Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television and a New Model of Production (original) (raw)

Hollywood Horror and Spanish Culture

A paper examining how the Spanish horror film, "The Orphanage" adapts Hollywood horror genre conventions to suit the fairy tale quality of the Spanish ghost story and to engage with Spain's cultural history.

Blurring Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Spanish Horror TV

Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television

This chapter analyses the horror TV work of Daniel Calparsoro, and specifically, El castigo / The Punishment (Antena 3, 2008), La ira 1/ The Rage (Telecinco, 2009) and Inocentes ) Tnnocents (Antena 3, 2010) as an entry point into contemporary Spanish horror TV production. First, it scrutinizes the Spanish TV horror panorama since 2000 in order to give an account of the evolution of this generic category within the Spanish audio-visual industries. Second, it explains how new Spanish horror production ca n be seen as the product of the central role given to private television operators by the successive legislative changes in the Spanish audiovisual law. For this purpose, it studies the role of prívate TV channels "Antena 3" and "Telecinco" in the production, distribution and exhibition of film and serialized TV in the last decade. Third, it explains how Calparsoro's TV work establishes a dynamic relationship with Spanish society, utilizing horror as a tool to engage with the real from a critical perspective. Therefore, it combines an aesthetic account of the working mechanisms of the horror genre within t he structural patterns of serialized television and an in-depth discussion of how the audiovisual and the historical intertwine in depicting salient traumas within the contemporary Spanish social fabric. It explores thus how the horror genre occupies a significant position in the televisual landscape.

Blurring Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Spanish Horror TV: The Case of Daniel Calparsoro

Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television, 2018

Traumatized subjects : horror film and the legacy of mass extermination in post-dictatorship Spain

Dissertation, 2012

“Traumatized Subjects” examines the legacy of the mass extermination carried out during the 1936 coup against the II Spanish Republic and under the Francoist dictatorship through the lens of contemporary Spanish horror film, which I take as an index of cultural anxieties. I claim that “the Transition” is the dominant cultural process of post-dictatorship Spain, rather than a discrete historical period, and show how it is predicated upon the disavowal of mass extermination, while arguing that the emergent cultural process of the recuperation of historical memory that began with the historic mass grave exhumation in Priaranza del Bierzo in 2000 poses the first significant threat to the hegemony of the Transition since its consolidation during the failed coup attempt of 1981. Adapting notions of allegory found in the work of Walter Benjamin, Idelber Avelar, Adam Lowenstein and Michael Denning, I perform allegorical readings of what I call “the new wave of Spanish horror film” that consider each film as a variation of a master plot that frequently revolves around the loss of a family member followed by a search for the truth about the circumstances of their death or disappearance. By way of Lacanian psychoanalysis, I interpret these films as the largely unconscious dramatization of cultural conflicts around issues of memory, justice and impunity that have become central concerns in post-dictatorship Spain over the past decade. I demonstrate how each film exemplifies a distinct cultural politics that reflect their various ways of dealing with the legacy of mass extermination encoded in their scripts, and suggest that horror is a privileged genre of cinema for observing cultural battles and shifts related to historical trauma.

Making sense of genre: the ‘quality thriller’ as a vehicle to revise a controversial past in recent Spanish cinema

Studies in European Cinema, 2018

This article explores three recent Spanish films -Grupo 7 (Group 7, 2012), La isla mínima (Marshland, 2014) and El hombre de las mil caras (Smoke and Mirrors, 2016) that can be classified as "quality thriller" as they share a "filmmaker-auteur" nature, good production values, and an effort to obey the rules of the genre. Their production is an illustrative example of commercial productions which are giving a special visibility to a new version of the cinematographic authorship, a phenomenon which is described here as "the auteurism of commerce". Besides, as the analysis of their narratives and forms shows, the way in which these films participate in the cultural upheaval which spread through Spain since 2011 is also especially remarkable as they take a stance embracing a revisionist approach to the history of Spanish democracy,. All this considered, they represent a poignant case to explore the way in which mainstream fiction films dialogue with the challenges with which democracy is confronted in 21st century Europe.

Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television and a New Model of Production (original) (raw)

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