‘The Devil’s Backbone’: The Guillermo del Toro movie that “horrified” Hollywood
Guillermo del Toro has carved himself a niche within the movie industry as someone who isn’t afraid of the more sinister things in life. He’s a purveyor of monsters and mythology, with films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water under his belt, proving himself worthy of the accolades he’s gained, including an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ and a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
The hallmarks of del Toro’s work are a preference for practical effects and prosthetics, darker interpretations of fairytale-like stories and a recognition of the humanity that can be found in stories about surreal monsters that can often be overlooked by other films in the horror genre, in favour of jumpscares and shock factor.
It’s one of del Toro’s earlier works, made before he broke into more conventional Hollywood circles with franchise sequels like Blade II and Hellboy, that del Toro says would be too difficult for many American studios to produce.
“Any studio would have been horrified by the violence inflicted towards or by children,” the director says of his 2001 gothic-horror set in 1930s Spain, The Devil’s Backbone. The film tells the story of a young boy left at a remote, Republican-run orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the film, the young boy, Carlos, is haunted by the ghost of a former student, Santi, whose death is tangled in a mystery that is linked to a secret at the heart of the institution he now haunts. Exploring themes of betrayal, loss and having a violent streak running through it, del Toro played on his own childhood to bring a sense of harrowing realism to his phantasm.
“The worst years of my life were my childhood,” he says. The film was independently produced in Spain, and despite the praise that it would go on to receive, del Toro insists that it couldn’t have been made any other way. “Any studio would have been horrified by the violence inflicted towards or by children,” del Toro says, speaking of the focus of the film being around two young boys, but the themes and graphic danger not being sanitised around them. “That’s the core of the movie: it has to show children as mortal figures.”
Del Toro claims that in American-produced cinema, children are ‘uncomplex’ and remain ‘incredibly safe’, an idea totally at odds with his own experiences as a child. “If you’re a pale, introspective creature of the shadows – like I was – it’s hell.”
The director has continued to channel his introspection and shadowy childhood into his more recent work, with his adaptation of the beloved fairy tale Pinocchio securing an Academy Award for ‘Best Animated Feature’ in 2022, a film and character that del Toro says he has a “deep personal connection to”, embracing the darkness of the source material more than the famous Disney adaptation from 1940.
