Anyway, I finally caught up with Guillermo Del Toro's film El Espinazo Del Diablo, The Devil's Backbone, on DVD, and I could see why he would describe it a the "spiritual predecessor" to last year's acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth.Both are about orphaned children during the Spanish civil war, dealing with evil, greasy haired bad guys and supernatural forces. In Backbone, it's a child's ghost instead of an entire fantasy world, and the film as a whole is much less expansive than its "sequel"- the story is more or less self-contained in the orphanage that a young boy is sent to when his father dies, with the war lingering sadly at the fringes, instead of the much more intertwined plot of Labyrinth.
It's been described as a horror film (or at least it showed up on those Bravo "Scariest moment" countdowns that seem stupid but you end up watching the whole hour somehow), but it's not a jump out of your seat sort of experience. It's a ghost story with a purpose, and artistic merit- I guess I mean that it's a good story that happens to have a ghost in it, which is something that only seems to exist in other countries. In America, ghost stories are merely thinly plotted star vehicles where people slowly approach something creepy with creepy music playing before... BOO!
Another thing unique about both of Del Toro's historical fantasies is that he isn't afraid to show how unrelentingly cruel the world, and adults can be- there's no children's movie gloss to these stories just because the protagonists happen to be children. It makes me wish he'd have directed The Golden Compass.
Ah, well. At least we have The Hobbit to look forward to now. It should be interesting to see how he manages the more child friendly tone of that book with the dark currents of Jackson's trilogy.
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