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Andy Willis
University of Salford

Paul Naschy, Exorcismo (1974) and the Reactionary Horrors of Spanish Popular Cinema in the Early 1970s

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Much of the recent academic work on European horror cinema has attempted to reveal the potentially radical, subversive or transgressive elements contained within. Films produced within the Spanish horror boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example The Blood Spattered Bride (1972) and The Bell of Hell (1973), and some of the key practitioners of the period such as Jess Franco have, for the most part, proved a rich source for such an approach with writers such as Joan Hawkins and Tatjana Pavlovic identifying radical aspects in such work.

However, in this paper I would like to consider the potentially less progressive and more reactionary side of the Spanish horror film explosion, arguing that the continual seeking of the radical within European horror often results in an overlooking of the very real, reactionary impulses contained within the films themselves.

The films written by and starring Spanish horror icon Paula Naschy are perhaps the clearest examples of the ideologically reactionary tendencies of this period. By concentrating on the 1974 film Exorcismo (directed by Juan Bosch) and placing it firmly in the historical and cultural context of Spain in the early 1970s I want to explore the possibilities of reading the use of setting, religion and sexuality contained within the film as reactionary, arguing that far from being subversive it ultimately reinforces the ideologies of the right-wing Francoist state, a fact that should not be overlooked or ignored.

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European Nightmares - An International Conference on European Horror Cinema

1st – 2nd June 2006

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