Let's shake

I have never seen air disaster movies on a plane, not even a Land as you can , although I would have appreciated the experience. As a fan of horror movies, quarantine offers me opportunities to see them in their most empowering contexts. Sometimes the atmosphere is so suitable that it almost renders fiction unnecessary: ​​what can the impressive The Ballad of Narayama bring to an old man like me — salve, colleagues — that does not appear more starkly in the opinions of a thrifty Dutch minister? In what way does the ill-advised Donald Sutherland overcome, roaring at the outsider in The Invasion of the Ultrabodies , at the honest citizen who from his balcony accuses the daring who wanders the empty street? And I think that while the home life in the impressive The Babadook is not reassuring, worse things probably happen in the houses of the confinement ...

A few days ago Stuart Gordon died in Los Angeles. I met him personally over a decade ago at the Sitges Festival, when I was happy. He was a director obsessed with Lovecraft and signed the best film inspired by the Providence solitaire: Dagon , in which he successfully transferred the misty Innsmouth to Galicia and had the latest interpretation of the great Paco Rabal. But his greatest success came with Re-Animator , also loosely underpinned by one of Lovecraft's youthful tales, when the Great Ancients had not yet been revealed to him. There he perpetrated the iconic play of the tragicomedy gore and launched the cult of the possessed, among which I figure, actor Jeffrey Combs. I have seen it in my confinement with delight because it takes place in hospitals and morgues. But the difference is that it makes you laugh when you tremble. And its title revives, what the news broadcasts do not achieve.

You can follow EL PAÍS Opinion on Facebook, Twitter or subscribe here to the Newsletter.