“El Hombre del Saco”, translated to English as The Sack Man or The Bag Man, is a mysterious popular figure rooted in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and some countries in Latin America. Considered as the Latin version of the Bogeyman, is usually depicted as a mean and impossibly ugly and skinny old man who eats the misbehaving children he collects. The popular myth became a true story when in 1910 in the Spanish small town of Gador when a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped and subsequently murdered to use the child’s blood and body fat as a folk cure for a wealthy patron’s tuberculosis, a practice that was believed to be effective.
The movie El Hombre del Saco (2023), which is also known as El Hombre del Saco. El Origen del Mito (the origin of the myth), is a horror film that is inspired by that true event. A family moves to a house in a small town in a rural area in Almería where a tuberculosis patient will do anything to get well, even consuming the blood of the kids he kidnaps in a sack.
Javier Botet, one of the most notorious creature actors in the current panorama, who has performed in the REC saga, Mama (2013), Crimson Peak (2015), The Conjuring 2 (2016) as Crooked Man, Don’t Knock Twice (2016), Alien: Covenant (2017) as a Xenomorph, It (2017), Insidious: The Last Key (2018), Polaroid (2019), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), the upcoming The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) as Dracula himself, and Slender Man (2018) and Mara (2018) as the title creature, quite an impressive list, is adding a new monster to his resume playing the Sack Man himself. Macarena Gómez, Manolo Solo, Carla Tous, Iván Renedo, Lucas Blas, Lorca Gutiérrez Prada, Claudia Placer, Guillermo Novillo, Luna Fulgencio, Vicente Vergara, and Ruth Gabriel complete the main cast.
Ángel Gómez Hernández, responsible for the supernatural horror Don’t Listen (aka Voces) (2020) and the awards-winner fantasy short film Behind (2016), is the director of El Hombre del Saco (2023). Manuel Facal (Achuras (2005)), Juma Fodde (Lobo Feroz (2023)), and Ignacio García Cucucovich (You Shall Not Sleep (2018)) are the writers of the screenplay.
El Hombre del Saco (2023) is opening in Spanish cinemas on August 11, 2023, and more international dates are yet to come with FilmSharks International as the sales representatives. Watch here its official trailer in the Spanish language, although, sadly, with no English subtitles.
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