Reasons to Smile (and Shudder): Sitges2025 Announces its Leitmotif
The 58th edition of the SITGES - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia is going to put a smile on your face... just before you burst out laughing, which, in turn, will also be leading up to a panic attack that’s going to paralyze your entire body. This year in SITGES, the winning combination will be composed of both laughs and chills; this is how we'll be celebrating one of the concoctions that has best mastered the art of reinventing, renewing, subverting and, while we're at it, dismantling the tropes that have historically shaped fantastic genre films.
Venerating the work and legacy of masters who have made a global impact on the general public such as Joe Dante and Sam Raimi (and likewise exploring the underground of Paul Bartel and John Waters) we will vindicate the pleasure of laughing at horror films, as well as the stimulating pleasure of remembering that humor can be the best catalyst for our fears. Likewise, we will also revisit the careers of immortal magicians like Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati... to better understand how they have led us to Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Quentin Dupieux.
With this in mind, we will rediscover the grotesque and absurd manifestations of Soviet fantastic genre to deepen our understanding of its burlesque take on the social and political values of the Eastern Bloc. Focusing on Great Britain, we will understand how we went from Monty Python to Edgar Wright; how, in Spain, we could chart the leap from auteurs such as Fernando Fernán Gómez or José Luis Berlanga to Álex de la Iglesia. And, of course, we will also visit the Asian continent, where we will immerse ourselves in the boundless inventiveness of Sammo Hung, Takeshi Kitano and Hitoshi Matsumoto. All this without forgetting the musical delight of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Little Shop of Horrors, or the parodic irreverence of Abbott & Costello or Scary Movie films.
In honor of this constellation of films and filmmakers, SITGES will be featuring a retrospective and will publish a book, edited by Hermenaute, where we will review the historical confluences between the motivations leading to our 2025 leitmotif.
We Re-animate the Myth
Laughter, as a course to follow, will lead us to one of the cinematic milestones that, needless to say, we are going to relive this year, and yes, pun intended. Because after all, it was exactly four decades ago that the hilarious gore featured in Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator picked up the Award for Best Feature Film right here, at the 18th edition of our Festival. Loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story, the film is, in retrospect, an excellent example of that substance of 80s horror that, as the aforementioned Sam Raimi proclaimed, conceived blood and guts scenarios as an irresistible dissolution where, as we said, "laughs and chills" are presented as two sides of the same coin.
They are in this particular cinema that both amuses and shakes us to the same degree; they are at an edition that, 40 years after its crowning, is going to witness the reunion of the crew of one of the films that has best grasped the properties and virtues of stirring up both sets of emotions.