The most personal film by Guillermo del Toro (CRONOS) is also among his most frightening and emotionally layered. Set during the final week of the Spanish Civil War THE DEVIL S BACKBONE tells the tale of a ten-year-old boy who after his freedom-fighting father is killed is sent to a haunted rural orphanage full of terrible secrets. Del Toro effectively combines gothic ghost story murder mystery and historical melodrama in a stylish concoction that reminds used as would his later PAN S LABYRINTH that the scariest monsters are often the human ones.