Premiere:
"El espinazo del diablo" by Guillermo del Toro
January 30, 2009
After his low-budget beginnings (Cronos, 1993), Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has quickly become one of the true masters of horror and fantasy in contemporary cinema. With works such as Hellboy (2004) and El Laberinto del fauno / Pan's Labyrinth (2006), he pulled off the rare feat of attracting both commercial movie audiences and cinephile critics. One of the significant aspects of Del Toro’s cinema is his ability to “politicize” the terrain of special effects fantasy to an unusual degree.
His third feature film, El espinazo del diablo/The Devil's Backbone (2001), which has never been shown in Austria, is a central work in this respect. The film is set in 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War, in an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. The ghosts which the young hero encounters there have a very tangible connection to political occurrences in Spain: "The living will always be more dangerous than the dead."
