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WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO SEE IS A TRUE STORY

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AT LEAST AS WE REMEMBER IT

THE DANISH CHAPTER THE JOURNEY BEGINS

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

It's almost been 20 years since Un Golpe Definitivo,

and it's still going round in my head.

Because I never got to finish it, and I keep being reminded of it.

In Copenhagen, where I've lived for 15 years,

I keep getting asked about what happened.

Especially from paranormal media.

DIRECTOR OF UN GOLPE DEFINITIVO

It's crazy how such a small and unfinished project is still being talked about.

But I suppose that's what makes us human.

We try to find an explanation and meaning for the world around us,

and for what may lie beyond.

For many, the fact that we shot at Cortijo Jurado

could have unleashed a curse on the film and crew.

I keep getting asked if I saw anything there or on the tapes

and I always answer honestly.

I never saw anything.

I am a sceptic, and I can't even say

that I believe in the Cortijo Jurado curse.

But besides some bad luck that defies statistics,

I have been unable to explain the accidents that happened to us,

such as the final edit of the short film being deleted five times.

What really happened?

Is it possible to find out so much later?

Was it me or was it other forces that didn't let me finish the short film?

And what makes us even consider this possibility?

I would like to trust my memory,

but I know that our memories change as time passes.

Mine, as well as that of those who were involved.

That's why I want to ask you to listen carefully,

to the facts we are going to tell you about.

These facts might seem insignificant or contradictory at first glance,

but you will be able to connect the dots at the end of it

and create your own picture.

I lived half my life away from Málaga, but it is still my city.

And just like if it were a family member,

I have this ambiguous love-hate relationship with it.

But big love and soft hate,

the kind you have for those people or things that are part of you.

When you see your family once or twice a year,

you see the changes in the other person. I have that with Málaga.

It's different than when I left.

Both its urban landscape and cultural life.

Making films was very different back then.

END-OF-CENTURY CINEMA IN MÁLAGA

In the 90s I think we entered a period of transition

and also of disorientation from the sector itself a bit,

which ended up leading to...

DIRECTOR OF THE MÁLAGA FILM FESTIVAL

At the turn of the century,

in an assumption of something fundamental, and that is that the anxiety

of appearing and being is not what is fundamental,

but rather to have good projects

that have a more modern narrative sense.

To look into production and co-production formulas,

and in a way,

to accept the reality of a complicated and difficult sector

like the audiovisual sector,

and what role the people of Málaga should play in it.

For different reasons, this generation we are talking about...

FILM JOURNALIST, CANAL SUR

...is labelled as cursed.

And it is not something that was decided on a whim, but it was actually

based on objectivity.

Films that have fallen by the wayside,

actors and producers that have left us prematurely.

I will always remember

the drive,

the enthusiasm of José Miguel López.

I must also remember Pablo Cantos,

who was a guy who had his own world, his own personality.

And, of course, we should talk of those that left us,

like Fernando García Rimada.

And of people who, out of free will,

and while having the talent it takes,

decided to leave the camera behind, like Gaby Beneroso.

Like Kike Canalla.

We are of course

dealing with a cursed generation that, due to different circumstances,

has meant that

we're not enjoying something that could have been much bigger.

I would like to remember it

as if it had been a kind of a local movement...

CULTURAL EDITOR OF LA OPINIÓN DE MÁLAGA

...a sparkling moment of creativity, but in reality,

I think it wasn't like that entirely.

And the proof is in the fact that there have been no works that have lasted

as such.

But it was a moment in which, due to different circumstances,

lots of different people were working with a willpower,

and a desire to do things that often transcended

the quality of what they were offering.

I wouldn't call it a movement...

EX DIRECTOR OF FESTIVAL DE CINE FANTÁSTICO

...because it was never really a movement, not of genre and style,

it wasn't a movement per se, but there was a type of directors,

or aspiring directors, who would have some of success later on.

It's all the fruit of its time.

We suddenly... there started to be...

DIRECTOR

...more television channels,

Canal Sur was born,

and the audiovisual sector in Málaga became professional,

audiovisual communication also begins in the mid to late 90s.

And it's normal: if we have a generation that studies film,

they will want to make them.

We were still shooting in film...

PRODUCER

...in 35, in 16,

because the video formats at that time were obviously not

like all the new technologies that we have right now, weren't they?

Along with the appearance of the camera, the video camera and...

and of festivals.

I fondly remember

the transfer of the film director Jesús Franco

to the Costa del Sol.

With his example, he encouraged certain people

who might not have dared to start making films,

to get down to work and do it guerrilla and commando style,

and to keep going.

And we were used to myths like Tarantino in the 90s,

who said that someone who was an assistant in a video store could make films.

That encouraged us all to say,

"Well, we love cinema, we have so many incentives nowadays,

The Málaga festival, the cameras,

the computers for editing, we have everything,

so let's do things." So there was a boom

of directors in Málaga that said, "Why not?"

We were caught in the 90s just when... I mean the end of the 90s.

When it seemed that everything came together to turn it

into what it was in the year 2000.

The 21st century began with an...

with an economic boom that obviously benefitted films.

COMPOSER

I don't think there was

any kind of Málaga breeding ground that emerged or exploded in those years.

I don't think the landscape was particularly exciting, it wasn't easy.

SCREENWRITER

Especially since it was hard for what was being done to have quality,

with projection capability outside Málaga.

Besides a number of people that were

really willing to do anything to make their film.

CULTURAL EDITOR, DIARIO SUR

THE VIDEO OF THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN DELETED

I remember interviewing many short film directors.

One who is still inactive even told me

that he had gotten a cast, a great script, locations,

but he had no money for the camera. So he bought one on Friday,

at the mall, and returned it on Monday after shooting that weekend.

It wasn't a spiritual curse, I think it was a professional curse.

The pressure and necessity beat logic and reason.

We believed that we were better than we were,

but we were something.

We did it because we wanted to.

And we managed because we had the willpower.

I think we did what we could, and it was a lot.

PRODUCER

All we had was an illusion and a passion. We didn't have the means.

We had no technicians, no industry.

We had nothing.

And building something up from nothing was tough.

It's already difficult nowadays with everything we have,

but at the time it was even more so.

And even then, we managed to keep going and tell our story.

I am going to quote a phrase from Jesús Franco:

"To make films, all you need is a camera and freedom."

It was at this moment

that I was finishing my degree in stage direction

at the Higher School of Dramatic Art in 2000.

I already had the freedom,

now all I needed was the camera.

GENESIS OF THE SHORT FILM

Jorge brought his contacts together,

and I think that...

he had met Paulino beforehand, but they hadn't worked together.

SCRIPT OF UN GOLPE DEFINITIVO

The idea for the short film came from Jorge Rivera, the director.

PRODUCER OF UN GOLPE DEFINITIVO

He proposed this project to us.

We had had several talks about Lovecraft...

SCREENWRITER

...about topics that we both like, and we were reading him a lot,

we exchanged translations and such.

One day he wanted to make a short film, and asked me to write the script.

Jorge knew that my passion had always been the world of fantasy.

The world of fantasy films.

And when I heard of this project, based on one of the great masters of mystery,

of horror...

Lovecraft,

I was immediately blown away by the idea.

At that time, Paulino offered me

the chance of working and joining a film crew.

There were barely any opportunities back in those days...

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY OF UN GOLPE DEFINITIVO

...to work with a team of... I wouldn't say professionals,

but rather people who pretended to be professional, because we were all acting.

I wasn't actually a director of photography, but that's what I did.

I had seen enough making-ofs

to know what a director of photography had to do.

I think most of the technicians at that time,

some with more training than others...

Actually, we were all playing a role.

A role-playing game.

And our game was the game of filmmaking.

And it was because of a role-playing game in the late 80s

that I heard of Lovecraft.

I was immediately fascinated with his stories.

I soon discovered that Lovecraft was one of the most important figures

of contemporary horror literature,

and a large part of popular culture.

I knew Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe,

but discovering Lovecraft was like discovering the missing link for me.

All of today's great authors have some Lovecraft in their literature.

WRITER AND SCREENWRITER

Starting with Stephen King himself,

another author, also from the New England area,

and who is perhaps today's most widely read horror author.

I think Lovecraft has meant more to popular culture...

PODCASTER OF HAN DUO

...and especially to films and horror literature

than one would think.

He's like a stone falling into the water.

He has inspired great figures in popular culture who have then inspired others.

He wasn't that big during his lifetime, while he was publishing...

FILM CRITIC FILMNØRDENS HJØRNE

...but like other great artists, gained recognition after his death.

H. P. Lovecraft grew up in an upper-class family...

JOURNALIST

...in Providence, New England.

He was kind of raised like Norman Bates,

but then upper class, so to speak.

His mother was very dominating.

His father passed away when he was quite young and he grew up

in the family mansion

with his granddad's library filled with books he had read entirely,

several times.

And he was homeschooled.

His mother didn't want him going to school and mixing with other children,

who she deemed as inferior.

He loved science. As a child he was interested in physics and chemistry...

PHILOSOPHER AND BIOGRAPHER OF LOVECRAFT

...as well as astronomy.

As a child, he had a telescope and wrote little magazines

with astronomy results.

That's when he started inventing stories.

Already as a child when

adults, relatives, etc. would come to his house,

he would tell them stories. He invented the character of Abdul Alhazred,

to whom he attributed the authorship of the Necronomicon.

We could say that he had a very rich inner world

because the outside world terrified him.

He mixed the gothic horror of Edgar Allan Poe,

his first-person narrative style,

with protagonists who experience something terrible,

and the creation of gods and the poetic style of Lord Dunsany.

With that combination he creates something special,

truly special.

In fact, he took classic stories

like The Haunted House, The Graveyard of the Dark...

and added his own world to it.

Creating cosmic horror, as we call it... because of his interest in science.

But he clung to the idea that Newtonian physics

governed the laws of physics.

That is to say, what we now call classical physics.

But he lives in a time where Einstein, amongst others,

makes his appearance and presents the theory of relativity.

As well as quantum physics.

Two aspects of the world that cannot be explained by classical physics.

Lovecraft believes that, in our time, science bears the truth.

It allows us to find the truth about the world around us.

And takes the role of religion.

The idea of

beings in another dimension or universe that don't give a damn about us.

They are neither good, nor bad. Maybe they created us, maybe they didn't.

But either way, we are insignificant.

Literature is often about the life of the human being.

How important we are, how we feel.

Lovecraft rebels against this,

because what science proves, through the results of Einstein

and the new science,

is that when we investigate it, we find that we are insignificant.

The universe doesn't care about us.

Let's try to put it into literature.

I think most of us have looked up at the stars

and have felt intimidated by how small we are,

by how small man is compared to the universe.

Our brains cannot grasp the concept of infinity.

He wrote about reality as it really was.

He makes an incision in our reality and opens it up to show us the truth.

Real terror lies in the discovery.

We defeated the monster by chance.

But I now have this knowledge that I can never get rid of.

When one discovers what reality is really like,

one goes mad,

because it is impossible, so terrible and overwhelming,

that it cannot be grasped without losing one's mind.

To put these ideas on film was very difficult for a small production.

Initially, I wanted to tell another story,

The Colour Out of Space. But since I didn't have the necessary means,

I had to find a simpler story.

So, I thought of doing The Terrible Old Man,

a short story, which had never been made into a film.

THE TERRIBLE OLD MAN

It was written in 1920,

and is basically about the robbery of a house where

a very old man,

a very mysterious man lives, in the fictionalised port town of Kingsport.

The Terrible Old Man is the story of a necromancer.

It is about a man, an old man,

who lives in a secluded village. He doesn't socialise with anyone.

He supposedly has

a lot of money because he has gold coins, silver coins...

And then three robbers of different nationalities decide to

rob him because they think he must be hiding

valuable objects, money or some kind of treasure.

It was more than they bargained for,

because the old man kills them, they are found slaughtered a few days later.

Mangled corpses that look like they've been kicked

by hundreds of boots.

And the old man was still happy with his cane and with their

souls stuffed into little jars, talking to them.

As I was saying, regarding the production, it was a short film with a script

that didn't really require any large locations.

Just a house, an old man, three thieves

and special effects too, of course.

With the script finished, we started the shooting of Un Golpe Definitivo.

Just like the protagonists, we had a bulletproof plan

that would eventually go awry.

FILMING STARTS

As I had one of the best or most professional cameras of the time,

it was up to me to be the camera man and director of photography.

What I found funny were those moments when I

had to attack Rafa with a knife, wanting to poke his eye out.

I remember that the whole process

took a lot of effort, because it was too long ago.

A long time ago.

And back then, in order to survive as an actor you had to do a ton of things.

So we were doing a ton of projects.

I was doing the short film, something else with the theatre,

or I was... A ton of things.

I remember the first location we shot at,

which was Paulino's aunt's home in Muelle Heredia.

We weren't being picky for the locations, we shot wherever they would let us.

I remember the sound problems, because there was a ton of echo.

If you would say, "Hold still!", you'd hear, "Be quiet, quiet..."

A ton of echo, but the apartment was empty, we were very comfortable.

We thought, "How great is it that we have an empty house

and that we can make a film!"

Because everything revolved around making a film.

We learned new things everywhere we went.

That was also the beauty of that time... throwing yourself into it.

I laughed a lot, because I also worked with two colleagues,

two actors that were older than me. At the time I had basically just

graduated from drama school.

It wasn't my first job, it was far from it.

I had a lot of experience,

but it's true that having two people, two actors older than you,

well, it makes you learn

and you have a lot of fun too, because they were both charming.

One was Pepe, who is no longer with us.

Pepe González Rubio was there, because Pepe González Rubio

was an actor who was in every single short film. I remember

I even thought of the name "Shortman",

for Pepe, because he was always in every single short film

that was produced.

He was a man who had been a civil guard

and had decided to dedicate his life to acting.

Most of us on the crew were something similar,

like one of those films

where a gang comes together, The Dirty Dozen.

It was a succession of us characters that would join.

We had a solid cast for the story,

now all we needed

was to find the actor to play the terrible old man.

Paul Naschy was the first to accept the role of the character.

We talked to him, we sent him the script, he said yes.

We talked on the phone a few times,

but something came up on the same days as the shooting, it was unforeseen.

Then I remember that we also talked with Ángel Aranda at El Pimpi,

he was an actor from the 50s,

but he declined the offer because people

had an image of him from when he was young, and he didn't want to be seen old.

Time was running out, so I thought, a guy with presence,

who is tall, who is strong... Hans Meyers.

So we found him and he said yes.

I think it was all pretty

spontaneous, for example, the greengrocer's shop.

I remember we were walking through the streets of Málaga,

close to where we lived,

and Jorge said, "Wow, this would be a great place

to shoot one of the scenes."

We shot the first scenes

with no major accidents other than those caused by inexperience.

The shooting continued at Cortijo Jurado,

one of the most famous buildings in Málaga,

full of history and legends,

that I didn't even remember if I had heard of.

Today, it's more like the house in Psycho. On top of a hill, slightly creepy.

There are a few things to bear in mind.

PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY

The first is that it was much more lush in the nineteenth century.

The house had a front garden,

it is a typical recreational villa, not a farmhouse.

It has the characteristics of cultivated architecture.

Like of the city.

And stylistically, it's related to eclecticism, which is a characteristic

style of the nineteenth century, which is to mix,

as the name implies,

mix different styles.

It was founded in the mid-19th century by the Heredia family.

JOURNALIST AND PRESIDENT OF PRISMA PUBLICACIONES

Later, it passed into the hands of the Larios family, who were neighbours.

In fact, they owned the Cortijo de Colmenares, which is currently

the Guadalhorce Golf Club.

The Heredia family was one of the most important families of Málaga,

and not a lot of people know they actually built...

JOURNALIST AND HETERODOXY EXPERT

...the first railway line between Málaga and Seville,

because they worked in the iron mines and had to move that iron.

A lot of gypsies also have the surname Heredia

because the Heredia family put it on their passports so these gypsies could

go to England to learn how to work the iron.

Subsequently, it became part of the Quesada family and finally, in 1975,

the farmhouse is taken over by the Vega Jurado family.

Very little is known about Cortijo Jurado. Like most of the villas in the

recreational area in the outskirts of Málaga,

there is hardly any documentation.

Because it didn't depend on the Town Hall, but on the Ministry of Development.

It has not been found.

Legend has it that this farmhouse was connected to the Cortijo de los Larios

by underground tunnels which, in fact, have never been found.

These tunnels were also supposed to have devices for torture.

It has not been proven that there are tunnels. There's lots of urban legends

about that house.

It is said that there were satanic rituals or Black Masses in the chapel.

Several girls disappeared between 1890 and 1920,

many of them would also be killed in death rituals,

satanic rituals.

With clear signs of violence, torture and humiliation.

And at the time it was thought it was the Heredia family.

They were close with an English family, the Loring family.

And surely this union of English and Spanish customs would

bring about... who knows, why not?

The first rituals of Freemasonry brought over from England,

prevailing at that time, in that nineteenth-century society.

The first spiritualist séances were probably...

Old-fashioned spiritism that is. It was a unique thing.

The first Spiritualist society in Spain

started in Seville, then Málaga, and it was created by General Primo de Rivera.

This unknown part is fantastic,

and you rediscover a history that is exciting, that is not

mysterious, but rather enigmatic.

The Mirador Group bought it and wanted to make it a hotel,

but the work is never done

because the real estate crisis started and constructions were halted.

The idea of filming at the Cortijo Jurado...

I think it was my idea.

I have been working in audiovisual production for many years,

I research locations,

I find the places where we can shoot.

The fact is that the farmhouse was completely abandoned

and fenced off, so it was pretty easy to see the sign.

It said "Viewpoint."

I explained the project

and they literally gave me the key of the padlock that opened the gates.

In the days prior

to scouting for locations, I had been able to

get inside the house in daylight and research,

take some resource plans

of what was there, of the graffiti on the walls, of that

sordid atmosphere that emanated from that house.

There were even some remains of a ritual.

If not satanic,

it was at least gruesome, because there was a dead animal, a goat, the walls

were painted with blood,

and at the time I even told that story

to try to spark some fear among the members of the team.

We thought that

maybe something could happen, because we had heard the stories,

but we never saw anything.

One night, I went without the rest of the the team, I went with another

of the developers of this story, which was Juan Domínguez.

He got that engine-generator that was so noisy you could hear it from Málaga,

even though we were about 15 kilometres away.

From the first moment he decided it should be doubled,

because you couldn't hear over the noise.

I remember we spent the days there.

First we shot with the children.

One of the children fell ill the same day.

He was hospitalised for four months.

Then the other actors came and we shot the scenes with them,

and at night we shot the dark scenes.

It was very cold there, and I remember that we were all

wearing coats, scarves...

We had to look after the actors,

because they couldn't be on camera with their coats on.

I don't know why we wanted an interior.

I was with a girl, and she had a flashlight,

and suddenly, in a very dark room

it was like, "Look there's something Christmassy."

We saw lots of little light bulbs.

She shined her light at it, and it was a lot of rats.

Problems would come up that would make us wonder

if this was all normal.

The lights suddenly going out, etc.

But during the filming, the shooting, not so much.

So we were shooting there, it was very late at night,

the people... Well, what happens when people get together in a place like this...

"Do you know the legend, the story..."

They tell all kinds of stories to scare people

and to give a bit of excitement to that shooting, which was already fun.

At some point during the shooting, we were shooting next to a car

and the three thieves were talking, among us, the three criminals.

And for reasons, I guess, related to the speed, the night, the cold...

Pepe was having some difficulties with the text,

which can happen to anyone at a given moment.

He didn't remember some of the parts well, so we had no choice

but to have someone help him with the lines.

But the funny thing was that we could all hear Paqui, but Pepe

was the only person who couldn't hear her. He made her speak up very loud.

"I can't hear!" And then Pepe...

He made that text we were all hearing being screamed out sound very natural.

You know how he acts around you.

He's a genius at what he does, but when he gets mad, he can't control himself.

It's better that way, trust me.

It was all fun and games until that point, even with the little accidents we had.

But that night,

just after shooting in Cortijo Jurado, the first catastrophe happened.

I know that Hans, after filming the scene, that night of shooting,

he apparently went home and fell.

I was told it was both down a staircase and a lift,

but I don't remember his house having a lift,

but he fell down the stairs and broke his leg.

Nothing I saw or heard at Cortijo Jurado.

The cause of the disasters to come could be supernatural,

but it could also be psychological or even cultural.

Where does this belief in haunted houses come from?

HAUNTED HOUSES

It is as old as our ability to believe in life after death,

and that is why we still watch films and read stories about ghosts

that haunt the places where they died.

The first attempt to make a scary film was about a haunted house.

Because it's something latent inside us, this fear of haunted houses,

and psychologically it makes sense.

If it's haunted, that is, with spells that produce terror inside us...

PSYCHOLOGIST

...then that house would represent

our lack of control, and lack of control is a terrifying thing.

We do not tolerate uncertainty, we do not tolerate

anything that is not under the control of our reason.

When faced with a haunted house, and therefore, with spirits...

WRITER OF THE COMIC CORTIJO JURADO

...you don't know whether

it's in front or behind you, it can attack you in any way,

a shapeless mass can put you up against the wall,

you don't know what it wants from you,

that house, that spirit could want something from you, good or bad...

It fills your head with these questions that appeal to your darkest fears.

And once it's gotten to your darkest fears, it doesn't get worse than that.

Spaces are fundamental in literature, and later in horror films too.

In works that deal with the supernatural,

it is as if the house has a memory

of all the things, the terrible events that took place there.

There have always been testimonies. It was conveyed in literature

because we find it fascinating, it is something unknown.

NOVELIST

For me, these topics are like the ultimate frontier of knowledge.

I think we have all pushed that whole thing away a bit. The spiritual world,

the unknown world, occultism and all that, because it sounds medieval.

People put up this wall of rejection.

They might say, "What? That's weird."

But I think it's a fascinating subject.

We should separate haunted houses into two categories.

Those marked by a tragic event where a dynamic memory seems to remain

that repeats itself, as if it were a cinematic film,

and that certain people with a special type of sensitivity

are capable of detecting,

and then there's those haunted houses where something dwells,

something invisible, that's intelligent, that we don't know whether

it's from the great-beyond or hereafter,

or from a parallel universe,

but it's there, it's the others,

whoever the others are and wherever they come from.

Horror films, horror stories

are beyond all control, because they're all

in fantasy, which allows us to have that distance,

and allows us to play with it

and get closer, but with one foot in the safe zone,

so I get out whenever I want, "This isn't true."

Ninety per cent of haunted houses are neither positive nor negative.

They are neutral,

what's inside them is nothing more than people who

have died and not moved on, but rather remained there.

But they are neither better nor worse than in life.

That dismal, macabre image we have of haunted houses

comes from films.

The kind looking to sell, because a horror film is supposed to be exaggerated.

They propose this idea of a haunted house where really macabre things happen.

But it's not like that.

The ghost stories that I tell, as well as many other

ghost stories in literature and film...

WRITER AND DIRECTOR

...are not actually horror stories, although they might seem to be.

The ghost doesn't come to us to scare us, but rather because it needs wings.

Because it needs to be accompanied to that famous Poltergeist light,

or because it needs something it left behind in life,

something it didn't finish in life, someone to do it for them.

We keep the idea of the ideal house with charm versus the idea of a house...

ANTHROPOLOGIST

...that can mean torture, that can mean rupture, meaning that

these mechanisms of fear, of ignorance,

of fear of the unknown,

are fabulation mechanisms.

These are mechanisms that have led the human mind,

both the popular mind as well as that of writers

to produce fabulation, to produce art.

Vladimir Propp, an anthropologist and scholar of fairy tales, in his work

Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale,

relates all of these places to different constructions where

initiation rites were held in many cultures.

It's in the good house where that God is found,

that sage, that good, nurturing mother

who is already within us, we no longer have to look for her outside.

This corresponds with the idea of archetypes

that maintain opposition, as the French anthropologist Gilbert Durand said.

These are archetypes in opposition: light versus darkness,

security versus uncertainty.

There are undoubtedly places that for some reason record

the experiences that have been lived in them.

There are lots of cases in Spain, and everywhere,

and talking to mediums, connected people,

maybe they are superior to us from an evolutionary perspective,

because they can connect with that other world we talked about,

that we don't know much about yet.

I believe that we currently live in very VICA or VUCA environment...

PSYCHIATRIST

...volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous,

in which we don't have an explanation for many things,

and I think that pushes us as a society

to look for explanations for things that don't have one.

And science is particularly affected by not having explanations

for these things.

Why couldn't haunted houses be like a social void in which we deposit

all the uncertainty of what we don't know?

Places where we all deposit

our search for explanations for things we don't understand about ourselves.

An abandoned house is, in a way, the shadow of a failure.

What has happened there for that house to be abandoned?

Throughout human history, we've seen ruined or abandoned places

where spirits roam.

But they don't have to be castles.

I was investigating a healer, and when I was

investigating that case to make a report,

I found testimonies from different people

who told me, "Have you seen that in that house over there in the Altozano

strange things are happening?"

"Did you know a lady appears? Did you know you can hear..."

Last millennium, we started getting

testimonies of people talking about their experiences, and we filtered everything.

We are not ghost hunters, we are journalists.

And we have to be rigorous.

If strange phenomena occur, we are going to record and film them.

This is how, a month later, a special live programme was set up.

There were two guards who were going to provide security so no one would

bother us.

When I got there, the first person I saw was the security guard.

"Are you Franco Contreras? Hello" With his colleague...

He opens the door and says, "You're staying here tonight."

He then takes off his chain,

hands it to me and says, "Put this on, this is a bad place."

These security guards have to have some kind of

psychological security in the face of all these phenomena,

they are not there to look for psychophonies or ghosts.

They know the place inside out.

So we were stopping strangers as part of the end-of-degree project

of Audiovisual Communication. And funnily, when we got there, the guard told us,

"When you go up the hill to the house you have to keep the windows rolled up,

because the dogs can get close to the cars and they can get in."

What do we do about the dogs when we go up?

"No, the dogs don't go up."

"The dogs don't go up the hill."

The rest of the night was very unique.

I can tell you that

I got two results from the psychophonic tests I performed,

a girl's voice saying "here" and a boy's voice saying "it's me."

And I can tell you that they still remember me at Cadena SER.

We went with two mobile units. One from Cadena SER and one from 40 Principales,

and after the programme,

after two hours of broadcasting

both mobile units completely broke down, which had never happened before

at Cadena SER in Málaga,

all the batteries of the recorders, the cameras, the Sony ones, the...

The Nikon ones disappeared. It was as if suddenly

absolutely everything that had batteries or electricity had exploded.

It is true that,

when you try to record many of these phenomena,

a series of parameters repeat themselves.

Firstly, the camera batteries tend to mysteriously drain.

Some say it's because they need to extract that energy

so they can manifest.

Otherwise it's more difficult for them to perhaps commit more noticeable acts,

more notorious.

It is also true that, in some cases, the recordings made in places

with paranormal phenomena

suddenly suffered unexplainable tape erasures.

Or psychophonies that unexpectedly came to the surface

when listening to the recorded audios or videos.

If we think of the concept of the Ouija board,

which is like having a phone and calling the spirit world,

I would imagine, if we think in these terms,

that if we enter a haunted or cursed house,

and do a supernatural story that plays with those energies,

that maybe it could have the same effect and awaken something.

Yeah.

It is possible that we can awaken those phenomena

or open that door to the other side, whatever it is, that other side

and its dwellers.

It's just a belief.

A belief based on 30 years of experience in mystery journalism,

with over a thousand investigations in haunted houses

and 5000 interviews of people who have been in contact with the other side.

I do believe... I do believe there are other realities.

That sometimes those other realities manifest themselves.

That we don't know if they are from the great-beyond or a parallel universe.

Quantum physics and string theory explain a lot of these phenomena.

And it's very Lovecraftian.

There's something dormant, hibernating,

waiting for someone to come along, look, investigate it

and ultimately, awaken it.

It's difficult to say

whether it is simply a coincidence that these things happen, or if

there is something else that affects the films. I would say

that when you get too close to the fire you get burned.

In other words, when we get too close to a phenomenon,

too close to a reality of this nature, it could be

that there is something that doesn't want you to go in there.

You end up asking yourself questions when

so many bad things don't happen in the same project,

and especially in a place that has its own history of mystery.

In 2015, the farmhouse goes on sale.

It was funny, because the ad was published on Idealista,

and it was being sold for 16 million, at the time.

The curious thing is that it says that it is a haunted farmhouse,

a macabre farmhouse with a very dark history.

I never believed there was a connection between the accidents

and the shooting at Cortijo Jurado.

So we continued shooting the short film as planned.

FILMING CONTINUES

I remember that things happened around the... the short film,

for example, Hans falling.

The shop burning down. But they were always things

that could be considered as normal, they also belong to the normal world.

The special effects were filmed in Jorge's garage.

Particularly the scenes, or well, the special effects you could see

when we were all mutilated.

On a kind of platform, like a big table,

covered with filth, with raw skinless sausages,

with mashed potatoes, with ketchup,

and there were eyes, ears, hands.

It was the great Juan Domínguez, who won't be forgotten,

an absolute pro and a man of a category that...

The good ones always die first. It's the truth.

This was 20 years ago.

I was given the opportunity, and we were going to shoot in a village

in Málaga, which was called Colmenar.

It was a splendid day, it was autumn, a splendid day, really sunny...

But we got to the location and everything became cloudy

and it started raining. We were fast.

We arrived, we got everything set up, we got dressed, we did our make-up,

but every time we started, something happened.

Something wrong with the cameras. It was fine, we did some tests,

a rehearsal... let's try, what's going on? "The battery doesn't work now, wait."

It was freezing cold.

I was freezing

with the corpse there, but of course you couldn't move,

because the retake was key.

We stopped, it rained, we tried, we stopped again, it rained again,

we finished it and we left.

With the film shot,

I bought the necessary equipment and started editing.

When a computer broke down at home...

EDITING STARTS

...a thunderstorm had just taken place right before

that same night,

so we thought it was

just that the we had a bad electrical system in the flat where we lived.

We always tried to find logical explanations for the events.

During the set up with Jorge he called me,

he was of course really stressed out because everything we had shot was lost,

and there was no way of recovering the footage.

Then, when it happened the second time

and it also got deleted, or Paulino's computer broke down,

it was even stranger, but

I think we just found it funny.

I don't think we were really scared,

I don't think Jorge ever felt like he was cursed or anything like that.

The second edit was deleted while he was sleeping.

The third, when he turned off the computer to cool down.

I took a shower and when I came back, there was no trace of it.

I remember accompanying Jorge around half of Málaga

looking for computer repair stores, leaving no stones unturned.

We were taking his computer's hard drive, because every time he tried to

edit the recordings he had, the hard drive or the computer would crash,

something deleted,

something always happened.

I'd see Jorge banging his head against the walls in despair.

I even remember a small repair shop on Avenida Rosaleda, and we were like,

if they can't fix it here, that's the end of the road.

Nothing could be done.

Of course, we had to spend more time on this project than planned,

because we had to keep starting all over again.

While it was being edited,

Jorge was editing El Golpe Definitivo, which is this short film.

And simultaneously, on that computer, they were editing the short film

I made about Tintin, twenty years later.

We finished a short film. "Great!" But it was mine.

The other kept deleting, over and over.

Jorge must have had unlimited patience,

because he kept editing it, just for it to be deleted again.

I think Jorge reacted in a very...

normal way, as if he were saying,

"Well, this is a bit odd,

but we have to keep going."

"We have to do this."

And we didn't know why the whole short film had been deleted.

The brother of one of the actors, Víctor Pérez,

was a producer in Lucena, Córdoba.

There, we edited it again,

but I got to Málaga,

and the removable hard drive with the project was empty.

We tried to keep going in spite of these things that happened.

We were always wondering, "When are we going to be able to see it?"

Because most of us filmmakers need to have a goal,

and our goal was to premiere at the Málaga Film Festival.

I started on the fifth and final edit of the short film.

It didn't get deleted,

so we started dubbing.

Since Hans didn't have a lot of lines, we left his for the end.

I don't remember Jorge linking

Hans' disappearance

with a curse from the short film.

He vanished.

I never heard from this man again.

It's not like I saw him every day, but we did quite regularly see each other.

And that night was the last time I ever saw him.

But after that, he probably... There are tons of urban legends.

He left with a lady, a foreign noblewoman...

He went back to his country, Germany...

He had gone to Marbella...

I was told 27 versions, and I don't know if any of them were true.

I was quite understanding and thought, "How is this possible?"

He told me the originals had been ruined,

they had gone from the hard drive, that...

Here were guys who became suggestible.

You can become suggestible,

because when you go to a place you've heard lots about,

no matter if you're a sceptic,

some suggestibility can bring you to doubt certain things,

like noises, or...

And if other things happen on top of that, then maybe one can have doubts.

But interestingly enough, Jorge is not someone

who believes in these things.

Because when one is gullible, one gives in to suggestibility more.

After the dubbing, the fifth edit was deleted from the computer.

3 COMPUTERS, 5 EDITS, 2 CITIES

Luckily, before dubbing, I had made a copy on VHS,

which is all I have of the short film today.

Was this a cursed film?

CURSED FILMS

And what is a cursed film?

The truth is that lots of films are considered as cursed,

but we would enter a debate of whether this curse is real,

or whether it's simply a publicity stunt, which is also a thing.

It is true that there is a high percentage of films of these themes

that also carry this kind of curse. The most famous is perhaps Poltergeist.

It has two sequels,

and between all three films, four members of the cast died,

including the actress who plays the older sister,

who was strangled by her boyfriend at the age of 22,

and little Carol Anne, played by Heather O'Rourke,

who died at the age of 12, before the release of the third film,

due to medical complications.

In the film of The Exorcist, at some point they had to call in a real exorcist

to perform a whole exorcism ritual on the film set. Why?

Because sets would randomly start burning down,

events that nobody understood would take place,

and they actually started causing real problems during the shooting,

and then at a given point, because of what was happening or not,

they decided to bring in a real exorcist to perform a whole ritual.

In addition to this, during its premiere in Rome,

there was a church nearby that was struck by lightning,

and it destroyed the cross on top of the church.

A 400-year-old cross just dropped down in the square

in front of the church while the film was being shown.

Jacinto Molina, Paul Naschy.

I visited the castle of Valdeiglesias in Madrid, called the House of the Savages.

He shot The Devil's Possessed there, and he told me how, during the shooting,

half of his fellow actors

were afraid because they would hear footsteps in the corridors and voices,

and I assure you that Paul Naschy, Jacinto, was a sceptic.

He was tough, he endured the make-up for hours,

and he said, "I would get goosebumps all over, and my colleagues

would run away."

In other films, like Amityville for example,

all the artists reported waking up with nightmares,

at the exact time that the character in the film

would feel and suffer from these hallucinations,

which was at 03:15 in the morning.

And in the film The Prophecy,

another religious horror, a film by Richard Donner from 1976,

the lead actor, Gregory Peck,

the screenwriter and a producer, on three different planes,

were struck by lightning on their way to the set.

And then there was a death.

There were several deaths, including the production manager.

John Richardson, I think his name was.

Near the kilometre point where the accident took place

there was a sign that said, "Ommen, 66.6."

It was a Dutch city that was 66.6 kilometres away from there.

But Ommen sounds a lot like omen, or prophecy,

and 666 is also the number of the beast.

Bendita Promesa was paradoxically a short film about souls

purging for unfulfilled promises, and at one point in the final scene,

they had that scream that no one heard, but could be heard in the footage,

For example, in the case of Rosemary's Baby,

we have a cursed building, The Dakota.

A building where a horror film was shot.

Where, moreover, a protest was held against that film

by a Satanist group, where Mason was present.

He would later become the murderer of Sharon Tate, actress and wife

of the director and producer, Roman Polanski.

But the black magic magician par excellence

also lived in that building.

In that building, some of the owners practiced satanic rituals,

according to the legend.

And it was on that building's doorsteps that John Lennon was murdered.

It was never proven whether it was a curse or not.

And that's the thing, it can't be proven.

If it were proven to be a curse, that would prove that the supernatural exists,

that ghosts exist.

You would have hard evidence of it.

That's why it can never be proven. There will always be people who will say,

"It's a coincidence."

"It could be that more people died in this production compared to others,

but it's a coincidence."

And those on the other side will say, "No, no. You brought this on yourselves."

"Because you have stirred up dark energies."

"You may have done it as fiction..."

And their argument would probably be

that this is not known to supernatural beings,

ghosts, demons or whatever is to blame for this curse on the set.

They don't know.

They sense you are playing on their field, so they come to play,

and you shouldn't have done it.

For me, cursed films themselves don't exist, because

I believe in people who think

that there a film is cursed just because a series of events occur.

In Apocalypse Now, there was a helicopter crash in which people died,

or in The Twilight Zone, I think it was, one of the actors was decapitated.

But nobody thinks they're cursed films

just because there was an accident, accidents happen all the time.

People die sooner or later.

People die, people have accidents and twisted things happen

that can make you think, if you're a believer.

Superstitions, generally speaking,

involve the mental mechanism of linking cause and effect

with arbitrary reasons, and that they are

going to control our fate,

and the sense of insecurity and helplessness that we have.

Malevolent forces, a fucking coincidence...

I believe that chance and serendipity are two of the

most powerful forces in the universe.

But I'm open-minded. And it could exist.

Reality is full of random phenomena,

and we can modify them ourselves based on where we focus our attention.

I was wondering whether it's the curse

itself that's the problem or whether the problem is the belief that's a curse.

Because if we believe it's a curse, there is a greater chance

of repeating that view of reality

as a curse, and therefore

of the curse being fulfilled.

Because if something happens one day to some guys picking radishes,

they will probably tell that story, and they will be able to give it

a narrative, but when something happens within a cinematographic environment,

between film professionals,

it's the perfect breeding ground for something spectacular to come out of it,

and so every time it's told, it's even more spectacular.

When you went, I think that in Málaga, at a local level, it boosted

that reputation it had as a strange place because of what happened there,

especially in the world of films, of the actors,

of the cameramen, make-up artists. What's created...

Because a lot of things have happened that can't be explained, and that

starts spreading.

I remember every time they would want us to produce a project

and they would tell me,

"Let's shoot at Cortijo Jurado" and I would say: "No, we can't shoot there."

They'd ask, "Why not? And I'd say, "No, I don't know what happened or how."

"I don't want to know, but something happened while shooting once."

"So I'm not going to shoot there."

It's a wonderful location for shooting, but

for me it's been off limits ever since, and will remain that way, all because

of your short film.

I've had people tell me they were filming with me, but that I wasn't there.

"That short film that was shot in in Cortijo Jurado where..."

"I was there, I shot it."

"I didn't see you."

"Well, then it was probably another one."

I think that it was because of time in the end,

because another job came up, so he had to put this aside,

but I don't remember Jorge

deciding, "I don't want to finish the short film any more."

What I remember about Jorge is that at that time

he was leaving Spain, he was going to Denmark for work reasons,

and it was a no-brainer. We had lost all the editing, all the real material.

I think there was still

some VHS pre-recorded footage that obviously lacked the quality

it needed to be exhibited.

A part of Jorge is still not done with this project.

In fact, I think this documentary also shows that he never

really abandoned the project entirely.

During this time, I have heard stories and legends about the short film and myself.

That I took an Ouija to the set, or that I saw and experienced paranormal events.

These are all lies.

Although I can't explain everything,

even now, as I approach the end of my journey,

I can't or won't think that my film was cursed.

STORIES

But there are many who believe it.

There's lots of enthusiastic blogs with lots of colours and fake pictures,

because it sells, because it's exciting,

we're looking for it, we don't know what'll happen.

We get to an age, I'm 46 now, where you start to wonder,

"How long do I have left? What will happen to me? Where will I go?"

All of that makes us interested in these topics,

we don't want to end or die, we don't accept death.

It's the great enigma,

it's what we all want to know.

We don't want to know anything about it on the one hand, but...

it's appealing on the other,

and we would love to know what's on the other side,

if there really is something.

There has always been this attraction, repulsion

towards that which produces fear.

But fear actually, is a very human feeling,

and even, as long as it can be controlled, is positive.

Fear is part of our survival instinct.

It's a defence mechanism that has been built by nature,

basically millions of years ago,

and our defence mechanism, which depends on the tonsils

and continuously connects with the hypothalamus

is the same as chimpanzees have, that other animals have.

The human being is fascinated by the unknown,

It's part of the intellectual process.

We wanted to know where we are, what surrounded us,

how things worked, what made us evolve,

and at the beginning we filled in the gaps with mythologies, with beliefs.

"The sun is a god, we don't know what it is."

Science has filled in those gaps.

Fascination is, in my opinion,

made up of two factors. The willingness of the subject

to empathise with the other, to feel what the other is feeling,

and there is also a kind of

physiological transfer, that is that the body of the subject who sees the other

vibrates in the same tune.

With films and stories

we can get closer to our monsters and we can identify with them.

That's why we feel so much emotion.

All these emotions that we can't normally release.

Because it's a safe moment, a moment in which we have control.

Lovecraft himself, in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature,

said that fear is the oldest and most intense of human emotions.

And the oldest and most intense fear is the fear of the unknown.

This relationship of structures, of binary structures

makes sense if we think that a good part of human life

is the hope of an ordered world, the hope of rational knowledge.

I love that this process,

which could be the paranoia of artists, but it's not,

is being talked about, because it can be very exciting,

that impotence, let's say, of determination.

The saddest thing is when you try

to bring it to a laboratory it falls apart, it doesn't work.

And you can't, you're even

recording something, but when you play it back with cameras and such

it's vetoed for some reason.

It's vetoed to us and it has to be.

It's part of the learning process that has brought us into this world.

Right now, a whole scientific field

is opening up to us around all these... superstitions.

And what's being questioned is what element of truth they may have

in the interpretation, because they have been interpreted.

As I said before, there is a tendency to find an explanation for everything.

Human beings have this need.

The human brain has this need of explaining everything.

But now, maybe, we have more information in light, for example, of quantum physics.

Quantum physics grew so much over those years

because it started showing that, what we thought was science fiction,

and what Lovecraft thought was pure fantasy,

was maybe something more.

All this stuff about multidimensions

and things that we can't see but are still there.

Quantum physics almost comes close to a possible explanation or proof

that, in fact, parallel dimensions exist.

I always say that, if you were to take a television back a century,

what people would think...

They would probably think it's the devil's work or that it's paranormal.

Who's to say that in a few years, what we refer to as ghosts and psychophonies,

won't be considered normal?

The spirit world is undoubtedly science.

I'm sure it conforms to the rules and laws that we know, all of them.

The physical laws...

The thing is that our science is still insignificant.

Our ego makes us think that our science is already the best it can be,

that we're at the top of the food chain and know everything.

I think we don't know 99 per cent of what goes on in our reality,

and that new findings are going to lead us to discover

things that we thought were strictly in the realm

of madness or the supernatural.

That's what I believe, I'm confident.

ANSWERS

Something interesting did happen...

I compile folders on my computer for each comic I make,

and I compile the documentation.

This one time I had put everything together,

and then the next day when I wanted to start working on the script,

the folder was gone from my computer.

It was just the one folder out of hundreds of folders that I have

with illustrations, scripts, comics, etc.

So that happened.

Wanting to start work on that folder the next day, and it was the only one missing.

If you are watching this,

it could prove that the curse is either non-existent or over.

Spiritual and professional.

The facts tell me that we were young and inexperienced.

I have found answers to enigmas, like Hans',

but I still can't explain why we were so unlucky.

And I don't know why our short film kept deleting.

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli's equipment, perhaps like me,

stopped working whenever he approached it,

and like with some paranormal phenomena,

it only happened when he was alone.

In either case, we will never know whether it was all the result of suggestion,

electromagnetism or something else.

Science is discovering things

that used to seem like science fiction or pure fantasy.

We are beginning to talk to people in comas,

we have proven that phobias and feelings

are passed on through genetic code.

A large part of our body,

like our brains, has yet to be discovered.

Maybe it could explain the supernatural,

or maybe the multidimensionalities that quantum physics tells us about.

Faith, like terror and superstition,

is defined as that which surpasses the rational.

The question is,

can we dispel these beliefs just because there's no evidence?

Or perhaps our minds and science are not developed enough yet?

We are not so far from the age-old Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant.

Reality is there, but none of us perceives it entirely,

and each person makes their own image.

True, but incomplete.

Perhaps the human being is too small to know the truth,

and perhaps,

just like in Lovecraft's stories, we would lose our sanity if we knew.

I started this journey to find answers,

but every person I interviewed only led to more questions.

After all this, I still don't know what happened,

but I've learned

that the important thing is to remember and to ask questions.

By asking myself questions

I have rediscovered people and experiences from the past

that will accompany me in the future.

Those who are gone came back into my life for a while,

like ghosts, but the good kind.

In this whole story, their memory is the only thing that remains indelible.

We found out that Hans died a natural death in 2019 in Germany.

The Russian mafia did not kill him as some legends claimed.

We have not been able to contact the boy who fell ill,

but we have heard that he works as a civil guard.

Cortijo Jurado is still empty.

Why montage after montage was deleted remains a mystery.

For Juan Domíngez.

Makeup artist. Movie man. Adventurer. Friend.