The Pinochet vampire keeps company with SIC patriarch Vurdalak. At Venice Days, a reluctant young creature of the night must find an alternative solution to the nocturnal hunt for humans. In competition is the Poor Creature Emma Stone/Bella Baxter, who returns to life and rebels against the macho hegemony she was subjected to before she departed. The genre runs strong in Venice 80, but besides, it is the real kind of horror that characterizes the different sections. The horror of History, which humanity, or what remains of it, lives daily with guilty indifference when not cruelty. It is recounted by Agnieszka Holland in Green Border (in competition, like Larraìn’s Bicentennial Dictator and Lanthimos’s Frankenstein), which tells the odyssey of those who flee their homeland in search of a new home, instead still finding hatred and violence. The topicality of fear for more than a year and a half has been synonymous with Ukraine, told from an “underground” point of view in the documentary Photophobia, which follows 12-year-old Niki living in the Kharkiv subway, safe from Russian bombs but robbed of his childhood, yet another crime of a senseless conflict. But what war does, on the other hand, have it. Hollywoodgate explains it well, documenting how, after 20 years in Afghanistan, the United States has bequeathed a giant arsenal to the Taliban. If this is not horror…
There are no discounts this year, not even to the institution of family, intertwined with the Franco dictatorship that stole children from its opponents, the terrible story of Sobre Todo de Noche (Venice Days). And confronted with the inexplicable, as in En Attendant la Nuit, another young vampire with quite different cravings from the existentialist colleague mentioned at the beginning. The night also returns in Quitter la Nuit, a story of women who no longer want to be scared. And it would be about time.