Prepare to be astounded with the upcoming Blu-ray release of Guillermo Del Toro’s ultimate collection on the 25th October 2010 courtesy of Optimum Home Entertainment

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PRESS RELEASE

PAN’S LABYRINTH

DEL TORO INTERVIEW

With the Del Toro Blu-Ray collection from Optimum Releasing ready to drop on Monday (25.10.2010), it’s time to take a closer look at two of the titles in the set. Last week, I published a blog about the directors stunning breakthrough hit Pan’s Labyrinth (read that post HERE). Yes, I know film fanatics will have known about his work for years, both as a deeply personal creator of artful fantasy movies and as a go to guy for big mainstream titles like Blade and Hellboy. In the case of the Hollywood movies, the characters, so richly drawn from their original comic book sources, were the stars and his previous titles reached already converted audiences for world cinema and unusual horror.

It was Pan’s Labyrinth that pushed the director’s more personal work into the spotlight but this week, let’s take a look at Del Toro’s uniquely odd version of the vampire myth, CRONOS and his creepy riff on childhood fears and traditional ghost yarns in THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE.

Cronos is that most rare of Vampire movies, one that owes little of it’s existence to Universal monster cliches and thus sits alongside other alternative takes on the myths (Martin, Ganja & Hess and Near Dark spring to mind). Critically, this film manages to tick all the horror boxes without being cheap, exploitative or artless.

The Devil’s Backbone build’s on the success of Cronos, managing to create a waking nightmare that fuses fantasy and horror with the very real events of the Spanish Civil War, reflecting both the real terrors of history and the imagination through the eyes of a child, a theme that is brought to it’s logicial conclusion in Pan’s Labyrinth.