The Devil's Backbone

A boy is left at an orphanage in the last year of the war. There is an unexploded bomb in the courtyard and a child who died the night it fell.

Del Toro opens with a narration asking what a ghost is and answers it: a tragedy condemned to repeat, an instant of pain, something dead which appears at times alive. The film then spends ninety minutes demonstrating that the ghost is the least dangerous thing in the building.

Santi's design, with the blood suspended in the water around his head like ink, is one of the great ghost effects and it was achieved practically and digitally together.

The actual antagonist is a young caretaker with a plan involving gold, and Eduardo Noriega plays him as a man whose cruelty comes from his own thwarted life.

The last act is a siege by children and it is truly rousing.