El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth)

Del Toro has talked about the Grimms for his whole career, and specifically about wanting the pre-sanitised version: tales in which children are abandoned on purpose, the punishments are physical, and obedience is not rewarded. The film is built on that reading. Ofelia is given three tasks by a creature whose trustworthiness is never settled, the rule she breaks is the fairy-tale rule about eating at the wrong table, and the consequence is immediate and not undone. The underworld is offered as real and as possibly a child's way of surviving a fascist stepfather, and the film refuses to say which. Filed MEDIUM: the debt is to the tradition and its cruelty rather than to a particular tale, and the Spanish material is doing as much work.

Del Toro has spoken about Carroll and Victorian fairy tale illustration as sources, and Ofelia's underworld runs on Wonderland's logic: three tasks with rules stated precisely and then broken, a warning about eating what is on the table, and creatures who are neither friendly nor hostile but simply indifferent to a child's distress. The difference is what sits on the other side. Alice wakes up, and del Toro puts a fascist captain in the room instead.