The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Directed by Víctor Erice
In 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a young girl living on the Castilian plain is haunted after attending a screening of James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein and hearing from her sister that the monster is not dead, instead existing as a spirit inhabiting a nearby barn.
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What critics compared The Spirit of the Beehive to
In early scenes, meanwhile, as protagonist Francisca is introduced in the girlhood form of striking newcomer Olivia Bond, it’s not just the young actress’s dark, concentrated gaze that recalls Ana Torrent in “The Spirit of the Beehive”; both films probe children’s repulsed fascination with the monstrous, though “Eyes” literalizes the terror in the barn rather more emphatically than Victor Erice’s 1973 classic.
Writer/director Nicolas Pesce makes an accomplished transition from music videos with this darkly disturbing slice of American Gothic that wears its debts to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) with quiet pride.
A less obvious but equally potent comparison is to Víctor Erice 's hypnotic The Spirit of the Beehive , which also touches on the hold movies have on our imaginations and was an influence on del Toro.
Here he has fashioned a tonal and stylistic tribute to the eerie kid- fright of "The Spirit of the Beehive," "The Sixth Sense" and to Hitchcock.
I don’t know how you will value the imagination of Pan’s Labyrinth against the quasi-documentary realism of the only film I know as a touchstone, Victor Erice’s great The Spirit of the Beehive.
Ivana Baquero, her face both credulous and wise before its time, seems ideally poised between the childish and the adult, and that makes her a fine successor to Ana Torrent, whose youthful performances in “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973) and “Raise Ravens” (1976) are indispensable to the cinema of modern Spain.
Leave the political allegory to a film like Pan's Labyrinth (where it's only somewhat successful, largely because it's so unavoidable, and I believe this helps to make my point).