Labyrinth stars a young Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, who wishes away her baby brother Toby to the goblins – a wish that Goblin King Jareth (played by David Bowie) is happy to fulfill.
Classification Issues
- Violence
- A character is shown trying to kill fairies using a kind of poison. Goblins attack with axes and cannons although no human character is ever struck or hurt. There are scenes of slapstick violence in which helmeted goblins are bashed in the head. A character is tormented by goblins who prod him with small biting creatures attached to sticks.
- Threat and horror
- Mild scary scenes include a baby being stolen from its bedroom by goblins and a teenage girl falling into a pit with monstrous hands coming out of its walls to grab at her. Bizarre dancing creatures pull off their own limbs and remove their eyeballs, but can replace them with no injury. Characters are pursued down a narrow corridor by a drill-like machine with spinning blades. These scenes, and other sequences of threat, are fantastical in tone and ultimately have reassuring outcomes.
- Language
- There is occasional mild bad language ('crap'), as well as milder terms such as 'hell' and 'damn'.
- Additional issues
- There are some scenes of mild rude humour, including a goblin creature urinating and some fart sound effects from a’bog of eternal stench’. A woman tells her teenage daughter she should be dating boys, and a goblin character secretly wishes a girl would kiss him.
Classification history
Submitted for classification in June 1986, Labyrinth was the big-screen follow-up to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, which had been released in 1982. The Dark Crystal was one of the earliest films to be classified PG for its theatrical release in 1982 (the PG category having replaced the former A category, which cautioned parents that a film may be unsuitable for young children).
Columbia-EMI-Warner, the distributor of Labyrinth, anticipated a PG rating for the film. Upon examination, however, the BBFC considered the film to be suitable at the U category. Whilst the creatures of The Dark Crystal were previously described by the Examiners as “frightening and monster like” and the overall tone “rather sombre”, the Examiners of Labyrinth considered this film’s “sequences... which aim at suspense and excitement” to be “perhaps initially scary for children” but mitigated by humour and the overall narrative.
The early scene in which goblins scuttle around Toby's room, hidden from Sarah, has “a very slight element of Gremlins... but this is more properly to be compared with pantomime, particularly as the goblins have already been revealed as fairly innocuous Muppet-creatures.” A later sequence, in which Sarah and Hoggle are chased by a machine with rotating blades, “sounds worrying but is totally acceptable for U within the context of a children's fantasy and set against the fearlessness of the Alice-like heroine.”
Overall, the Examiners reasoned that “although spooky, we have never denied children the right to be deliriously scared”. Labyrinth was passed U for cinema release in June 1986, and has subsequently also been classified U for video, DVD and Blu-ray.
Reclassification for cinemas
In 2025, Labyrinth returned to the BBFC ahead of a cinema re-release.
When distributors choose to resubmit older films, the BBFC applies its current Classification Guidelines. This means that films may require a higher or lower rating than they received in the past.
Under the 2025 guidelines, the film’s scenes of violence and threat are more comfortably placed at PG than U. The film also includes a use of ‘crap’, which BBFC policy no longer permits at U. Accordingly, Labyrinth was reclassified PG for mild scary scenes, violence and language.
