The subgenre of the cursed film isn’t particularly widespread. Some may say the concept is too "inside baseball" for general audiences — others may find it steps a little too closely to existentially terrifying its potential viewers. John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns, Giuliano Mondaldo’s Circuito Chiuso, Fabien Delage’s Fury of the Demon, and Amito and Laicini’s Antrum are probably the best-known examples of the cautionary tale of cinema technology, combining alchemy and storytelling in a way that always finds a way to make some folks nervous. An exquisite confession of powerlessness and desire, Iván Zulueta’s 1979 magnum opus Arrebato drifted along on the outskirts of film discourse, kept alive and as vital as possible by horror fans, queer theorists and the academic and artistic voices in Spanish cinema to this day, turning the simple click of a projector into the sound of mortality.
Now presented in a suitably sumptuous 4K restoration by Anus Films (yes really), the queer classics sub-label of Altered Innocence (Knife + Heart, A Closer Walk With Thee), and being released to American theaters for the first time, Arrebato is ready to seduce new generations. In detailing the parallel addictions of heroin and cinema, the film is a relentless, achronical portrayal of the never-ending chase for transcendent pleasures, as bleakly visionary as Videodrome but alternating between contagious numbness and white-hot passions. Sexually free, artistic in the way that ’70s Europe did so very well, and stuffed to the gills in the utter stank of possibility, this is a film that demands your attention even as it slowly dissolves you from within, embodying the Madrid-based explosion of sex- and drug-fuelled liberation following the end of the Francisco Franco regime.
Steeped in junk culture (of both senses), the scent of poppers and the sound of a projector, Arrebato is a druggy work of gradual terror that aims to find the teleological urges in all the things that bring us joy. It is both fair and accurate to call this the Night of the Hunter of heroin films, but it’s also a deeply terrifying horror film that doesn’t have to demand the viewer’s participation — you follow it to its end willingly, always reaching for that something new and overwhelming. And it grants you that.
Arrebato plays Sunday, Oct. 24, as part of the Belcourt's ongoing Universal Monsters + Restored Halloween Classics series. Full disclosure: I will provide an introduction for the film.
