Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: EXORCISMO

For a brief period after the death of General Francisco Franco, Spain’s mid-century fascist dictator, the nation produced reams of genre cinema that, even today, make the works of Pedro Almodóvar look like episodes of Sesame Street. Exorcismo: The Transgressive Legacy of Clasificada ‘S,’ an excellent new documentary by first-timer Alberto Sedano, digs into Spanish exploitation cinema of the post-Franco transition with the intellectual rigor of a scholar and the bloody, beating heart of a horror buff. 

Cine de Transición

Produced by Severin Films and clocking in at a little over two hours, the film is a thorough deep-dive into the wonderfully seedy underbelly of a national cinema known better for its arthouse cred than its grindhouse roots; incredibly, it manages to feel both nerdy and cool. Narrated by Iggy Pop and illustrated with pristine scans of surreal softcore horror films with titles like Swedish Bisexual Needs Stallion and Poppers, academics, former porn directors, and film critics alike construct a nuanced history of the relationship between sex on screen and freedom from oppression in the long-embattled, deeply Catholic country.

Between 1976 and 1983, Spain had its own alternative to the American “X” rating. This category was marked with a “S,” not strictly for “sexualidad” as one may assume, but also, as one historian suggests, for “sensibilidad,” or the film’s offensiveness to a conservative sensibility. 

Cine Político 

The narrative arc of the film is well constructed and thoughtful, never losing sight of its argument, and the healthy runtime allows for a level of context on Spanish political history that could make this film on an under-explored era full of little-known characters accessible to even relative newcomers to this highly particular national cinema. Still, the filmmaker takes a strategic approach to this history: For example, by making virtually no mention of Spain’s more “legitimate” or “artistic” auteurs like Buñuel or Amenábar or Saura to set the scene and focusing instead on the industry side of filmmaking, the strangely paradoxical economic and political mechanisms of censorship come starkly into focus. Cinema “S,” the film suggests, served as a financial lifeline for a country in economic freefall, even as its sex and violence ran fundamentally counter to the moralistic doctrine that defined four decades of dictatorship. Thus, raunchy or violent films produced in the country were coded as “foreign” through dubbing into other languages or stories set in other nations (though still obviously shot in Spain). At the same time, the distance these tactics afforded this commercial kind of filmmaking provided new space for veiled forms of political dissent, from more diverse representations of sexuality and femininity outside the paradigm of Catholic heterosexual maternity, to symbolic critiques of the deprivations of the Franco years.

These contradictions and dynamics established, the film celebrates a depraved cavalcade of films and filmmakers like old friends, investigating the oeuvres of genre directors like Eloy de la Iglesia, Rodjara, and León Klimovsky alongside more famous names like Jess Franco. An overwhelming sense of youthful excitement and wacky creative joy is one of the film’s most notable aspects, a reminder that this form of filmmaking was both hyper-commercial and subversively fun. Fans of Italian giallo films will take frantic notes of titles as the random decapitations, bloody explosions, logistically improbable/surrealistic sex acts, and supernatural shenanigans pile up. When the popularly elected socialist government installs a culture minister who wants what one Cine S veteran calls “el cine de calidad” (“quality cinema”) with more than a little disdain, I at least shared his disappointment. 

Conclusion:

This period in Spanish cinema history, one historian muses, is the national artform’s “Scarlet Letter.” But by shattering taboos in the aftermath of a period defined by extreme violence and strife (after the Spanish Civil War, a critic reminds us, “everyone had seen a dead body”), the film argues that Cinema “S” represented a much-needed expression of liberty as well as a way for a depressed nation to unwind and hold a funhouse mirror to its pain. Like any good exploitation movie Exorcismo feels like a pleasant discovery for a genre buff, a treat from the back of the video store.  

Exorcismo premiered at the 2024 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.