By Nicole Snyder

Too often, viewers leave horror movie screenings thoroughly disappointed. After weeks of terrifying trailers and anticipation, the viewer finds that everything scary was in the trailer and, really, the actors were just running around screaming the entire time. Guillermo del Toro’s “The Orphanage,” falls in a different class.

“The Orphanage” is not just a great horror movie – a difficult feat – but a great movie as well. The film, presented in Spanish with English subtitles, doesn’t rely on gruesome deaths or special effects, but instead on a masterfully-written script, perfect setting and phenomenal acting. And as for the scariness factor, a creepy little child in a long, dark hallway wearing a dirtied burlap mask was enough to make most people in the theatre scream more than once.

The movie centers on Laura (Bel’eacute;n Rueda), who as a young girl spent years in an orphanage on the Spanish coast before being adopted, never knowing what became of the other children she had to leave behind.

Many years later, after adopting a child of her own, Laura and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo), decide to move into the abandoned orphanage and make it into a home for sick and disabled children. Their 7-year-old son Sim’oacute;n (Roger Pr’iacute;ncep) will now finally have other children to play with.

Shortly before the opening of the orphanage, Sim’oacute;n befriends a boy named Tom’aacute;s, at the beach, who appears only to him. Five more children, invisible to everyone but Sim’oacute;n, quickly become part of his circle of imaginary friends. Together they create elaborate scavenger hunts for him with intentions that border on menacing.

The grand reopening of the orphanage finally comes, and Sim’oacute;n is less than thrilled to meet the new children. He is perfectly content playing with his imaginary group of friends, which frustrates his parents.

Carlos believes Sim’oacute;n is acting out for attention, while Laura thinks it may have something to do with the orphanage itself.

As Sim’oacute;n runs off to play in his imaginary world, Laura sees something that makes her question if her son’s friends are a little more than imaginary.

Scared and confused, Laura looks for Sim’oacute;n, and when she cannot find him she immediately becomes frantic and realizes that he has completely vanished.

Laura begins digging up the past, searching for answers to what happened to the children from the orphanage and how it relates to her son’s disappearance. She soon becomes immersed in the world Sim’oacute;n was so fixated with and eventually goes on a scavenger hunt of her own, set up by the “imaginary” children, to find her son.

“The Orphanage” was directed by newcomer Juan Antonio Bayona, and produced and presented by director Guillermo del Toro, who made the critically acclaimed “Pan’s Labyrinth” in 2006. “The Orphanage” is this year’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” – a horror masterpiece, which has already been chosen by the Spanish Academy of Films as Spain’s nominee for the 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar.

The real jewel of this movie though, is Rueda, who delivers an emotionally riveting performance. The relationship between mother and son is fixed in the viewer’s mind throughout the film, so when Laura loses her son in the middle of the movie, the viewer feels an intense sorrow for her.

In other horror movies, many viewers are just in it for the creative deaths, but in “The Orphanage,” the viewer comes to really care about the family. Since Sim’oacute;n vanishes halfway through and Carlos doesn’t play too important a role, Rueda gets that much more credit for going it alone.

“The Orphanage” is the must-see of horror movies this year with its quick-paced story and scream-out-loud scares. Audiences can expect to see more of Bayona if he continues to create work of this caliber.