MIAMI, United States. – One of the absurd precepts of cinema produced by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC)especially in its beginnings, was the rejection of the cultivation of the so-called genres, so dear to American cinematography.
Gangster movies or noir series, musicals, horror, thrillersscience fiction, adventure, among others, were cancelled or ignored, in some way, to make way for a pretentious Europeanization of the national circumstance. Many of these films today belong to the universal history of boredom and oblivion.
We had to wait for the arrival of the so-called young cinema, especially that of the famous and controversial “Muestras”, later cancelled, to enjoy experimental and even fun forays into genre cinema.
It is truly regrettable that “horror” in all its attractive variants has not been cultivated more frequently in national cinematography, given the context of fear that the average Cuban has had to live through.
In many of his books about the myths of the Island, Samuel Feijóo rescued tales of ghosts with stories of frank horror in the countryside that could make even Guillermo del Toro’s hair stand on end.
I remember enjoying a characterization that he made Hector Medina as a vampire in the short film Hemoglobin (2010), directed by Michel Pascual and David Pérez, as well as Luis Alberto Garcia in a trailer for another vampire movie he was preparing Carlos Lettuce in Havana, before leaving for exile.
The classic of Cuban horror cinema remains unrivaled: it is Juan of the Deada feature film that Alejandro Brugues made in 2011. This film not only belongs to the large-scale fear genre, but is the first and most accurate national approach to the zombie subgenre.
With all the setbacks that the Cuban population is already suffering, infesting Havana with the living dead was a challenge, totally valid, that wavers between the ridiculousness and the drama of the most rancid dictatorship.
Juan of the Dead It is as eschatological as Alice in Wonderland (1991), by Daniel Díaz Torres. Both speculate on the ugly, the putrid, the deterioration of an inhospitable society that is collapsing, without spiritual or material maintenance.
We will have to return to these films to resolve the ineffectiveness of Castroism in its most hyperbolic impudence.
Like so many other filmmakers, Alejandro Brugués, who is considered a Cuban-Argentine director, left the Island, but instead of settling in Miami or in some European city, chose to be close to the great film industry of Hollywoodwhere he continued to cultivate the horror genre, first with some shorts and recently with a feature film entitled The Inheritance.
The film, made in the old style, takes place in the traditional setting of a haunted house with no escape, where an economically elite family must spend the night, made up of some descendants with no financial pretensions and others unscrupulous when faced with the possibility of a substantial inheritance.
Brugués knows how to pull the strings of the genre and summons his culture and experience in an investigation in the style of Agatha Christie, where the supernatural, the mystery and even scenes are manifested gore in a classic story destined to keep fans entertained by the suspicion of the inexplicable and unknown, which in some way is part of the human condition.
There are scenes in the film that are visually heirs to Lovecraft, extremely sophisticated, where a director emerges who will one day be able to develop his aesthetic and conceptual potential as he did in Juan of the Dead.
Brugués said on the site Halloween Daily that Spanish horror cinema is in need of an evil character, like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, who sets the standard for the genre. Who knows if in the future his perseverance will bring him that creative privilege.
OPINION ARTICLE
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