Capturing history, or interpreting it, has meant many things over the years, ranging from melodrama-driven accounts, to brutally realist narratives to absurdist ‘fragmented’, ‘non-stories’. This paper deals with Guillermo del Torro’s use of the fantastic in Pan’s Labyrinth to allegorise the Spanish Civil War on the one hand, but more importantly, to explore and expand the field of the historical narrative in cinema.