It's Playing, Just With Research

Guillermo del Toro — when he isn’t thrilling us with hellboys or kaiju — has given us some of the most intensely personal and fantastically dark films to explore how we cope with living.  In The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, according to Christopher Olson’s interpretation, del Toro is utilizing fantasy tropes to illustrate how children cope with some of the worst fears imaginable: war and death.

via Exploring the Trauma of the Spanish Civil War at the Intersection of Fantasy and Reality.