Triple Award Winners on the Most Monstrous Night

A mammoth day of awards, Encounters, talks, and presentations. There's only one day left to discover the winners of the 58th edition, but here in Sitges, we continue to expand the horizons of Fantastic genre, traveling to new realities and navigating between different dimensions through films such as Obsession, an exercise in pure cinematic wisdom, or the return of The Grabber in Black Phone 2, which left us glued to our seats. All this on the day that Enzo G. Castellari, Terry Gilliam, and Sean S. Cunningham were honored with awards.

It’s Alive!

A classic myth that has been revisited countless times throughout film history, from the silent era to present day, the iconic creature that returned from beyond the grave as a result of a scientific experiment in Mary Shelley's masterpiece now receives a dazzling adaptation in the new blockbuster from Guillermo del Toro. Frankenstein is his genuine reinterpretation of the modern Prometheus based on a script written by the filmmaker behind such landmark films like Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, which opened Sitges in 2017 for its 50th anniversary.

Del Toro captivated a good portion of the audience, who were able to share the love he feels for the monstrous in this brand-new version featuring a stellar cast including Oscar Isaac in the role of the iconic Doctor -previously played by stars such as Peter Cushing and Colin Clive- and Jacob Elordi displaying the innocent nature of the famous creature. Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz also participate in this succulent reworking of the myth that collects and transforms the legacy of Boris Karloff in the Universal classic directed by James Whale in 1931.

A Builder of Worlds

The screening of Frankenstein, held tonight at the Auditorium, was particularly memorable, but it would not have been the same without the appearance of a great legend in contemporary fantastic genre filmmaking, who took to the stage just before the screening.

Terry Gilliam, visionary filmmaker of madness and eccentric epics, quixotic Monty Python member, and creative father of political, social, and religious parables such as 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, returned to the same Festival where we remember him receiving the Time Machine Award in 2000. This year, the British magician returned with his unmistakable charisma and sense of humor to receive the Grand Honorary Award before an audience that erupted in applause.

Visibly touched, Gilliam expressed his gratitude for the award before an audience that has grown and matured accompanied by his magnificent films, always attentive to the power of ideas, to reflection beyond the limits of the screen, to the power of denunciation that inhabits a cyberpunk satire as dystopian as Brazil, where the filmmaker described a world subjected to technological authoritarianism not so far removed from the darkest pages of contemporary history.

Gilliam also held an Encounter where he joked that he “doesn't like fantasy” and that almost all of his films are about imagination, which, according to him, “has no rules,” fighting against reality. He also highlighted the new paths of contemporary animation, following his visit to the Annecy Festival, his frustrated desire to become a Disney animation director, and expressed his opinion on the need for pure imagination in this age of sensory overload.

Macabre Clown

With his snake-like gaze and sharp teeth, the most terrifying clown in this genre invited us to visit his sinister town with no return ticket. Pennywise, the legend created by Stephen King in 1986 and brought to life by Tim Curry in the 1990 television classic, returns to the new television format of our time with It: Welcome to Derry, the terrifying series that serves as a prequel to the two films released in 2017 and 2019 - It and It. Chapter 2—which confirmed the talent of its creators, Bárbara Muschietti and Andy Muschietti, special guests at this year's edition, and who held an Encounter to present their new project as executive producers.

Always positioned at the forefront, the Sitges Film Festival presented the first few minutes of this series, which premieres on HBO Max on Monday, October 27th. This new story takes us back to 1960s America to expand on the lore of Pennywise, immersing viewers in the diabolical forging of the famous child-eating monster, played once again by the unsettling Bill Skarsgård.

The Darkest Call

The Grabber is back. Black Phone 2 infiltrated the Auditorium to carry out its revenge from beyond the grave. Director Scott Derrickson, the man behind major horror films that have left their mark on the fantastic imaginary, such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister, brings back the famous Colorado bogeyman, the dark main character of Black Phone, who in 2021 was played by a Machiavellian Ethan Hawke as a killer of kidnapped children in a story written by Joe Hill, Stephen King's son.

This time, Derrickson presents a sequel in the form of a surreal nightmare that both plays with the conventions of horror moviemaking and explores new avenues that expand on the original myth. Hawke returns to play The Grabber, who wants to take revenge on Finn, played once again by actor Mason Thames, but now his new target is Gwen, his little sister, played for the second time by Madeleine McGraw in this supernatural slasher film that has caused more than a few scares in the Meliá Auditorium.

Time Machine Award for a Master of Exploitation

Applause continued to take over Sitges on a very eventful day, filled with historic figures from the film world. Renowned director Enzo G. Castellari, a key figure in spaghetti westerns and macaroni combat films, was honored with the Time Machine Award for a career marked by formal inventiveness. The man behind cult classics such as Keoma and The Last Shark, Castellari was capable of combining popular epic storytelling with an unmistakable style that has influenced countless generations to follow.

In fact, the explosive war action film The Inglorious Bastards -one of his most memorable films in the form of a quirky reworking of The Dirty Dozen- became a key ingredient in the postmodern soup that Quentin Tarantino would make decades later in the reverential Inglourious Basterds. This nod to him is no coincidence. If Castellari's cinema allows us to understand anything, it's the Italian roots of the exploitation language of the 1970s and 1980s as a fertile imaginary for understanding the inclination toward B movies that underlies much of the mutations that have taken place in contemporary film.

A Slasher Genre Legend

Master of the best stabbings ever perpetrated on the big screen, Sean S. Cunningham received the Time Machine Award the same year that Friday the 13th celebrated its 45th anniversary. This cult film -close to John Carpenter's equally canonical Halloween- was a monstrous reflection of conservative American society and one of the pieces that led to the explosion of horror movies in 1980s North America.

In a talk held with throngs of fans, Cunningham, who also produced Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, confessed that the huge success of the first film about Jason Vorhees - and the fever for sequels that ended up spawning a franchise of twelve titles - “was a matter of luck.” With box office receipts of nearly $40 million, Friday the 13th proved that it was possible to fill movie theaters by filming “without stars, on a low budget, and with a limited location.”

Thanks to Cunningham, the bloody Crystal Lake camp occupies a privileged place in our movie-loving memory in the best tradition of jump scares, along with the final scene of Brian De Palma's Carrie. All this bloody and chilling imagery has been the great calling card of a dystopian French thriller directed by Cédric Jimenez that we were able to enjoy at the Auditorium. Dog 51 is a police investigation thriller starring Gilles Lellouche and Adèle Exarchopoulos -so often seen on Sitges screens- that takes us to a futuristic Paris controlled by AI.

From Comic Strip to Screen

And last but not least, the wildest comedy ever arrived with Rafaela y su loco mundo, the new original series from Atresplayer created by Aníbal Gómez and based on his own graphic novel, El alucinante

The director also thanked Ernesto Sevilla for supervising the project and defended the eccentric vision of this wild family comedy, presented this Friday in the Serial Sitges section, where “the humor is the result of the sheer fun we had while filming it”. 

 mundo de Rafaella Mozzarella. The actor/director unfolds his imaginary self-adaptation as a delirious adventure story imbued with absurd humor through images with a pronounced surrealism that pay homage to that stage of existential mutation called adolescence.

The series features a cast of top-tier Spanish actors, from Joaquín Reyes, Carlos Areces, and Aníbal Gómez to Ingrid Garcia-Jonsson, David Verdaguer, and Arturo Valls. All of them, who attended the press conference held at the Sitges Meliá Hotel, expressed their excitement about the premiere of this carefully crafted project, which is reminiscent of production designs by Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Michel Gondry, or even the illustrations of Antonio Mingote.

The director also thanked Ernesto Sevilla for supervising the project and defended the eccentric vision of this wild family comedy, presented this Friday in the Serial Sitges section, where “the humor is the result of the sheer fun we had while filming it”.