his films from old material, yet the effect is rarely museum-like. Fairy tales, Catholic legends, ghost stories and invented Mexican myths become engines for questions about violence, memory and belonging. His creatures are frightening, but the deepest horror in his work often comes from adults who behave like monsters while insisting on ordinary explanations.

Del Toro treats inherited stories as living arguments, not a fixed inventory of national customs. A goblin can expose dictatorship; a water spirit can challenge what society calls human; a wooden boy can outlive the war that made him. Folklore survives because communities keep reshaping it, and these films show that reshaping with unusual force.

Folklore as an archive of power

Del Toro’s method is associative. He joins the Spanish Civil War to an orphanage haunting, wartime France to a girl’s private mythology, and 1962 Baltimore to a creature beside mermaids and water sprites. The connections feel fanciful, yet they sharpen historical questions. Myth softens the violence of the record, while history gives folklore moral urgency.

A Polish parallel comes through Leśmian’s mythic imagination, where talking animals and forest beings unsettle ordinary life. Bruno Schulz and other Polish modernists likewise made folklore strange without reducing it to nostalgia. Del Toro treats inherited tales as psychological material: the witch, revenant and impossible child become figures for repression, exile and the fear of being recognised as an outsider.

Mexico as an imagined myth

His Mexico is deliberately constructed. The settings draw on rural architecture, Catholic ritual and the idea of a republic shaped by many histories, yet they also reproduce the fantasy Mexico outsiders often expect. Calling that imagery traditional would mistake an aesthetic for an ethnographic record. A painted face or distant bell can be beautiful and ideologically loaded at once.

Cronos (1993) is the clearest example. Its scarab-shaped machine resembles an antique and operates like a vampire, delivering youth through blood while linking that bargain to conquest and cultural theft. The film’s theatrical passages add another layer, as a performer is trapped inside a melodrama about wrongful imprisonment. In The Devil’s Backbone (2001), a ghost’s revenge arrives inside the political violence of Franco’s Spain. Folklore becomes a language through which suppressed stories return.

Fairy tales against adult cruelty

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) makes that language explicit. The girl’s storybook rules provide a moral map, while Captain Vidal’s household embodies an order calling itself practical and necessary. The Pale Man resembles an ogre from a children’s tale; the deepest terror lies in Vidal’s cold authority. Del Toro refuses the comfortable division between fantasy and reality. The fable tells the truth about the world that has failed her.

The Shape of Water (2017) moves the argument into romantic fable. Its mute janitor, laboratory creature and advertising pin-seller loosely revise Beauty and the Beast and older stories of water spirits. Del Toro makes the fairy tale inclusive and bodily, yet resists a completely happy resolution. Recognition arrives as mutual vulnerability, not transformation into an acceptable social type. Related arguments about cinematic fairy tales can be found in film essays.

Monsters with political memory

Pinocchio (2022) asks what an inherited character means after industrial war and state violence. Geppetto’s grief, the wooden boy’s forbidden reading and the monstrous figures give Carlo Collodi’s story a new moral setting. Frankenstein (2024) returns to Mary Shelley’s Gothic frame, placing its creature among people who call themselves rational while punishing him for emotional response. In each, the old tale disputes who may become human.

That is why del Toro’s monsters carry political memory. They may live beyond a village or an institution, but their bodies register what power has done to ordinary lives. The Devil’s Backbone makes this painfully ambiguous: an apparent haunting carries a dead child’s anger, while the living director creates a regime of fear around the orphans. The film asks viewers to weigh causation, guilt and silence, not merely admire a startling ghost.

Music as an oral inheritance

Music makes the inheritance audible. Javier Navarrete’s scores for The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth use melody as a fragile counterweight to institutional harshness. A thin flute can sound innocent because it belongs to play and childhood; when repeated beside an image of hunger, it acquires something more unsettled. The music does not explain the supernatural. It lets a familiar folk-like sound coexist with dread.

Broader reflections on musical atmosphere show how such choices work beyond plot. In Cronos, Gerry Rosado’s score combines an electronic pulse with textures that make a workshop of old objects uncanny. Elsewhere, the songs in Pinocchio give characters something communal to lose. Sound completes del Toro’s folklore: an inherited melody can recall safety, carry violence or promise that another world remains possible.

Folklore on Australian screens

These layers meet audiences in recognisably Australian settings. The Melbourne International Film Festival’s late-night programmes, retrospectives and discussions suit del Toro’s mixture of genre cinema and visual poetry. In Sydney, the Polish Film Festival keeps regional stories, including Polish folklore, in public conversation; Canberra’s National Film and Sound Archive of Australia offers another route into cultural memory. A Sunday-afternoon cinema trip or late double feature can frame the comparison.

The local market also shapes access. Del Toro’s work may have a major studio campaign, yet local audiences often encounter it through festival seasons, subtitled programmes, streaming shelves and collectors buying special editions. Public exhibition must comply with the Australian Classification Board’s decisions: a film refused classification cannot be released, while an R18+ title may be shown only under the conditions attached to that rating.

Folklore forms and Australian viewing contexts

• Cronos turns vampirism into an antique, linking blood to colonial theft.
• The Devil’s Backbone joins a child’s haunting to civil-war violence.
• Pan’s Labyrinth makes the Pale Man an ogre-like test of resistance.
• The Shape of Water places the water spirit inside modern Baltimore.

The same material shifts when it reaches local audiences.

• Spanish history gives The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth their political weight.
• Subtitles change the rhythm of songs, jokes and wordless speech.
• Classification and scheduling affect which foreign films reach Australian viewers.
• Polish and Mexican folklore remain distinct ways of examining power and belonging.

Taken together, these viewing conditions reveal folklore alive in circulation: borrowed from childhood, revised by cinema and reshaped by the places where it is watched.

Bring the old stories back

Folklore gives del Toro’s cinema its pulse: not a museum of national relics, but stories strong enough to survive censorship, war and technological change. The films reward a second viewing because their creatures reveal their makers. Notice who tells each story, who is silenced and which inherited rule is broken.

Choose one title, watch it with its score, and write down the tale it brings to mind. Read another essay on the site, bring a friend to the next screening, and share the work of independent cultural writing.