There are still five months left to enjoy the 57th edition of the Sitges Festival, but the fantastic film competition has already begun to warm up its engines within the framework of the Cannes festival, where this Saturday it unveiled this year’s poster, a distorted portrait and deformed that pays tribute to Monster Stop, a classic in film history directed by Tod Browning in 1932. A milestone that encapsulates the powerful feeling of community around fantastic cinema, in the words of the organization.
From the Fantastic Pavilion of the Marché du Film, the director of the Sitges festival, Ángel Sala, has pointed out that the poster, the result of a chemical process on a photograph by the CHINA agency, pays tribute to the disfiguring beauty of fantastic cinema and that is open to many interpretations, with the aim of being able to play with the public. “He’s not Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider,” Sala joked about the actor, present on the Croisette these days with the psychological thriller The Surfer.
In addition to the poster for the next edition, the Sitges festival has announced the visit of the American director and screenwriter Mike Flanagan, one of the key figures of horror cinema, who will receive the Honorary Màquina del Temps Award and will be accompanied by his wife, the actress Kate Siegel.
Flanagan, 45, has adapted works by Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe. Among its titles are Absentia (2011), The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), Oculus: The Mirror of Evil (2013), Somnia: Inside Your Dreams (2016), Ouija: The Origin of Evil (2016), The Curse of Hill House (2018) and Doctor Sleep (2019).
The 57th edition of the Fantastic International Film Festival will also feature the presence of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who has reviewed his career with Sala, among which stand out Esposados, Intacto and 28 Semanas Later. A conversation that anticipates the start of the Fantastic 7 program, which will begin tomorrow, Sunday.