Film: The Devil's Backbone
Release date: 25th March 2002
Certificate: 15
Running time: 103 mins
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Íñigo Garcés
Genre: Fantasy/Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Spain/Mexico
It may not have gathered as much critical acclaim as Pan’s Labyrinth, nor achieved the commercial success of Hellboy or Blade 2, but it was The Devil’s Backbone (2001) that Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro described as his most personal film.
With the Fascist forces in the ascendancy during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, young Carlos becomes the latest addition to the number of war orphans under the care of the kindly Dr. Casares and his devoted headmistress Carmen. In addition to the dozens of young boys, the orphanage also houses a cache of gold intended for the Republican cause – a treasure that’s constantly on the mind of the devious caretaker Jacinto.
On his arrival, Carlos immediately clashes with the class bully, and it’s not long before he’s on the receiving end of Jacinto’s violent, quick-temper. But this soon becomes the least of his worries, as he begins to hear rumours of a mysterious presence haunting the orphanage, referred to by the other boys as “the one who sighs.”
After earning his peers’ respect with a harrowing late-night journey into the school’s kitchen, Carlos begins to learn some more unsettling news: one of the young boys (whose bed Carlos has inherited) recently vanished. While several of the boys believe that Santi simply ran away, a few of the older boys suspect murder – and nearly all the boys believe that Santi is still around, albeit in ghostly form.
When Carlos confirms the boys’ fears, and encounters the ghost of Santi who tells him that “many will die,” it is a prediction that comes less as a threat than as a warning…
Foreshadowing many of the themes of The Devil’s Backbone and its companion piece Pan’s Labyrinth is a wonderful 1973 Spanish film called The Spirit Of The Beehive. Directed by Victor Erice, it relates the story of 6-year-old Ana who begins to associate a Republican solider hiding from Franco’s troops in her parents’ sheepfold with the monster from Frankenstein, after a touring film company projects the film upon a wall in her hometown. It’s neither a horror film nor a supernatural thriller, but, in many ways, it can be seen as the antecedent to a particularly Spanish sub-genre, where the painful reality of the Civil War and the Fascist ascent to power is seen through the eyes of a young child. Within this tradition, Del Toro has made a particular brand of the supernatural his own – one in which the horror contained in real life is so all-encompassing that his ghosts and monsters begin to elicit more sympathy than terror in relation to it. It’s such a central aspect of Del Toro’s art that his films become more overwhelmingly sad than frightening. His ghosts are as much haunted as they haunt, wracked figures of loneliness and hurt, seemingly born out of a child’s imagination, and in this film, as in the Del Toro produced The Orphanage, taking the form of a child.
The ghost of Santi appears very early in the film, and it is made clear from the off that he is, in fact, a ghost. Del Toro does not go in for any ambiguity here, never suggesting his apparition as a figment of the imagination so often seen in more conventional ghost stories. In terms of frights, the early encounters with the ghost are the most powerful. Del Toro’s use of sound is possibly the most effective aspect – a soundtrack of mysterious rustlings, footsteps and disembodied screams - the spooky voice of Santi more like a death-rattle than a sigh. When we see him fully, he’s a no less disconcerting and creepy presence - black eyes in a pale Goya-mask of a face, his outline shimmering in ripples like the stream of blood which floats upwards from his head, forever trapped in the moment of his watery death. As the film progresses, though, and we learn more about Santi the boy, our fear dissipates slightly, as we begin to sympathise with him as a victim of the same tragedies as the other orphans. For this reason, he never truly seems a threat to the boys, and when he warns of some future catastrophe destined to occur, sure enough, it comes not from Santi, nor from any other supernatural force, but from all-too-human actions inspired by greed and spite.
Just as in Pan’s Labyrinth, the true horror of the film emanates less from the realms of make-believe than from a world recognisably our own. The secluded orphanage is the most obvious symbol of a country torn apart by Civil War, home to the fatherless, and representing a Spain abandoned by the international community as the Fascist forces gain supremacy. The unexploded bomb that lies embedded in the courtyard highlights the fact that the orphanage’s seclusion does not make it any more of a haven from the surrounding troubles, however.
Appropriately, most of the characters are damaged in some way - all part of the same catastrophic events of the Civil War. Carmen is in a constant state of discomfort from her prosthetic leg. The doctor’s impotence not only prevents him from acting on his feelings for Carmen, but is symbolic of a wider inability to act – to put his humanist values into action against the brutal dictates of the Fascists. Even Jacinto, the villain of the piece, is not wholly without sympathy - an abandoned orphan himself, his fragile emotional state cannot have been helped by entering into a sexual relationship with Carmen not long after he turned 17; one he is only too aware as being purely sexual, and almost incestuous in light of the older woman’s role as mother figure to the boys. It is this complexity in terms of character that elevates the film far beyond standard ghost story fare. In fact, Del Toro has so much going on behind his ghost story, it’s a minor miracle the film makes sense at all.
That it does is testament to Del Toro’s exquisite craftsmanship. M. Night Shyamalan could learn much from the cohesion of The Devil’s Backbone’s screenplay, with its plot twists and multiple layers never feeling forced or used merely for effect. Backing up the cohesion is a cinematography which eschews generic gloom and claustrophobia in favour of a vibrant use of colour (with much of the film taking place in daylight, baking under the Spanish sun), and with buildings and everyday objects strangely oversized, as though seen through a child’s eyes. The predominance of red and yellow tones (in sandstone buildings, in the parched desert surrounding the orphanage, in blood) indicates this is a film very much about Spain, but it is amber that is the most thematically significant. Amber tones link Santi’s watery grave to the deformed embryos preserved in the doctor’s jars, as well as relating to the voiceover which opens the film defining a ghost as “a moment of pain…an insect trapped in amber.”
The film is so visually polished, so Hollywood slick, and seemingly custom-built for the appreciation of a mainstream audience, that at first you might not notice just how incredibly dark some of its themes are. That we see the fascistic Jacinto in one early scene naked and so eroticised even the freedom-fighter Carmen cannot resist him suggests Del Toro is implying there is something inherently sexy about fascism, something in its call to order and obedience that we are irresistibly drawn to. It is one of the film’s ironies that the children, presumably the most vulnerable to the violence and brutality of war, must finally resort to violence themselves, in a scene reminiscent of Lord Of The Flies, in order to both save their lives and reassert values of humanism and goodness against so much totalitarian barbarity. Such themes give The Devil’s Backbone the ability to disturb and move long after the initial thrills and shocks of more run-of-the-mill horror films have faded away.
While The Devil’s Backbone falls just short of being a masterpiece in quite the same way as Pan’s Labyrinth, it is still a small gem of a movie. Forgetting Del Toro’s own output, it’s hard to think of many horror films in recent memory possessing quite as much depth, sub-text and emotional impact. One of the best films to emerge from that fertile period of Spanish horror during the first decade of this century, and highly recommended. GJK
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