Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 26: The Devil's Backbone

Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 26: The Devil's Backbone

After Cronos Del Toro had his American debut with Mimic, a movie I haven't seen but doesn't seem to be very well-received. In 2001 he followed up Mimc with another Mexican film, this one called El Espinazo del Diablo, or The Devil's Backbone.

I've got things I like and don't like about this movie, so I'm gonna start with the negative.

Del Toro has a recurring theme of "the humans are worse than the monsters", which I don't think is particularly original or compelling and more often than not it makes his movies seem unfocused. It's really frustrating when there's this wonderful, Zero for Conduct-esque group of orphan boys that discover this ghost but their story keeps getting interrupted by these adult men who are all in love with the same teacher, then one of them goes crazy and causes a whole heap of trouble. The ghost is the interesting part, that should be the focus. Del Toro finally finds his balance in Pan's Labyrinth, which seamlessly goes back and forth between horrific reality and creepy fantasy, but here it's so bogged down in the real world side story that it doesn't let the main fantasy story breathe. He unfortunately regresses with The Shape of Water, but hopefully one of his million next projects (seriously, check out how many TV shows and movies he has planned on IMDb) will get back on the Pan's Labyrinth level of quality.

That's really my only issue with the movie, I just don't find his version of the real world that interesting. Moving on to the positive, I love the production design of this movie. Del Toro's talked about the amount of painstaking detail that went into this film, including spending an incredible amount of time on one pattern of one wall. It's this kind of uncompromising, singular vision that I love to see in film, and it's always my favorite thing about Del Toro's work. The ghost boy has a simple and interesting design, with a steady flow of blood floating from his head at all times. There's CGI used along with the practical elements of the movie, which only very rarely feels at all dated.

The performances are all great. A couple of the actors from Cronos show up and they're very good, but it's the kid actors in particular who do a fantastic job of feeling like real kids. They're often mean to each other, but they're also undyingly loyal to each other like actual young boys, but they also feel like fully-formed characters as opposed to just a bunch of cute kids. Any scenes with the boys are wonderful, which again is why I'm annoyed with how much time is spent with the selfish adult characters.

The kid fantasy story and the production design are marvelous, just know that a lot more time is spent with obnoxious grown-ups having drama amongst themselves.