Angustia (Bigas Luna, 1987)o Los rostros sin ojos

The cinema of Bigas Luna tends to resist the notion of ‘genre film’. With the exception of his first feature Tatuaje/Tattoo (1978), which clearly fits the ‘police crime’ genre, his films are often quite hybrid. However, the director seems to have a clear and sustained interest in a central figure of the horror genre: the psychopath. Noticeably present in Bilbao (1978) and Angustia/Anguish (1987), more subtle examples can be found also in Caniche/Poodle (1979) or Reborn (1981). Out of all these films, Angustia stands out as the Bigas Luna film that most clearly fits the horror genre. Here he uses classic conventions that go back to Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929) to reflect not only on alterity but also on cinema itself as a construct where ‘reality’, ‘fiction’ and ‘meta-fiction’ are all at play. Angustia can be singled out not only as a paradigmatic example of the horror genre, but also as a very modern film.