The Orphanage

The Orphanage, created by Guillermo del Toro, is a Spanish film about a family who has moved into an old orphanage. The mother, Laura, grew up at the orphanage until she was adopted, and now she's planning on making it a home for children who have special needs. Her son, Simon, is a young imaginative boy. He often plays with imaginary friend, which becomes important throughout the movie, but seems relatively harmless at the beginning.

Simon eventually meets 6 new friends who play with him in the house. They have a particular game they play, where they each have a treasure. The others steal one child's treasure and leave clues for that child, like a treasure hunt. If you find your treasure, you get a wish. Laura and Simon look for Simon's treasure, and when they find it Laura realizes that Simon has discovered that he is adopted and ill, and this creates tension between the two characters. There is still tension when the children who will be moving in come over for a welcome party. This is the turning point of the movie. Simon and Laura have a fight, because Simon wants to show her "Tomas's little house", and Laura doesn't have time. Laura refuses and leaves Simon in his room to go tend to the party. This is the last time we see Simon alive. Later on during the party, Laura goes to look for Simon. A young boy with a burlap sack over his face pushes her into the bathroom and locks the door.

When Carlos, the father, breaks Laura out of the bathroom, they discover that Simon is missing. The rest of the movie is Laura desperately searching for her son. As the movie progresses, the viewer and Laura discover more and more about the house and the events that occurred after Laura was adopted. 9 months after Simon's disappearance, Laura plays the treasure hunt game...

This movie plays around a lot with the line between what is reality and what is supernatural. Everything that happens in this movie can be explained without the supernatural. That may not be what we are led to believe by the end of the movie, but nothing occurs that would necessitate the supernatural, as long as we allow for the hallucinogenic qualities of desperation and drug overdoses. I find this to be very interesting when considering both Carrol and Freeland's writings on horror. Carrol describes the primary reason that we are attracted to horror is primarily curiosity about the monster. Tomas, the young boy in the burlap sack, is the closest thing this movie has to a monster. The viewer gets engrossed in discovering more about the circumstances behind Tomas' life and death. The image of a child in a burlap sack mask is very disturbing, and at first it seems clear that this is a negative character, and that Tomas can be considered a monster. However, as we learn more about the child, and as we discover the truth behind what's going on, Tomas is humanized. He's just a young boy who had a disfigurement and died early. He commits no crime and the viewer is left just pitying the poor boy. This is where the story blends into realist horror. The film has moments of gruesome spectacle (Tomas' appearance, Benigna's horrific death) that are realistic and disturbing. The music and setting make us worried that there is going to be more of these spectacles, but they remain few and far between. What is really horrific is what we discover at the end. There is a moment where Laura stops hallucinating and she fully understands what has happened (I'll avoid telling you this part, as it would ruin the movie), and that is the most horrific scene in the entire movie. There is no violence or spectacle, just understanding. All the monsters disappear and the viewer is just left with the truth. 

The movie goes on after this revelation, and stops really being a horror film. It's probably the happiest ending for a horror film I've ever seen. The last sequences of the movie vacillate between the supernatural and real life, and we are left with all the pieces tied together. Laura has finished her treasure hunt, and received her wish. 

Freud's discussion of the uncanny is also fairly interesting to consider in this movie, as well as with other horror tropes. What makes something horrific? We discussed in class how making the familiar unfamiliar is an important part of horror films. Freud's essay also delves into the concept. This is very apparent in Tomas' character in this film. He's just a young boy, nothing anyone is afraid of. But when his face is obscured with the burlap sack, suddenly we are horrified by him. I was discussing this quality while talking about this movie with a friend. I feel that the young child with a burlap sack over his face is something I felt horror about before this movie, but I have no recollection of ever seeing it before. I mentioned that I felt the same way about slender man (who is depicted as a tall man in a suit with no face), and she talked about another character that stole people's faces. In the midst of describing these characters for which we feel an absurd amount of fear and recognition, I noticed that all three of these examples have no face, or their face is obscured in some format. My theory is that this is related to Freud's belief that the unfamiliar creates such a strong feeling of repulsion in us because of its nearness to the familiar. We receive many of our emotional cues from other people's faces. The face can arguably be said to be a visual representation of our humanity. When we take just the face away from a character, this is deeply unsettling. I believe this is because we can recognize that character as human, until we get the face in which we no longer recognize or empathize with the character. Whether or not the character is a monster, we place all our preconceived notion of the inhuman on that character. Tomas is just a normal little boy, and yet we see him as a monster because of this.