Directory of World Cinema: Spain

Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano, Lorenzo Hortelano

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781841504636
• eBook ISBN: 9781841505770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Though loved by moviegoers worldwide, Spanish cinema has thus far suffered from a relative lack of critical attention. Focusing on the vast corpus of films that have left their marks on generations of spectators, Directory of World Cinema: Spain returns the national cinema of Spain rightfully to the forefront with numerous full-color stills and essays establishing the key players and genres in their sociopolitical context, including civil war films, romances, comedies, and the cinema of the transition. From the award-winning big-budget productions of Pedro Almodóvar in Madrid to Pere Portabella's experimental documentaries and the influential Barcelona School, reviews cover individual titles in considerable depth. Essential reading for aficionados of Spanish cinema at all levels, this volume provides an accessible overview of the main trends and issues in Spanish film.

FANTASY AND HORROR

The Orphanage/El orfanato, Telecinco.

Although it can boast a fifty-year history, Spanish horror has frequently been overshadowed by more popular trends and fashions. During the 1960s and early 1970s British and Italian horror was dominant, with US horror taking pole position in the 1980s. By that point the Spanish horror film had effectively ceased to exist, not emerging again until the late 1990s. Unfortunately its rebirth then coincided with the sudden boom in Asian horror, with the Japanese and South Korean horror industry pushing their Spanish counterpart into a secondary position. Even within the domestic cinema scene, horror and fantasy-horror are often overlooked, with only the works of Alejandro Amenábar (Thesis, Open Your Eyes, The Others) and the Mexican-born Guillermo del Toro (El espinazo del Diablo/The Devil's Backbone; El laberinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth) coming close to the levels of success and acclaim associated with major mainstream figures like Pedro Almodóvar, Vicente Aranda or Julio Médem. However, recent hits such as El orfanato/The Orphanage (2007) and [Rec] (2007) have done much to raise the profile of Spanish horror, establishing Spain as a key contributor to the world of international horror.

The first Spanish horror movie is widely considered to be Jesús Franco's Gritos en la noche (1962). Although in English the title translates as Screams in the Night, outside Spain the film is best known as The Awful Dr Orloff. Unlike most of his contemporaries -who were busy reworking recent landmark hits like Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958) or Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) - Franco took his inspiration from another source: Georges Franju's elegant and controversial horror masterpiece Eyes Without a Face (1960). Although now considered to be one of the finest genre films ever made, at the time of release Eyes Without A Face was a commercial and critical failure. Heavily edited, badly dubbed and saddled with a hyperbolic (and meaningless) new title - The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus - Franju's film was initially dismissed as another cheap ‘mad scientist’ feature. Jesús Franco disagreed, however, and set about creating his own version of Franju's twisted tale. The young and ambitious director had already begun to weave elements of horror and fantasy into his work, and he based much of his film around the most notorious scenes from Eyes Without A Face, together with material drawn from Frankenstein and other popular sources. Although The Awful Dr Orloff was not warmly greeted by the critics, it quickly became a cult favorite, establishing the title character as Spain's first horror icon and paving the way for several sequels. Franco would soon become one of Spain's most prolific film-makers, and he would return to the territory he explored in The Awful Dr Orloff on a number of occasions over the following decades.

From the start it was clear that The Awful Dr Orloff was primarily intended for international audiences. Despite the slight relaxation of the government's controls on cinema in the late 1950s, neither the director nor the producers were optimistic about the possibility of reaching domestic audiences, and much of the financing came from French companies with crucial experience of marketing horror films across Europe. This was a pattern that would repeat itself many times over the next two decades, as Spanish film-makers tried to defray their costs (not to mention the difficulties of filming in a heavily-conservative dictatorship) by signing deals with Italian, French and occasionally British production companies. The most obvious example is the spaghetti westerns, which, despite their Italian background, were filmed mainly on Spanish locations, before returning to shoot the interiors at Cinecittà in Rome. As well as the financial considerations, the Spanish film industry also benefitted from the presence of experienced foreign technical staff.

The good Dr Orloff (and some of his disciples) went on to appear in several sequels -not all of them directed by Jesús Franco and some a distinct improvement on the original - but it was not until the late 1960s that the nascent Spanish genre tradition began to thrive. 1968 saw the release of The Mark of the Wolfman, the first film to feature Walde-mar Daninsky, El hombre lobo -the Wolfman. Played by former weightlifter Paul Naschy, Waldemar Daninsky is a tragic figure in the same vein as Lon Chaney Jr's Laurence Talbot: doomed to commit unspeakable deeds until he can find his true love, the only one who can end his painful existence. Spain's most popular horror icon, Daninsky has appeared in more than a dozen movies, and always played by Naschy, who frequently wrote the scripts himself, under his real name of Jacinto Molina. Released in Technicolor and 3-D, The Mark of the Wolfman was a big success in Spain, taking full advantage of the government's more favourable approach to domestic cinema. For the next decade, Paul Naschy would be a mainstay of Spanish horror, appearing in dozens of films and playing almost every popular genre icon, including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Dr Jekyll versus the Werewolf, 1971), Dracula (Count Dracula's Great Love, 1972), the Mummy (The Mummy's Revenge, 1972), the Hunchback (The Hunchback of the Morgue, 1973) and even Satan himself (Vengeance of the Zombies, 1973).

During this period the main influences on Spanish horror were Britain and Italy, resulting in a great many Hammer-style gothic horrors - often set in the present day to avoid the expense of a period setting - and lurid psycho-thrillers, with a little nudity and blood thrown in for titillation. Although these films were sometimes hampered by low budgets and amateurish acting, the results were occasionally surprising and often entertaining. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's La residencia/The House That Screamed (1969) stars Lilli Palmer as the headmistress of a nineteenth-century school for wayward girls, with Christina Galbó playing the latest inmate. Beneath the school's brutal regime lurk a number of secrets, including the disappearance of several of the girls, written off by the headmistress as runaways. By adopting the trappings of the period-set gothic horror film, Serrador (perhaps wisely) distracts attention from his political message: that oppressive, heavily conservative regimes actually foster and breed the very things they are attempting to stamp out, like immorality, liberal sexuality and rebellion. Eugenio Martín cast Hammer's twin icons, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, in his Pánico en el Transiberiano/ Horror Express (1972), a wildly entertaining film about two British scientists trying to deal with an alien monster while hurtling across the tundra on the Trans-Siberian Express. Although initially ignored in its home territory, Horror Express has gone on to become a cult classic.

The success of George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) inspired a slew of Spanish zombie movies, including Amando De Ossorio's Tombs of the Blind Dead (1970) and the three sequels that followed. In each of the films, long-dead Templar knights rise from their graves to feed on human blood. De Ossorio's living characters are flat and frequently irritating, but the Blind Dead are a marvelous creation, clad in rotting robes and slowly but relentlessly pursuing their victims, despite their sightless eyes. More obviously indebted to Romero is Jorge Grau's No profanar el sueño de los muertos/The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (1974). Set against picturesque British countryside, Christina Galbó and Ray Lovelock find themselves confronting both the living dead - brought back to life by a new agricultural machine - and the forces of law and order, led by Arthur Kennedy's brutal and vindictive police sergeant. Although the plot requires a number of unlikely leaps of logic, Grau provides plenty of grim, atmospheric sequences, and more than enough gore - provided by Italian effects master Giannetto De Rossi - to compete with its transatlantic cousins. Arguably the finest Spanish horror film of the 1970s is Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? (1976). On an isolated Spanish island something diabolical has happened to the children: overnight they have become murderous, slaughtering their parents and all other adults as if it were some new and exciting game. Unfortunately, English holidaymaker Lewis Fianderand his heavily pregnant wife Prunella Ransome decide to step away from the tourist trails and visit the island. Intense, original and surprisingly restrained, Serrador's film has enjoyed considerable critical acclaim over the years, despite a US version that was cut by 40 minutes and saddled with a cash-in title (Island of the Damned).

Who Can Kill a Child? represented the zenith of contemporary Spanish horror, but it could not prevent the genre from slipping into a decline in the last years of the decade. Like its British counterpart, domestic horror found it increasingly difficult to compete with the films coming...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction by the Editor
• Film of the Year: Biutiful
• Interview with Jaime Rosales
• Industry Spotlight: Spanish Film Production
• Cultural Crossover
• Festival Focus
• Film Location: Madrid
• Directors
• Auteur Melodrama/Melodrama de autor/
• Grotesque Comedy/Esperpento
• Iberian Drama
• Musical (But Not Only Flamenco…)
• Period Films/De época
• Dictatorship Forgotten Cinema
• The Transition to Democracy Cinema/Cine de La Transición
• Crime and Thriller
• Fantasy and Horror
• Experimental Documentary
• Recommended Reading
• Spanish Cinema Online
• Test Your Knowledge
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary
• Filmography