Who better to teach you about the horror of fairy tales than Guillermo del Toro?
Guillermo del Toro talks the connection between horror and fairy tales in this exclusive clip
Aux News Guillermo del Toro
It shouldn’t scare anyone to find out that Guillermo del Toro has thoughts on the similarities between fairy tales and horror movies. Why should it? He’s allowed to have some thoughts on the subject. After all, the director of The Shape Of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth has made a career out of horror movies with a Grimm worldview.
In this exclusive clip from the Blu-ray for Antlers, del Toro, who produced the film, elaborates on how both fairy tales and horror are branches from the same tree. “In horror, you use elements that are fanciful or poetic or almost fairy tale like,” del Toro says. “Horror and fairy tales are one single tree trunk and two different branches.” He goes on to describe Hansel And Gretel, the story of a witch that wants to eat the flesh of two kids, as “not exactly soothing.”
For fans of Antlers, the extra insights from the film’s producer might be reason enough to pick up the Blu-ray. Directed by Scott Cooper (Black Mass, Out Of The Furnace), the movie has the stateliness of one del Toro’s Oscar-winning creature features—though goes much harder on the grim realities of being stuck in a fairy tale.
The A.V. Club’s film editor A.A. Dowd left the film with a mixed opinion, praising the technical feats and heavy-hitting cast. It’s the genre-mandated metaphors that dragged the whole thing down. Dowd writes:
There’s a pretty good monster movie lurking somewhere beneath the oppressively depressive skin of Scott Cooper’s Antlers. It peeks its head out here and there—just like the monster itself, a hoofed ancestral beast the film catches only in quick glimpses, in what you could call a variation on the classic Jaws tact of getting more from less. The trouble here is endemic to the present age of creature feature: Everyone involved wants the monster to be more than a monster. Once upon a time, there was subtext in these films. It has since been swallowed whole by fearsome oversized metaphors.
Antlers will be available on VOD on December 21 and Blu-ray and DVD on January 4, 2022.
5 Comments
How about this fucker make a horror movie instead of just talking about it like he knows something? Clearly he knows how to sprinkle these dark fantastical elements around. So sprinkle some on a goddamned actual horror movie and then maybe you can talk like you’re Spooky Kubrick. Blue-balling fuck
Look, we’re all on edge these days. Lord knows I am. But I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here.
I was really jazzed for the Lovecraft movie he said he was going to do. That was right when the dude was absolutely on fire. I feel like it could have indeed been a Kubrick-sized thing. But instead he did the sexy merman Oscar film, and now he’s talking like M. Night
Antlers sucked
hell, who even remembers that when the wolf fell down the chimney, that he fell into a huge cauldron and the three pigs ate him as soup? as an american living in europe, i was surprised when i read the original to my kid in french. i was like “wait a minute…” but yeah, the three little pigs totally eat the wolf at the end! 😀