Two Boxes: Televised Terror in Franco’s Spain (1972 & 1974) Unabashed horror that puts most feature lengths to shame

As Transmission’s release this week has it, the 1970s were an interesting time in Spain. A country in flux, Spain was beginning to enjoy and increased economic prosperity that clashed with the Francoist fascist regime the nation had endured for, up until that point, almost forty years. Even the cheesy hit your nan and grandad will no doubt have sang on their first package holiday to Spain in this era (a significant boost to Spain’s economy), Y viva España by Sylvia Vrethammar, which spent a whopping six months in the UK chart of 1974, peaking at number four, signifies this unholy mix; despite the celebratory, sunkissed tone of the song, “¡Viva España!”, or its more specific “¡Arriba España!”, were phrases employed by the Francoist military coup in 1936, used both throughout the subsequent Civil War (1936 – 1939), and until Franco’s death in 1975. I suppose it’s a little bit like singing “Make America Great Again”.

As is often the case when something interesting is happening in society, filmmakers attempt to document it. As we’ve seen with many examples of cinema from the Soviet-era Eastern Bloc, to do so, creatives had to get a little metaphorical or allegorical. As we’ll see from this release, a pair of Spanish filmmakers also took this route, using two familiar boxes to tell their stories; the telephone box and the television set. First up, is one of the finest, and best known, examples – Antonio Mercero’s La Cabina. Made for Spanish TV in 1972, La Cabina is a short that lasts just over thirty minutes, but whose disturbing memory stays with you forever. Penned by Mercero and José Luis Garci, the film starts innocuously enough, with the dawn chorus of a group of workmen installing a brand new telephone box in the middle of a deserted town square. A little while later, departing from the apartment block that overlooks the square is our protagonist, an unnamed businessman played by José Luis López Vázquez. He’s escorting his little, football-mad boy to the bus stop for school and having waved him off, spies the telephone box. He enters to make a call, but finds that the phone is out of order. Worse than that, so is the door too. What comes to pass beyond that, I won’t spoil, however, in his doomed attempts to escape, the film, which has slowly been ratcheting up the anxiety and claustrophobia, takes some deeply sinister and unforgettable surprises.

La Cabina is nothing short of a masterpiece of macabre storytelling that rightly won a number of awards in its native Spain. Here in the UK, it made its TV debut almost a decade later on BBC2 in the summer of 1981, and was shown again by the newly launched Channel 4 the following year. Its resultant staple as a late night chiller earned the film cult appeal from admiring viewers who were equally fans of such similar unsettling fare as Tales of the Unexpected and The Twilight Zone. It’s easy to see why Mercero’s film became so memorable for audiences; the film deftly glides through the genres of comedy to thriller to poignant human tragedy and to unabashed horror in a manner that puts most feature lengths to shame, and there’s no shortage of arresting images either; from the roadside funeral with the glass hearse mirroring our hapless protagonist’s situation, to the similarly reflective slow-pan across the faces of circus performers, one of whom is holding a ship in a bottle. It’s not just the images that stay with you either; in a mostly dialogue-free piece, German composer Carl Orff’s music captures your attention and imagination.

Furthermore, La Cabina is a film that begs for discussion, chiefly, what did it all mean? Not just in terms of the imponderables that the action itself throws up (who is behind the businessman’s imprisonment? Why a telephone box?), but in terms of the allegorical too – that’s where the real meat lies. Is La Cabina a potent anti-fascist metaphor for the wrongful imprisonment and “disappearances” of those Spaniards who were courageous enough to speak out against Franco, or is it a blackly comic social satire on the ghoulish human nature of those who find entertainment in the unfortunate predicaments of others? Me? I think it’s both of those things, and I think it’s really bloody good filmmaking.

TO BUY TWO BOXES: TELEVISED TERROR IN FRANCO’S SPAIN, CLICK THE BOX ART AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN

The second film in this release was one that was unknown to me. El Televisor is a 1974 TV film by the writer/director Narciso “Chicho” Ibáñez Serrador, a man who played a huge role in Spain’s horror boom of the 1960s, thanks to his successful anthology series Historias Para No Dormir (Tales to Keep You Awake), which presented adaptations of Poe and other authors alongside original stories in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or the aforementioned The Twilight Zone. El Televisor is effectively a special one-off episode of that series, whose regular run had ended six years earlier in 1968. Like many of the original plays in the series, this stars Serrador’s own father, Narciso Ibáñez Menta, as the tale’s hapless protagonist. In the role of Enrique, Menta plays a rather sad and meek accountant who lives to work and provide for his wife, Susana (María Fernanda D’Ocón), and their son and daughter. His one dream in life has been to own a television set but, as selfless as ever (and displaying a desire for perfectionism), Enrique chooses to hold off from purchasing until both the family have everything they want, and colour television arrives to Spain. With Susana insistent that she and the children have everything they need and the holy grail of colour TV now on the market, Enrique buys a brand new state of the art TV set and has it installed in the modest little room he calls his study.

Again, I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum here, but El Televisor is a traditional “be careful what you wish for” tale that reminded me a little of the Kate Bush song, Deeper Understanding, which tells the story of a lonely man who becomes obsessed with his computer. Just like that protagonist, once Enrique has his TV, he begins to become slavishly devoted to it. Everything he used to enjoy, his novels, his record collection, and even his leisure time with his family, is sacrified in favour of his worship at the altar of the gogglebox. Enrique even foregoes the work he was once so commited to undertaking, for he is too fearful of missing out on what the television has to offer him. As the world of television becomes more real to him than the world beyond his study door, Susana rightly starts to worry for her husband’s sanity. His rapturous obsession, which once found the delight in every little thing the TV schedule presented to him, from cartoons for children to magazine shows, live theatre to US imports such as Cannon and Kung Fu, now begins to curdle as he becomes aware of how much violence and misfortune dominates its output. Like a Spanish Mary Whitehouse, Enrique feels he must protect his family from the evil on screen, but he can’t bring himself to switch the set off, as he realises he’s completely given himself over to it.

As a satire on the consumerism that Spain’s economic boom introduced to the population, El Televisor shrinks in comparison to the themes of La Cabina, but that’s not to say that it isn’t a brilliantly done chiller. Like La Cabina, Serrador’s film moves from humour to pathos and outright horror in such an effective and absorbing way that it’s impossible to feel the gears change. The descent into delusional madness that poor Enrique experiences is expertly delivered by Serrador’s writing and direction, and is equally well performed by Menta. I was also particularly impressed by the incredibly sympathetic turn from D’Ocón, who absolutely convinces as the loving wife and mother who is trying to hold everything together in the face of her husband’s mental collapse; the scenes of her standing outside his study door, listening to the TV noise, have a memorable sense of dread and tragedy that pulls on the viewer’s emotions. As with the conceit of Tales to Keep You Awake, there’s a sting in the tale to El Televisor. It doesn’t really bear scrutiny, but it’s incredibly well done nonetheless.

This is a welcome release, not least because it marks the world premiere to Blu-ray of La Cabina, something that was long overdue. There’s a brand new audio commentary from Inside No. 9‘s Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton accompanying that film, of which, they are, unsurprisingly, huge fans. Whilst horror experts Jonathan Rigby and Kevin Lyons perform commentary duties for El Televisor. A new interview with Spanish film expert Antonio Lazaro-Reboli explores in greater depth the career of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador and Spain’s horror boom of the late 60s and early 70s. The release is rounded off by some archive footage, including an interview with La Cabina‘s co-writer José Luis Garci and the director of that film’s son, Antonio Mercero Santos visiting the filming locations of his film, plus there’s footage from the 1999 press conference for an El Televisor screening. Lastly, a limited edition booklet featuring new writing from Alex Mendibil.

MARK’S ARCHIVE – TWO BOXES: TELEVISED TERROR