The long-awaited 'MadS', 'Exhuma', 'Oddity' or 'Azrael', among the first films confirmed for the Molins de Rei Horror Film Festival 2024.
The official festival poster, designed by Paco Ruiz, headed by a heroine with a chainsaw, pays homage to the imagery of 1970s terror.
03/09/2024 | The Molins de Rei Horror Film Festival 2024 already has an image and a first preview of films. The event will celebrate its 43rd edition from November 8 to 17 with the leitmotif of “rural terror”, referring to some of the most representative films of horror cinema and commemorating one of the most iconic and revolutionary events of all: the 50th anniversary of the premiere of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper's film is present on the poster designed by Paco Ruiz, with a pop spirit and comic book aesthetic, which has been revealed along with the first seven titles that will be part of the program and can be seen at the Teatre La Peni in Molins de Rei. They are Azrael, Krazy House, Oddity, the South Koreans Exhume i Handsome Guys, the French Animal i MadS.
An image 'made in the 70s'. This year's poster aims to illustrate the enormous influence that films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre exerted on pop culture and collective imaginaries, especially in horror fiction. Its creator, Paco Ruiz, was inspired by posters from the seventies that captured the vibrant and rebellious spirit of the time, and he incorporated visual references from the comics of that period using the same style of strokes and color palette. The reference for the central character, the heroine, is Ellen Ripley from’Alien, “an empowered woman capable of leaving behind the stereotype of the «damsel in distress» and assuming roles of leadership and courage”, in Ruiz’s words. Like the 2023 image, the technique used is a combination of collage, digital retouching and images generated through artificial intelligence. Paco Ruiz, who returns after having directed the commercial and designed the 2023 poster, is a filmmaker and professor of cinematographic language, trained at ESCAC and author of the short films Insidious i Maria, among others.
First set of films. Among the first confirmed titles for the 43rd edition of TerrorMolins, two nationalities stand out in particular: French and South Korean, whose genre cinema is proving to be in very good shape. From the Asian country comes Exhume, a film co-starring Choi Min-sik (Old Boy) that dazzled the Berlin Film Festival and that talks about evil spirits and collective traumas through the experience of a shaman who is entrusted with a dangerous mission in a remote area of the country. Also Korean, and also of rural horror, is the black comedy Handsome Guys, a film that draws on references such as Tucker & Dale vs Evil to tell the story of two friends who move to an isolated house where they are haunted by a strange presence. With an equally comic tone and the stellar role of Nick Frost comes the Dutch film Krazy House. A film that starts out as an innocent family sitcom and turns into a home invasion violent and full of very dark humor. Another familiar face that will appear on the screens of TerrorMolins is that of Australian actress Samara Weaving, star of one of the most anticipated horror films of the year. Azrael, by EL Katz (Cheap Thrills), is a journey to hell through secret cults and creatures of the underworld that combines the survival with some common denominators of rural terror. In the Irish style Oddity, awarded at the prestigious American festival SXSW and directed by Damian McCarthy (Caveat), the murder of a woman becomes the obsession of her sister, a bold blind medium. And from France they arrive MadS, by David Moreau (Islands) an intense real-time journey full of drugs, parties, blood and nightmares, and Animal, by Emma Benestan, a story that masterfully mixes bullfighting in the French Camargue and coming-of-age with touches of horror, a new example of the great female names in French genre cinema.
