National cinema and tropes of horror: Guillermo del Toro’s “The Devil’s Backbone” – Representing fascism through hauntology

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

04/30/2009

Category :

Arts & media

Sub category :

Film studies

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Summary :

Introduction
Individual characters in the film
The film's power
The film The Devil's Backbone
The victims in the film
What makes violence attractive and powerful?
The symbolic balance
Works cited

Abstract

horror films, rich in texture, are capable of interpretatively referencing specific national contexts. Using the supernatural, these stories can aid in understanding national themes by correlating particular social ills or historical periods with the uncanny: the film's meaning-making, acting as a mechanism for cathartic release; for discussion rather than the distance of simply memorializing. guillermo del toro's 2001 film, the devil's backbone, as this paper will argue, is one such film, which in its simplicity of narrative vision, provides a political clarity, a cathartic viewing experience and a negotiation of the boundaries of the spectral and the historical. Via allegory, the film maker is attempting to make sense of fascism in symbolic terms through evoking the world through a kind of magic-realist style, where the tropes of the horror film can be used to distinguish heroism from villainy.
In an article by Elizabeth Cowie, the author notes that well known New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, in a review of a 1959 French horror film Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face), deftly articulates the paradox that the enjoyment of the horror film has posed to critics and theorists in her contrast between the film's intellectual pretensions and its "exquisite dread images" whose power she cannot "throw off." (Cowie: 25-26) del toro's film does not present this paradox. the horror of the presence of the ghost, Santi, haunting the isolated country orphanage of Santa Lucia, as an image of 'exquisite dread', does not insistently interrupt a surface of 'intellectual pretensions'; the events of the civil war are seamlessly interwoven, and tell a simple, gripping narrative of the grand sweep of history.