Big Screen Classics: The Devil's Backbone in 35mm

Big Screen Classics: The Devil’s Backbone
Monday, December 13 and Wednesday, December 15
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (320 E 6th Street)
$9.50, 7pm Mon / 9:40pm Wed
[info & tickets]

"What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? A moment of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber. A ghost."

Ghosts come in all forms—natural and unnatural—in Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, screening Monday and Wednesday in 35mm at the Ritz. Hiding out in a bleak, deserted orphanage at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, a small group of boys and adults are held back by a number of individual hauntings...greed, fear, impotence, politics, unrequited love, responsibility, a bomb that never exploded, a dead boy with a gaping head wound. Dread Diversity Award. It seems best to consider Backbone a drama with a semi-spooky aesthetic; yes, a dead boy pops up every now and then misting ghost blood out of his cracked head, but the film is surprisingly more rooted in the real. The horrors of humanity. It's the recognizable human evils that make this a lingering, chilling film.

We'll make the obligatory Pan's Labyrinth comparison so you don't have to: although there are enough basic similarities (Spain, late 30's/early 40's, otherworldly elements) for del Toro to refer to Backbone as Labyrinth's masculine brother film, it really doesn't go beyond time period and director. Pan's Labyrinth is so completely fantastical and unnerving, all of its elements are on a much larger scale. It's an epic fairytale and it's frightening. Ghosts in The Devil's Backbone somehow seem like a background theme or B-story - it isn't the point. The brick orphanage is a rich setting that del Toro makes great use of when it comes to visuals and decay, but Backbone doesn't hold its audience with nightmarish imagery; it upsets it in the way of human drama and insensitivity, which ultimately can be a pretty scary, brutish thing.

This 35mm screening coincides will with Mondo’s announcement of their first-ever "Director's Series" in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro. The collectible art boutique arm of Alamo Drafthouse worked with del Toro to create unique, fanboy/girl-worthy screen prints of The Devil’s Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth, the Hellboy films, and Blade 2. In the words of del Toro, "It is a rare privilege to be included in this mind-blowing poster series. These images enshrine and preserve the energy of the films they depict in a way that no square marketing could!!! More power to them!!!" Extra exclamation points included.

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