The ghost at the end of the corridor in The Devil’s Backbone grew out of a fear Guillermo del Toro carried through his grandmother’s house: that something would be waiting at the far end of the hallway.
On the October 5, 2026 episode of Armchair Expert, the director described childhood nights when lucid dreams made frightening figures feel present in his bedroom. He remembered seeing something in the closet and fingers moving on the rug. He said he was so afraid to leave his crib that he’d wet himself.
Eventually, he offered the monsters a bargain. If they’d let him go to the bathroom, he told them, “I will be your friend forever.” In his telling, they withdrew.
His analyst calls that response a “counterphobic reaction.” Del Toro explained that his fear became a reason to love the creatures and grow close to them, a way of coping with what terrified him.
The corridor in his grandmother’s house became part of that same story. As a child, he imagined encountering a figure at its end, an image he later brought into The Devil’s Backbone. In a Criterion interview, he described “the reveal of the ghost at the end of the corridor” as “one of the oldest ideas I had.”
He’d also told the childhood bargain in 2002. After recalling his promise of friendship to the monsters, he added, “I’m a man of my word.”
When he returned to the house a few years before the podcast conversation, he found that the hallway he’d remembered as “a gauntlet of horrors” was, by his account, just 2 feet long.
