Fantaterror: the Spanish horror boom, 1968 to 1976

On a Spanish horror set in 1972 the crew would light a bedroom, roll camera, and shoot the scene with the actress in her nightgown. Then, without moving a single lamp, they would ask her to take the nightgown off and shoot it again. The first take went to the censorship board in Madrid. The second went to a buyer in Paris or Frankfurt or a drive-in outside Cleveland. That double exposure, clothed for the state and naked for export, was the working method of an entire national horror industry for the better part of a decade, and it is the reason the industry existed at all.

The one country where this should not have happened

Spain in 1970 was a National-Catholic dictatorship with a board that read every script before a frame was exposed and inspected every finished cut before it reached a screen. Nudity, gore, and anything that embarrassed the Church or the family came out as a matter of routine. It is close to the last place on the continent you would pencil in for a horror boom, and for years there wasn't one. Jess Franco made the first real Spanish horror film, Gritos en la noche (The Awful Dr. Orlof), in 1962, and got it past the board partly by setting it in a foggy foreign city that could not be mistaken for anywhere in Spain. The respectable breakthrough came in 1969 with Narciso Ibanez Serrador's La residencia (The House That Screamed), a handsome gothic set in a French girls' boarding school. It was the most expensive Spanish film made to that point, and it broke box-office records at home, which proved two things at once: horror could clear the censor, and it could make real money doing it. What followed got a nickname, fantaterror, and between roughly 1968 and 1976 Spain turned out well over a hundred of them.

The censor got one cut, everyone else got the other

The economy underneath it was structural. A producer needed two films out of one shoot: a chaste version espanola the board would clear for domestic cinemas, and a nuder, bloodier export version for France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the American grindhouse circuit, where the rules were looser and the cheque was bigger. So they made both at once. The export cut of Paul Naschy's El gran amor del conde Dracula (Count Dracula's Great Love, 1973) is wall-to-wall nudity and a bathtub-of-blood finale; the print that played Spain had the worst of it either trimmed or reshot with the clothes back on. When a Spanish leading lady's contract or reputation would not stretch to the export nudity, a producer hired a second actress purely to do the bare inserts, so the star stayed spotless and the buyer abroad still got his flesh. Where the international version ended on damnation, the Spanish one might tack on a line revealing the sinning couple had been married the whole time, so the board could file the thing as a moral fable and wave it through. The horror was almost always set somewhere else, a Germanic castle or an English village or a nameless stretch of central Europe, and the credits were packed with Anglo pseudonyms, half to sell the picture to foreign distributors and half to keep Catholic Spain out of frame. The forbidden version was the entire business. It was the one that earned abroad, and part of what it sold was the novelty that buttoned-up Spain had produced it.

Paul Naschy, the weightlifter who wanted to be Lon Chaney

The boom's first monster was a werewolf, and the man in the fur was a weightlifter. Jacinto Molina, born in Madrid in 1934, was a national weightlifting champion before he talked his way into pictures. As a boy in the hungry years after the Civil War he had seen Universal's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and never got over Lon Chaney Jr's Wolf Man; he set out to become the Spanish equivalent, and across his career played a mummy, a hunchback, Mr Hyde and a beheaded warlock alongside the wolf. He wrote his werewolf first and acted it under a name he decided would travel better than Jacinto Molina: Paul Naschy. La marca del hombre lobo (1968) was shot in 3-D, almost never actually projected that way, and released in the United States as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, a retitle so brazen that the distributor, having promised exhibitors a Frankenstein picture it did not have, glued an animated prologue onto the front about a cursed clan called Wolfstein. Naschy's doomed Polish nobleman, Waldemar Daninsky, came back eleven more times over the next three and a half decades, nearly always from Naschy's own scripts. La noche de Walpurgis (The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, 1971) was the one that broke him internationally, a sizeable hit in West Germany and the film that made him a horror star in Japan. He worked the same seam of gothic pulp in Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973), doubling as a decapitated medieval sorcerer and the living descendant the sorcerer's severed, still-scheming head sets out to possess.

The best idea in the whole boom rode a skeletal horse

The finest thing fantaterror produced belonged to Amando de Ossorio, and it came down to a single design. In La noche del terror ciego (Tombs of the Blind Dead, 1972), a company of medieval Templars, executed for Satanic blood rites and left hanging while crows ate the eyes out of their heads, claw out of a ruined monastery and hunt the living by sound, running their victims down on skeletal horses shot in long, dread slow motion. The design should be ridiculous. It is instead the best monster the decade produced, and nobody since has bettered the slow-motion cavalry charge. Ossorio insisted to the end that the Blind Dead were not zombies, which is technically correct and beside the point, and he brought them back three times, in Return of the Evil Dead (1973), The Ghost Galleon (1974) and Night of the Seagulls (1975). The export circus around these films reached its purest in America, where the story goes that one distributor tried to sell Tombs of the Blind Dead as a Planet of the Apes cash-in, recut with a fresh prologue under the title Revenge from Planet Ape, on the theory that audiences would take the Templars for intelligent apes from the future. Ossorio's other genre work, like the Rhine-legend creature feature The Loreley's Grasp (1974), only proves the Templars were lightning he caught exactly once.

The other Franco

The country was run by one Franco and a good share of its horror by another. Jesus Franco, who signed his foreign work Jess, was a one-man factory who finished somewhere near 200 features, at times shooting two at once on the same sets with the same cast to halve the cost. He was the double-version economy walking around on two legs, forever handing over a soft cut and a hot cut tuned to whichever border the print was about to cross. His muse was Soledad Miranda, whose green-lit vampire in Vampyros Lesbos (1971) is the most hypnotic image in his whole catalogue, and whose psych-jazz score, cut by two German session players, outlived the film by decades as a lounge-revival record. Miranda saw none of it. She was killed in a car crash near Lisbon in August 1970, aged 27, reportedly days after signing the contract that was going to make her a star, with the Berlin producer Artur Brauner. Much of Franco's strongest work of the period was German money of that kind: the fractured nightclub psychodrama Succubus (1968) that Fritz Lang is said to have admired, the drifting A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973) that distributors later spiked with zombie footage shot by someone else. Brauner and his peers wanted erotic horror for a market Franco's own country would never let its citizens watch uncut.

Serrador does it with real corpses

The respectable end of the boom stayed with the man who started it. Serrador's Quien puede matar a un nino? (Who Can Kill a Child?, 1976) opens with several minutes of genuine documentary footage of children killed in the atrocities of the twentieth century, the camps, Vietnam, Biafra, before a single actor says a word. Then it strands two tourists on a sun-blasted island where the children have quietly decided to murder every adult, and plays it as calmly and as upsettingly as anything the cycle managed. The horror argument is made in full before the fiction even starts.

When the assembly line made a real film

The co-production plumbing that fed all this occasionally turned out something with a mind behind it. The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), Vicente Aranda's Carmilla adaptation, hides a real and unusually vicious rage about marriage under the lesbian-vampire wrapping. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), a Spanish-Italian zombie picture that Spanish money shot in England around Manchester and the Peak District (the US retitle, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, gives the location away), runs a sour ecological streak and a class grudge against the police under the gut-munching. Both had to look like they came from anywhere but Spain, and both are better than the format that carried them.

How the freedom killed it

Then the other Franco died. On 20 November 1975 the general was gone, and over the next two years the apparatus that had shaped the entire trade came apart. The board was dismantled, and in 1977 the state introduced the "S" rating for films that might, in the decree's phrase, herir la sensibilidad del espectador, hurt the viewer's sensibility. The S was a legal shelf built to sell precisely the material Spain had spent a decade shooting only for foreigners. A Spanish audience could now watch nudity on a Spanish screen, and the logic of fantaterror fell out from under it. The two-version trick had nothing left to do the moment the chaste cut was pointless, and the forbidden-fruit markup that carried the export version abroad evaporated the moment the fruit was legal at home. Audiences and producers both bolted for the destape, the wave of cheerful domestic sex comedies that undressed everyone the board used to keep covered and cost less than a gothic and needed no castle. Naschy kept making Daninsky pictures into the next century, to steadily smaller rooms. Ossorio's Templars never rode again after 1975. Jess Franco, who had never really needed anyone's permission, simply carried on: something like a hundred more features, a last one called Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies in 2012, and a death in Malaga the following spring.