When done well, a horror picture can romance a viewer’s squirming, sublimated inner mind more ardently than a movie from any other genre. This connection, a kind of fan and film collective unconscious of familiar themes, conventions, and symbols is a powerful one. So powerful, in fact, that the bond isn’t threatened by the scary movie’s tradition of outright approbation. Lest we forget, even Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 ground zero of slasher movies, “Psycho,” owed its developmental genesis and a strong stylistic debt to Henri-George Clouzot’s equally precise and seedily gothic 1955 thriller “Les Diaboliques.”

When held up to the light of genre history and convention, the polished new horror films emerging from contemporary Spain divulge their forebears with almost arrogant pride. “The Orphanage,” directed by Juan Antonio Bayona in his feature debut and produced by “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone” helmer Guillermo del Toro, is a supernatural thriller constructed from such familiar and sturdy story materials that initially, as rose petals fly up to meet an elegantly booming camera and innocently frolicking children’s screams allude to the gruesome torments to come, the film almost feels like Spanish Scary Movie’s Greatest Hits Volume One.

In present-day Spain, a now fully grown former resident of a seaside orphanage named Laura (Belén Rueda) returns to her abandoned childhood home with her physician husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their 7-year-old adopted son, Simon (Roger Princep). Chronic illness has inclined Simon toward flights of imagination that his parents have difficulty fathoming. But when Simon acquires a group of new invisible playmates led by Tomás (Óscar Cosas), Laura and Carlos find themselves at odds over how best to deal both with Simon’s emphatic belief in the unseen, and with the unfortunate terrestrial truths that they are finding it increasingly difficult to keep from their son. Visits from a creepy and inquisitive social worker named Benigna (Montserrat Carulla) do nothing to settle anyone’s nerves.

At a reception celebrating the reopening of the orphanage as a home for disabled children, Simon vanishes. Laura and Carlos’s initially frantic search of the grounds yields nothing but more indication that Tomás is more real than the two parents were willing to believe, and that Benigna was even more malevolent than her wrinkled, owlish appearance suggested. Against the ticking clock of Simon’s fragile health, Laura begins a search that ultimately bridges two worlds and the two lives she has led as both an orphan and a mother.

Mr. Bayona and fellow first-time screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez ingeniously prune their narrative into a trellis of such darkly blooming revelations and welcome surprises that I cannot disclose much more in clear conscience.

That “The Orphanage” delivers jolts outdoors in broad daylight with the same facility with which it elicits cries from the dark is a testament to just how finely wrought the film is from the script level up. A mid-movie sequence depicting a high-tech medium’s efforts to make a connection with Simon or the spirits who may be holding him captive is particularity stunning.

The hypnotized medium, Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin, now nearly a dead ringer for her father), drifts through the house, tracked by a series of video screens manned by Aurora’s colleagues, Laura, Carlos, and highly skeptical members of the police. Mr. Bayona alternates between color faces, monochrome monitors, and a 2-D floor map of the house with an editorial dexterity that evokes former cutting-room toiler Robert Wise’s “The Haunting,” if not the master of suspense himself. The only thing missing is Aurora’s point of view, and as that omission becomes increasingly and nail-bitingly apparent, the sequence builds to a nearly unbearable tension.

“Seeing is not believing,” Aurora tells Laura, “it’s the other way around.” Though it delivers powerful but transitory scares more effectively than the lingering sentiment to which it ultimately aspires, “The Orphanage” is a film of both strong creative vision and unwavering belief in the mutability of existence and the eternal nature of fables that, like the film itself, extol love’s virtues.

An endearing storytelling ritual that Laura and Simon share early on neatly distills this crowd-pleasing film’s considerable appeal. “Pirates, lighthouse, treasure,” Simon lists off the top of his head, and his mother dutifully spins these coarse plot threads into a narrative sufficiently well woven to amuse and enchant the boy. A film that essays loss and tragedy with the sweetness and delicateness of a parent’s kiss good night, “The Orphanage” could very well have begun life as a child’s random listing of “kid, mom, house, death, love.” I hope that it’s not too long before Messrs. Bayona and Sanchez tell another one.