It traces family and school dynamics, her fascination with the 1931 American horror film Frankenstein, her exploration of a haunted home and landscape, making subtle references towards the dark, contentious politics of the time.

While censors were alarmed by some of the film's suggestive content about the authoritarian government, they allowed it to be released in Spain based on its success abroad, under the assumption that most of the public would have no real interest in seeing "a slow-paced, thinly-plotted and 'arty' picture.

[3] Six-year-old Ana is a shy girl who lives in the manor house in an isolated Spanish village on the Castilian plateau with her parents Fernando and Teresa and her older sister, Isabel.

The film makes a deep impression on Ana, who is especially riveted by the scene where the monster plays benignly with a little girl, then accidentally kills her.

The doctor assures her mother that she will gradually recover from her unspecified "trauma", but Ana instead withdraws from her family, preferring to stand alone by the window and silently call to the spirit, just as Isabel told her.

And the beehive symbolizes the same thing for both parties: “the inhumanity of fascist Spain.”[7] The barren empty landscapes around the sheepfold have been seen as representing Spain's isolation during the beginning years of the Francoist state.

[9] Ana represents the innocent young generation of Spain around 1940, while her sister Isabel's deceitful advice symbolizes the Nationals (the Nationalist faction soldiers led by Franco, and their supporters), accused of being obsessed with money and power.

Thinking that this version would “tidy up the drama, emphasizing soap opera over childish magic,” Erice changed the story.

In that work, Maeterlinck uses the expression 'The Spirit of the Beehive' to name the powerful, enigmatic, and paradoxical force that the bees seem to obey, and that the reason of man has never come to understand.

Years later, when the film was re-released in the United States in early 2007, A. O. Scott, film critic for The New York Times, lauded the direction of the drama: "The story that emerges from [Erice's] lovely, lovingly considered images is at once lucid and enigmatic, poised between adult longing and childlike eagerness, sorrowful knowledge, and startled innocence.

He wrote, "Every magic hour, light-drenched image in Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive is filled with mysterious dread....

There's something voluptuous about the cinematography, and this suits the sense of emerging sexuality in the girls, especially in the scene where Isabel speculatively paints her lips with blood from her own finger...[and] Torrent, with her severe, beautiful little face, provides an eerily unflappable presence to center the film.

"[16] Tom Dawson of the BBC wrote of how the film handled using its lead child actors to portray children's point of view, praising the young actresses Ana Torrent and Isabel Tellería.

Newman also commended the film's lack of explanation for the events happening on screen, "or, indeed, precisely what is going on in Ana's family, the village or the country.

The site's critics consensus reads: "El espíritu de la colmena uses a classic horror story's legacy as the thread for a singularly absorbing childhood fable woven with uncommon grace.

Guillermo del Toro's films The Devil's Backbone (2001) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006) particularly resort to the idea that children believe and act according to their beliefs about imaginary worlds around this period of Spain's history.

[2] The movie's dream-logic visuals and metaphorical storytelling also laid the groundwork and shaped the vision of Issa López's 2017 film Tigers Are Not Afraid.