“For all its flaws and superficial delights, Labyrinth reacquainted audiences with an old idea that Hollywood had long neglected: Childhood is a scary and dangerous place, an inherently strange time filled with dead-ends, wrong turns, lies, and traps. In other words: It’s not the Muppets.”
“To access art is to access darkness, and to dwell in childhood is to dwell in a place of death, the potential deepest darkness.”
“Jareth’s land, an eerie expanse of bullies, traps, and two-faced allies, is pretty much an exaggerated blueprint of childhood. In Labyrinth, as in childhood, everything is magnified and inexplicable.”
“The world is larger than life when you’re a child, odd and suspicious. Everything is new. There is this strange confusion of language, the rules at school, school itself. And just when you learn the rules, they change on you. Once you hit the teenage years, everything is turned upside down all over again, much like the changing staircases in one of the last scenes in Labyrinth (and in Harry Potter, which followed much later). It’s why adolescence lends itself so well to horror.”
“Perhaps Labyrinth was preparing its audience for the explosion of YA, the teen as self-possessed heroine inheriting the Earth, scorched though it may be. Sarah does the right thing, as the Katnisses and Bellas and Hermiones do the right thing: Though their audience screams at them to choose fantasy, choose adventure, choose yourself, they go back to family and home and responsibilities every time.”
“With Labyrinth, perhaps Henson was reminding us: This is where we come from. This is the origin of our nights and night-fearing stories.”
“Thirty years later, the complex and confusing Labyrinth doesn’t feel edgy as much as classic. It’s not an advance so much as a return. Childhood has been this way forever: wonderful and hard and full of horror. Labyrinth just helps us remember what, deep down, in the dark, we’ve always known.”