In ‘The Devil’s Backbone’, a young boy named Carlos is dropped off at an orphanage for boys whose fathers have been killed in the Spanish Civil War. The orphanage is run by Carmen, a widow to a leftist revolutionary poet, and a doctor named Cásares, who is in love with Carmen. Casares and Carmen support the Republican loyalists, and are hiding a large cache of gold being used to back the Republican treasury. They are assisted by Jacinto, a caretaker and former orphan, and Conchita, a teacher who is engaged to Jacinto. An unexploded bomb dropped by the fascists sits in the centre of the school’s courtyard. Carlos soon discovers that the children are often visited by the ghost of Santi, an orphan who mysteriously disappeared the night the bomb was dropped.
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THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON CHILDREN: LOSS OF INNOCENCE
Cabin, Chris. "Review: Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone on Criterion Blu-ray.” Slant Magazine, 2013, https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/the-devils-backbone-bd/.
The corrosive power of stasis, of having no realm of escape, has hardened Jacinto into a greedy, savage cynic, but del Toro never loses sight of the neglected, disappointed child he once was. In comparison, Santi is quiet and focused, wanting only justice for his murder, but he’s as much a grand metaphor for the innocent “collateral damage” of war as he is a character. […] To help pay for food and other necessities, Casares sells bottles of rum infused with the remains of deformed fetuses, and in the middle of the home’s courtyard is a missile, dropped from a plane during the war, that never went off. The unifying element is the slow, often cyclical march of time, and though Pan’s Labyrinth offers wilder imagery, The Devil’s Backbone is just as piercing in its depiction of the psychological and physical wounds that war inflicts on the innocent.
THE POLITICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE
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Scott, A.O. “FILM REVIEW; Dodging Bombs and Ghosts in Civil War Spain.” The New York Times, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/21/movies/film-review-dodging-bombs-and-ghosts-in-civil-war-spain.html.
Mr. del Toro's allegorical intentions also become increasingly overt, as the boys must band together against their oppressor. ''He's bigger than us,'' one says. ‘' But there are more of us,'' Carlos replies, evoking a proud movie lineage of strike dramas and populist westerns, in which the people, united, can never be defeated.
Kermode, Mark. “The Devil’s Backbone: The Past Is Never Dead . . ..” The Criterion Collection, 2013, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2850-the-devil-s-backbone-the-past-is-never-dead.
The critic J. Hoberman has astutely described The Devil’s Backbone as “an experiment in antifascist supernaturalism,” a phrase that neatly encapsulates the recurrent themes that haunt del Toro’s work: the ghosts of history, the freedom of fantasy, the imperative of choice, the relationship between the “real” and the “imagined.” At its heart lies the conviction that horror and fantasy are inherently political. As del Toro told Time magazine in 2011, “Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution . . . the other is completely anarchic and anti-establishment.” Opening with the question “What is a ghost?” The Devil’s Backbone equates the legacy of history with the mythology of the living dead, providing a powerful metaphor for the way in which the past informs the present, and therefore shapes the future. Within this paradigm, a ghost may be “a tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and again . . . An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive.”
COMPARISONS TO PAN’S LABYRINTH
Kermode, Mark. “The Devil’s Backbone: The Past Is Never Dead . . ..” The Criterion Collection, 2013, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2850-the-devil-s-backbone-the-past-is-never-dead.
Both [Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone] balance political tensions with a feud between fantasy and reality, between the way the world seems and the way it is. And both counterpose the recurrent fairy-tale motif of choice against the specter of fascism—the ultimate lack of choice. Both films also centrally feature “a child facing a very adult situation, and dealing with it from a place of grace or purity.
ARE ‘WAR’ AND ‘HORROR’ AN EASY THEMATIC MARRIAGE?
BFI. “Ghost of the civil dead: Film of the Month: The Devil's Backbone.” BFI, 2012, http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/1904.
And del Toro's narrative […] echoes the conflict between the two Spains played out in the Civil War itself: the scientific rationalism of the leftist schoolmaster versus the supernatural irrationalism implicitly embodied by fascism. This sophisticated approach chimes with Freud's analysis of the uncanny, in which the supernatural is defined as a displaced or repressed version of the real, but it tends to undercut the frisson of the horror genre. While del Toro can faithfully execute a suspense sequence worthy of his master Hitchcock in the scene where the boys fetch water in the dead of night, the appearances of the ghost are too prosaic to satisfy genre aficionados. This is largely because of the interference of the historical setting in the supernatural drama. At the height of the Civil War it hardly requires supernatural intuition to predict, as ghostly Santi does, that 'many of you will die.' Likewise Casares remarks to his beloved Carmen that it is they, the outnumbered and vulnerable Republicans, who are the real ghosts. If the uncanny is diagnosed too well, then surely its potency is lost?
COLOUR SYMBOLISM IN THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE
Scott, A.O. “FILM REVIEW; Dodging Bombs and Ghosts in Civil War Spain.” The New York Times, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/21/movies/film-review-dodging-bombs-and-ghosts-in-civil-war-spain.html.
The Devil's Backbone is enriched by the contrast between the clammy, greenish light that infuses the orphanage by night and the parched orange glow of the daytime, a tonal contrast mirrored by the story, which melds horror and melodrama. By day we witness the turmoil of the adult world, which is somehow the source of the nightmares that emerge once the sun has gone down.