There’s a very simple fact about Jim Henson’s Labyrinth buried underneath all the glitter and songs and close-ups on David Bowie’s tight gray leggings: it’s scary! One wouldn’t expect a children’s film starring a pop star, a child actress, and a bunch of fantastical puppets to be replete with terrors both grotesque and existential, but this movie has it all, and a Bog of Eternal Stench.
At 40 years old, Labyrinth represents a philosophy long since lost amid the endless sea of blobbily animated crowd-pleasers and bloodless superhero movies—the strange yet logical notion that kids deserve scary movies, too.
The film begins with its protagonist, Jennifer Connelly’s teenaged Sarah, making a devastating mistake, flippantly asking goblins to spirit her irritating baby brother away. Well, the goblins—and therefore Sarah’s wish—are real, and the plot spirals from there down the endless halls of an extraordinary labyrinth overseen by David Bowie’s Goblin King Jareth, manicured eyebrows and all. Jareth’s intermittent songs are catchy, and Sarah manages to make a few good-hearted friends along her journey, but the movie never misses an opportunity to show its audience something horrifying at every turn.
Take, for example, the bird-like Fire Gang—creatures who can remove and reattach their limbs at will—who spend their one appalling scene playfully trying to rip off Sarah’s head. Or the Junk Lady, an ancient raisin of a woman who attempts to bury Sarah forever under a mountain of her useless childhood possessions as she dreamily chants, “Everything in the world you’ve ever cared about is all right here.” Or simply consider that the driving force of the movie is that a magical fey being has kidnapped a human baby and is threatening to keep him in his scary goblin court for eternity.
Part of the enduring power of Labyrinth is that it’s one of admittedly few fairy-tale movies that actually operates on fairy-tale logic. That is, in many ways, the Jim Henson and Brian Froud promise. (The duo previously collaborated on the possibly even more frightening fantasy film The Dark Crystal.) In these stories, a human, however unwittingly, encounters the fairy realm and discovers it to be full of beings that operate according to their own rules, with no real concern for mortal wellbeing. The trick, then, is to survive their trials and perhaps scheme your way out, rather than hope that good will triumph over evil.
Sarah repeatedly grumbles, “It’s not fair!” each time she encounters some impossible aspect of the labyrinth—which is, in fact, the whole point. Nothing the magical beings of this movie do is ever fair. In this way, Labyrinth has less in common with a Disney cartoon and more with the Irish legend of Oisín, the mortal man who accidentally spent centuries in the fairy world and turned to dust the instant his foot touched the soil of his home.
Then again, perhaps all this is the reason that Labyrinth is so often cited as the pivotal childhood movie of weird girls everywhere. Bowie tracks and immense feats of puppetry aside, Labyrinth trusts its audience to be scared, to feel that feeling and to be entertained by it, to allow it to drag you further into the magical realm its makers have concocted. Sarah, by contrast, is the weird-girl blueprint, not so easily frightened or discouraged by doors that turn into giant suits of armor or the aforementioned stinky bog. Her immediate thought upon first encountering the monstrous, shaggy hulk named Ludo is to kindly tell him, “You seem like such a nice beast.” It’s not that her plucky fortitude makes the surrounding film less frightening, but it definitely reassures the audience whenever things are looking dire.
There’s a reason children are obsessed with black holes and wolves and tornadoes and quicksand. Fear is fascinating, and scary things have a certain allure, especially in the mind of a child only just learning what’s worth being scared of and what isn’t. Kids are drawn to things that freak them out. Movies like Labyrinth exist within this magic dance of fear and fun, and trust their audience to handle it exactly the way Sarah would.
- Release Date
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June 27, 1986
- Runtime
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102 minutes
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
