Scarlet Peak proves to us that if a Tim Burton-type movie cannot be connected with the pain in reality (whether it is the fascist/Spanish civil war in Pan’s labyrinth or the Cold War/political correctness in The Shape of Water), then There will be no power. Because the intensity of such fairy tales/fables/children’s horror movies is not even as strong as the anxiety we feel in the face of continuous work pressure in modern life, or cannot be relieved.
So the Devil's Silver Claw is Del Toro's best movie. The bleak tone hypnotizes us, the simple props and sets, and the superposition of many elements of children’s movies makes us return to a state of innocence (who has never had a grandfather who loved her? How could the world be unlike a maze, a huge Antique shop?), in which fear becomes a kind of comfort, the display of nightmare becomes a kind of repair, a kind of catharsis, through which we can heal the wounds in our hearts.
Therefore, in Jurassic World 2, the little protagonist is shrunk in a bed, and the director uses the reflection of dinosaur's claws on the ceiling/wall to imitate Nosferatu. At this moment, the silent, simple, and awkward poetry far exceeds that of his childhood in Scarlet Mountain. A similar scene where the dead mother of the heroine visits at night. The possibility of naive and hypnotic tone in this scene has been completely shattered by the statement made by the adult female protagonist in the opening scene that "ghosts are real". What we see is the memory of a rational adult (the narration is even dragged into the past, the intention is obvious), the whole image is just a footnote to this sentence, an explanation, a cumbersome self-deception proof. "Look, there are ghosts in the real world," Del Toro said, and no one would believe it. Because what we need is not to imagine/deceive ourselves that ghosts really exist in this world, but to return/enter into the world where ghosts exist.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) El laberinto del fauno (2006) Crimson Peak (2015) The Shape of Water (2017)
ps went back and flipped through Tim Burton, and found that juxtaposing these films with it seemed to be unfair to Del Toro. Tim Bolton made some embarrassing movies, and I seemed to find out why I was so disgusted with him: my childhood couldn't be that way at all. My favorite movies are often similar to the pastoral festival of the dead, the sanatorium under the sand-made time mirror, and the mirror. The memory is sluggish and dignified, it is the collection of everything once possessed and not obtained. Any attempt to write it as a joke is a kind of blasphemy. Even if childhood is beautiful, it only collapses into the future with time, and the signs of decline have long been hidden in the background, and its shadow shrouded memories.
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