Between 1966 and 1982, Chicho Ibáñez Serrador stole the sleep of many Spaniards with his Stories to not sleep. There were 29 episodes of disturbing stories that TVE broadcast sporadically and that last year Amazon Prime began to revisit from the hand of prestigious directors.
The first season of the new Stories to Keep You Sleepless, with four chapters, premiered at the Sitges festival in 2021. And naturally, the second batch has also been screened at this event, which today has broadcast the new episodes directed by Salvador Calvo, Jaume Balagueró, Nacho Vigalondo and Alice Waddington. These new stories can be seen on the platform from October 28.
For producer Alejandro Ibáñez “if the project is well accepted and grows, it is possible that new scripts will be made, apart from those that Chicho wrote because in Spain we have incredible creators, scriptwriters and directors and this is a good series to exploit it”.
Pablo Derqui and Manuela Vellés are an ideal couple with two children who settle in a chalet. The husband is afraid of squatters and buys some security cameras whose recordings can be seen on all the screens in the house. The man becomes obsessed and stays glued to the television looking at the images of the exterior of his house in which nothing ever happens until one night he sees something disturbing… “
“I chose the episode of The TV, because it gave me a lot of freedom to modernize the plot”, explained Balagueró, author of the chapter, this morning as he passed through Sitges. The director also chose the actors who participate in the episode except for Vellés , that was fate, because “I ran into her on the street when I was thinking about the casting and I signed her”.
Calvo opted for “this episode with social content, which is more in line with my type of cinema”. In a distant future where pensions no longer exist and work is perpetual, Ana and Javier (Petra Martínez and Ramón Barea) decide to “renew themselves”, that is, undergo a treatment to recover their youth. But they only have money for the rejuvenation of one of them. Javi turns into a young and handsome boy with the look of Carlos Cuevas, while Ana continues to be the old woman he was, which causes the inevitable tensions in the couple.
In parallel, Andrés (Javier Gutiérrez) lives on the street, because he was a journalist, but his job has already disappeared. He lacks financial resources so he is forced to sell his organs, which the renovation company uses to rejuvenate people with money. “The original chapter was shot in 1967 and was super modern for its time,” said Calvo, who acknowledges that he has been “forced to do a synthesis exercise, because this story in which the rich are transplanted to improve their body while the poor give parts of theirs, it was enough for a feature film”.
For Nacho Vigalondo, director of The Alarm, the great tribute of this series is to compose “a mini fantastic film festival in which you can look out and see the state of Spanish genre cinema”. The director, who has traveled to Sitges together with the entire team of the new Stories to keep you awake, has stressed that the important thing is that each one can express themselves in relation to the Ibáñez Serrador material and “decide how much you want from the original chapter be in your proposal.
In The Alarm, Roberto Álamo and Anibal Gómez are a homosexual couple who take in a family in their chalet while it is raining outside. It is impossible to go outside without protection because the drops that fall are toxic. As they help an injured man who turns out to be Gomez’s character’s ex-partner, things get more and more complicated. Above all, considering that Javier Gurruchaga gets into the skin of a somewhat sinister grandfather.
Vigalondo sees the story, an adaptation of El sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke, as a kind of prelude to “2001, a space odyssey, in a chalet in the mountains of Madrid”. He assures that he has been able to do with Gómez “what I wanted, like Shelley Duvall and Stanley Kubrick.” That he has been “very happy” filming his chapter and that he regrets “a little that it is not like the golden pilot of a five-season series.”
Alice Waddington, one of the few Spanish women dedicated to genre films and a regular in Sitges, has chosen The Nightmare, a chapter that delves into the darkness of a village in Galicia at the end of the 19th century where three young women have dead murdered in just one month, coinciding with the arrival in the town of Naim, a black man.
As part of her family has Galician roots, the director felt strongly attracted to this folk horror story, “a mix of times and influences”, in which vampires do their thing in an atmosphere full of mystery.
Starring Mina El Hammani and Álvaro Morte, in a character far removed from what he has done so far, The Nightmare talks about returnees and beasts with fangs and hooves that terrorize a town where the living also hide some secrets. “It’s emotional and exciting. I feel like I’m part of a legacy,” says the director about the fact of having participated in this mythical series, which is her first foray on television and in Spanish.
