Horror and the

Gothic in Spanish

Cinema

Guillermo del Toro:

In the eighteenth century Romanticism – and with it the Gothic

tale – surged as a reaction against the suffocating dogmas of

Enlightenment. Empiricism weighed heavily upon our souls so

that, as the age of reason went to sleep, it produced monsters.

Reason and science were enthroned, then the Gothic

Romance exploded full of emotion and thrills.(Diestro-Dopido Pan’s Labyrinth, p.22)

Goya ‘El sueño de la razón produce monstruos’ 1797-1799

Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous

A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.

As many skeletons, in chests and presses.

An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.

Assassins and desperadoes, 'quant. suff.'

Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.

Mix them together in the form of three volumes, to be taken at any of

the watering places before going to bed.

(Walkers Hibernian Magazine, 1798)

Meteorological – rain, storms, mists, darkness

Topographical – forests, mountains, deserts, chasms, boundless

ocean

Architectural – towers, prisons, castles, crypts, ruins, secret passages,

mazes

Material – masks, disguises, armour, tapestries, billowing curtains

Textual – riddles, folklore, rumours, fragmented texts, stories in stories,

dialect

Spiritual – symbolism, religious allegory, Catholic ritual, magic and

the occult

Psychological – dreams, hallucinations, madness, doubles, ghosts,

death

(adapted from Nick Groom The Gothic)

Early Gothic cinema?

The Lumiere brothers Le squelette joyeux (1895)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMSLL5AH1m0

George Melies La manoir du diable (1896)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPmKaz3Quzo

Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (Wiene, 1920)

Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922)

Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)

Saint Francis in Meditation, Zurburán (1639)

Saint Paul the

Hermit, Ribera

(1638)

Goya’s Saturno devorando a su hijo (1819-1823)

echoed in the Pale Man devouring fairies in El laberinto del fauno

Goya’s witches (1819-1823) echoed in the aesthetic of

El espinazo del diablo

Arthur Rackham twisted dead tree in

Sleepy Hollow (1928) echoed in

El laberinto del fauno

Giménez’s Paracuellos (1975-) as influence on story and aesthetic of El espinazo del diablo

The iconography of Saint Lucy – Bayer’s Lonely metropolitan (1932) – the Pale Man

Marcelino, pan y vino (Vajda, 1955) – the miracle

of the living Christ becomes the mythical faun

Seeing and visibility – Ofelia and Ana in

El espíritu de la colmena (Erice, 1973) acquire a

new vision of the world

El espinazo del diablo

¿Qué es un fantasma? Un evento terrible condenado a repetirse una y otra vez, un instante de dolor quizás, algo muerto que parece por momentos vivo aún, un sentimiento suspendido en el tiempo, como una fotografía borrosa, como un insecto atrapado en ámbar. Un fantasma, eso soy yo.

Bloody remains and traces of

identity

Acquiring points of view – Jacinto’s

past and Santi watches Carlos

The bomb – a ticking heart

El laberinto opening sequence – reversal of time; mythic worlds; brutal realities

The abject – the consumed and the

expelled; borders of human, animal

and vegetable

Monsters, fantasy and

reality

Images of the uterine

Magical ending:

image, colour and

emotion