THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE – Guillermo del Toro’s creative resurrection

After a bad experience in Hollywood, Guillermo del Toro had lost his spark. He got it back with a story of a haunted orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, a script he wrote when he was still a student. 

Together with the film’s producer Rosa Bosch, BFI’s Creative Director and author of THE FABER BOOK OF MEXICAN CINEMA Jason Wood and co-host of the Filmspotting podcast Josh Larsen, guest host Anna Bogutskaya finds out how THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE gave Guillermo his horror groove back. 

Season 6, titled Haunted Homes, explores how haunted house movies have mirrored our relationship with our homes. Each episode visits a horror movie that changed the way we imagine a haunted house, from the crumbling Gothic mansions to white picket fences, what it says about the people who live in the houses and what scares them the most.  

Guest written and hosted by Anna Bogutskaya. Find her book on horror films and feelings, FEEDING THE MONSTER, online and in all good bookshops. You can also listen to her horror film history podcast The Final Girls and subscribe to her movie newsletter Admit One.

A Woman’s Bite: Female Vampires collection is now streaming on MUBI. To watch some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes talk of ghost children, civils wars, 9/11 and spoilers, but it doesn't include me, Rico Gagliano. For the next few episodes leading up to Halloween, I am handing over my hosting reins to a horror expert par excellence. You're in good, creepy hands with her. Enjoy. It all started with a drawing. Guillermo del Toro has been drawing since he was a kid, and he started so he could illustrate the horror stories he was writing. I was a very lonely child. I was very strange. He drew the monsters he read about in novels and saw in movies like Frankenstein's creature.<i>It's moving. It's alive!</i> And Lon Chaney's<i>Phantom of the Opera</i>.<i>It's alive, it's alive, it's alive!</i> I'm rifling through his drawings right now through a massive coffee table book called, appropriately,<i>Cabinet of Curiosities</i>. It contains only a portion of the hundreds, probably thousands, of pages of sketchbooks and diaries del Toro has kept for many years. There are sketches of some of del Toro's most famous monsters. The Pale Man from <i>Pan's Labyrinth</i>,<i>Hellboy</i>, and the Reapers from <i>Blade 2</i>. There's also incredible drawings for films that he hasn't made yet. Like a love story and a <i>Phantom of the Opera</i>, set in a meat processing plant. And one of the pages of these notebooks contains the drawing of a little boy with blood streaming from a gash in his head. His skin is translucent. You can almost see his bones through it, and the blood from his head flows upwards. That little boy was the origin point of the film we're looking at in this episode. He would become the ghost that haunts <i>The Devil's Backbone</i>. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI is the streaming service that champions great cinema, and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. I'm Anna Bogutskaya and I'll be your host for this season. I'm a film critic and host of <i>The Final Girls</i> podcast, and the author of the new book, <i>Feeding the Monster</i> a deep dive into why we love watching horror movies. Which I've made a career out of doing. I'm a guest in MUBI's definitely not haunted house. Your regular host, Rico Gagliano, will be back with a new season in November. Meanwhile, this is season six. We're calling it 'Haunted Homes'. And for the next five episodes leading up to Halloween, I'm diving into the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made. In this episode, we take a look at what's lurking in the darkness of <i>The Devil's Backbone</i>, the film that Guillermo del Toro has called his most personal creation, and the project that brought him back from creative limbo. In many ways,<i>Devil's Backbone</i> is my first movie. That is him at the BFI London Film Festival in 2017. Let us go back to Spain 1938, and talk to the film's producers and admirers to understand what <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> has to say about the past and the present. Guillermo del Toro had the idea for <i>El Espinazo del Diablo</i>. That's the original title for <i>The Devil's Backbone</i>, when he was still a student. He wrote a thesis film which was actually <i>The Devil's Backbone</i>, which he was going to make before <i>Cronos</i>. That's Jason Wood, creative director of the British Film Institute and author of <i>The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema</i>. He says del Toro showed the script to his mentor, filmmaker Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, who absolutely ripped it to shreds. And del Toro, rather than wanting to rewrite it, just gave a two fingered salute and said, I'll just write something new then. And that new project was <i>Cronos</i>.<i>Cronos</i> would be his debut feature and is the story of a middle class, middle aged antique dealer who unwillingly becomes a vampire. That film got some attention. It screened at Cannes, although there was very little support for it from the Mexican film industry, or IMCINE, aka the Mexican Film Institute. He went to Cannes. They didn't pay for him to go. He slept on a floor. I think they gave him two rolls of sticky tape so he could put up his own posters. Because it was a genre film and it wasn't about social realism. I don't think the Mexican government were very supportive of it. The sticky tape must have worked because <i>Cronos</i> had a life. I spoke to Rosa Bosch, who was one of the partners of Tequila Gang the production company that del Toro founded in the late 90s, along with director Alfonso Cuaron, screenwriter Laura Esquivel and producer Berta Novaro.<i>Cronos</i> made a big mark artistically, but not financially. The level of distribution and sales agent at the time did not put him necessarily on the map. But it took him all the way to Hollywood and to the offices of Miramax, the company run by the Weinstein brothers. Del Toro's first American production was the giant cockroach movie <i>Mimic</i>, starring Mira Sorvino. This is him again in London in 2017. My first American experience was almost my last experience because it was with the Weinsteins at Miramax. I mean, fair. Two horrible things happened in the late 90s. My father was kidnaped and I worked with the Weinsteins, and I don't know which one was worse. Actually, the kidnaping made more sense because I knew what they wanted, you know. Then, to make matters worse... A friend of mine did the worst thing you can do to a friend. He gave me five screenplays that he wrote, to read, and four of them were dismal. But the fifth script contained an image. A bomb in the playground of an orphanage. More on that in a minute. Reinvigorated, del Toro resurrected his thesis film, pitching it as. A gothic western horror ghost story set in the end of the Civil War. Which definitely sounds cool to me and probably to most of you listening to this podcast, but to 90s studio executives, not so much. Every studio specialist from Fox Searchlight to you name it, passed on it. There were endless amounts of meetings, endless amounts of meetings. Part of the rejection was the cost. The film at the time was not a cheap film. Anything to do with Guillermo because of the complexity of effects is never cheap. So I think at the time you're probably looking at if the average Spanish film was 2 million, <i>El Espinazo</i> was probably four and a half five. I have some vague recollection of 10, 15 finance plans that would have included anything from Scandinavian money to you name it. Another difficulty was the mix of genres that has become a staple of del Toro's cinema. This was quite innovative at the time. The background of the Spanish Civil War had something to do with it. We kept, you know, on Spanish Civil War, Spanish Civil War. Who cares about the Spanish? It's really a backdrop. The truth of the matter is that it's such a universal film, because you could have set it up on the aftermath of any war. And then, of course, just some good old fashioned xenophobia. At that point, there hadn't been so many big box office in Spanish language other than Almodóvar. And it was Almodóvar who provided, finally, a silver lining. I had met Pedro Almodóvar at the end of the tour of <i>Cronos</i>, and Pedro Almodóvar had said to me, "I love your movie."If you can come to Spain, we will produce something for you." And listener they did. It was Pedro's and Agustin's strength as a company that really was the finishing magic. The original idea of <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> was set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution. With the Almodóvars on board and the Spanish co-production, the action moved to Spain, and the story to 1938. The year before the Spanish Civil War ended and Francisco Franco's Fascist government took over the country for the next 40 years. The haunted house in <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> is an orphanage in the middle of the desert, housing the children of the Republican resistance against the fascists. An orphanage with a ghost. The image for me from <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> is the plume of blood that floats around Santi's head. The boy ghost. That's Josh Larsen, host of Filmspotting

and author of <i>Fear Not: 9:52

A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies</i>. That little boy with white irises and black eyes, near translucent skin and with blood flowing upwards from his head. Just like in the picture that del Toro drew so many years ago. The boy's name is Santi, and he's haunting the orphanage, trying to get someone to solve his disappearance and to get revenge for his murder. To the other kids Santi is known as the one who sighs, a detail that is taken directly from Guillermo del Toro's own experience with a ghost, that of his uncle. As he said in this interview with Criterion, they were very close. He was named Guillermo. I was named after him. Together they made a pact. Whoever died first would send the other a sign. I was hedging my bets. I was like ten years old, you know. He was going to croak first. After Uncle Guillermo died, del Toro inherited his room. All of a sudden I heard this, this really deep sigh, really deep sigh, and really, really sad like a tremolo. And I thought, what the hell was that? And I turned off the TV and I waited and I heard it again, you know, and it was a really deep sigh. That's why in <i>Devil's Backbone</i> the ghost is called The One Who Sighs. In the film, a new boy, Carlos, arrives at the orphanage, befriends the ghost boy Santi, and sets out to figure out who killed him. Spoiler alert it was the caretaker, the brutish Jacinto, played by Spanish heartthrob Eduardo Noriega. Jacinto though, is, in a way, a blueprint for all of del Toro's villains. An orphan himself, he wants the gold that the orphanage is safeguarding for the Republican Resistance. He's greedy. He's kind of eaten up by jealousy and avarice. This is a staple of all of del Toro's films. The monsters are never the actual villains. It's not the ghost that's the scariest part of <i>The Devil's Backbone</i>. This is one of the more nuanced explorations of what it's like to bully and be bullied. That's something the movies almost always get wrong, but those lines are often more blurry in real life than the movies depict, and. The kids, in turn, bully each other. Another boy initially targets Carlos, but to face Jacinto they become allies. Carlos and Jaime, the bigger boy who initially comes after him, become partners in a way, but uneasy partners, right? It's not like they're necessarily best friends. They band together to take him down and in a shocking scene, like something out of <i>The Lord of the Flies</i>... They beat him up and feed him to the ghost boy who pulls Jacinto and all the gold with him down into the water.<i>The Devil's Backbone</i> is not a ghost story that offers any reconciliation or forgiveness or hope. It's incredibly dark in that way. When I wrote about ghost stories, I proposed that the fear most ghost stories most ghost horror films are exploring is fear of guilt of some kind. It can be our guilt. It can be someone we know. Their guilt. Something happened in a particular place that needs to be confronted, exposed, admitted. And it doesn't always happen, but in some cases, in some horror films, forgiven. The ghosts of <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> unlike the dead of the Spanish Civil War, demand and get their retribution. The war was a good background to explore what it means for a country to try and forget its own dead. You have this ghost story, haunted school story, representing the Spanish Civil War on one level, but also the individual hauntings that these boys have experienced. Each of the people working at this orphanage have experienced in their lives. The film is actually narrated by a ghost, Dr Casares, played by legendary Argentine actor Federico Luppi, who had actually played the lead role in del Toro's <i>Cronos</i>. He bookends the film with his this question. What is a ghost? A terrible event destined to repeat itself, he says. A moment of pain. A feeling suspended in time like a blurry photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber. What we don't know at first is that the character's a ghost. A ghost who doesn't believe in ghosts.<i>The Devil's Backbone</i> has many ghosts, both seen and unseen. It's the unclaimed dead of the Spanish Civil War. The children forgotten or abandoned by their parents. The guilt of the people who feel like they're not doing enough to fight the forces of fascism. The biggest one of them all is that bomb planted in the middle of the Orphanage's courtyard. It's another ghost, and it is working in some ways in concert with Santi. The irony being that it was meant to kill everyone in the school. It was dropped to destroy them, but it's being used for a different purpose now. It's being used as this agent of justice to connect Carlos to Santi, and I think it's just an incredibly brilliant masterstroke of del Toro to use it in that way, beyond just that initial, oh yeah, there's a war going on, remember? Here's a bomb. Carlos talks to it like it's alive. It's a huge, ever present reminder of the war happening outside the walls of the orphanage. The threat. That is what a good haunted house needs. It can't just be a scare room, one giant scare room. It's a classic element of gothic literature. In this case... You know, this school, the geography of the school, the layout of the buildings that all feels very novelistic and something that good gothic novels in particular have, because a sense of place. These are stories where the setting is distinct, evocative of the narrative. In a genre film, you know, if you if you reveal a gun in the first act, you have to fire it in the third. I think that the bomb kind of serves that purpose. But in the film, the bomb never detonates. It's just there. And somehow that's scarier. In the climate that we're in now socially and politically with the rise of fascism, I think that the bomb is saying these dangers and these incremental hateful thoughts and policies and and movements are there. It hasn't gone away. It's kind of threatening to take over. And the movie itself would debut in another dangerous political moment. It's bleak, but stay with me. The traumatic first screening and the uplifting afterlife of <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> in a minute. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters! Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers. We've always got something new for you to discover. And joining me is regular MUBI Podcast host Rico Gagliano, hi! I am here, I'm so glad that you have been killing it with this series, and thanks for continuing to guest host while I just lounge on the beach in,- I don't know, Spain.- Yeah, you say that. What I know you're actually doing is lurking in the Zoom recordings that I'm doing for this season. That's basically my life these days. But I want to tell you about what's happening in the MUBIverse this week.- Tell me.- There's a collection you can find on MUBI.com, a curated collection of films.

It is called 'A Woman's Bite: 19:01

Female Vampires.' It's just a bunch of female vampire movies, many of which I haven't seen and I cannot wait to see, but is kind of headlined for me by the Jim Jarmusch movie<i>Only Lovers Left Alive</i>. It's about two cool-ass vampires played by Tilda Swinton and... Tom Hiddleston! Yes, just living the life, but simultaneously kind of looking at the world and saying, man, this is a beautiful and sad place and have they ever got that right. So that's on MUBI globally starting October 11th. It's a great collection of vampire flicks, and I want to shout out Claire Denis's 2001 <i>Trouble Every Day</i>, which sits somewhere between a vampire and a cannibal movie. It stars Beatrice Dalle, an actress that has one of the best faces in French cinema. It is one of my favorite horror movies, and it is the only film ever in the history of cinema that gets away with using Comic Sans in its opening credits. I mean, you could have just started with that, and it would become instantly at the top of my hit list. Anyone can find out which one of those films are playing in your country in the show notes of this episode. And now back to ghosts. Thanks to Pedro Almodóvar's support as a producer, <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> was a creative resurrection for del Toro. He basically resurrected me. He allowed me to believe that you could make movies again. After the fraught experience of <i>Mimic</i> he made something that was true to his vision and importantly, that was in his language. But despite the positive production experience, <i>The Devil's Backbone</i> was not off to a great start. Its first press screening at the Toronto International Film Festival

was at 8: 20:49

30 a.m. on September 11th, 2001. The film was never finished screening at that moment.

9: 21:00

00 the Twin Towers were hit. We had to stop the projection. The cinema was full of American distributors, press, you name it. We had to stop it and then remember the world went into a complete shutdown. Guillermo del Toro never made it to Toronto. Listen, it was like a Buñuel film. The bar of the main hotel was like Bertolucci sitting there. Every filmmaker was sitting in the lobby bar drinking. And to be honest to you, it's like post-traumatic stress. What we went through that day, I might have blocked out. Obviously not a good day for anyone. You couldn't say the film had this amazing launch, but honestly, talk about premiering September 11th.<i>The Devil's Backbone</i> was well received, but it wasn't until del Toro pulled out his notebooks that it became a hit on the festival circuit. So because Guillermo is so visually sophisticated, Guillermo goes around with these beautiful notebooks where everything is drawn and thought and visualized. They come out at every meal. They're on the table. I mean, they're part of his body, really. They're an extension of his body. Here he is with his notebook on the Charlie Rose show in 2006.- You keep a notebook all the time.- All the time. And you're write ideas? Yeah... It says if you find this notebook, you may receive up to $800. Didn't you give $900 once to get it back from a taxi? If you notice, I added one number is 1800. It's now 1800. So Rosa and the then director of the Edinburgh Film Festival concocted a plan. For the film's premiere Del Toro put his notebooks on an overhead projector and screened them, talking through his ideas and process. It was a sensation. The success of the film helped dispel that allergy to subtitles and what some called'foreign language films.' Beyond genre it's a significant film in terms of bringing the so-called foreign language into the mainstream.<i>The Devil's Backbone</i> was coming out at a time when Mexican cinema was on the rise. Del Toro's contemporaries were breaking out in huge ways. Alfonso Cuarón returned to Mexico after a stint in Hollywood with <i>Y tu mamá también</i>. And Alejandro González Iñárritu broke out with the dark drama <i>Amores Perros</i>. All three of them, del Toro, Cuarón and Iñárritu, The Three Amigos, as they call themselves, would go on to win Oscars. What a group chat they must have. But it wouldn't be until another dark fairy tale set during the Spanish Civil War... that del Toro would become a globally recognized filmmaker. A visionary with a uniquely dark and humanist sensibility.<i>Pan's Labyrinth</i> wouldn't have happened without <i>Devil's Backbone</i>. They are, in many ways, sister films. Both of those films are set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Both use the language of the gothic and fairy tales, and, crucially, both bridge... That gap between the transition from childhood to adulthood. He kind of shows you how difficult a transition that is. But I think he also says that there are things to be frightened of, which are fantastical monsters, ghosts, powers beyond our realm. But there are also things to be frightened of, which are perfectly ordinary. And that's quite often adults. Without <i>The Devil's Backbone</i>, we might not have had any other del Toro films. It was the film that, in his words, made him whole again and inspired him to pay it forward, mentoring filmmakers like J. A. Bayona by producing <i>The Orphanage</i>. And Andrés Muschietti who's <i>Mama</i>...<i>- They talk to the walls.- And what do they say?</i><i>Mama.</i> he also produced. And it all started with a drawing. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to hear more stories about houses and how they haunt us at the movies. Next week we explore<i>The Amityville Horror</i>, America's most notorious haunted house. My magazine, Fangoria, does an annual award show called The Chainsaw Awards, and in 2023, we installed a new category called Best Amityville because there were 40 something Amityville movies to choose from just that year alone. Follow us so you don't miss it. Until then, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me Anna Bogutskaya. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Christian Coons is our editor. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Thanks this week to David Harper and Augustin Cassola. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen. Let them know we're not your standard movie podcast. And if you've got questions, comments, or just want to tell me about how your house is haunted, I'd love to hear it. Seriously, email us at podcast at mubi.com This show is executive produced by Rico Gagliano, John Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca. And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned on this very podcast subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com. Thanks for listening and stay haunted.