FORTY YEARS IN THE LABYRINTH

And yet here we are.

In 1986, Jim Henson opened the doors to Labyrinth: goblins, riddles, impossible staircases, and a Goblin King who understood exactly which promises were hardest to resist. Jennifer Connelly was Sarah. David Bowie was Jareth.

But anniversaries have a way of reducing things to numbers: forty years, a cult classic. Those things tell us when Labyrinth happened, not why so many of us never left.

Before the Goblin King, before Hoggle, before Ludo, before there is even a Labyrinth, there is Sarah's bedroom.

A room filled with the things we surround ourselves with when imagination still feels real. Sarah doesn't begin her story in some terrible place she needs to escape. She begins surrounded by stories, costumes, possessions and fantasy, a world in which she understands her part.

Then real life interrupts it. A baby cries, her parents have expectations, she has responsibilities she didn't ask for, and in one angry moment, she wishes all of it away.

It may be one of the most painfully accurate beginnings to a fantasy ever made. Growing up rarely starts with some grand declaration that childhood is over. Usually somebody asks you to do something you don't want to do.

Then the clock starts.

Sarah has thirteen hours to get Toby back. But forty years later, it feels different, as if childhood has discovered its own deadline.

There is a strange moment when time stops being endless. Summer ends, school years disappear, people change, things that felt permanent become things you remember.

Sarah spends the film trying to reach something before it's too late. Maybe that's why the ticking clock feels different when you're an adult.

Jareth is not frightening because he is simply evil. That would have been easier. He's frightening because he is tempting.

He offers Sarah escape: fantasy without responsibility, a world where everything can bend around her desires and she can remain at the center of the story forever.

And because this is David Bowie, temptation looks more interesting than evil has any right to. Jareth is theatrical. Beautiful. Ridiculous. Dangerous. Funny. Lonely.

He does not feel like the monster waiting at the end of a children's story. He feels like the first realization that not everything attractive is good for you. That's a more complicated thing to give a young audience, but Henson trusted us with it.

Nothing in the Labyrinth is what it first appears. Ludo looks terrifying and isn't. Hoggle spends most of the story looking after himself, until he doesn't. Sir Didymus, absurd, has enough courage for an army.

Sarah stops moving through the Labyrinth alone. That's when she becomes capable of leaving it.

And then sometimes Labyrinth doesn't need to teach us a goddamn thing. Sometimes heads come off, limbs get thrown around, creatures dance, and everything becomes unhinged for a few minutes.

Thank God.

There is something wonderful about a movie willing to be strange simply because someone thought of something strange: no cinematic universe to service, no algorithm to satisfy. Just: wouldn't this be insane? And then somebody had to figure out how to make it.

This may be what feels most powerful forty years later: you can still feel the people who built it.

The film's conceptual design came from Brian Froud, and its creatures were brought to life by performers and craftspeople. Look at the world: things have weight, fabric has texture, faces wrinkle, hair catches light, walls have surfaces. Creatures occupy actual space beside human beings.

Someone sculpted them. Someone painted them. Someone stitched them. Someone engineered them. Someone crouched somewhere just outside the frame making them breathe.

The illusion isn't powerful because you can't imagine how it was done. It's powerful because you can. There are human fingerprints hiding inside the magic, and forty years later, that makes the fantasy feel more real, not less.

Near the end, the world stops making sense. Sarah races through impossible, inverted architecture while Jareth stays out of reach.

She has learned that the maze can lie, that appearances are unreliable, that someone can construct an entire reality around you and still not have the right to define who you are inside it.

Six words: “You have no power over me.” That's it.

No sword. No spell. No great battle. Sarah wins when she understands something: the power Jareth holds over her depends upon her surrendering it.

As children, maybe we heard Sarah defeating the Goblin King. As adults, we hear something else: a person finally recognizing herself.

There are relationships like that, fears like that, memories like that, people like that. Sometimes the most important sentence in your life isn't an attack. It's simply the moment you stop asking someone else for permission to be free.

Sarah goes home. This matters. The story could have punished her for loving fantasy with the traditional message: put away childish things, grow up, leave the creatures behind, become sensible.

But Labyrinth doesn't do that. Sarah returns to her ordinary life having accepted responsibility, and imagination hasn't been taken away from her as payment for becoming older. Growing up shouldn't mean murdering the person you used to be.

And then they come back.

Hoggle. Ludo. Didymus. The impossible friends from an impossible place.

Sarah doesn't need to stay trapped in the Labyrinth to keep them.

“Should you need us…” Of course she will. So will we.

The Jim Henson Company marks 2026 as the film's 40th anniversary. But maybe that's the wrong way to measure it. Maybe Labyrinth isn't forty years old. Maybe it has been forty years deep.

As children, we saw goblins. As teenagers, maybe we saw Jareth. As parents, perhaps we finally understood the terror of wishing away something precious.

Forty years later, technology can create worlds Henson could never have imagined: images can appear in seconds. And still, we return to this one.

That somebody cared enough to make the door, paint the stone, sew the creature, move the eyes, build the maze, and invite us inside.