First posted September 2020.

Coming off the last entry in this series, Pan’s Labyrinth, we now travel back in time five years to cover the first part of this semi-duology, The Devil’s Backbone. This ghost story takes place in the final days of the Spanish Civil War, whereas Ofelia’s fairytale takes place in the immediate aftermath. Though this series is meant to focus on fairytale influences in Guillermo del Toro’s films, The Devil’s Backbone is more in the folkloric storytelling tradition of which fairytales are a subgenre. There is one good fairytale moment I’ll mention at the end, but for this post, I’m going to focus on the folkloric tradition of the ghost, how ghosts are used in literature, and how those tropes feature in this film.

Tales of the dead returning to the world of the living have been with us as long as we’ve had stories. In early Asian and European Cinderella-type stories, the spirit of the dead mother returns in what we now usually think of as the fairy godmother’s position to help her daughter. Other stories tell of vengeful spectres haunting and haranguing their still-living wrongdoers, or restless ghosts calling out to anyone who will listen until their body is discovered and given proper burial. The ballet Giselle is based on tales of the vila (ghosts of women who died of broken hearts) in Slavic folklore, and countless folk songs, including but not limited to “The Cruel Sister,” “The Greenwood Side,” and “The Suffolk Miracle,” feature ghosts who bear messages to their survivors.

Not all folkloric ghosts are bent on destruction and terror; of those previously mentioned, Cinderella’s mother, Giselle, and the lover in “The Suffolk Miracle” intend not to frighten but to soothe the troubles of those who survived them. This is the kind of ghost we find in The Devil’s Backbone; del Toro even mentions in his director’s commentary that this is not meant to be a scary ghost, but a tragic one. (He still ends up being a little vengeful, though. Santi can have a little revenge murder, as a treat.)

As we move from timeless folkloric ghosts into documented literary ones in the medieval period, we see a kind of codification of ghosts, and the split between ghosts in media used to terrify and ghosts used to ameliorate or enlighten can be traced back to this period. In literature that explicitly draws on Catholicism, ghosts are souls in Purgatory whose reappearance in the living world is done in pursuit of redemption—curiously, usually done by terrifying their living loved ones into giving the church money in exchange for masses to save them. Ghosts in the Protestant imagination are a non-entity; the Protestant rejection of Purgatory also necessarily rejects the existence of ghosts. Anything you think is a ghost in Protestant literature is actually a demon in disguise, thus serving the same purpose of terrifying the living (also very obviously drawn on these days in the slew of supernatural media that conflates ghosts and demons). It’s not until the late 17th century that we start to see a resurgence of the ghost as a benevolent and helpful being; Shakespeare’s King Hamlet is an early 17th century example, pointing his son toward solving his murder, but as you probably already know, that doesn’t exactly have a happy ending.

In 1764, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is published. The story opens with a gigantic helmet falling from the sky into the courtyard, and if you’ve seen The Devil’s Backbone, you probably already know where this is going. The helmet is seen as an omen of the fulfilment of an ancient curse, but Walpole’s got nothing on the unexploded bomb that falls into the courtyard during the opening of The Devil’s Backbone and remains in the centre of the entire film, forcing characters to see it, avoid it, entreat it for guidance, and listen to it tick in the still of the night. Subtle it is not, but it serves a satisfying narrative purpose as it ties the ghost of past evil with the looming spectre of war.

The Castle of Otranto is widely considered the first gothic novel, and as gothic literature grows as a genre we progress to works that consider not what literary purpose ghosts serve, but whether ghosts exist at all. Literature of this time is more of the Scooby Doo villain variety, where a ghost is not a ghost but a carnival owner or mysteriously disappeared cousin in disguise. Reflecting the late 18th century turn toward rational enquiry, The Devil’s Backbone employs Dr. Casares to serve as the balance between superstition and reason. The doctor shows the film’s protagonist, Carlos, jars of preserved fetuses with exposed spines and explains that the folkloric explanation for this phenomenon is that these are “children who should never have been born.” Casares then immediately dismisses this notion. “Poverty and disease,” he says, “that’s all it is.” He ladles out some of the liquid in which the fetuses are preserved and explains that the superstitious villagers refer to this as “limbo water,” and believe it can cure all sorts of ailments and illnesses. He offers it to Carlos, who refuses, and Casares concludes before dismissing the boy that if he is not irrational enough to believe in limbo water, he can’t be irrational enough to believe in ghosts. But after Carlos leaves, Casares himself drinks the limbo water—just in case it does work, after all.

Emotion and reason are considered opposite ends of the spectrum, both in 18th century ideology and in The Devil’s Backbone. The film’s characters inhabit a world given over in more than one way to emotion, and it is not an environment in which reason can exist. “War,” del Toro states in his commentary, “is the absolute lack of reason,” and Casares notes in the monologue that serves to both open and close the film, “[A ghost is] an emotion suspended in time.”

Of the literary purposes for ghosts—to terrify, to teach, or to question—the film hints at the former and latter, but firmly places itself in the camp of the middle. The ghost Santi is a speaker of truth, and through the imparting of his message he inspires the children to fight for truth as well. However, this story doesn’t have a happy ending; much like Hamlet, the damage is done, and what happens going forward is only aftermath. In these final days of the Spanish Civil War, fascism is on the brink of outright victory. Jacinto, the groundskeeper, seems close to finding the orphanage’s hidden treasure, the search for which led him to murder Santi when his secret was discovered. While Jacinto gets his comeuppance, murdered in turn by Santi’s ghost, the tide of the war cannot be turned. The bomb remains unexploded, and Santi’s ghost is not put to rest.

The spectral omen of the unexploded bomb functions to underline the duality inherent to the story. A ghost both is and is not, a ghost is both alive and dead, a ghost is here yet not here. The war is over, but the fight is not finished. The traumatic events that took place in the orphanage and in Spain at large during the Civil War have ramifications that never cease. Poetically encapsulated in the appearance of Santi’s ghost to Carlos in the underground room in which he died, the lingering trauma is symbolised by the trail of blood that hangs in the air even when the image of Santi disappears. In the final shot of the film, the surviving children drag heavy suitcases down the road as they leave the smouldering remains of the orphanage. All of the adults are dead, and these orphaned children of resistance fighters have nowhere safe waiting for them. Their future is, at best, uncertain, and the effects of everything that has happened to them will never fully leave them. The only flicker of hope is that they are together; together they defeated Jacinto, and perhaps together they can fight bigger and badder monsters.

In an effort to end this post on a happier note than the film, I promised you a fairytale moment and a fairytale moment you shall have. Before his fatal plunge to meet Santi’s ghost in the cellar pool, Jacinto is seen stuffing his pockets with the gold bars that he finally acquired. When the boys push him in, he sinks under the weight of the gold, and as he struggles to empty his pockets, Santi’s ghost appears and drags him down. In the director’s commentary, del Toro says this moment is inspired by the Grimms’ story, “The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats.” The wolf in the story eats six of the young goats while their mother is away, but the seventh hides in a clock. When the mother returns, she finds all but one of her children gone and the wolf sleeping beneath a nearby tree. Quickly, she instructs the seventh child to fetch her scissors, a needle, and thread, and she cuts open the wolf’s belly. All the children emerge, and together they gather stones to fill the wolf’s belly before the mother sews him back up. When he awakes, the wolf goes to drink from the river, but the stones make him so heavy he falls in and drowns. This ending is similar to early Grimm variations of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the huntsman cuts open the wolf to free Red and her grandmother, and they put stones in his belly before sewing him back up. When he stands up again, his legs are too weak to support the weight of the stones in his body, and he falls down dead.

The Devil’s Backbone is an early example of themes we see more regularly in later del Toro films. It’s widely acknowledged—by himself, as well—that he loves monsters and seeks to portray monsters and terrifying beings as friends, pitting them against the true monsters of fascism, xenophobia, classism, racism, and hate. Hellboy and The Shape of Water’s Asset owe a lot to Santi: a ghost who is an ally, not an enemy.