Jaume Balagueró, a regular at the Sitges Festival since he stood out with the short film Alicia (1994), returns to the fantasy and horror film competition, taking charge of opening this 55th edition in style with Venus, loosely inspired by the story 'Dreams from the witch's house', by the American writer H.P. Lovecraft.
The film, which will hit theaters on December 2, combines "horror, drama and emotion" in a cursed building in Madrid for which the Catalan director has had the famous Dakota building in New York as a recognizable reference, where it was set The Devil's Baby, by Roman Polanski. "The Venus building is our Dakota in Madrid, with those witches and warlocks who live inside," said the director at a press conference.
That's where Lucía ends up, played by Ester Expósito, a disco dancer who steals a bag from the nightclub and flees from the thugs who chase her. She is hurt and seeks refuge in the house of her sister, with whom she has not spoken for a long time, who in turn runs away with her young daughter from a home where strange phenomena occur. From a realistic situation, the film takes place in a setting increasingly dominated by fantasy and horror elements with some close-ups not suitable for sensitive stomachs.
Balagueró, who last year premiered the action thriller Way down with box office success, assures that when he conceived Venus, co-written with Fernando Navarro, he did not think about the genre but about the story, which has very different layers, and in which underlies a family story about sorrow and how to fight against pain, always with the dance very present. Because Lucía is a dancer, her niece wants her to teach her how to dance and the film contains that desire for the party not to stop, as launched by a protagonist turned into a bloody heroine. "The question of dance was very present from the beginning of the project" and from a dancer protagonist he saw "possibilities of turning it into something much more important, into a symbol of something else as a form of struggle and fun".
Expósito, a horror enthusiast, wanted her character to be "a very real neighborhood girl and bring a street truth." "From the script, she wasn't a normal victim of a horror movie who only suffers, but she also makes her family suffer, and she had many shadows and contradictions. She starts being selfish and then she transforms, she evolves towards luminosity" , points out the actress, popular as a result of the series 'Elite'. Expósito says that she has not based herself on any specific character to embody Lucía, although she has had Manuela Vellés very much in mind in [REC], "one of my favorite films".
Venus is the second project of The Fear collection label promoted by Álex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang after Veneciafrenia. "When Álex called me and told me that he wanted me to do a movie for him, he made it quite clear that it had to be a cosmic horror movie. I have tried to do the movie he asked me to do and I hope it will. For me it has been I enjoy working with someone who has paved the way for an entire generation that dreamed of making genre films and believed that it was not possible".
For his part, De la Iglesia has admitted that never in his life has he felt as proud of a film as Venus, "the best thing that Balagueró has done", in his opinion, to which he has tried to give the greatest freedom so that it would be himself as much as possible. "It's a dream, just what we wanted," confessed the director, who together with Bang "are discovering the immense pleasure of producing."
Among his upcoming projects is the third season of the 30 coins series, the third film of The Fear Collection, which will be titled Anathema, and many other initiatives that he hopes will be "very crazy."
