"The Orphanage" is a stylistic, old fashion ghost/horror movie that, despite the absence of visual gore, will scare you half to death. Produced by the creative Guillermo del Toro, the director of last year's magically inventive "Pan's Labyrinth", it can only make you weep at the banal nature of modern day American horror movies reflected by such sadistic torture fests as the "Saw" and "Hostel" series.

What makes this film so frightening is found in what you don't see. Its emotional force rests on an increasing sense of dread and doom. While there are several scenes that will literally cause you to jump out of your seat, the psychological power of this movie flows directly from the principal characters questioning their own sanity while they wrestle with the dark forces enveloping them.

Quite frankly, "The Orphanage" has a great deal in common with Spielberg's classic horror film "Poltergeist." The plot of both films centers around the disappearance of a small child and a desperate mother's attempt to find her/him.

While "Poltergeist" takes place in a typical American suburban neighborhood, the background for "The Orphanage" is an isolated, wind swept coastline in France. The heroine (Belen Rueda) is refurbishing an old orphanage where she herself stayed as a child. That structure and the surrounding landscape is as eerie as it is foreboding, and it wonderfully establishes the sense of dread that continues to build throughout this fine scary film.

Again as in "Poltergeist", both mothers resort to using a medium to desperately try and locate their missing child. (Remember the diminutive Ms. Zelda Rubinstein in "Poltergeist" and her famous premature declaration, "This house is clean?") While JoBeth Williams discovered that her daughter had mysteriously disappeared into the family's TV, Ms. Rueda learns in a chilling sequence that her child has been kidnapped by the "invisible friends" that he had previously been claiming to play with.

What makes both movies work so well is that the audience is drawn into the mothers' sense of increased desperation. For example, who can ever forget the hauntingly frightening cry of "Poltergeist's" JoBeth Williams' daughter, Carole Anne, "Mommieee?" Or Ms. Williams' heartbreaking entreaty to her daughter, "Don't go near the light, Carole Anne!"

Similarly, prior to her child disappearing, there is an equally mesmerizing scene in "The Orphanage." While walking with her son on an abandoned beach, he enters a dark seaside cave followed by his mother. When he momentarily disappears, she frantically pursues him, only to hear him talking to someone in the darkness.

As she admonishes him to head towards the cave entrance, she momentarily shines her flashlight into the darkness, observing small footprints walking away into the bowels of the cave from where her son had been standing. I defy you to watch that scene without the sensation that the temperature has dropped ten degrees in the theater!

As with a black hole in the solar system, "The Orphanage" emotionally sucks the audience in whether you try to resist or not. As another example, Ms. Rueda's little boy draws a picture of his imaginary friends for his mother. One of them literally appears dressed in rags while wearing a hideously decorated bag over his head.

Without giving anything away (this scene appears in the previews), there is a defining scene where Ms. Reuda goes looking for her son after he has temporarily disappeared from a masquerade party thrown on his behalf. Her desperation increasing, she looks up from her search of an upstairs bathroom after hearing some type of noise in the long hallway behind her.

As she slowly looks up, she is shockingly confronted with a small figure standing at the end of the hall dressed in rags with that grotesque bag over his head exactly as drawn by her son. What happens next is one of the great heart stopping scenes in any horror film in years.

The essential strength of this film, as was again true in "Poltergeist", is drawn from the fact that mothers will literally go into the unknown bowels of hell to retrieve a child. No matter what monster they may face, they will not leave without their baby.

While this is one of the most powerful forces in nature, I cannot help but reflect on a case I handled several years ago where my client, a young college student, was ordered confined in the Marion County Jail for nine days. His mother, a resident of Illinois, told me that she had rented a hotel room and was going to stay in Indianapolis until her son was released.

When I told her that there was literally nothing she could do and that she would be better off going home, she looked at me and said, "Mr. Hammerle, I brought that boy into this world, and I am not leaving Indianapolis without him."

In a similar fashion, neither would Ms. Williams or Ms. Rueda. Ghost stories centering on a mother's unbreakable bond with a child make for incredibly powerful films.