Arthur Machen
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, "The Great God Pan". It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and consequently sold well, going into a second edition.
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".