When Demián Rugna was little “he played with soldiers making horror movies, which were increasingly violent. My dolls would fight with each other and I would buy red paint to incorporate the blood”. Demián’s parents did not pay much attention to their son’s entertainment, but when the boy started to draw “they did worry, because my cartoons were very violent, so they sent me to the psychopedagogue, who to see everything wonderful because he understood that I was channeling violence through art”.
“My mother gave me a license to kill,” jokes the director in an interview with La Vanguardia at the Sitges festival. With maternal permission and natural talent, it was inevitable that Rugna would become Argentina’s most renowned horror film director. “Although it was not easy. There was a time when I was about to throw in the towel, my films weren’t working, they said they were very eighties, but then they became fashionable and became something like evolution of the genre”.
Aterrados (2017) was a bomb, and now fans of the genre adore Rugna. It’s enough for his name to appear on the screen to trigger a huge round of applause. And his name has shone in very bright letters this Sitges festival. Rugna has presented Cuando acecha la maldad, a demonic thriller that has excited the public and already smells like an award.
Two brothers living on a ranch discover that one of their neighbors has a demonic germ inside. A cleaner arrived on the scene to heal the infected, but he died dismembered. Evil takes over the whole area despite the attempts of the two protagonists to stop the gestation of Satan…
Rugna plays with psychological terror (although he has no manias in terms of a few hatchets and streaks of blood) because “there are things that are not seen and this helps the viewer to finish building the story, in Cuando acecha evil gets into the head and this can generate madness and terror”, says the director, whose film has already been screened at the Toronto Film Festival and has been released in 660 theaters in the United States.
And right there, in Los Angeles, he lives and works directing big productions of Rings (2017) Francisco Javier Gutiérrez. The Córdoba director went to Hollywood after the success of 3 días (2008) and is delighted, but there is something very secretive about these great productions: “I like to make personal cinema, that breaks the rules, and that can’t be done when you’re running the big Hollywood franchises.”
So, Gutiérrez returned to Spain, albeit only temporarily, to shoot a very personal film, La espera, a rural thriller that has excited Sitges. Eladio (Víctor Clavijo) is the guard of a Sevillian farmhouse. Greed makes him lose what he loves most, and this allows the director to put on the table a reflection on “values, guilt, human nature, mistakes of the past, education, the symbology of original sin and the relations between the landowner and the employee”.
The wait moves between the rural drama, with reminiscences of Los santos inocentes, the psychological story and the fantastic, and has a great point in its favor: the interpretation of the protagonist, Víctor Clavijo, who gives life to Eladio, who, shortly little by little, he becomes dirty as he is tormented by a feeling of guilt.
Clavijo already sounds like a possible winner of the interpretation prize of this competition, and the truth is that he has hung on, because Gutiérrez, who had already worked with him 3 days ago, did not make it easy for him at all: “The complexity of the role required a lot of effort, but in addition, you had to lose weight, grow a beard, change the tone of your voice and learn the accent and, if that wasn’t enough, go through a process to understand loneliness: Víctor, who is very urban, had to shut himself up in a farmhouse in Seville in the middle of July without any company.”
