My first impression of Horror movies was that it was a sick and demented genre obsessed with the horrendous and demonic; filled with nothing but bloody decapitations, gratuitous sex, and other disgusting imagery. It wouldn't be until I came across the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Scott Derrickson and J. A. Bayona, that I realized that there was more to the genre than gory scares. Nowhere is that true than in Juan Antonio Bayona's directorial debut
El Orfanato.
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| Young Laura playing with her friends at the orphanage. |
Better known as
The Orphange in English, this Spanish Horror film premiered on September 10, 2007 in its home country of Spain and received a limited release in the United States on December 28 that same year. Laura (Belen Rueda) returns to the old orphanage where she she spent most of her childhood before she was adopted. Accompanied by her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their son Simón (Roger Príncep), she plans to reopen it as a home for disable children.
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| Laura comforting her son Simon |
One day Simon makes some imaginary friends, Laura doesn't give it a second thought until she see's the drawings of his "friends" with one of them wearing a sack over his face. Things start to get strange. First, a mysterious woman (Montserrat Carulla) claiming to be social worker tries to collect Simon due to him being adopted and being HIV positive but is quickly dismissed by Laura. Second, her son does some unusual activities including a scavenger hunt that leads to the revelation of his adoption files. The final blow comes with the arrival of Tomas, the kid wearing the sack.
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| Tomas |
What is going on? Are Simon's imaginary friend's real? Where did they come from? What was that woman doing here? What secrets does this orphanage hold? There are twists and turns with each revelation more ghastly and ghostly than the next. As the story came to a close, I was loss with words.
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Geraldine Chaplin as Aurora, the medium inspecting the orphanage.
This would be Chaplin's first appearance in Bayona's films |
The Orphanage changed my look on Horror and for the most part be more open-minded with the genre. While at college I wrote a piece on said subject and mentioned the movie,
....a
captivating plot, potent scares that weren’t grotesque to the extreme,
three-dimensional characters, and an ending that left me awestruck. I
never thought a horror film would leave me like that; its films like
these that make me consider that there is more to this spooky genre than
I previously thought as mindless junk (which the genre does have but
it’s not all that it offers).
Doesn’t matter when it was made, what makes a good
horror movie is not just the scares but the plot and characters that
help elevate it. With all these elements you have a scary movie that
audiences will be thinking about and revisit again and again.
A ghost story on the level of The Sixth Sense, Bayona was off to a good start. His next movie wouldn't arrive five years later and would focus on a horror of a different kind and family who lived to tale the tale.
Behind-the-scenes
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| J.A. Bayona |
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| Belen Rueda , Guillermo del Toro and J.A. Bayona at the premiere. |
Final Verdict: (A-)
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| Theatrical Poster |
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