With three Academy Awards and a remarkable filmography, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has successfully established himself as one of the best horror filmmakers of all time. His distinctive horror and fantasy films are a result of his fascination with monsters. His 2001 movie, The Devil’s Backbone, received positive reviews and performed decently at the box office, but there is one scene in that movie that was inspired by John Wayne’s movie.
The filmmaker once revealed that his favorite shot in The Devil’s Backbone (2001) was inspired by legendary actor John Wayne’s 1956 epic Western film The Searchers. Wayne, also known as The Duke or Duke Wayne, is often labeled as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema and del Toro isn’t the only one who has been influenced by his movies.
John Wayne’s 1956 movie inspired this scene in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
In 2014, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro revealed in an interview with DGA that the final scene in his 2001 movie The Devil’s Backbone was inspired by John Wayne’s 1956 epic Western film The Searchers,
“The final shot on Devil’s Backbone might be my favorite shot I’ve ever done. I was very much influenced by Westerns – my favorite is The Searchers. The shot of John Wayne’s silhouette against the frame of the door is so epic.”
The Searchers stars John Wayne as a middle-aged Civil War veteran who spends years looking for his abducted niece with his adopted nephew. The film was a massive success at the time of its release and today, it is widely considered as one of the best Western genre films of all time.
Guillermo del Toro initially had different plans for The Devil’s Backbone‘s ending
Further in the interview Guillermo del Toro revealed that they had a different ending planned for the movie, however, they didn’t have enough time so they went with the shot that was inspired by The Searchers,
“Originally we had a whole other sequence planned. It was the last day, like an hour from sundown. We were tearing our hair out; we couldn’t make it. The shot we [already] had was the shadow of the professor, who was a ghost now, framed by the architecture of the orphanage, trapped like an insect in amber, with the kids outside in the sunlight. I saw that shot on the video and I said, ‘That’s the end of the movie. We don’t need anything else.’ I thought it was a perfect way to show the demarcation between the ghost world of shadows, and the real world of light.”
The Devil’s Backbone is set in 1939 Spain and narrates the story of a boy who is left in an orphanage operated by Republican loyalists and haunted by the ghost of another deceased boy. Upon release, the film was well-received by the audience but compared to the other films in del Toro’s filmography, it underperformed.
