On December 9 it opens in Spanish cinemas ‘Open Body’ (O corpo aberto), a new Spanish horror film directed by angeles orchard and starring Tamar Novas, María Vázquez and Victória Guerra. Written by the director herself together with Daniel D. García, it is based on a story by the writer Xose Luis Mendez Ferrinone of the great authors of contemporary Galician literature, whose text ‘Lobosandaus’ here gives rise to a gothic tale with folk horror elements.
The subgenre, which has undergone a revival since ‘Midsommar’, here becomes a deeper element, connecting the pagan Celtiberian tradition with the rural roots of the community, a relationship that has never been alien to Spanish cinema, Y already in Valle-Inclán’s adaptation ‘Flor de sanctidad’ (1973) there were moments worthy of ‘The Wicker Man’ without any influence from the contemporary British film, and it hasn’t come as a surprise in these years either, after the miniseries ‘Néboa’, more focused on criminal thrillers.
‘Cuerpo Abierto’ takes place in 1909, with the story in the first person, with a voice-over that transports us to a time of diffuse fantastic cinema, by Miguel, a young teacher assigned to Lobosandaus, a small mountain town in the “raia seca”, on the border between Spain and Portugal, an inhospitable village with ancestral traditions. As soon as he arrived, he perceived how mystery and superstition coexist naturally in the daily life of the population.
Return to epistolary gothic
Following the tradition of the literary ‘Sleepy Hollow’, its protagonist is a man of science who, from rationalism, confronts the common local belief that the spirit of the dead can manifest itself and remain among them by inhabiting other bodies. As winter approaches, Miguel feels darkness taking over everything around him, as his fascination with the enigmatic Dorinda grows and he begins to unleash his darkest desires.
But the strange death of a neighbor from the town leads him to question his convictions and the limits, the “raias”, or lines that separate the real world and that of death, which Huerta intelligently expands from the passages of the original story to take him to the current discourse of gender identity, although in an always suggestive way, where the fear of most of the characters is embodied in something that repels them, a queer relationship forbidden that generates repulsion and an interesting dual game with the fear of the fantastic.
The film fully enters the recent Galician horror trend, with examples such as ‘Jacinto’, ’13 exorcisms’, and the thriller with pure Spanish Gothic trimmings ‘As Bestas’ and not only because it was filmed in the Xurés- Gêres, and the province of Ourense, but because touches on aspects of its heritage in depth, with highly documented detailssuch as the punctual use of Spanish with the town priest, as in the background, treating the idea of death and sex in an epidermal way and really present in the day to day of their culture.
Terror in textures, silences and sounds
The mysteries of the mountains, the humid environment, the fog and the traditions, from the slaughter to the dances of the mayos, everything is present and is conjugated in a fascinating way in details such as the idea that a child can become ill by “catching a air of death”, the gloomy/tragic images such as post-mortem photos or those hanged in the trees. Everything reflects a telluric and intangible horror, very much in common with the British folk idea, so well reflected in the ghostly episodes of ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’.
Huerta’s film has no scares, apparitions or specters, and condenses his tendency to the supernatural through the editing or the soundtrack by the Galician artist Mercedes Peón, dark, unsettling, which sometimes accompanies close-ups full of symbolism that is never seen. explains, the very close-ups to the eyes, the throats, the bees as a recurring theme related to a dark funeral rite of the area, which is not explained, everything breaks down in an oppressive mental state, until an end that connects even with stories of ‘Stories from the Crypt’, which confirms an unreliable narrator and closes the circle in its convenient use of epistolary narration.
‘Open Body’ is probably the opposite of louder or excessive horror movies, meandering through the recognizable genre elements of soul possession or transmigration, but understands its native literary roots and their dialogue with the fantastic, more related to the possibility of something happeningin the style of the genre in the 40s, which with the post J-Horror explosion in which we live immersed, and yet, it does not use, like some authors indie current, alibis of drama, romance or posturing to avoid being a classic horror tale in its simplest essence, but instead embraces its gothic essence, perhaps outdated for some, but also timeless and full of textures, a little oasis of which are rarely found.