31 Days of Horror Recommendations: La Semana Del Asesino (Week of the Killer)

 

Year: 2018

Country: Spain

Subgenre: Psychological Horror (w/ hints of Exploitation/Splatter Flick)

Runtime: 147 minutes (original & restored cut)/ 94 minutes

Director: Eloy de la Iglesia 

The world knows this film better as The Cannibal Man, which is a wholly misleading title used for marketing a European psychological horror thriller as a something more like a Herschell Gordon Lewis film to U.S. video tapes consumers. That's nothing new to American distributors, but since this is a Eloy de la Iglesia film, it does feel a bit out of line. Not only was Iglesia a VERY out spoken gay filmmaker, who was a member of the Communist party in Spain in the 1970's, he was also a Basque. Though he grew up in Madrid (having been born in the Basque homeland town of Zarautz), his "otherness" was more than just being a gay artist, or a leftist in the film world during the time of Franco. When the Franco government's grip on the country began to loosen, he began to openly include more gay themes in his films that, despite spanning multiple genres, all included some thriller theme based on social suspicion or fear of interaction. It was uniquely Spanish and it has a name: Cine quinqui (or kinki cine). Though the name would indeed suggest the cinema of exploitation, it is more a Spanish genre that largely engages the fear of political non-conformity of the time. This was something Iglesia specialized in; telling stories of imposed isolation that were brought about, basically required, by the political conditions of the country; and that is what Week Of The Killer excels at. There is NO actual cannibalism in the film (unless you count that the killer who works at a meat processing plant, MAYBE gets some of his victims into the food chain by accident); heck protagonist Marcos isn't really even a proper serial killer. He becomes one by accident and the horror of it starts to take it's toll on his already fragile sanity. His isolated living conditions and his poverty certainly do not help the situation. To be clear this is a horror movie, a horror thriller if you will, but it is a deeply psychological one. I don't think many film makers topped Iglesia in making psychological films of any genre--and this is no exception. One note though, it's really hard to find a copy of this in Spanish (even Shudder has the shorter dubbed film up). The difference between the two is HUGE, but even the dubbed version is a really good introduction to this complicated filmmaker and his works. [Trailer below is the English language trailer--the only one I could find]