Wasn’t it about this time last year that a supernatural thriller from Spain with the name Guillermo del Toro hovering over it crossed the ocean and stirred up all kinds of critical praise and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award? Following the path carved last year by del Toro’s Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, Juan Antonio Bayona’s feature film debut, The Orphanage, washes ashore in North America upon a tide of accolades, including 14 nominations for Goya Awards—acclaim that no doubt convinced Spain to make it their country’s official entry in this year’s Oscars.

Having del Toro’s name attached as producer might conjure up certain expectations, which The Orphanage doesn’t aspire to. Where Pan’s Labyrinth was a dark, brutal fairytale set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, Bayona’s film is a rather quieter contemporary ghost story set on the northwest coast of Spain, where a mother vies for possession of her young son against the spirits that inhabit the family’s new home, a former orphanage. The director, whose career thus far has revolved around short film and music videos, balks at the description of The Orphanage as a horror film.

“Sometimes people tend to think that ghost stories are horror movies,” Bayona says, “but when I think of ghost stories, I think of a movie like The Innocents from Jack Clayton and another movie from him called Our Mother’s House—these were ghost stories with not too many horror elements. I remember when I saw for the first time Our Mother’s House I was so impressed with how the movie was dealing with strong subject matter like growing up and the death of a parent and it was not a horror movie, but it was so powerful that I thought that was the kind of story I wanted to do. And probably this kind of story is more European, more about character-driven situations.” 

Bayona says he was lucky to find all the qualities he admired in a script by Spanish filmmaker Sergio Sanchez. “I loved it—there were all these scary sequences, very well-written, but at the same time there was a lot of emotion and the kind of characters you’re not used to finding in a genre movie. The greatest challenge was to keep both readings of the story at the same time—one reading of the story like a classical ghost story with the classical elements, and at the same time you could read the story of a woman who can’t deal with losing her child. In the end, we have this perfect puzzle where all the pieces fit perfectly, but with these two levels of readings that made our job very, very difficult.”

The Orphanage differs from Pan’s Labyrinth or del Toro’s earlier Spanish-set ghost story The Devil’s Backbone in another significant way: instead of taking the child’s perspective of fantastical goings-on, The Orphanage aligns itself with the perspective of its adult protagonist, Laura (played by Belén Rueda), who may or may not be wrestling with supernatural forces. “It’s a movie that’s very obsessed with the idea of point of view,” Bayona says. “There are gaps in the story that we took out in the editing room because we wanted to be very radical and extreme with the idea of the point of view.”

Bayona credits his star with evoking the feelings of parental anguish that are central to The Orphanage’s drama. “I’m not a parent,” he says, “but I had great help in the shooting with Belén Rueda—she’s a great mother in real life, so she could reveal some of the gaps we had in rehearsal. She’s very well-known in Spain because of her experience on TV—she was playing in comedy on TV, so I thought it would be interesting to cast someone who the audience wouldn’t expect, to put them in a situation where they don’t know what to expect watching the movie. 

“I did more or less the same with the whole cast—Fernando Cayo, Mabel Rivera, Montserrat Carrula, they are not-too-seen actors on the big screen and at the same time they are playing something completely different from what we are used to from them.”

The ghost story traditionally has a special significance to Spanish filmgoers, a significance that Bayona said is embodied in his casting of Geraldine Chaplin (Opal from the BBC to fans of Robert Altman’s Nashville) as the human connection to The Orphanage’s realm of ghosts. “She has a strong connection to Spain because of her long relationship with Carlos Saura, the Spanish director, and I remember her from my childhood watching all these Spanish movies from Carlos Saura,” Bayona says. “These were political movies about things we were not able to talk about in an open way under the Franco regime. Geraldine played the ghost of a mother in [Saura’s] Cría Cuervos, so I thought it would be perfect to catch the same mood of movies that were political but for me, when I was a child, were very scary movies.”

Bayona said he’s lucky to enjoy a strong connection to the current Spanish cinema through del Toro and Alejandro Amenábar. Del Toro, in particular, has been inspiring in many ways to the emerging filmmaker, while allowing him to ply his own vision with The Orphanage. “First of all, as a human being, as a person, he is so generous,” Bayona says. “I would like to be exactly the same—especially in the movie business, it’s such a hard world sometimes. Also, I like the way he works—you know, he enjoys so much the pre-production of a movie, visualizing the story and working with all the artists.... If you ask me, the best producer for me is another director because he could understand perfectly your situation and at the same time he was very sensitive. He never insisted on ideas or suggestions.”

With the rapturous reception of The Orphanage in Spain and, so far, internationally, Bayona must be feeling an even closer connection to contemporary Spanish cinema. The multiple award nominations suggest he’s succeeded in transcending the cinematic stigma of the “scary movie,” a success he’s glad to share with his collaborators.

“It was the first movie from most of the crew, so I was really happy for them. And, you know, there is no trend for horror movies or genre movies to be nominated for these kinds of awards, so I’m happy the Spanish academy just thought it was a great movie.”