Three friends in a gentrified neighborhood in Barcelona are dedicated to living in a delighted house. It is the only solution to pay the rent. Thus begins the short film Co-Hauntingwhich can be seen in Movistar Plus+. There are ghostly appearances, objects that fly, blood rises from taps … what is expected of the recognizable icons of this film subgenre, but mixed with. Or perhaps only gothic mansions as , from Ja Bayona, and , of Alejandro Amenábar, can they be possessed? In this case, the ghost even thinks about coexistence, as who has to pay the rent. It is another twist to renew the stories of ghostly households.
In 2017, Paco Plaza raised another, set in an apartment in Vallecas. “The ghosts also remember the director about the film, which mixed the Spanish black legend with the problems of adolescent identity. Steven Soderbergh also looks for a turn when embarking, now in cinemas, with another original look: this time the point of view is in the eyes of the spectrum, the camera only shows what you see that presence. Before, He already used video surveillance cameras to get out of visual parameters.
Co-Haunting Play With the false report: “Our greatest inspiration is the costumbrismo of the viral video of Street from the neighbors of Valencia. And we mix it with the knowledge of the spectator of this type of movies, which dominates its codes, ”explains Paula Sánchez Álvarez, co -director of the Short with Adrián Carande and Pepe Rico, who already works in a feature film with more characters, precariousness and problems such as ageism and the LGTBIQ+identity:“ Terror is the house of weirdos. Our conclusion is that neither after death is rest. Life problems move to ghosts, and keep sharing a floor. ”
This renewal is not just aesthetics. Presence It is not a horror movie, but of family traumas, just like the famous The sixth sense, by M. Night Shyamalan. The director of Ocean’s Eleven y Erin Brockovich that the elements of the spectral genre were the Trojan horse to narrate the life of a family wrapped in a period of stress. In the same way, Mike Flanagan deepened the family traumas in his new television versions of the classic ultraimited, and, the latter based on Shirley Jackson’s novel and one of the most adapted to terror.
served Tobe Hooper to scrutinize the perfect suburbs of the United States, and with the Kubrick ran into the hidden violence in his country and in the model family. The romantic spirit was a young man who had perpetrated a massacre in his school.
When getting home, the dead break the most personal and intimate space of the protagonists. In The Parentingthis Friday in Max, there is a homosexual couple and two dysfunctional families captained by Brian Cox, Catherine O’Hara and Lisa Kudrow, but this time the conflict is narrated from black humor, such as.
“We seek satire in the bleaching of precariousness. Actually, the ghost and the rented have the same feeling of being trapped. Both inhabit a space that belongs to others, ”explains the director of Co-Haunting. But the enchanted cinematographic mansions date back to the origins of cinema, in 1896, with The manor of the devil and also inspired Walt Disney to lift one of the most popular attractions of his park, which has jumped to the cinema several times. Even Buñuel contributed his vision of Poe’s Gothic by co -writing a version of the Usher House in 1927.
Screenwriter David Koepp, who directed comedy The dead fallen!on a dentist who sees ghosts, he was inspired to Presence In the classic Intruders (1944). Although he wanted to seek a motivation between the spirit and the humans that sound novel: “Our spectrum helps. I have the theory that when you make a new ghost story, you have to invent a reason for people to see them. My way is through trauma. Because I, every time I experience one, I open more to the world, those around me, ”to face the nth history of appearances. The presence is not evil, but curious and shy, like the clumsy of the series (with and American), The ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Hold on those ghosts, by Peter Jackson, the included Casper. Nor drop of the viscera of classics like.
Paco Plaza, who takes the classic as referents The enchanted mansion (First adaptation, from 1963, from Shirley Jackson’s novel) and The guests (2011), from you West, believes that original looks can still be filmed: “There are always ways to look again at more or less threshed genres. In fact, that previous knowledge can be of great help to take a turn from complicity, ”he describes. It is a genre, he says, that he will always speak to the viewer: “The ghosts appeal to our fear and also to hope. Because they can terrorize us, but they offer us the promise that this life is not the end. There will be whoever provides comfort. ”
A blanket with two eyes served to transmit warmth and terror. Because the spectral sensation is achieved with little money. Co-Hauntingwho put the blanket to one of its directors, was recorded in three days. “As death is tangible and simple, its fiction is easier to understand than or zombies. These ghosts always convey a sense of sadness, consequences of the loss, ”recalls Sánchez. They can even sneak into as costumbrista narratives as Bodegón with ghosts (2024), of Enrique Buleo.
Ghosts, after all, never age. In times of success of the podcasts of mystery and (lo ), The franchise of the very classic hunting spaces will premiere. It is the second play that remained in the West End London, from 1989 to 2023. They also transmit the same in different cultures, (2024), by Pedro Martín-Calero, who spoke about the terror of women, to the Japanese House (1977), by Nobuhiko Obayashi, and what do the enchanted houses still have to attract us? “All houses are delighted,” Plaza recalls: “Thousands of people have lived, loved and dead in the places we inhabit. And that some of those echoes are noticeable still seems reasonable. ”
