Film: Subtly Terrifying, Just Like Real Life

A LOT of movie comedies are described as horrible. And plenty of horror films make people laugh. Faced with excruciatingly gory, sadistic or otherwise twisted imagery, an audience invariably giggles, prompted by nerves, revulsion or embarrassment.

No one will giggle at “The Orphanage.” In a market in which each thriller seeks to outdo the last in the number of corpuscles it can scatter across the screen, this Spanish ghost story, which opened Friday, instead follows in the tradition of “The Innocents” (1961), “The Haunting” (1963) and “The Others” (2001), movies that rely on implication rather than evisceration.

When the star of “The Orphanage,” Belén Rueda (“The Sea Inside”), said in a telephone interview that her film should be thought of as “something that could happen in real life,” she meant losing one’s way, losing one’s child or losing one’s mind: not the stuff of the everyday, perhaps, but far more plausible than blood-sucking ghouls, flesh-eating viruses or “torture porn,” techniques that work on the nervous system the way a reflex hammer works on a kneecap.

What Ms. Rueda is talking about is a fear of the possible.

“The Orphanage,” from the first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona and produced by the Mexican horror maestro Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), asserts that the horror film doesn’t have to rely on jump-scare tactics to generate thrills or great bloody oceans to maintain a crowd’s attention. It’s almost a revolutionary idea in the current market, considering the buckets of cash generated by “Hostel” ($4.8 million budget, $47 million return), “Saw” ($1.2 million, $55 million) and their spawn.

The more subtle style appeals to some. “The Orphanage” is Spain’s candidate for the foreign-language Oscar and this month earned 14 nominations in the Goyas, Spain’s top awards for film. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, some viewers described it as among the scariest movies they’d seen, largely because of finely calibrated camera moves and well-developed characters.

Opening at a home for children on the Spanish coast, the film shows the 7-year-old, soon-to-be-adopted Laura at play with other orphans. Jumping ahead 30 years, the adult Laura (Ms. Rueda) and her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), are making plans to turn the building into a home for children with disabilities. When their young son, Simón (Roger Príncep), develops a number of imaginary friends, starts drawing pictures of a grotesquely deformed boy out of Laura’s childhood memories and then disappears, the film moves into a world of uncertainty.

“The horror genre has many incarnations,” Mr. Del Toro, whose filmography as a director of horror includes “Cronos,” “Mimic” and “Hellboy,” said in a telephone interview. “So many people tend to lump them all together, but that’s like lumping a Farrelly brothers comedy with one by Peter Sellers or Woody Allen. There are many incarnations, some classic, some transgressive. They may be shocking or emotional or both. They all have a right to exist. I’m in favor of anything that evokes thought or emotion.”

He can’t, however, see himself producing what is commonly called torture porn “because I think it’s dehumanizing, and nothing works if there’s no human empathy. All the suspense is completely empty if the characters are not human.”

Mikita Brottman, author of “Offensive Films” (Greenwood Press) and a professor of language and literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, said: “Films like ‘Hostel’ are more like the grand guignol of late-19th-century French street theater, in that subtlety, psychology, character and sustained narrative are all sacrificed on the altar of shock effect and images of bodily disintegration.

“‘Hostel stands in relation to ‘Orphanage’ as hard-core porn does to Hollywood romance — distilled, undiluted collections of those moments that their traditional counterparts can’t reveal.”

It remains to be seen whether “The Orphanage” will temper the exceedingly brutal but profitable standards of bloodletting set by the likes of “The Hills Have Eyes” or the various “Texas Chainsaw Massacres,” or if it will draw the traditional horror audience away from its gorier fare. The possibility exists that the film will attract a new, perhaps older crowd to what has been a genre for young viewers. The audience that brings more life experience to “The Orphanage” may have more reason to feel fear.

“I spent a lot of time with moms of missing children,” Ms. Rueda said of her research for the film. “I asked what they did, how they tried with psychics and mediums to get to their children. I have two children, and while nothing so bad has ever happened, I can understand how desperate you might get.”

Mr. Bayona, the director — who said he met Mr. Del Toro while posing as a journalist and “trying to get free tickets” at a fantasy film festival 15 years ago — said that he and the screenwriter, Sergio G. Sánchez, never thought of the material as horror. “We approached it as drama, as real life,” he said. “The horror aspects were merely ingredients.”

Movie terror has always been a kind of alchemy of ingredients, at least when the sought-after effect is having an audience peel the cushions off the armrests. “Hitchcock famously distinguished between surprise and suspense in movies,” said David Sterritt, author of “The Films of Alfred Hitchcock” (Cambridge Film Classics). “You see people eating in a restaurant, and suddenly a table blows up. That’s a great surprise, and the audience jumps, but it’s over in a flash.

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