All tagged dreamscape
Everything in Eraserhead folds back on the protagonist, Henry Spencer. Every disturbing image, grating sound, jarring scene change, and bizarre dialogue tells us what’s happening in the film and what’s happening in his head, a terrible, body-horror inflected vision of paternal postpartum depression.
Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy horror classic, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), is a coming-of-age story about Ofelia, a girl living in the fascist Spanish regime of Francisco Franco as an imperiled pregnancy brings about her mother’s death. In the end, Ofelia grows--she transcends these horrors--not by giving up childish fantasies, as she’s told to do, but by learning from them to hold to her convictions, keep her own counsel, and make moral choices, even when it means sacrificing herself.
Bernard Rose’s 1988 film Paperhouse blurs the line between dream and reality, focusing on a bedridden young girl who finds herself inside her own drawing of a strange house when she sleeps. In this stark but fantastic world, she bonds with another sick child while her dreams burn and char into a horrible nightmarescape, reflecting the indelible scars left by a child’s death and by parental abuse and alcoholism.
