Great Legends and Today's Rising Stars

We approached the first Friday of the Festival with the memory still lingering in our minds of great monarchs of fantastic and horror genre films such as Julia Ducournau and Carmen Maura. Today, however, the spotlight was on legends of quirky 1980s comedy like Joe Dante, and scream queens such as Nancy Loomis and Barbara Crampton in a MaestrAs encounter that was the best face-to-face of the day. All this, without forgetting that Loomis received a WomanInFan Award for her inimitable career as an actress in the history of genre film.

Clingy Love According to Michael Shanks

Screened in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival, Together sparked both applause and laughter in equal measure in a jam-packed Auditorium. This feature debut from Australian director and screenwriter Michael Shanks addresses the toxicity of romantic relationships, using extreme forms of body horror to question codependency within the context of a couple.

Californians Alison Brie and Dave Franco portray a situation that is all too common in the world of couples: the crisis that arises as a result of a change in context, from the hustle and bustle of city life to the apparent tranquility of the countryside. The most curious thing about this body horror story is that an accident in a cave will cause a change in their relationship with extreme consequences.

As for the leading duo, at the press conference Shanks said that Alison Brie and Dave Franco “already brought their rapport from home” and that it had been a privilege to work with a married couple. The fact that they are a couple both on and off camera adds layers of meaning to a film that is in dialogue with the historical map of films featuring actresses and actors who have shared a relationship beyond the movie set in stories of torment and tension. From Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the ruthless Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, united in the struggle and apocalyptic tragedy of A Quiet Place. The big difference is that, this time, the great evil that threatens the couple is something as intimate and absurd as how clingy their physical affection can become. Basically, Together would be, in the words of its maker, the reverse of The Substance. If in Coralie Fargeat's film, an identity was violently split in two, here the opposite happens, but without losing an ounce of bloody celebration. The result is a well-blended mix of romantic comedy and body horror set to the beat of the Spice Girls, which generated tension, applause, and laughter in equal measure at a well-attended screening at the Auditorium.

Shanks, who took advantage of the press conference to announce that he will soon be a father and that “the strength of the couple lies in leaving individualism behind,” also highlighted the greater presence of prosthetic effects and the use of puppets as opposed to digital textures, which are relegated to very specific scenes where the monstrous manifests itself in all its splendor. As an anecdote, the director confessed that he himself volunteered to play one of the creatures that appear in the film and that his house is a veritable cave of horrors, full of objects and references to the macabre.

Vernacular Macumbas in Youthful Argentina

And from the most monstrous Australia, we traveled to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The director of The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Laura Casabé, took us to the edges of the Argentine capital, commonly known as the conurbation, to surprise us with a tale of pagan magic, neighborhood witches, and vernacular macumbas. Casabé has created an ambitious adaptation of two stories by Mariana Enríquez, the great literary monarch of horror and fantasy who, precisely, was part of the jury for the Official Selection in 2022, the year of the highly successful Sisu.

The acclaimed author of such powerful works as Our Share of Night and Things We Lost in the Fire is the original source of a film inspired by the pages of El carrito and The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, which is co-produced by Spain, Argentina, and Mexico with Catalan participation. As for the cast, Casabé explained to the media that “in addition to being actors and actresses, they are also friends.” They are a group of young people recruited through an open audition lasting several months in the same Buenos Aires suburb where the storyline takes place.

Inspired by the way that John Cassavetes worked with everyday life, the director of The Returned reinforced the naturalness of the performances by “escaping the logic of theater schools to find talented artists outside the usual circuit,” such as the commendable debutante Dolores Oliverio in the role of a postmodern Carrie, or the promising young actors Agustín Sosa and Isabel Bracamonte, who participated in today’s press conference.

As for the dialogue with writer Mariana Enríquez, the film received her direct support during the scriptwriting and editing phases, with “very respectful contributions.” This was undoubtedly a privilege for the director, who shared that Enríquez was astonished to discover that the protagonist played by Oliverio in The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is an exact reflection of the character we find in the novel of the same name.

Casabé also emphasized the political and emotional resonance of the project. “It's a generational film set in 2001, the year we were teenagers.” With this statement, she referred to the first drafts of the script, co-written with screenwriter Benjamín Naishtat, which began as a process where “we shared music like two teenagers.” The rock band Las Pelotas and the songs of The Cure inspired the construction of this gothic tale of teenage violence about the act of witchcraft that young Natalia invokes on a hot summer afternoon among friends to punish a couple in love in a quarry, which corresponds to the danger-filled areas in the province of Buenos Aires that, in the film, function as a “liminal space” with a stifling atmosphere.

Strange Baby and Enraged Ape

Also outstanding on this second day of the SITGES – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia were the maternal comedy Mother's Baby by Johanna Moder and the animal horror film Primate by Johannes Roberts.

The first, directed by an up-and-coming Austrian filmmaker who is well worth keeping an eye on, places us in the horrific viewpoint of Julia, a mother unable to connect with her newborn baby. The character, played by German actress Marie Leuenberger alongside actor Hans Löw as the new father, naturally brings to mind echoes of the strangeness and mistrust of Lynch's Eraserhead in terms of narrative, although the director steers the forms of this harrowing domestic thriller towards a very different territory.

Nominated for the Golden Bear in Berlin, Mother’s Baby has made its mark on the eager audience in Sitges as a solid psychological thriller about the complicated emotions involved in motherhood and postpartum in a film that features the irresistible Claes Bang in the cast as a mysterious gynecologist.

All in all, Moder took on her third feature film as director and screenwriter to launch an intelligent critique of the imbalances in conciliation that still persist in our day and age, in a spiral of hallucinations and macabre discoveries.

Meanwhile, a B-movie with more carefully crafted aesthetics brought us Primate, the latest offering from British director Johannes Roberts, which became the perfect opportunity to enjoy a collective experience in a large theater. The director wrote it fifteen years ago, and the story has become quite an adventure. Primate uses old-school animatronics technology, foregoing new technologies in the field of visual effects to tell the story of a bloody family reunion, complete with a chimpanzee. The screening in Sitges turned into a veritable party when the monkey in question began to get aggressive as a result of contracting rabies.

It's impossible not to recall the chilling scene from Jordan Peele's Nope where Gordy the chimpanzee wreaks havoc on a television set designed to look like a typical American living room. However, Primate takes a different path in an adrenaline-fueled narrative starring talents such as Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, and Troy Kotsur, winner of an Academy Award for CODA.

Great Legends of 1980s Film

The undisputed Scream Queen and Final Girl who left her mark on an entire generation, Nancy Loomis, received the WomanInFan Award at a heartfelt gala filled with applause and cheers. The legendary actress, Carpenter's quintessential girl, credited in several of his films as Nancy Kyes, received the award before an audience of generous film lovers who remember her in such impressive titles as Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, and Halloween.

Both grateful and moved, Loomis accepted the award on a day when she also shared a conversation with another inimitable monarch of American genre moviemaking: Barbara Crampton. The event was held at the Meliá Hotel before an attentive audience as part of MaestrAs, a major initiative this year which, as we have mentioned in previous communications, is committed to promoting the presence and work of leading female creators in contemporary fantastic and horror genre.

At the same time, the great cult director of the 80s, Joe Dante, also gave a talk in Encounter format, moderated by our artistic director, Ángel Sala, where he took the temperature of current fantastic and horror filmmaking, reviewing, along the way, the glories of his stellar career as a director. We're talking about true genre classics such as Gremlins, The Howling, Small Soldiers, and a gem among 70s exploitation movies as enjoyable as Piranha, Dante's quasi-debut film that rewrote Steven Spielberg's iconic Jaws, amplifying the humor of the underwater threat in a summer resort town.

And as could only be expected, the roster of big names and surnames continued to grow with another eagerly awaited appointment. The legendary co-founder of Troma, Lloyd Kaufman, starred in a once-in-a-lifetime encounter. This legend of trash movies, who appeared two weeks ago in a delightful cameo in the remake of The Toxic Avenger, and a key figure in this year's Sitges Documenta section with the previously announced documentary Occupy Cannes!, directed by his daughter Lily Hayes Kaufman, interacted with an audience that fondly remembered the original version of The Toxic Avenger, co-directed by Michael Herz and Kaufman himself, a major work by Troma Films and, perhaps, the best bastardized parody ever made of Marvel's Hulk.