Professor Barry Jordan
De Montfort University, Leicester
Alejandro Amenábar and Contemporary Spanish Horror
Windows Media Video
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What does Amenábar think he is up to? He has made three of the most successful ‘horror/thriller’ hybrids in Spanish film history (Tesis/Thesis (1996), Abre los ojos/Open your eyes (1997) and Los Otros/The Others (2001)) but then appears to ape Almodóvar in his fourth film, the melodrama/weepie Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside for which he collects an Oscar for Best Foreign Film! Equally puzzling in his horror trilogy is his approach to genre, which is contradictory and curiously anti-mainstream, not only in Spain but in relation to Hollywood convention too. Unlike the gore, freakery, filth and excess of his commercial ‘horror’ contemporaries in Spain such as Alex de la Iglesia, Juanma Bajo Ulloa and Santiago Segura, Amenábar makes extremely clean and tidy ‘art horror’ movies. The latter are dominated by what he calls ‘contención’ (restraint/control) and a studied avoidance of CGI, special effects and the grotesque. He prefers to scare via the unseen not the seen, by way of silences, suggestive lighting, ‘small’ sound tracks, camera positioning and audience engagement, to fill in the blanks. In the context of 1990s Spanish filmmaking and contemporary Hollywood, how do we account for this rather classical, arty, retro approach to the horror genre?
