Horror Month: The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

                       This movie defied all my expectations. All I knew about this film when I started watching is that there's a ghost in it and it's directed by Guillermo del Toro. I thought it was going to be a somewhat conventional ghost story. Instead of that, what I got was a fantastic humanist story which wasn't particularly scary in any conventional sense, but did in fact have a creepy ghost in it. 

                      The Devil's Backbone is about a young boy named Carlos who is without warning left by his jerk of a tutor at an orphanage in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The orphanage is hiding gold for one of the armies in the war, and the caretaker has been trying to steal it for some time. During his time at the orphanage Carlos repeatedly encounters the ghost of a young boy, who is later revealed to be a child who was at the orphanage until the caretaker murdered him. As events transpire, the caretaker takes over the orphanage and nearly blows the entire place up, killing the good people who take care of the orphans in his search for the gold. It turns out that in the end the ghost of the dead child is not really evil as you sort of assume from the start, all he wants is justice for himself against the caretaker. Which in the end he gets, with help from Carlos and the other boys. 

                     As I said before, I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. Instead of the ghost being the story's antagonist, it is the caretaker of the orphanage who is the bad one. The ghost serves to remind us that the evil things we do by no means stay buried, and old acts of evil can come back to haunt us, though not usually in such a literal sense. Del Toro did a magnificent job developing the villain of the movie, making the audience absolutely loathe him. The mere prospect of the caretaker getting away with all the horrendous crimes he committed was appalling to me. And that makes the ending that much more powerful, though the orphans' future is uncertain they have triumphed over evil. I also noticed some similarities between this and Del Toro's other masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth. Both take place during times of political or civil unrest, and both are told from the perspective of a child and involve their escapism from a harsh reality. Del Toro must have the mind of a child, to be able to recreate the innocence and curiosity of a child so well.

                    Great movie.