Horror Without The Gore

"The married couple in the movie," continues S¿nchez, "had 'too weird a relationship with each other.' And they said, 'You don't have a villain, you need a villain and it has to be all the way through to the very ending and you need a big fight with the villain at the end. And then Laura has to fight him or her.' And we thought 'No!' "

They showed the script to Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of "Pan's Labyrinth," who agreed to produce and "present" it -- enough of a kingly blessing to persuade Picturehouse (which also brought "Labyrinth" to the U.S. market) to distribute the movie in North America.

Del Toro, reached by telephone in Budapest, where he's been in postproduction on the comic-book horror movie "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," sees the essential difference between Spanish-language horror and its American counterpart as spiritual.

"I believe that Spanish-language films retain beautiful idiosyncrasies that do make them a different experience. . . . American genre movies seem more concerned with the destruction of the body to an almost obsessive detail, giving birth to the sub-genre, torture porn. On the other hand, it seems the concerns of the Spanish or Latin American genre efforts are more concerned with the destruction of the soul."

The filmmakers trace this difference to their culture's attitude toward life and death. "As a kid in Mexico or Spain," says Del Toro, "you are exposed to the imperfections of living every day. When people get injured or hurt, they don't look for someone to sue. In the face of pain, you look for a way of understanding it. In that sense, death is seen as one of the salient, physiological facts of life. And that involves a reality that transcends just physical death and limitations. I don't want to ruin the ending of 'The Orphanage,' but it works at an almost metaphysical level."

S¿nchez concurs. On All Souls' Day, also known as the Day of the Dead, he says, "it's funny because it becomes a social event more than anything. . . . It's not something that you look upon as horrifying or sad or terrible but as a way to conciliate with death. You bring death home instead of trying not to think about it. And out of it comes all this mythology and these elements that we use in the film."

In "The Orphanage," a portentous childhood memory of Laura's takes place in the 1960s, before Spain began its slow transition to democracy from Franco's totalitarian state. The significance of that date, the director says, is entirely intentional.

"In Spain it was obvious why they were there -- these ghosts," says Bayona. "There were all these wounds from the past. So many people went missing and you didn't know where they were."

While no one is suggesting "The Orphanage" and other Spanish-language horror films will threaten the profit sheets at Lionsgate, Picturehouse is confident that moviegoers will seek out the film, as they did "Pan's Labyrinth," which took in a respectable (for a foreign film) $37 million in North America. As for such perceived negatives as subtitles -- supposedly a no-no for mainstream audiences -- "the storytelling in the movie trumps all that," says Picturehouse President Bob Berney, who plans an aggressive release of the film on 1,000 screens by Jan. 18. Ultimately, says Berney, audiences will get exactly what they seek in any horror film, American, Spanish or Mexican: "a visceral experience."