In the past few years, Spain has been a regular source of horror. Spanish horror is known for its mix of gore and tension in the atmosphere, which makes for a very scary experience. Spain is full of folktales and cultural context. Even though some of Spain’s horror movies are made for a younger audience, they are still scary enough to shock and scare anyone who sees them. Here are some of Spain’s all-time best scary movies.
Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (2017)
Errementari is a Basque version of The Smith and the Devil, which is a European fairy tale. The movie takes place in the middle of the 18th century. It’s about a rebel soldier named Patxi who makes a deal with a devil named Sartael to keep from being killed by his captors. Once the deal is made and Paxti is saved, he comes up with a way to trick Sartael and keeps torturing him until a little girl frees the devil one day.
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Pan’s Labyrinth is another great book for kids by Guillermo del Toro that made the list. The movie takes place five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. It is about a young girl named Ofelia who lives with her cruel stepfather, Vidal, who is also a Spanish army officer. Vidal is a cruel man who doesn’t care much about his family and only seems to get pleasure from hunting Spanish Maquis. Ophelia runs away to a labyrinth to get away from her cruel stepfather. There, she meets a mysterious and creepy faun who says he knows what will happen to her.
Del Toro’s movie is dark and beautiful to look at, but it also has a childlike quality to it. The great director cuts between the real world and a magical world, making it hard to tell which is which.
Piggy (2022)
A fat teen who is constantly picked on by her classmates faces a big problem when she sees her bullies being taken away by a stranger she doesn’t know. Piggy is more than just a typical movie about how the hunted become the hunter. With a victim who turns into an oppressor, it raises important questions about how people act and what happens to them as a result. Also, the movie does a great job of keeping the audience on the edge of their seats and making them feel uneasy throughout.
REC (2007)
REC, which is short for “record,” is one of Spain’s most scary found footage movies. In the movie, a late-night talk show host goes with a group of firefighters to a call for help. As the firefighters and camera crew get to the scene, they find that a virus has spread through the building and turned the people inside into monsters who want to drink blood. When it came out, Time Out put REC at number 60 on its list of the Top 100 Best Horror Films. It was also remade in Hollywood as Quarantine.
Sleep Tight (2011)
In Sleep Tight, Cesar, the concierge of an apartment building, thinks he’s doomed to be unhappy, so he does horrible things to make sure everyone around him is unhappy, too. Cesar sneaks into their homes like a parasite and comes up with creative ways to make their lives hard and painful. Sleep Tight, which was directed by Jaume Balagueró (Rec, Venus), is a much more subtle and cerebral film, but it has the same powerful effect.
The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
The Devil’s Backbone is about an orphan named Carlos who lives in Spain in the 1800s. As soon as Carlos gets to the Santa Lucia orphanage, he makes some friends and some enemies as he tries to get to the bottom of a dark, mysterious presence that’s out for revenge. The Devil’s Backbone, which won an Academy Award for Best Director for Guillermo del Toro, is more interesting than scary and has a strong gothic feel.
The Platform (2019)
The Platform is based on a plot device that is easy to understand but hard to pull off. The movie isn’t a typical horror movie, but the way it shows people makes it scare the living daylights out of you. In The Platform, there isn’t a monster who wants to drink the hero’s blood. In fact, the most scary thing about the movie is how empty it is. The story is set in a futuristic world where prisoners live in vertical cells and get their food from above. This means that the higher up you are, the better you eat. This simple instinct turns men into monsters and monsters into men.
The Skin I Live In (2011)
The Skin I Live In is not usually thought of as a full-on horror movie. Instead, it is more creepy than scary. Pedro Almodóvar, who directed the movie, said that it was “a horror story without screams or frights.” The creepy movie by Almodóvar is based on the 1984 novel Mygale by Thierry Jonquet. It tells the story of Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a successful surgeon who holds Vera against her will. The Skin I Live In uses some of the same style elements as Almodóvar, such as dark secrets and sexual deviations, but adds a very dark Hitchcockian twist to the mix.
