Bestiary. Vampires, Witches and Other Misfits

A film about werewolves, but with a stronger focus on their mothers. It starts with a wealthy woman interviewing a poor woman. Ana is pregnant and looking for a nanny/housekeeper to help with her child and home; Clara needs a job and a place to live. The child’s father is an enigma: he appeared mysteriously one night and disappeared the following day. Amid this intimacy, fashioned first by work and then by desire, Clara begins to see strange things: every full moon Ana falls under a spell and walks around the city looking for morsels of prey, but has no recollection the next day. Mixing horror, melodrama and musical, As Boas Maneiras is split into two parts: the first is hope for a child born into a wealthy area, the second the life of a strange child in a poor neighbourhood.

Mary Shelley’s classic has been adapted to screen on numerous occasions. Some versions have become cult, for instance Frankenstein directed by James Whale, one of the few classical Hollywood directors that was openly homosexual. Universal Pictures spent the best part of twenty years intensifying its efforts to produce horror films and, consequently, monster stars. The actor Boris Karloff was among the biggest of them, his horrified expression immortalising the face of the beast created by doctor Frankenstein. A film about the obsession of a man and his assistant with creating life in their laboratory.

An applauded gem of silent cinema, censored for decades and screened here in a new version restored by Svenska Filminstitutet. Häxan. Witchcraft Through the Ages draws from Malleus Maleficarum (1486), a book used notoriously in the hunt and execution of witches, and even in the contemporary world. In the film, a narrator tells us this story as staged scenes which are shown to be real in a flawless and extremely early example of the false documentary. It is structured in four parts: faith and its deviations in the Middle Ages, the recreation of the fantastical visions of witches, case studies presented as fiction within fiction and the contemporary relationship between witchcraft and hysteria. Häxan. Witchcraft Through the Ages was not only the most expensive silent film in the history of Scandinavian cinema, but also drew admiration from Carl Theodor Dreyer, Alfred Hitchcock, Surrealist artists, and later from the 1970s underground and famous demonologists like William S. Burroughs and Kenneth Anger.

One summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette worked in close collaboration with his stars and confidants Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier to re-write the rules of cinema from the spirit of play. The result is one of the most inventive and enchanting films from French nouvelle vague. Julie (Labourier), a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline (Berto), an enigmatic witch. Both become the heroines of adventures which involve a bewitched house, hallucinogenic candy and a melodrama of mystery and murder. With allusions to Lewis Carroll and Louis Feuillade, the film is regarded as one of the finest comedies of all time and is a ludic space of cinematic dreaming which pauses at pleasures and the infinite possibilities of storytelling.

The vampires in this silent series are not traditional mythological beings. They are a gang of thieves that menace Parisian bourgeois society at the dawn of the twentieth century. Les vampires (The Vampires), ten chapters which stirred emotions at the time, is a stone-cold classic in the history of cinema. Its big star is Musidora (a pseudonym of actress Jeanne Roques), an early femme fatale who gained international fame through her performance of Irma Vep: a cabaret singer turned thief who, when donning her leather suit, became an icon par excellence of vampness and a Surrealist muse. Hypnotic Eyes is the sixth episode in the series.

A homage to Louis Feuillade’s The Vampires, and in particular its lead character Irma Vep, an anagram of the word vampire, played by the irresistible Musidora. A character that became an early icon of girl power, a powerful and independent woman on the margins of prudish morality in the early part of the twentieth century. In the film, Assayas, an erudite film buff, sets in motion a game of mirrors, a metafictional exercise of film within film, whereby The Vampires synthesises the hex of the medium. Furthermore, the idea of the vampire, in this instance synonymous with rebel and outlaw, serves to represent the notion of freedom which any life devoted to art assumes.

A cult film about the vampiric yearning to enjoy life. In this story, a vampire scientist, the son of Dracula, has discovered Vampisol, a revolutionary potion that allows vampires to stroll around in broad daylight. The news reaches international crime syndicates, who travel to Havana to take control of the formula: the standoffish and sinister European vampires, Grupo Vampiro, and the North American vampire mobsters, Capa Nostra. Pepito, a trumpet player and nephew of the creator of Vampisol, is chased by both groups from the time he is given custody of the formula. The result is a parody ranging across the vampire genre, gangster films and Cold War political thrillers.

An emblematic film from the Colombian Cali Group, led by film-makers Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo and writer Andrés Caicedo, centred on an urban horror story mixing vampires, salsa, drugs, sex and corruption and giving rise to one of the legendary tropical gothic films. Here the vampire is a bloodsucker, literally, a misanthropic, exploitive multimillionaire who, stricken by a strange blood disorder, must receive blood transfusions from children to survive. The film draws on the real-life “Monster of Mangones”, an alleged anonymous psychopath who killed and discarded children, and a figure who still looms over the macabre popular culture of Cali. Regarded as the first Colombian horror film, Pure Blood also contains flashes of comedy splattered with social critiques on underdevelopment and exploitation.

An introspective and well-mannered video game designer (played by Nacho Ruiz) thinks up imaginary beasts, an occupation that keeps him distracted from his darkest desire: children. Manticore is a mythological Persian animal with a human head, lion’s body and scorpion’s tail and means “man-eater”. Half psychological thriller, half horror, the film raises the uncomfortable and disturbing question: Is desire — the thought — a crime or just when it is executed? A work of great maturity by one of the most original film-makers on the European landscape, and nominated for Goya Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay, its simple storyline and the understated performance of its actors reveal film-making about the abyss and hidden depths of the human soul, culminating in the question: Where is the limit between sadism and monstrousness?    

A slasher film tinged with Iberian costumbrismo and shaped by a feminist gaze on bodies and society. A stifling summer in Extremadura with swimming pools, bikinis and gangs. A girl with obesity (played by Laura Galán, winner of a Goya Award for Best New Actress in 2023) is insulted by girls in the town for her physical difference and for being working class. A disappearance, a gruesome crime, silence. Appropriating and giving a new twist to horror film clichés, Piggy shows how evil is not just about tragic atrocities, but also invisible daily actions such as bullying. From that starting point, it considers how these microscopic ills can lead to the following questions: And if the monster is the victim? Do these micro-monstrosities perhaps inhabit us all?

In just under ten minutes, Faith Hubley tells a story spanning centuries: there was a time when women were goddesses, priestesses and heads of state, and then came the accusations of witchcraft, the stake, the conquest of the Americas and slavery. This short film was made with hand-painted animation, in a collaboration with the director’s two daughters: Emily, also an animator, and Georgia, from the band Yo La Tengo.

I Married a Witch, meanwhile, is a film by director René Clair, one of four that emerged as Hollywood was escaping from the Second World War. In this story, two sorcerers, father and daughter, are condemned to be burnt at the stake in seventeenth-century Salem. Before dying, a young witch (played by Veronica Lake) puts a curse on her accuser: all the men in his family will marry the wrong women and will be unhappy. Centuries later, in 1940s New York, both roving spirits take human form to torment a descendent of the family that sent them to eternal damnation. A love potion changes hands and a horror film becomes a romantic comedy. Under the guise of innocence, I Married a Witch links the stake with the sentence of romance, evils which have engulfed women for centuries.

Anna Biller is a film-maker who makes pictures that are unusual and feminist. Drawing on two film genres, witches and serial killers, she creates a witch which, like René Clair’s, seeks revenge armed with a love potion. The film is a time warp to the 1960s, Bewitched crossed with the aesthetic of gialloi film from Italy. Biller grew up watching her mother work as a wardrobe artist and inherited an obsession with making things by hand, making them beautiful, fashioning an idiosyncratic world. In this film she does everything: write, direct, decorate, create wardrobes, paint pictures, invent witch instruments, and write the music based on medieval melodies. The Love Witch is a film which, with a mainstream texture, opens up questions on the place women occupy in horror films.

“Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. That is their tragedy”, asserted Ishirō Honda, known globally for his tokusatsui productions, films that mix reality and special effects. In 1954, inspired by King Kong, Honda and special effects artist Eiji Tsuburaya created this soaring mythical monster that stomped through Japan’s coastal towns and into the imaginary of monster films. The threat to the world and a violent history for Japan (nuclear bombs, radioactivity) moves to the sea, where it finds its prey for a monstrous mutation. Godzilla is nature’s revenge against humanity.

Japanese film-maker Kaneto Shindō was born and died in Hiroshima — he was 33 when the USA destroyed the city with the atomic bomb. Sometime later, Shindō became a film-maker and began to participate in the national tradition of films led by sprits and demons. The story is set in feudal Japan (with present-day echoes) during the Sengoku Period (1467–1615). Two women (a mother and a wife) wait for the man of the house, a samurai fighting at war. Alone in the middle of a forest, they are murdered by a group of evil samurais, and later transform into vengeful spirits in the form of a black cat (kuroneko in Japanese), swearing to spend eternity taking revenge on these men of war. When the son/husband returns home, the curse hangs over everyone. The film is shot in a grainy black and white, whereby the faces and their expressions are seen as shards of light amid the darkness.  

Tod Browning was a great film-maker of strange films, a poet of monstrosity. He was an actor, writer, director and, above all, a circus and vaudeville artist. This man of tours and shows created, between 1919 and 1939, a distinctive bestiary in film, working with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi and other actors in the shadows. Freaks is a classic of monster cinema because Browning wrote his own story on the relationship between monster and tenderness. In a travelling circus full of “freaks”, a “normal” woman joins as a trapeze artist with a hidden agenda: to seduce Hans, a man with dwarfism who has inherited a vast fortune. The question is: Who is the real monster, the one who is not the norm or the one with vile actions? The film experienced all sorts of problems upon its release, particularly with its studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which cut half of the scenes to not put out its executives and viewers. The film’s story is also plagued with a lack of understanding.

In 1963, North American writer Maurice Sendak published a children’s book entitled Where the Wild Things Are, adapted to film by Spike Jonze in 2009. Max is a boy who lives with his mother, a single woman carrying the weight of providing for her family. Max has his own problems: he is unable to make friends and the few children he does manage to befriend turn their back on him. Each with their own miseries, they argue one night and Max throws such a monumental tantrum that he enters another dimension, a world inhabited by monsters. Luckily he is wearing his wolf suit and the inhabitants of this village name him king. There he learns about his new life and about the old one with his mother, with his family condition ill-suited to its suburban context. A story as tender as it gets.