Death becomes him

>> Horrormeister Guillermo del Toro directs the brilliant Gothic epic The Devil’s Backbone

by MATTHEW HAYS

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is filled with optimism for the horror genre. This, despite what many consider a longstanding decline and petering out of the horror movie. What are we left with? The Scary Movie comedies, which are weak parodies of parodies of reruns. Rather than give audiences more of the same, del Toro tells me, filmmakers should be giving them better.

“Sure, I liked things about Scream,” he says, basking in the heated adulation his latest film, The Devil’s Backbone, was receiving at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. “But these films have overextended their welcome. For those horror fans who want a mask and a potato peeler, I’d like to show those people just how rich the genre can actually be. I’ve rooted my films in modernism, rather than postmodernity. I’d like to avoid empty parody.”

Beat the devil

And del Toro has done just that with his latest. Though he paused to make the latest in the breadwinning Blade franchise (currently screening in cinemas), he has also made what is probably his best film yet, The Devil’s Backbone. Set in a remote Spanish orphanage during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, the film is seen through the eyes of wee 10-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a child who arrives to find the orphanage teeming with corruption and haunted by ghosts. The ghost of one orphan, in particular, repeatedly appears to Tielve, providing clues as to where the evil in the orphanage remains. Young caretaker Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), as it turns out, is fraught with hatred and resentment for the orphanage and those who run it. Noriega is soon in a bloody battle to the end with the orphans and their keepers. Devil’s Backbone is a brutal and intensely gory film; full of excessive images of pain, I would argue it’s the best horror film to come along in years—one of the best of the decade, for sure.

Celluloid spirits

For del Toro, the film was an opportunity to explore the very idea of ghosts on as many different levels as possible. “When I made Cronos, I was able to address vampirism on as many levels as I could—the old man, the dependent child, aging, immortality, the rich white guy living in Mexico. With Backbone, I wanted to ask: what is a ghost? And then to answer that question in as many different ways as possible.”

The Spanish Civil War itself proved a fitting setting for a film that ponders death and its finality. “If the Civil War had been prevented, WWII would have been far less likely,” del Toro says. “The Civil War proved a training ground for fascists and their weapons of mass destruction. Wars, of course, destroy futures. As well, as the orphanage is divided horrifically, so was Spain during its Civil War. Father was turned against son, brother against brother during that war.

“And there’s something about the idea of dead people coming to life that has great appeal. But I didn’t want to do it the way others have done it. For me, it’s crucial to fuck with the audience’s mind. Not necessarily to destroy expectations, but to reconfigure them. I want to fuck them, but also to show them a new position. Come over and try this!”

As well, the spectre of death hangs over the film in another sense, as an undetonated bomb sits in the middle of the orphanage. For whatever reason, the bomb dropped years before but didn’t go off—a constant reminder of the death that surrounds the orphans in the middle of this unresolved conflict.

Del Toro feels many contemporary horror films have lost that vital haunting touch. “Think of it: fairy tales, really good fairy tales, haunt you forever. Good horror movies, in my view, have to have the same power. In order to that, as well as the scares there must be an essential humanity to the pictures. Even in my more commercial pictures, I hope to put parts of that in. And hopefully, if I’ve done them right, the films will also have a little poetry.” :

The Devil’s Backbone opens Friday, April 12