Whereas THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE and THE OTHERS are set in the past, EL ORFANATO and NO-DO are set in the present but refer to the past. In these films, it is the ghosts – significantly, all children – who come from the past, a past Spain is still seeking to come to terms with. In making their presence felt, the ghosts thus literalise the sense, noted apropos THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, of Spain as a country of metaphorical ghosts. They raise issues about the relatively recent past that are still pressing.

Lost Children

El orfanato/The Orphanage (J.A. Bayona 2006)

Produced by Guillermo del Toro, the first feature of both Juan Antonio Bayona and scriptwriter Sergio G. Sánchez, EL ORFANATO is probably the most richly satisfying of the films discussed in this book. Its basic premise is straightforward: a family moves into an old orphanage building that turns out to be haunted by the ghosts of children who once lived there. But the film has an exceptional density of themes, motifs and poetic connections. Collectively, its scenes form a tapestry: links to other scenes; references to other ghost films; cultural references (to Spanish history; to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan); echoes of the past in the present – all are interwoven.

In Spain, EL ORFANATO was also the top box-office film for 2007. Maria Delgado suggests perhaps part of its appeal to the Spanish lay in its allusion to the horrors of the Franco regime – with its multitude of (hidden, unacknowledged) murder victims (2008: 44-45). In fact, as a date on a newspaper report shows, the film locates its primary traumatic event in May 1976, six months after General Franco had died. This was during a transitional period, lasting until July 1976, when Carlos Arias Navarro endeavoured to perpetuate the Francoist legacy. Setting the backstory during that period is like a warning: the monstrous legacy of the fascist state – symbolised not just by the past murders, but also by the apparently successful covering up of the murders – did not end with Franco's death.

In a short pre-credits sequence, seven-year-old Laura (Mireia Renau) plays the game known in England as ‘Grandmother's footsteps’ with five other children in the grounds of an orphanage.