Looking Back at THE ORPHANAGE: Outstanding Horror

A few years ago, horror was draped in the white robes of raven-haired virgins. Light and not particularly sturdy, the garment gradually began to fall apart. While in the first years of its existence it worked perfectly, later on it started to bore, and at times even amuse. After all, how long can one wear the same outfit? Horror became naked once again. The Orphanage.

In an old wardrobe hung dusty cloaks recalling the former glory of a certain Romanian ruler; there were werewolf costumes, and somewhere nearby lay worn crucifixes that had once stood up to antichrists and the spawn of Satan. Then, timidly, horror put on the garb of a torero and began to dance flamenco, shifting its epicenter from the Land of the Rising Sun to the homeland of the corrida. The relocation was not abrupt at all; horror cinema had long been picking up castanets and traveling across the land of Cervantes.

Is Un Chien Andalou by the surrealist master Luis Buñuel not, by any chance, a discreet ancestor of today’s bloody carnage? After all, how perfectly that characteristic slicing of a woman’s eyeball fits the hostel poetics. And without that very surrealism, would the expressionist movement have emerged at all—the movement that became the foundation of horror and created its greatest legends, with Nosferatu at the forefront? If I kept speculating, I would probably arrive at many more or less controversial conclusions, but this is not a text about the history of Spanish cinema and its contribution to the global legacy of horror. And so—by necessity—I will get to the point and move to a somewhat more recent past.

That past, in this case, begins in 1999, when Roman Polański sent to the silver screen a tale of dealings between a bibliophile and Satan. The excellent The Ninth Gate was created in collaboration with the Spanish; what is more, two of them—Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Enrique Urbizu—co-wrote the script of the Polish director’s film. It is precisely at this moment that the Iberian knack for inducing fear through unconventional forms becomes apparent.

Earlier Spanish horror was largely gore cinema, reminiscent in its anti-content of the infamous Guinea Pig series. After collaborating with the author of Rosemary’s Baby, Spanish cinema did not regress at all—quite the opposite, in fact—as Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Amenábar appeared on the scene.

The former made The Devil’s Backbone and, set in similar realities, Pan’s Labyrinth. Both films, in an unpretentious way, fuse the drama brought about by the cruelty of war with a tale on the border between fairy tale and horror. The story of the Faun takes one’s breath away, thus distancing itself from all Western productions touching on similar themes. Amenábar, after Abre los ojos and his collaboration with Crowe on its remake, sends Nicole Kidman wandering between the walls of a haunted house, releasing to cinemas The Others—a film that would become the template for The Orphanage.

An additional recommendation, besides these excellent models, is the patronage of the creator of the cruel world of Ofelia and the Faun—Guillermo del Toro. The bar was set extraordinarily high, yet, surprisingly, Juan Antonio Bayona, making his feature-length debut, clears it without even the slightest brush. The film, like Amenábar’s horror, takes us to an old house with a history and its own secrets. This time it is the titular orphanage (a nod to The Devil’s Backbone), where—out of sentiment—one of its former wards comes to live. The metaphorical bridge between reality and the paranormal world, which remains in excellent shape around the aging building, will of course be the child of the protagonist.

A boy who gives himself over to playing with imaginary friends with such passion that his mother begins to doubt whether they are merely creations of a small child’s mind. In the world of spirits, to believe means the same as to see—The Orphanage cultivates this principle.

An extraordinary atmosphere, surprising narrative solutions, and unusual characters are the hallmarks of Spanish horror cinema. Bored with the ugly faces of Asian women plundering electronic connections, tired of poor anatomy lessons delivered by Roth and his imitators, weary of yet another incarnation of horror heroes, we gladly move to a place where the spiritual world and the earthly one interpenetrate in a thoughtful, subtle way. With a shiver of emotion we watch the actions of a desperate mother, haunted by a figure with a face covered by linen cloth, on which an utterly inappropriate—and therefore terrifying—smile is painted.

We willingly allow ourselves to be swept up in her private investigation into her son’s disappearance; what is more, we ourselves try to solve the mystery, but to no avail. The screenplay departs from well-worn templates to such an extent that finding the solution earlier than the screenwriter intended is practically impossible.

The Orphanage, produced under del Toro’s name, leans more toward cinema in the style of Amenábar. Nevertheless, it draws from both men only what is best. Bayona joins the ranks of Spaniards who in recent years have been surprising audiences with an unusually high—by today’s standards—level of horror filmmaking.

Together with the directors of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Others, alongside the not previously mentioned author of 28 Weeks Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (the sequel to Danny Boyle’s film), he forms a group that has a chance to carry out a successful resuscitation of horror, which for quite a few years now has been hovering on the brink of clinical death.