Carles Porta premieres this Tuesday Light in the Darkness, a new project for Movistar Plus inspired by the successful Crims on TV3. The new true crime comes to the platform with two double-episode criminal cases and will continue with more installments in 2024. Meanwhile, the journalist will prepare the return of Crims to TV3 and the fiction series 33 days for Atresplayer, about the popular case by Brito and Picatoste.
Why do we like gruesome stories so much?
Don’t know. But from the first minute I have tried to reduce the gruesome element of my stories because I understand it as a pejorative adjective. It is evident that we start from a violent death but in both Light in the Dark and Crims what we talk about the least is crime. We talk above all about life: that of the investigators, that of the murderers, that of the victim… What we would describe as gruesome has a very small temporal dimension.
Is this the key to your success?
That’s how I understand it. There is a niche audience that looks for gruesomeness, blood, the adjectives “brutal” and “tragic”, but this is not our audience. There is another, broader and more mainstream, that seeks the story, the tension, the discovery of the murderer… That is historical throughout life. The crime novel is one of the best-selling genres because, in the end, what it does is that the viewer, the reader or the listener becomes a researcher. And because, furthermore, it is a genre that appeals to the most primary essences and emotions of the human being.
Light in the Darkness is the heir to Crims. Are there differences beyond the fact that the cases treated are from outside Catalonia?
Light in the Dark is an evolution of Crims. And the big difference is that we have sought to make a much more cinematic product. Both with respect to the narration of the story, the content and the script, and, above all, when it comes to filming, editing, incorporating sound… And, obviously, the cases we address have happened in the rest of Spain, which gives us other perspectives and other landscapes.
Give us a little insight into the two cases that will be discussed in this first batch of episodes.
We titled the first case ‘Daniela, Dulce y Bella’. They are three women who, at different times, meet three other men through a social network to flirt and meet near Los Monegros, in Aragon. When they get there, they torture the men and kill one of them. We explain how it ends up being discovered that the three women are actually one and the same and how the story is resolved. Furthermore, we have managed to speak with a very powerful testimony, one of the victims, who explains to us what happened to her in the first person.
And the second case?
It is that of the “boy painter” who disappeared in Malaga 40 years ago. One of the most media stories in the recent history of Spain. We have had access to the family and the entire investigation. And as we often say, it looks like a movie but it is real. Both stories have many twists and turns that are quite surprising.
How do you find all these cases?
At True Crime Factory we have 25 people dedicated to finding crimes that will later go to Light in the Darkness, to the Crims of TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio and to the podcast Why We Kill. We have several avenues: newspaper library, police, prosecutors, judges… We also turn to local journalists who have worked on cases with little coverage in the media but who are very powerful and have what we need: dramatic plot twists, access to direct documentation of the case such as, above all, the summary, and third, and very important, that we can find protagonists and eyewitnesses.
He also has the fiction series 33 days underway on Atresplayer. Do your days last 36 hours?
No, 360 (joking). The truth is that without a very large and very good team all this could not be done. As for 33 days, we have hired writers who are developing the story and we will go step by step. I increasingly have a job of supervision and setting direction rather than execution, where we are accompanied by a company like Goroka that is doing an exceptional job of production, with nothing to envy of other similar productions around the world.
After so many cases experienced and narrated, what have you learned about human nature?
That the most beautiful thing there is is to love and be loved. And I have also learned that evil exists, that you cannot live in fear and that much more should be invested in schools and social services and much less in police and prisons.
