Exorcismo: Defying a Dictator & Raising Hell in Post-Franco Spain (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Philippe Garnier

A ten-disc Blu-ray box set including nineteen feature films, twenty-one hours of special features, and a 168-page book. Blu-ray, Spanish dialogue with English subtitles. A Severin Films release.

Anyone who can get Iggy Pop to narrate his documentary must be doing something right, and that is exactly what Alberto Sedano has done with Exorcismo: The Transgressive Legacy of Clasificada “S,” which introduces us to the Severin Exorcismo! Blu-ray box set—a mind-boggling mix of nineteen lurid feature films tucked into ten disks. Sedano also co-curated this epic release, similar in range and quality to All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Vol. 2, also put together by the Severin thinktank last year. Horror, gore, and cannibal flicks remain the company’s core business, but these guys and gals (including the peerless Kier-La Janisse, author of the wonderful book House of Psychotic Women) have been showing an acumen in their acquisitions and curating comparable only to what the Criterion Collection folks (at their best) do routinely for classic and art cinema. Only those who don’t know that Severin has in the past released a worthy edition of Peter Watkins’s chilling The War Game—made for television in 1965 at the height of the nuclear scare—will find this surprising. Putting it bluntly, Severin’s multifaceted approach to these “trash” artifacts makes you watch genre stuff that you would normally not stomach (or would most likely ignore), just by telling the stories behind it, since some of these documentaries are better than the films themselves.

Exorcismo! tells the intriguing story of what happened when censorship weakened in the late Seventies at the end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and during the turbulent and often violent period that followed (commonly called the “Transition”), until the massive victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party in the 1982 election. How a bunch of savvy producers and distributors quietly managed to create a kind of self-contained subgenre cinema branded “S” by government censors—“S” not only for “sex” but also for “sensitivity.” This Scarlet Letter warned viewers that, for instance, if they did not care to see a priest fucking a parishioner in her small Seat 600 car, they need not buy tickets. Eloy de la Iglesia’s El sacerdote (The Priest), by the way, was less a sacrilegious gesture à la Buñuel than a human melodrama, culminating in shocking, though not fatal, self-emasculation.

Included on the same disc as the Exorcismo! documentary is Far from the Tree, seven years in the making before its release in 1972 and severely censored at the time. It was not even allowed to keep its original title, The Land of All Demons. Directed by Catalan Jacinto Esteva and shot in striking black and white by no less than six cameramen, it documents the violence at the core of Spanish religion and culture. The film trumps viewer expectation (masochist religious processions, bullfighting, flamenco, etc., although they are later featured) with a stunning opening of young people jerking and twisting on a club dance floor to the Farfisa-laden music of Los Gatos Negros and Los Mustangs. These teenage dancers express all the pent-up frustration that will be released twenty years later and fuel the famous Movida Madrileña cultural youth movement. Besides being a great film, this addition of a seemingly out of place artifact is typical of Severin curating, always giving you perspective. During the Transition, “S” movies often circumvented Spanish censorship by setting their hoary stories and orgies in a bogus foreign country, thus sparing the nation’s sensitivity about its reputation abroad. This box set expertly scans the striking variety of those subterranean productions. The “S” had become a guarantee for new freedom and was so popular that producers often demanded outrageous scenes from their directors to obtain the coveted rating.

Most of these films had great production values, added foreign star power, and, as in the case of The Bell from Hell, unbeatable backstories. There is a belfry in this Franco-era film, and a bell about to be hoisted in the church tower. But what shocker of a film has ever had its director so involved in his work (or sick in the belfry), that he fell to his death while directing the last scene, as Claudio Guerin did in 1972? In 1980-81, now-cult-director Eugenio Martin shot two of his favorite films (That House on the Outskirts and Supernatural) in an old hunting lodge (cum private chapel) that belonged to Franco’s family. The upstairs quarters, still occupied by Franco’s cousins and relatives, were off limits to the crew. Which did not prevent the screenwriters to slip this quip from an old servant into one of the films: “Don’t go up there, that old man is mean.” And presumably already brain-dead.

Most of these “S” films, at least the ones selected here, show a similar vengeful joy at pounding the cracks of a crumbling cultural order. Alberto Sedano goes so far as to define Miguel Madrid’s 1979 Bacanal en directo (Sins of a Nympho) as “Pasolini on acid.” And an early 1976 entry by Leon Klimovsky, Último deseo (The People Who Own the Dark) that shows fat cats enjoying feasts and orgies in a bunker while waiting for a nuclear onslaught—the hoi polloi raging outside—plays like B-film Buñuel. Both made in 1978, Xavier Aguirre’s Battered Flesh and Eloy de la Eglesia’s El sacerdote are early examples of films centered on sexuality in repressive environments—the first a lesbian relationship set in a women’s prison, the second a curate’s sexual torments. The latter would be totally inappropriate outside the extreme freedom that prevailed during the Spanish Transition between the two regimes.

The “S” system was also a breeding ground for future talent. In 1983, Ignasi P. Ferré, who after having rubbed shoulders with the likes of Tinto Brass and Antonioni in Italy, seemed fated to direct only porno films in Spain, was able to make a very successful spoof of the two dominant genres in B movies, horror and sex comedies. For Morbus, his sex-zombie folly, he recruited the fledging talent of nineteen-year-old Isabel Coixet to write the giddy script. She went on to become a prolific director in Catalan cinema for the next three decades (My Life Without Me, The Secret Life of Words, etc.). Similarly, Almodóvar did not arrive sui generis on the scene. Eloy de la Iglesia, for instance, was making transgressive gay B-melodramas years before him, and the divine Pedro gorged himself on these “S” nuggets of insanity. And cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, who shot Jorge Darnell’s 1974 The Devil’s Exorcist, not only worked with Almodóvar from the late 1980s on but also with Victor Erice on El Sur.

The six-year existence of the “S” film classification system had two distinct phases. The first, from 1977 to 1979, was characterized by experimentation, increasing sexualization, and social introspection. The second, from 1980 to 1982, witnessed an explosion of low-budget exploitation films, many of which were soft-core comedies or extreme horror. This Severin box set seems to have privileged the first, more creative and politically transgressive period. But again, they also offer perspective: one text in the booklet is titled, tongue firmly in cheek (we hope), “Soft-core pornography and the Spanish transition to democracy, 1977-1982.” In it we learn that the phenomenally prolific Jess Franco, “who had prudently waited for the waters of Spanish media to be tested by others,” came back to his country with a vengeance after the 1977 decree on censorship. In 1980 alone, he churned out six S-rated Spanish films, in 1981 another seven, and in the last year of the S-film, no fewer than nine. None of them figure here, and neither do titles like the very successful Can You Be with 5 Girls at Once? (1979), directed by septuagenarian veteran Franco filmmaker Ignacio F. Iquino, who started to direct and even perform in soft-core films during that period.

Come the Eighties, what had started as truly creative stabs at freedom under a declining Francoist Spain turned to outright orgy and an increasing portion of the “S” films were outright porno flicks. Worse, Socialists being notorious killjoys, they got rid of this thriving industry in the early 1980s by suppressing the “S” films. The X category that replaced it killed this intriguing scene just as effectively as center-right forces put an end to the creative political and horror/porno movement that started in France at about the same time.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 4