THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE []

Striking art-house shocker. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 106 minutes. Rated R (gore, violence, sex, profanity). At the Empire, the Lincoln Plaza, the Angelika, others.

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‘THE Devil’s Backbone” is a genuinely scary, exquisitely shot – and very well-acted – ghost story/political allegory set during the Spanish Civil War from Guillermo del Toro, Mexico’s answer to David Cronenberg.

After his parents’ deaths, 12-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is sent to a remote orphanage run by Cesares (Federico Luppi of del Toro’s earlier “Chronos”), an opera-loving doctor who swigs vintage brandy from containers preserving dead fetuses.

Small wonder the frightened Carlos is having “Sixth Sense”-style visions of Jacinto (Junio Valverde), whose moldering corpse lies bound in a stagnant swimming pool in the orphanage’s basement.

Jacinto mysteriously disappeared after an event we glimpse in the opening credits: a bomb dropping from a plane into the orphanage’s courtyard, where the boys treat the unexploded device as a much-needed diversion in their grim lives.

Even as Jacinto is spookily warning Carlos that “many will die,” Francisco Franco’s forces are closing in on the orphanage, where Carlos’ one-legged companion, Carmen (Marisa Paredes), is hoarding gold bars for the Republican cause.

Carmen is also cuckolding the impotent Cesares with Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), a hunky former student of hers who’s now the orphanage janitor and is dating a teacher named Conchita (Irene Visedo).

The situation literally explodes when Jacinto tries to get his hands on the gold before the orphanage is evacuated.

“The Devil’s Backbone,” which is not for the faint of heart, is vastly more frightening and stylish than this year’s other period ghost story, “The Others.”