More than Horror in "The Devil's Backbone"

While El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro, 2001) is often placed under the "horror" genre, to label it as such feels misleading. When I think of the horror genre, I think of slasher films and possessed children. While children are at the core of El espinazo del diablo , there are many layers within the film that make it much more than simply a horror film. Emotion permeates at the core of El espinazo del diablo. In addition to its thriller nature, the film, set in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, is both historical and melancholic.

El espinazo del diablo is in many ways a poignant film. The story unfolds at a corrupt and remote orphanage. Carlos (Fernando Tielve), the orphanage's most recent addition, is innocence personified. As Enrique Ajuria Ibarra suggests in his analysis of the film, the ghost is emblematic for the national trauma that Spain faced in the 1930s. Carlos is haunted by the apparition of a ghost, but he does not understand what he is seeing. In many shots, the ghost is in the same place as the deactivated bomb that looms over the orphanage from the courtyard. Carlos understands neither the ghost nor the war, both of which are silenced. The tragedies that affect the orphanage are sad and understated, a subtlety often lost in the horror genre.

The ghost in El espinazo del diablo is not a typically grotesque ghost that would be found in many horror films. The ghost is the apparition of Santi, a young boy that disappeared from the orphanage a year prior to Carlos' arrival. Santi is still very human and simply aims to bring light to his death. He leads Carlos to the answers that surround his mysterious disappearance, simultaneously shedding light on a number of horrors committed by the living.

It would be foolish to suggest that there are not elements of horror in del Toro's El espinazo del diablo, but it would be equally foolish to deny that the film is much more than horror as mainstream America has come to understand it. The horrors in El espinazo del diablo are not particularly gruesome or shocking to the eye, but they get the viewer at the heart and mind.