El Orfanato

The phrase The Haunting meets Poltergeist sums up The Orphanage but fails to do the Spanish horror film justice. This smart foreigner has a sense of foreboding but also treats its audience with respect. The scare moments in The Orphanage are earned, they come in progression to the sequence of events and aren’t like typical American PG-13 horror scares based on noise and shadow. The Orphanage bears Guillermo Del Toro’s name as executive producer and is rated R for what I can only imagine as “disturbing content” (the rating’s board) and bones sticking out of the skin (the Berg board).
A couple raising an adopted child in a large house in the country, have their lives put on hold when the house turns out to have a history. Ghosts in the house have told their young boy that he’s an orphan. When he disappears the mom eventually turns to spiritualist. Here’s where El Orfanato starts to get really creepy. As the team of – for want of a better term – ghost busters sets their equipment up the editing gets frantic, the camera starts to move. A psychic counts down in the living room to her encounter with ghosts, all the while monitored remotely by the spiritualists. This scene will have you crawling in your skin, it’s that good.
Even better The Orphanage follows that up with a tight, suspense filled third act where the mom chants the child rhyme that conjures the ghosts and a strikingly somber if fully realized conclusion. There’s no bastards in a basket here, just filmmakers with a slick sense of style to their horror.