In 1989, TVE associated with other European television channels to launch a large production made up of six telefilms lasting ninety minutes each, whose common element was that they were centered on witchcraft. ‘Sabbath‘ was an unprecedented event in the chain and ended up being lost in time, except for a small DVD edition that remained untraceable. But now it’s finally available and free on Rtve play.
Televisión Española premiered the series in the summer of 1992, taking prime time to the terrain of horror movies with the broadcast of the six episodes, which tried to give the perspective of witches from different perspectives, from historical reality to popular tradition. Along with Spain, the associated countries were France, Italy, Germany and Portugal, with channels such as RTP, France 3, Reteitalia, and the companies SFP and BetaFilms.
A summer of terror on the first chain
The series, according to TVE, intended to show, “through certain periods of history, an overview and pose situations, environments and events that had a living and throbbing reality.” A classic justification of low terror a cultural prism that would give “prestige” to a series quite loaded with nudes, blood and typical elements of the genre. Of course, the stories were related to the oral tradition of the territories and some with the processes, with which they were filmed in natural spaces.
According to theThe producers of the series assured that these are events that:
“They had to be reconstructed in the same settings where they happened, in the same places that are attributed to them, since very often such settings are still strange and unusual magical spaces, before which it is perfectly understandable that the impossible could happen there.”
The producers explained to ABC at the time that in 90 minutes, each director had developed “a critical vision of certain periods of history, in which the official version largely crushed what popular sentiment had embodied in oral tradition. of songs or anonymous writings”. They claimed that the ‘Sabbath’ stories were neither an anthropological study nor an explicit analysis of history, and that “neither have concessions been made to fantasy“.
An anthology from the festival to the most academic
As if they had a guilt complex, they wanted to mask the fact that the films had many leaks into the supernatural and fantastic, like the first film released on July 2 ‘La luna negra’, directed by Imanol Uribe, a reformulation of satanic cinema from the 70s who managed to advance elements of ‘Hereditary’ with a cast with Lydia Bosch, Fernando Guillén, José Coronado, Emma Suárez, Amparo Muñoz and Fernando Sancho. It was the first of the episodes of Televisión Española that also contributed ‘The legend of priest Bargota’.
This contribution of Pedro Oleais a kind of thematic continuation of his coven, in which he faced witchcraft and trials, here a priest who could be the son of the same Satan because his mother is a member of a surprise Its protagonist was a young Fernando Guillén Cuervo. Italy, participated with ‘The Demon’s Mask’, Lamberto Bava’s remake of his father’s film, which led to the terrain of his ‘Demons’, although being more faithful to the source material, ‘El Viyi’ by Gogol.
France participated with ‘mary the wolf‘; Germany, with ‘Anna Göldin, the last witch‘ (Anna Göldin, letzte Hexe, 1991), and Portugal, with ‘The curse of Maria Alva’ (A maldiÇao do Marialva, 1990). In 2008 there was a DVD edition by So Good Ent., which presented the series divided into two volumes, at the rate of two titles per disc. Some of the films come from that restoration, but that of ‘La luna negra’ comes from the work that the Filmoteca did a couple of years ago.