A HAUNTED HOUSE
With the support of LAV — Laboratory of Contemporary Audiovisual Creation and Practice
Approach
A Haunted House was a collective action I initiated at LAV in Madrid, as part of an exploration into the intersections between experimental cinema and horror cinema. Through a performative lecture and a collective activation of the space, we proposed a situated reflection on how these two cinematic territories have historically contaminated each other.Performative lecture
The session began with a curated screening of audiovisual fragments that illustrated this two-way dynamic: on the one hand, how horror cinema has incorporated experimental cinema strategies to build atmospheres of strangeness and unease; on the other, how many experimental works have been perceived as “creepy” or “disturbing” due to the abject materiality of their forms. Grain, glitch, or image deterioration are understood here as monstrous elements—residues of the device that interrupt and distort the reading of the image, opposing the obsession with cleanliness and sharpness that characterizes contemporary audiovisual production.The screening included works by filmmakers such as Takashi Ito, Ana Mendieta, and Ben Rivers, as well as performative and musical records by artists like Nina Hagen or Candela Capitán, and theoretical framework with texts by Mark Fisher, Julia Kristeva, and Eugenio Trías. We also watched scenes from cult films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), and cases where the cinematic device itself becomes a monstrous figure: in The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), the VHS tape operates as a vessel of evil and a vector of contagion; in Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012), the Super 8 projector becomes the channel of a demonic curse with an inevitable tragic end. In both films, the uncanny presence of obsolete analog devices becomes the trigger of the horrific.