The thing is, in my own experience, every week, every day, I find that when you are obeying, I generally think you are doing the wrong thing. If you find there are two options, one difficult and one easy, 99 per cent of the time the hard choice is the good choice in my opinion.

In this way, she is reborn in the Underworld Realm the way she wishes herself to be, in an ending that has been read as Ofelia’s self-sacrifice and ‘resurrection’ as a Jesus Christ figure.

For Pan’s myriad influences reinforce the film’s rejection of a unique version of truth, an imposed master-narrative incarnated by Vidal, and as such, any reductive or ‘final’ reading of the film is rendered obsolete – in a way, fascist.

GdT has acknowledged many times that the philosophy that has had the most influence on his work is the Jungian, almost psycho-magical conception of the world. I believe we see the world, and create the world we live in, in

a goat with horns, but also the female fallopian tubes and ovaries.

‘the permeability of the membrane between reality and fantasy’.

Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, on 9 October 1964, GdT was raised mainly by his grandmother, a devout Catholic who literally exorcised him with holy water twice when he was growing up.

‘Fascism is above all a form of perversion of innocence, and thus of childhood. For me, Fascism represents in some ways the death of the soul.’87

saying: ‘To obey – just like that – for obedience’s sake … without questioning … . That’s something only people like you do.’