Goosebumps

The Devil’s Backbone tingles the spine and the brain.

by Sam Adams

The Devil’s Backbone

Directed by Guillermo del Toro
A Sony Pictures Classics release

recommended



Fright School: Fernando Tielve is a haunted orphan in The Devil’s Backbone.

When the ghost who haunts the Spanish orphanage in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone whispers "Many of you will die," he’s not kidding. Del Toro, whose previous movie was the stylish cockroaches-in-the sewer thriller Mimic, leaped into the ranks of the most daring horror directors with a single, bold stroke: He killed the kid. It’s a cardinal rule of horror movies that children, like animals, are off-limits. (This absurd lack of nerve leads to such preposterous events as Spike Lee inserting a shot at the end of Summer of Sam to prove that at least his David Berkowitz would never be so cruel as to kill a dog. If only his human victims had been so lucky.) Del Toro seems to know no such boundaries — when Mimic’s curious youngsters came upon the movie’s carnivorous oversize instinct, they were turned into bug food but quick.

It’s not that Del Toro likes cheap shock tactics (although he doesn’t exactly dislike them either), but he knows that if you can’t spook the audience’s inner preteen, you might as well take your ball and go home. Set in an orphanage during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, The Devil’s Backbone explores the psyche of children living under the omnipresent threat of violence. Though the movie leaves the compound, which resembles an abandoned fort, only for brief periods, the violence that has consumed the country makes its presence felt everywhere. The school’s dusty courtyard has as its unofficial centerpiece an enormous airborne bomb, dropped directly on the school but miraculously unexploded, now sticking out of the earth like a bone thrust up from a fresh grave, circled with stones and topped with a ragged flag as if to turn it into a kind of morbid decoration. What it represents more obviously is the imminent and omnipresent threat of death that even the school’s walls cannot keep out.

Ten-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve) arrives in the middle of this without seeming to have so much as an inkling of what’s going around him. Cásares (Federico Luppi) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes), the magisterial couple who run the school, shelter republican troops from fascist soldiers, and they’re rumored by the staff to keep a cache of gold to support the anti-Franco cause, but Carlos is aware only that he’s been abandoned. When he sees the ghostly Santi (Junio Valverde) standing shadowed in a far-off doorway, Carlos is as intrigued as he is frightened by the other boy’s greyish skin, smashed skull and the buoyant reddish particles that fill the air around him.

Carlos is, at first, tormented by his fellows, but once they discover that he’s come with a stash of dog-eared but still endlessly prized comic books, he is admitted to the gang on a provisional basis, and he starts to hear rumors of the school’s secrets. Most notably, they whisper of Santi, who was once a student at the school and disappeared the night the bomb fell into the courtyard. Though Santi’s ghost is surrounded by a CGI cloud as if he carries a block of mist around with him, del Toro stages his appearances with Old World techniques, thus hanging on to the vintage creepiness that makes Backbone so effective. The story’s supernaturalism, while central, is almost incidental; the ghost adds meaning to the story, but the story would, at least up until the movie’s climax, happen almost identically without it.

Ghosts, it’s suggested, are "a terrible moment, condemned to repeat itself over and over." They’re something like guilt, or the stench of a lingering wrong, or perhaps just a feeling of dread you just can’t shake. Del Toro has little interest in the particularities of the Spanish conflict — he originally wanted to set the story in Mexico, but it proved more feasible to shoot in Spain. Like any good horror story, Backbone uses its monsters as archetypes. Santi, it develops, has a specific aim: to bring out the truth about his disappearance and take vengeance on the party responsible. But the all-too-human vices that drive the movie to its violent climax, particularly the greed of the virile, resentful caretaker Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), are entirely palpable, almost mundane. If it makes sense to say a ghost story traffics in realism, that’s what The Devil’s Backbone does.

Shot in dry, golden hues by cinematograper Guillermo Navarro, Backbone looks like a sepia photo come to bustling life. Del Toro makes great sport of the tension between genre requirements and his atypical story. For a filmmaker whose films are aesthetic to a fault, Del Toro seems to distrust neatness, at least on the level of story: Jacinto, the villain, is suave and handsome, while Cásares is withered and impotent and Carmen wears a false leg that she removes for her trysts with Jacinto. Pleasure is fused to death’s hip; scientific Cásares has a roomful of deformed fetuses in jars, preserved in aged rum, which he spoons out and sells to the locals to keep the orphanage afloat.

With some of the enjoyable slickness that made Mimic a hoot (you have to wonder what del Toro will do with March’s Blade II), Backbone is a creeper, but with so much more on its mind than recent examples of the genre it almost hurts to make the comparison. Although far less bloody and histrionic, it has some of the coiled power of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Even better, it doesn’t jettison its carefully maintained tone to juice up the ending (which is still plenty juicy, by the way). It has the familiar eerieness of the ghost stories your parents make up on the spot, the ones where all the characters just happen to have your names.