The film’s protagonist, 11-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve), is the son of a Republican insurgent who, unbeknownst to his son, has been killed in battle. The father’s fellow Republican soldiers, having nothing else to do with Carlos, drop him off at a rural orphanage run by Carmen (Marisa Paredes), a crippled widow whose husband was a staunch idealist who died for his revolutionary beliefs, and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi, who played the tragic grandfather-turned-vampire in Cronos), a doctor and longtime friend who has dedicated his life to supporting Carmen, even though she does not return his decades-long romantic desires. The orphanage’s caretaker, Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), is a handsome young man (he looks like a Castilian Colin Farrell) who grew up in the orphanage, but resents it and is scheming to get his hands on a stash of gold he suspects Carmen is hiding there for the resistance.

The orphanage sits alone amid the dusty, sun-baked hills of rural Spain, which makes it a kind of visual corollary for Carlos’s lonely, unmoored experience. An intelligent, gregarious boy with bright eyes, he is nevertheless completely alone in the world, a point that del Toro punches home with great emotional power when Carols runs crying after those who have dropped him off, having been unaware that the orphanage was to be his final stop. His isolation is intensified by the fact that he does not immediately fit in with the other boys at the orphanage, particularly Jaime (Íñigo Garcés), who is bigger than the others and seems to carry a sizable chip on his shoulder that he is all too willing to take out on the new kid.

Carlos soon discovers that the orphanage is haunted by the specter of Santi (Junio Valverde), a young boy who recently disappeared. In the opening credits sequence we see Santi lying on the basement floor, his head pooled with blood. Jaime, who is weeping, cradles him and then dumps his body into a deep cesspool. Thus, although everyone in the orphanage suspects that Santi ran away, we know that he has died a violent death, whether by design or accident, although at whose hands remains a mystery until the film’s final reel. Santi’s ghost appears to Carlos almost as soon as he arrives at the orphanage, and although he is initially terrified, Carlos is drawn to Santi, who del Toro envisions as a spectral porcelain doll with black eyes and a cracked skull that is constantly emitting a haze of blood, as if he is perpetually underwater. There is another ghost at the orphanage as well, albeit one that is decidedly more physical: an enormous, unexploded bomb that was dropped from a plane the night Santi died and remains lodged in the ground at the center of the orphanage’s courtyard. A bomb squad has dismantled its mechanism, rendering it safe, yet Jaime claims that if you put your ear up to it, you can hear its heart beat. The bomb, so perpetually present, is a constant reminder of the war raging throughout Spain and how, despite the orphanage’s extreme isolation, no one remains untouched by its violence.

Although this was only del Toro’s third film, The Devil’s Backbone displays a masterful sense of both visual tension and deep layers of emotional resonance. Del Toro and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (who has shot all of his films) evoke a classic sense of dread and suspense by puncturing the film’s overall staunch realism with moments of surreal unease that underscore the film’s gothic influences. The historical setting amid a civil war immediately confers on the story’s horror elements a deeper political significance, as the specter of fascism creeps about the margins, reminding us of how the worst atrocities are not the stuff of supernatural creep-outs, but rather human beings losing sight of their humanity (del Toro would return to this theme five years later in Pan’s Labyrinth, which bears numerous similarities to The Devil’s Backbone both narratively and thematically). As the story unfolds, one of the characters eventually reveals himself to be capable of the worst depths of human depravity, a kind of one-man symbol of how vicious human nature can be when it is driven by all the wrong impulses. However, del Toro is not interested in simply reveling in human nastiness, as he also turns the tables on a number of our assumptions regarding characters who at first seemed mean and narrow-minded, eventually revealing that their cruelty is a thin mask for fear, insecurity, and doubt.

As in many horror films, human nature is revealed at least partially through the tension between the natural and the supernatural, which we see with particular force in Dr. Casares, who keeps a number of jars holding deformed human fetuses, one of which has an exposed spine referred to by locals as “the devil’s backbone.” Dr. Casares is a man of rationality and science who sees the deformities as flukes of nature, not supernatural punishment for misdeeds, yet the film ultimately presents us with a situation in which much deserved punishment is meted out in supernatural form. The presence of ghosts amid the real-life terrors of a country tearing itself apart with war makes the two sides mutually reinforcing, thus making The Devil’s Backbone a particularly resonant horror film. Interestingly, it was released around the same time as several other superior ghost movies, including M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others (2001), all of which evoke a powerful sense of unease regarding the abutment of the natural and the supernatural while also reminding us that the most obviously scary things aren’t always the things we should actually fear. In The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro gives us plenty of things that go bump in the night, but the film’s real horror turns out to be all too human.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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