'The Orphanage' by the Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona brings Horror and Fantastic elements where they truly belong, making them work strongly on the audience: they are totally embedded in the most banal aspects of the everyday life. Contrary to the slash and gory movies (which can also have a certain appeal sometimes), in which effects come from gruesome serial killers or spectacular scenes of violence, 'The Orphanage' manages to entice the audience in a universe so close from banality that any abnormal details trigger an extraordinary tension: the disappearance of the son during the Orphanage opening day celebration, the scene when Laura find the bags in the wall and of course the sheer horror when Laura realises what has happened. Kafka in 'The Metamorphosis' threw only one fantastic element in the first sentence among a perfectly ordinary environment to make the story so powerful: ' As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin'; Edgar Allan Poe made it an art in most of his short stories like The Black cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Oval Portrait, just to name a few.
This kind of story telling is what makes these stories delectable and really scary. Through his own stylistic vision, Bayona managed to enhance even more the story with amazing pictures. 'The Orphanage' is unmissable.
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