Santa Sangre (1989): Carnage at the Circus in Jodorowsky’s Chaotic Classic (Review)

What can you say about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, or more specifically, what can you say about it that isn’t said somewhere on this enormous four-disc Blu-Ray from Severin Films? The scale of this release is extraordinary, and includes the film itself in 4K and standard forms, a commentary with Jodorowsky and Alan Jones, a feature-length making-of documentary by David Gregory, interviews with producer Claudio Argento, screenwriter Roberto Leoni, soundtrack composer Simon Boswell … there’s even a very sweet short film directed by Santa Sangre’s star (and the director’s son), Adán Jodorowsky.

Those familiar with the film will know that it easily repays such attention, which is surprising considering this was ultimately Jodorowsky’s attempt at a commercial, director-for-hire project. After the cult success of the John Lennon and Yoko Ono-funded The Holy Mountain, the Chilean maverick’s career went through a very rough patch indeed. After spending years trying and failing to make his legendary adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, Jodorowsky saw his early films removed from circulation after a spat with the Beatles’ manager Allan Klein, and turned to creating comic books to make ends meet.

The comics, at least, weren’t a dead end, and while graphic novels works like The Incal and The Metabarons have gained as big a cult following as his films, for a while it looked like he would be one of those 1960s counterculture figures whose career didn’t survive the death of the hippie dream. Not that Jodorowsky had anything to do with the Haight-Ashbury scene, but it seemed unlikely that his surrealist, occult style would find much of an audience in the brasher, more superficial landscape of ‘80s cinema – until Claudio Argento, the brother of Dario, approached him with an offer to make a horror film. Argento had a script that was co-written by himself and Leoni, and he had a stipulation – lots of women had to be killed in the movie. This perturbed Jodorowsky, and at the start of Gregory’s documentary Forget Everything You Have Seen: The World of Santa Sangre, he wonders aloud why serial killers (particularly the movie ones), always target attractive women. “Why not ostriches?”, he ponders.

If Jodorowsky had a dream of filming an ostrich massacre then he wisely didn’t mention it to Argento, but there is a very memorable elephant, whose death traumatises the film’s anti-hero Fenix. Disgusted by his son’s show of emotions, his thuggish, alcoholic father Orgo uses a knife to inscribe on Fenix’s chest a replica of Orgo’s own phoenix tattoo, making this is a bad day for Fenix – but it’s not the worst. The opening act of Santa Sangre is a constantly unspooling ribbon of trauma for the poor kid, culminating in him witnessing his father, caught in the act of adultery by Fenix’s mother Concha, chopping off Concha’s arms before slitting his own throat. Even those with the most intransigent attitudes towards “nepo babies” will sympathise with Jodorowsky’s decision to cast his sons Adán and Axel as the younger and older versions of Fenix. Would you rather he put someone else’s kids through this?

Claudio Argento will have been pleased by the film’s horror content, but counter to the producer’s demand only two women killed on-screen. In the additional features Jodorowsky explains that he deliberately made their deaths as over-the-top as he could in order to satisfy the producer’s bloodlust. The adult Fenix is tormented by the memories of far more female victims – which brings us to the other inspiration that Jodorowsky brought to the film (aside from Leoni and Argento’s script). The director was also working from a strange and haunting memory from a previous trip to Mexico, and upon entering into conversation with a polite and friendly man Jodorowsky was shocked when the stranger gave his name as Goyo Hernández. Like any Latin American of his generation, Jodorowsky knew the Tacuba Strangler – a serial murderer of young women whose crimes were committed just as mass media came to Mexico, making him an unwholesome icon.

How could the crazed murderer Jodorowsky had read about turn out to be such a charming fellow? Severin’s extras include a featurette on the Hernández case (I told you they were thorough), which reveal that it wasn’t a facade. Unlike Jack Abbott, the supposedly reformed murderer who killed again after the novelist Norman Mailer campaigned for his release, Hernández really did end up as a model citizen, and it’s this, rather than the carnage Argento requested, that really motivated Jodorowsky to take on the horror genre.

Santa Sangre is a very successful horror movie, Boswell’s score being a very successful example of 1980s synth-suspense, and the murders being just as flamboyant as Jodorowsky promised. People often colloquially refer to slasher movies as “throwing buckets of blood about”, but the murder scenes in Santa Sangre really do look like someone is flinging a bucket of blood at the wall. Underneath it all though, Jodorowsky isn’t interested in human depravity, and is instead interested in the human capacity for redemption.

In some ways, Santa Sangre plays out like an outrageous parody of the mommy-issues that horror movies (not least the gialli Argento made his name with), often end up focusing on. The image of Fenix lending his limbs to his armless (but not harmless), mother is a darkly funny picture of co-dependence, but Fenix and Concha’s woes begin with the macho brute Orga, and Fenix’s destiny is not revenge but transcendence, acceptance, and inner peace. Santa Sangre isn’t just a film set in a circus, but a carnivalesque film in the Fellini style, and there’s so much that I haven’t mentioned in this review (the circus’s tattooed lady, played with orgasmic delight by the Mexican vedette Thelma Tixou, is unforgettable).

It’s certainly a horror and it’s definitely surrealist, as well as a film that Jodorowsky rightly noted was more personal and psychological than his previous work, and to the director it’s both “subtle and poetic”. The former might seem like a strange way to describe a movie where, at one point, a person’s psychosexual anguish manifests itself as a hallucination of a giant man-eating snake coming out of his trousers, but there are so many layers here, and thanks to Severin’s expansive set there’s plenty of room to explore them.

Graham’s Archive – Santa Sangre