Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal
“History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts.” – Guillermo del Toro
“What is a ghost?” These are the first words we hear a voice ponder at the outset of The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro’s breakthrough work that scored him the strongest critical reviews of his career up to that point. As the voiceover continues to consider if a ghost can be “an emotion suspended in time, like a blurred photograph, like an insect trapped in amber,” we understand that del Toro is not setting up a traditional horror movie or ghost story. Set towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, it’s a film that wades in the melancholy generated by senseless violence and the ripple effect of irreversible acts. In keeping with a motif del Toro continues to evoke in his work, human beings in his tales can act more monstrous than the actual monsters (in this case, apparitions) themselves.
We meet young Carlos (Fernando Tielve) as he is taken to an orphanage in the Spanish countryside after his father is killed in action. The orphanage’s headmistress Carmen (Marisa Paredes) is reticent to take on one more child, as they’re already struggling to take care of the orphans in their care already, but the head doctor Casares (Federico Luppi) convinces her to take Carlos in. At first, the orphanage bully Jaime (Íñigo Garcés) is needlessly cruel to Carlos and leaves him alone in the dark after the pair go to fill pitchers of water overnight. It’s here that Carlos first sees the ghost of Santi (Junio Valverde), a boy who died at the orphanage under mysterious circumstances years ago. As the conflict between the loyalists and nationalists rages on outside the confines of the orphanage, the violence threatens to make its way through the gates.
The first drafts of The Devil’s Backbone date back to Guillermo del Toro’s college days in the 1980s, even though the project wasn’t fully realized until many years for its release in 2001. Given this, along with the fact that del Toro felt the need to return to his roots after the commercial failure of 1997’s Mimic, it doesn’t seem a stretch to call The Devil’s Backbone his most personal work. While he wasn’t around in the 1930s when the movie takes place, he did go to an all-male Jesuit school with conditions similar to an orphanage and recalls hearing disembodied voices on the grounds. Much in the way that the audience finds its way into this story through Carlos, del Toro must have found his voice most clearly through the protagonist (who he’s described as a “force of innocence”) as well.
Del Toro also explores a surrogate father role for Carlos by way of the kindly Dr. Casares, who gives him the nickname “Carlitos” and looks out for him when his peers give him a harder time. Whether he’s reciting poetry or listening to music on his phonograph, his gentle disposition is a respite from the harsh realities of Carlos’s world. By comparison, the lead administrator Carmen is much colder and more cynical, burdened by a wooden artificial leg that causes her constant pain. Both supporters of the Republican loyalists, Casares and Carmen speculate on the outcome of the war, with the former characteristically optimistic that the loyalists will triumph and the latter dour about what she perceives as an inevitable victory for the nationalists. When discussing how dispiriting the war’s outcome looks, she laments, “Sometimes, I think that we are the ghosts,” a line that carries unintentional metatextual significance, as The Devil’s Backbone was released the same year as fellow ghost story The Others.
As much as the war is a metaphor for the ghost story and vice versa, The Devil’s Backbone contains several spine-chilling moments that stand on their own. The majority of these are courtesy of Santi, an eerie composite of ghoulish makeup and special effects that are still hauntingly effective more than 20 years later. My favorite detail is how Santi is surrounded by murky particles that aren’t easy to see when he moves but when he stands still, they float and coalesce in a way that calls attention to his ghastly presence. He also has a head wound with blood that slowly trickles up, another clue as to how Santi met his untimely demise. The sight of him is unnerving as is but his voice alone can make the hair on your arm stand on end; his portentous refrain of “many of you will die” tap us into the fear that Carlos feels in his midst.
As scary as Santi is, del Toro makes it clear that Carlos has other threats to his life that aren’t of the otherworldly or supernatural kind. In addition to the cruelty of some of the orphans and the threat of violence from the war, there’s also a groundskeeper (played by Eduardo Noriega) who lashes out at the kids from time to time. When he finds them sneaking around in the basement of a supply house, he grabs Jaime by his hair and viciously chastises them for trespassing. He then cuts Jaime across the cheek and then runs the children off, warning Carlos, “A single word about this and I’ll rip you in half.” Those who have seen Pan’s Labyrinth, which del Toro has called a “spiritual successor” to The Devil’s Backbone, may find parallels between Noriega’s character and the brutal Captain Vidal from that film.
Del Toro masterfully bookends his tale with an expansion on the opening line, musing that in addition to simply being a spirit of the dead, a ghost can also be an embodiment of a past mistake or residual energy of tragic events that replay over and over. We’re also given more context into who is narrating and at what point in time they’re doing so, leading to a powerful denouement and unforgettable final image. The Devil’s Backbone is a pivotal work in del Toro’s career when he found the courage to tell stories his own way.