Irving M. Levin Directing Award: Guillermo del Toro: The Devil’s Backbone

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We are proud to celebrate sci-fi and fantasy legend Guillermo del Toro with SFIFF58’s Irving M. Levin Directing Award. Del Toro will host an evening at the Castro Theatre, where he will participate in an in-depth conversation about his career, show clips from previous work, screen one of his best-loved films The Devil’s Backbone and share a sneak peek of upcoming projects.

The horror that slowly envelops a remote Spanish orphanage is not merely supernatural in Guillermo del Toro’s spine-tingling Gothic ghost story set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The home provides a refuge for the sons of Republican Loyalist fighters, but 10-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve)—unaware that his father is dead—finds little comfort in a place where the other boys haze him as the new kid, an unexploded bomb sits menacingly in the courtyard and the spirit of the child who used to sleep in his bed haunts him. More disturbing than any specter is Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), the cruel, spiteful caretaker, who is convinced there is gold on the premises. Del Toro seasons the suspense with a sprinkling of political allegory in Jacinto’s evident fascism and his relationship to Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), the pair who operate the orphanage. But del Toro’s main emphasis is on the psychological terror that comes to grip not only Carlos but the adults and other children as well. An undercurrent of fear and violence hums from the first frames of this creepy, atmospheric thriller—a masterwork of mood and suspense—growing steadily until bursting into the open in The Devil’s Backbone’s harrowing, visceral climax. —Pam Grady

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