Every Guillermo Del Toro Movie Ranked Worst To Best

In the end, though, despite a stunning career both before and since its release, Pan's Labyrinth remains Guillermo del Toro's magnum opus, the pinnacle of his wondrous imagination, his love for genre-mixing and his obvious adoration of monsters and the macabre.

But there's more to Pan's Labyrinth than the infamous Pale Man and its effortlessly engrossing worldbuilding. Under its aesthetic horrors, it's also a haunting fairytale wrapped up in real-life tragedy, set in the Spanish Civil War as a young girl enters into a dangerous journey.

Magical, tragic, surreal, brutal, hopeful and hopeless -- Pan's Labyrinth is all of these things and more, a testament to del Toro's abilities as a storyteller and visionary. It's the film he'll always be chasing, but he can rest assured that many other filmmakers are in its shadow, too.