Retrospective Film Review

The Devil’s Backbone (2001) • 20 Years Later

After a boy whose father has died in the Spanish Civil War arrives at an ominous boys’ orphanage, he discovers the school is haunted…

There are many ways to describe the marvellous work by writer-director Guillermo del Toro. He’s a visionary who ensnares his audience’s imagination with horror, fairytales, science fiction, and Gothic romance stories. Throughout his career, del Toro has presented many different worlds of fantasy he spent years immersed in. Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein directly inspired his own Cronos (1993) and Crimson Peak (2015), Hollywood blockbusters like Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004) show his love for comic-books, and Pacific Rim (2013) was a loving homage to Japanese kaiju cinema such as Godzilla / Gojira (1954). By infusing classic folktales with a modern sensibility, del Toro has become an advocate of phantasmagorical cinema.

Following his miserable experience working for Miramax on Mimic (1997), del Toro relocated to Mexico to reassert his independence. Determined to…