An Insect Trapped in Amber: The Haunted Empathy of ‘The Devil’s Backbone’
I first discovered this movie, as I’m sure many others did, during Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments in 2004. That introduced me to a lot of films I would otherwise not have seen, and of which I would possibly never have even heard. That documentary miniseries was monumental to my adolescent horror education. I was fourteen at the time and just starting to get truly serious about the genre. The scene from The Devil’s Backbone was one of the only scenes out of that entire event to genuinely scare me, and I knew nothing about it other than the brief recap of the movie provided by the various talking heads of that segment.
The image of a ghost child, with little yellow eyes and a cracked skull perpetually leaking blood into the open air scared the Hell out of me, even as a teenager. And that’s perfectly Guillermo del Toro, because that ghost is probably the last thing one should actually be afraid of in that film. The ghost, Santi, is a representation of all ghosts, and of what ghost stories represent, which is simply the sadness of a past doomed to repeat itself in the present.
The Devil’s Backbone is set during the final years of the Spanish Civil War. Tensions are high and money is scarce. There are adults doing the best they can with what they have, there are those going mad with a dream of finding so much more, and they are the caretakers of boys with no future, boys who may as well be lambs to the slaughter in this forgotten little corner of nowhere. The physical representation of all of this tension and anxiety is a literal bomb sitting in the courtyard.
It fell perfectly intact, stuck in the Earth. It never detonated, but everyone knows the reality that it could go off at any moment. That is an unspoken thing that every single character carries through every single scene. Every carefully constructed conversation here is in attempt to tiptoe around conflict, every conflict is a release to keep darker impulses at bay, and so in both cases, every interaction is in attempt to avoid an explosion. And in the midst of all of this, there is the ghost.
The Devil’s Backbone is a deconstruction of the ghost story in its pure, most basic form. The film even opens with the question, posed in narration by the orphanage’s owner, Casares, “What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.” This is a beautiful way to open the story by reframing what our idea of a ghost is, right out of the gate. It sets a mood and asks questions that the film repeatedly returns to throughout its runtime. It’s a sentiment explored through several different characters, and in several different ways.
The most obvious character to address this is the film’s actual ghost: the drowned boy, Santi. He is the literal interpretation of that opening quote, as he is actually suspended in time. He is trapped forever in the moment of death, the circumstances of which we don’t see until much later, the blood from his open skull forever floating into the air. At the beginning, Santi is simply a classic local legend. He’s the ghost story you might hear about anywhere you go in the world. A kid who died under terrible circumstances, a kid you might see if you are out of bed and wandering alone late at night.
He sounds terrifying and at first, he is terrifying. The brilliance of Santi’s role in this movie is that he is introduced as a figure of absolute horror, a nightmare of living death, an expression of undying rage. In pure del Toro tradition, what we actually reveal is that he is if anything the loneliest boy in the world. He is sad, he is isolated, and he is intimately aware that he is doomed to be like this forever. He is condemned to haunt the orphanage, and at the same time he’s a boy haunted by himself and his own circumstances.
The Devil’s Backbone deconstructs this view of Santi as the nightmarish ghost we originally expect him to be. He’s not that. He’s sad and even gentle in his own way. And then the film builds him back to being exactly what we initially expected him to be, after coming to understand and empathize with him, by revealing that there is exactly one person for whom he can and should be a figure of horror, and that’s the person that killed him. It’s a beautiful understanding of perspective, and empathy, to take away our fear of him and then give all of that fear to someone else in a way that allows us to be fundamentally on the ghost’s side, and not the living human’s, as Santi takes his long overdue revenge.
The other ghost fundamental to the tale is Casares himself, truly putting the opening quote in perspective with the reveal at the end that the story is being told to us by a ghost. With this in mind, that opening line is delivered to himself more than it even is to us, to put the circumstances into words. It is the story of a ghost attempting to understand his own condition, to make peace with what he is. Or it’s an attempt to explain what — in death — he has already come to accept.
In a way, it is like that for everybody, because the truth is that, ultimately, every character in The Devil’s Backbone is a ghost, even if not in as literal a way as Santi. There are different motivations here. Different goals. Some are here to make things easier for others, some are completely in it for themselves, believing that a hoard of wealth that means absolutely nothing given their circumstances will be the key to a better life, their ticket to leave all of this behind and finally be free. But the truth is that they are all in the exact same boat. They are in purgatory. This orphanage is an ending, a place where everyone knows on some level, they will never leave.
They are each suspending their own emotions in time. It is made explicitly clear by the bomb that sits in the courtyard, waiting to explode at any moment. In a way, it’s not that different from Santi, trapped in his perpetual drowning. By never knowing when the bomb could go off, knowing it could happen any second, they all exist in that immediate fear that accompanies an explosion. And it’s clearly not even something every character thinks about. They feel it every second, so sometimes they don’t have to think about it at all.
Everyone tells themselves a lie of escape, whether figurative or literal, that they may be saved from their life here or that they may save themselves. Some dream of hope. Others, like Jacinto, are so obsessed with escaping their situation that they’re driven by overwhelming greed. The beauty of this, of course, is that it is only with the physical help of a ghost that any of them eventually free themselves.
The Devil’s Backbone remains one of the best films from one of our great living directors over twenty years later. It deconstructs the idea of a ghost story, yet it’s also an incredibly earnest one, in that like all good ghost stories it is a portrait of unbearable sadness and loneliness. It’s a gothic haunted house tale, a political drama, and a coming-of-age story all at once, and established themes that del Toro has continued to explore throughout his career.
