The Great God Pan
The Great God Pan is a horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write "The Great God Pan" by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the magazine "The Whirlwind" in 1890. Machen later extended "The Great God Pan" and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a woman named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan. At the end, the heroes confront Helen and force her to kill herself. She undergoes a series of supernatural transformations before dying and she is revealed to be the child of Mary and the god Pan.
The Great God Pan
According to film historians Keith McDonald and Roger Clark, Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro's portrayal of the faun in his 2006 dark fantasy film "Pan's Labyrinth" was inspired by the "ambivalent and possibly dangerous" portrayals of Pan in late Victorian and early Edwardian novels, including Machen's "The Great God Pan" and "Pan's Garden" (1912) by Algernon Blackwood. Del Toro deliberately chose to imitate the darker, more sinister fauns of Machen and Blackwood rather than the "sweetly domesticated figure" of Mr. Tumnus from C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (1950). The original title of the film in Spanish is "El Laberinto del Fauno" ("The Labyrinth of the Faun"), but the English title "Pan's Labyrinth" emphasizes the connection between del Toro's film and the body of late nineteenth-century writings about Pan, including "The Great God Pan".