Heartfelt horror

As American horror has devolved into a butcher's market, where the hacking and chopping of captives has become the central purpose, the genre has forgotten to care about the people doing all the screaming — the “us'' in the film.

Hollywood has repurposed the genre into an efficient carnage delivery system; as “torture porn'' films such as Lionsgate's Saw and Hostel have taken in more than half a billion dollars, their characters have been rendered as nothing more than lambs to the slaughter.

Sure, the genre has occasionally flirted with a more art-house style from abroad (those creepy girl-in-the-well Ring films by way of Japan), but even those efforts have ignored their audience's need to empathise with somebody — anybody.

One film that rises above this cleaver fever is The Orphanage.

The Spanish-language psychodrama about a woman who becomes convinced that the dead spirits of her childhood have kidnapped her son is the latest in a series of Iberian or Mexican works that emphasise everything but the bloodshed.

Yet they are terrifying.

When we think of the horror classics, we don't recall the gruesome acts so much as the people who weathered them.

Think of Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), the determined mother in Rosemary's Baby who faces the prospect that her baby has been fathered by the Devil. Remember Regan MacNeil, the sweet pre-teen of The Exorcist, whose transformation forces heroics from two soft-spoken priests.

Even Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson's demented murderer at the heart of The Shining, affects us because he is a husband and father gone awry, not some abstract axe wielder.

That hunger for connection draws us into the recent spate of Spanish-language horror films that scare us without losing sight of the characters involved.

Where the American torture-happy films go for the gut with volume, sound effects and power tools, the foreign horror dramas — including last year's Academy Award winner Pan's Labyrinth and the 2001 Spanish-financed English-language, The Others — seek out menace with allegory and psychological dilemma.

The audience discovers the horror instead of flinching from it. Same end, but notably different means.

“One of the things people are saying when they walk out of the film is: ‘It doesn't look like a Spanish movie at all','' Orphanage screenwriter, Sergio Sanchez, says.

“So it's funny how people abroad see the Spanish elements, and in Spain, people like the movie because they see something more universal.''

Emotion over gore

And that universal aspect also comes down to compelling characters.

We care deeply about Laura (Belen Rueda of The Sea Inside), who in the new film returns as an adult to the orphanage of her childhood only to battle ghosts and confront her own demons, just as we were powerfully stirred by the young girl in Pan's Labyrinth, who must contend with an allegorical faun and the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War.

Similarly, we were swept into the story of Grace (Nicole Kidman), a young widow and mother in The Others, imprisoned in her ghostly mansion.

The Orphanage, Spain's Academy Award submission this year for Best Foreign Language Film, has enjoyed rave reviews at festivals — “Rattles the bones of the haunted-house genre and finds plenty of fresh [but not too bloody] meat'', Variety at Cannes declared — and was Spain's most successful 2007 release with a box office take of $35 million.

Sanchez and The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona say they began to appreciate the cultural differences between their storytelling and Hollywood's when Sanchez's script wended its way through studios and talent agencies in 2003.

The responses were universally dismissive.

“They all said the script was an impossible mix of horror and melodrama,'' Bayona recalls. “They said: ‘This is like oil and water, you can't play with these two.'''

“The married couple in the movie,'' Sanchez continues, “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 blessing to persuade Picturehouse (which also brought Labyrinth to the US market) to distribute the film in North America.

Del Toro sees the difference between Spanish-language horror and its American counterpart as spiritual.

The filmmakers trace this difference to their culture's attitude towards life and death. “As a kid in Mexico or Spain,'' Del Toro says, “you are exposed to the imperfections of living every day.

"In the face of pain, you look for a way of understanding it. Death is seen as one of the salient facts of life, which involves a reality that transcends just physical death and limitations. The Orphanage works at an almost metaphysical level.''

Sanchez concurs. On All Souls' Day, he says, “it becomes a social event more than anything. It's not something that you look upon as horrifying or sad 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 childhood memory of Laura's takes place in the 1960s, before Spain began its 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,'' Bayona says. “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 filmgoers will seek out the film, as they did Pan's Labyrinth.