The Devil's Backbone

The film starts out with Carlos being delivered to an orphange. When Carlos sneaks out to get water from the kitchen he comes across Santi the ghost but ends up getting scared. Carlos keeps going back to the ghost trying to overcome his fear to figure out what Santi wants. Carlos finds out that Santi wants revenge on his killer Jacinto. In the end, Jacinto sets fire to the orphange and everyone ends up dying besides some of the boys and Jacinto himself. The boys end up killing Jacinto and taking him to Santi and Santi gets his revenge.

I think based on Noel Carroll's stipulations on horror films that he would not consider The Devil's Backbone a horror film. Carroll states that the horror film requires a fearsome and disgusting monster. In the beginning of the film the ghost of Santi scared Carlos but to me even Casper the ghost scares people. In the film, the ghost of Santi was there to warn the boys but not to scare them. The film to me has a vibe of making ghosts seem nice and there to look out for you rather than scare you. Although the film may not be considered a work of horror, I think that it would be considered a work of art-dread.

I think the film is a work of art dread due to the fact that it shows a battle between good and evil. Evil is represented through Jacinto and good represented through Santi. Santi does good by warning the other boys about Jacinto and wanting revenge to take the evil out of the world. Dread is an emotional response in a horror film where something threatening is going to happen. Jacinto burning the orphange is a threat from Jacinto. The audience feels dread toward this threat.

The Devil's Backbone stands out more as a work of dread instead of horror. People feel that since it contains a ghost it is considered a horror film. Carroll shows us that the monster in the film needs to contain certain qualities to make it a horror film and the ghost in The Devil's Backbone does not contain these qualities. Dread is a better way to describe this film.