Devil's Backbone

Saw the Devil's Backbone today--it was more or less satisfying, and extremely creepy. It's a billed as a "spiritual prequel" to Pan's Labyrinth (or maybe the latter is a spiritual sequel to the former). It is to Pan's Labyrinth sort of what Evil Dead is to Evil Dead II, or El Marriachi is to Desperado--not a narrative prequel, but a scrappy early rendition of the same ideas, themes, images and character types, with all the unpainted spots showing.
As in the more famous, bigger budget version, this is a story about tough but innocent orphans running from creepy, but not necessarily harmful, ghosts and an utterly, unambiguously evil man with long floppy black hair, all set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. And I do mean backdrop; it's not explored in any way, and the movie has no apparent interest in the history of the war. The characters are just as one-dimensional as in P.L., but D.B. portrays itself as a mostly realistic story with a ghost story element, as opposed to slipping back and forth between a fairy-tale and a gritty "real world" that may not be any more real than the fantastic world, and is seen from the point of view of a child. Because of that, Jacinto is harder to really hate, and the girlfriend victim is impossible to care about and worry over.