The Devil's Backbone Starring Fernando Tielve and Eduardo Noriega. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Written by Guillermo Del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, and David Muñoz. Rated R.

If you want to make a good martial arts film, get a director who speaks Chinese. If you want to make a good ghost story, get one who speaks Spanish. At least that's the way it seems. Chilean-born Alejandro Amenébar made his fame in the U.S. last summer with The Others. Now Mexican writer-director Guillermo Del Toro gives us The Devil's Backbone, and while his movie doesn't have the psychological acuity or the emotional impact of Amenébar's superb film, it's a cool way to get some chills.

The movie begins as 12-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve) arrives at a secluded school for orphaned boys. There are plenty of orphans, since the film takes place during the Spanish Civil War. Supplies are scarce, and most of the country's men are off fighting. The only adults staffing the place are a flinty principal (Marisa Paredes), an elegant Argentinian science teacher (Federico Luppi), a jowly math teacher (Berta Ojea), and a sullen handyman (Eduardo Noriega). As if there aren't enough signs of bad karma, the school has a giant unexploded bomb sitting in the middle of the yard. Carlos quickly learns that a ghost whom the other boys call "Suspira" haunts the grounds at night, and his encounters with the ghost alert him to bad things going down.

Del Toro has a cult following for his 1994 Mexican film Cronos and gained some name recognition with Mimic (1997), his initial 1997 attempt at breaking into Hollywood. Both of those movies play like south-of-the-border David Cronenberg, exhibiting the same revulsion at human flesh and a severe fixation on insects. Those qualities are muted in The Devil's Backbone, which isn't so much a horror film as it is a Spanish Civil War movie with a ghost story embedded in it.

This movie does have lots of blood, like Del Toro's other films. However, his horror style is classical, building terror slowly through whispers and heavy breathing heard in the middle of the night and distant glimpses of the ghost running through the halls. When we finally get a good look at it, it's both terrifying and pitiable: a boy with gray skin and blood trailing off from his head wound instead of dripping.

Scarier than that, though, is Noriega's caretaker. The actor has a striking resemblance to Harry Connick Jr. and a penchant for playing bad dudes -- he had the Tom Cruise role in Amenébar's Open Your Eyes. It comes as no surprise that the really twisted goings-on at the school are his doing. The movie's attempts at complicating his character don't always work, but that's easily forgotten upon seeing the evil glint in his eyes as he plays cat-and-mouse with a boy who has misbehaved.

One problem: The print that I screened had wretched English subtitles, full of misspellings and inaccuracies. ("The one who sighs" -- the translation of "Suspira" -- was rendered as "sights" half the time.) This may have been corrected in subsequent prints, but even if it hasn't, this swiftly paced and somewhat perverse film is more evidence of a welcome surge in Spanish horror films. ¡Viva los terrores!