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List of contents
Introduction Bastard Sons: Contemporary Spanish Fantastic Film
Chapter 1 Álex de la Iglesia: The Father of a Generation
Mutant Action and The Day of the Beast
Chapter 2 Heroes and Villains
The Birthday and The Backwoods
Chapter 3 Alejandro Amenábar: The Drop-Out Auteur
Open Your Eyes and The Others
Chapter 4 The Haunting of Houses
The Abandoned and The Orphanage
Chapter 5 Jaume Balagueró: The Horror Aficionado
The Nameless and Darkness
Chapter 6 The Spanish Fantastic Woman
Sexykiller and Hierro
Chapter 7 Guillermo del Toro: The Outside Man
The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth
Chapter 8 Franchising the Spanish Fantastic
The [REC] Films
Chapter 9 Nacho Vigalondo, The Illegitimate Inheritor
Timescrimes and Extraterrestrial
Conclusion The End of an Era?
About the author
Shelagh Rowan-Legg is a writer, filmmaker, and script consultant. She is the Executive Director of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, a programmer for FrightFest, and a contributing editor for ScreenAnarchy. Her award-winning short films have screened at festivals around the world. She has a PhD in Spanish fantastic film from King’s College London.
Summary
In recent decades, the Spanish 'fantastic' has been at the forefront of genre filmmaking. Films such as The Day of the Beast, the Rec trilogy, The Orphanage and Timecrimes have received widespread attention and popularity, arguably rescuing Spanish cinema from its semi-invisibility during the creativity-crushing Franco years. By turns daring, evocative, outrageous, and intense, this new cinema has given voice to a generation, both beholden to and yet breaking away from their historical and cultural roots. Beginning in the 1990s, films from directors such as Alex de la Iglesia, Alejandro Amenabar, and Jaume Balaguero reinvigorated Spanish cinema in the horror, science fiction and fantasy veins as their work proliferated and took centre stage at international festivals such as Sitges, Fantasia International Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. Through an examination of key films and filmmakers, Shelagh Rowan-Legg here investigates the rise of this unique new wave of genre films from Spain, and how they have recycled, reshaped and renewed the stunning visual tropes, wild narratives and imaginative other worlds inherent to an increasingly influential cinematic field.Its emergence is part of a new trend of postnational cinema, led by the fantastic, which approaches the national boundaries of cinema with an exciting sense of fluidity.
Foreword
Spanish cinema is at the cutting edge of fantastic film production: this book examines the directors, visual styles and cultural contexts that make up this popular genre and festival favourite.
