How does Guillermo del Toro use a ghost story to tell the story of the Spanish Civil War for international audiences?

Guillermo del Toro is known for creating fantastical tales of conflict – whether it is humanity’s fight for survival against the Kaiju in Pacific Rim (2013), Hellboy’s discovery of his origins in Hellboy (2004), or Ofelia’s desire to escape reality in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), there is always some form of conflict which is central to the premise of the film.

The Devil’s Backbone (del Toro, 2001) is a ghost story set in 1939 surrounding the lives of seven orphan boys, and the people who look after them, during the final year of the Spanish Civil War.

Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a 12-year-old boy whose father has died in the war, is delivered to the Santa Lucia orphanage by his tutor and is immediately fascinated by a towering bomb wedged almost-vertically in the centre of the courtyard. The lives of everyone living in the orphanage seem to revolve around the bomb.

In their 2014 book, Keith McDonald and Roger Clark note that:

A recurring theme in Ghost or Horror stories is one of isolation. The orphanage is situated in the middle of the desert, which del Toro explains in an interview with Matt Zoller Seitz:

In an interview with Kimberly Chun, del Toro explains his use of a ghost story running alongside the Spanish Civil War: “Also the whole idea was to create a ghost story where the war was a background but eventually crept into the foreground.” (2009, p.29).

It is revealed that a boy named Santi (Junio Valverde) disappeared the same night the bomb fell and that his ghost is rumoured to haunt the orphanage. Jaime (Íñigo Garcés) reveals he saw Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) kill Santi and that his ghost remains. Carlos asks the bomb where the ghost is and a red ribbon, symbolic of Santi’s spilled blood, shows him the way into the cellar.

Later, it becomes clear Jacinto is an evil man consumed by his lust for the gold bars locked in the safe and the ghost’s warning of “Many of you will die” is realised when Jacinto’s last attempt to open the safe results in an explosion that kills many of the people around it. Their deaths represent and replace the devastation the bomb failed to deliver.

(Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers, 2022)

Anne E. Hardcastle raises an interesting point:

Santi’s ghost never posed a real threat to Carlos or the boys, and his warning could have been an attempt to save the boys from Jacinto’s, and the war’s, evil. Hardcastle further states: “By now all the boys have realized that it is the living, not the dead, that threaten Santa Lucia.” (2005, p. 123).

The Devil’s Backbone transitions from being primarily a ghost story to symbolising the struggles of the war through the eyes of the children, and Jacinto is portrayed as the opposing side of the war. The conflict within the orphanage represents the fact that even though they are far from the frontlines, the war affected the lives of everyone in Spain in some way or another.