Rating: 4 Pulses

Rated R

Those of you interested in the recently released Spanish horror flick The Orphanage because of its ties to last year’s whimsically disturbing Pan’s Labyrinth (directed by Guillermo del Toro) might do better to sever the mental connection between the two. Granted, both films deal with the innocence and horror of childhood, as well as the conflict between adult reality and childhood imagination, but whereas Pan’s Labyrinth took its cues largely from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Orphanage plays like another classic genre: the ghost story.

Bayona’s debut feature film, which is merely produced and presented by del Toro (’ la Quentin Tarantino), is a refreshing break from Hollywood’s current trend of mining the dregs of Japanese horror flicks to coax the American public out of a quick hundred million. The Orphanage works precisely because it seems to take its direction from Hollywood’s recent concept of horror as a guide for how not to make a scary movie.

Bayona’s film is a slow burn. The pacing deliberately builds tension within the viewer, and when the jump-out-of-your-seat scares finally come (and they do), they are effective because of the chilling atmosphere and the investment the story puts into the characters. Instead of a false scare every ten minutes, cued solely by swelling music and unnecessary camera movements, The Orphanage delivers real shocks that serve as a much needed, jolting release from the ever-growing anxiety the film creates. (In the especially unnerving ghost hunting sequence, the pay-off seems to be that there is none. The film wants you to hold on to the tension that scene so deftly builds.)

Tension and atmosphere aside, the film is not without its flaws. The story is a good one, though hardly original, and at times the histrionics of the otherwise spot-on acting of Bel’n Rueda as Laura are slightly cringe-worthy.

The best elements of this mystery, however, lie in its title character. The house picked to portray the orphanage is beautifully creepy in its muted, yet vibrant tones. The cinematography captures every piece of antique furniture, and, like John Carpenter’s Halloween, every possible hiding place. Also, the use of masks in the film taps into the shiver-inducing part of the brain far better than Rob Zombie’s recent re-envisioning of Michael Meyers as a member of Slipknot.

The pacing, atmosphere, and intriguing yet familiar story all coalesce to create an ominous haunted house film that harkens back to a more psychological, and ultimately more terrifying, genre amidst today’s remakes and torture-porn that pass for horror. And it’s worth it.