This 6th day at the festival brought us Greg Nicotero (Awarded on 2005 with the Sitges Time Machine Award for his career, and as some will remember, receiving that award on stage from the hands of Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth), who after having worked for many years as one of the best Make-Up Artists for cinema special effects, has started developing his career towards direction and production, and is now one of the responsible heads for the latest 9th season of The Walking Dead (2010-). With the objective of going back to the roots of the series, their goal is to focus again on the main characters and their development, bringing back the emotions they raised on the spectators, that somehow where the key of the series success for many years.
On another branch of the cinema genre, S. Craig Zahler, who is creating a growing expectation with every new movie release over the last years due to his so personal realistic, kind of brutal-raw style while filming crime dramas, delighted once more the Sitges audience with his Dragged Across Concrete (2018); you can read the full review here.
From South America comes the latest proposal of Argentinian director Alejandro Fadel: Muere, Monstruo, Muere (2018) is definitely part of the fantasy horror cinema that managed to include somehow the magical realism, a movement that pictures the weird and unreal as something from the daily life, which defined part of the Latin literature and art from the mid XX century. I’m not saying Fadel uses directly this concept, because his monster is very much a monster, and his movie is a horror one, but still I believe the imagery he uses, the periodic powerful and disconcerting shots that get mixed with the tension and increasing suspense, the ugliness that is also present on almost each of the characters he places on scene, it all contributes to a special horror portrait of the quotidianum that is very much rooted on the territory where monsters grow. With reminiscences of Amat Escalante’s The Untamed (2016) and David Lynch’s surrealism, Fadel confirms himself as an upcoming reference for the genre cinema.
