It remains the charge most frequently leveled against science fiction and fantasy: that these genres offer nothing but an irresponsible escapism, a way for their readers to avoid the grim truths of the real world. It is the same criticism against which J.R.R. Tolkien defended genre fiction in his 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories," but also the one that most relentlessly persists in the sphere of literary studies. Even the harshest of critics, however, would hesitate to describe Guillermo del Toro's much-lauded fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth as escapist or uninterested in reality. In fact, del Toro confronts this very issue of escapism as one of his central themes, and the horrors that inhabit both Ofelia's nightmarish fantasies and her "real life"
