ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how Spanish horror has engaged with the historical past. In the opening section, “Franco’s Monstrous Memory,” it analyzes a variety of films that have specifically addressed the key traumatic event in 20th-century Spanish history: the Civil War. In that regard, it starts by studying Guillermo del Toro’s diptych The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. Then it moves on to discuss a recent commercial zombie horror comedy, Malnazidos/Valley of the Dead (Alberto Toro and Javier Ruiz Caldera, 2020) and the work of domestic horror Musarañas/Shrew’s Nest (Juanfer Andrés and Esteban Roel, 2014), which focuses on the Francoist dictatorship’s subjugation of women. Then, it explains how Spanish horror has tackled the Spanish Transition to Democracy in the 1970s via Balada triste de trompeta/The Last Circus (2010) and Malasaña 32/32 Malasana Street (Albert Pintó, 2020). The second section, “Spanish Folk Horror” explores a variety of titles that have fundamentally approached locally rooted traditions and myths, especially set in Galicia and the Basque country. In that sense, Spanish cinema has participated in the recent global revival of this subgenre after 2010.
