Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Horror films, Film, Culture, Portugal, Festivals
Title – Gore, gimps and a potty-mouthed magpie: welcome to the Lisbon horror festival where nightmares are a dream | Horror films | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philhoad
Link – Gore, gimps and a potty-mouthed magpie: welcome to the Lisbon horror festival where nightmares are a dream | Horror films | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T15:23:22.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/11/motelx-lisbon-portugal-horror-film-festival
I f horror happens in the dark, the midnight movie showing was once the perfect way of gauging the genre’s health. But those days may be over. “When we were a film club, our first ever cinema screening was Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer in 2003, and it was full,” says Pedro Souto, co-director of Lisbon’s horror-centric MotelX festival . “But you don’t have that many people at midnight any more. I don’t know why.” He’s right: the midnight slot I attend – of the gore-bathed Indonesian kung fu flick Ikatan Darah – is only half full. Only a few appreciative chuckles when meat-cleavers plunge into craniums suggest the old midnight spirit still lives.
No need to panic, though: horror has simply embraced the light. With the genre exploding in the 2010s and 2020s, and blockbusting grosses this year for the likes of Obsession and Backrooms , MotelX is able to gorge itself on this cultural jugular. Now in its 20th edition, the festival has expanded to 11 days, with more than 170 films from 40 countries. Flashy branding – a howling gimp and the signature X, both in inflatable PVC – is dotted on around city billboards. At the opening ceremony, a gigantic birthday cake – the self-same gimp emerging from a lake of gelatine “blood” – is massacred by the punters within 20 minutes. Crowds seem abundant at most screenings, dominated by a heatwave look (dark singlets, shorts and sweaty tattoos) best described as “goth Decathlon”.
MotelX, the only purely horror festival in Portugal , grew out of a private film club catering to the country’s emerging love affair with the dark stuff in the 1990s. “Living in the suburbs, there was nothing much to do other than go to the movies,” says the festival’s other co-director, João Monteiro, sitting with Souto in the São Jorge cinema, the coffee-toned modernist palace where most screenings take place. “As well as the cinema, there were video clubs, so we spent the whole time renting horror movies like the seventh Friday the 13th. It was our initiation, like when kids in tribes become adults.”
He puts it this way because Portugal had virtually no tradition of horror cinema; it was frowned on by the Estado Novo regime, so there was no domestic output. “You could only do comedies, or films with a nationalistic take, all about Lisbon basically,” says Monteiro. Their research efforts only turned up about 25 films between 1910 and MotelX’s inaugural year in 2007 that could qualify as horror – where in neighbouring Spain, there was a mini-boom in the late Franco years. Foreign imports – Hammer films and the odd giallo – were often heavily censored.
MotelX is hoping to help fill that void, through its award for the best unproduced screenplay and by showcasing Portuguese work (the majority of which is still in the shorts category). And then there is the job of irrigating the local scene with horror cuts from around the world. This year, there’s at least one gem in the rough: Mohammad Reza Ardalan’s Poultry Farm, an ultra-grim Iranian film that Souto and Monteiro knew nothing about when they were offered it by a sales agent they had previously worked with. It turned out to be a richly characterised slow-burner about a young Iraqi-Kurd recruit working the chicken sheds at a farm, where secrets are lodged as obdurately as the rocks they prise from the ground. With its roots in Iranian social realism, it patrols the frontiers of noir and horror with great effectiveness, as it scrutinises this quasi-feudal society and the immigrants at its mercy.
US horror-comedy Drag was a fun opening film: an antidote to the sprinting-zombie movie in which an inept burglar (Lizzy Caplan) puts her back out helping herself to “rich people’s shampoo” and must be painstakingly hauled from the crime scene. With its knowing placement of excruciatingly painful obstacles, the film plays like a Wile E Coyote cartoon – until the sinister owner, John Stamos’s abstract-expressionist artist, turns up prematurely to dose us with musings on the male gaze.
The artists are the guests in Corrin Evans’s 1990s-set Corpus, in which a grungy photographer/small town dealer is invited to a party at an upstate New York mansion by his it-boy model ex-boyfriend. With her interminable hangout scenes, Evans – who was previously an intimacy coordinator for MaXXXine – is clearly besotted with the decade’s club scene. But she only moves past self-conscious hipsterdom and finds a natural rhythm during the film’s carnal second half, when sexual onlookers and objects fuse to suggest something intriguing about the nature of desire.
There were no English-language subtitles at the Cinemateca Portuguesa for 1968 Estonian witch-panic classic Libahunt (Werewolf). But no matter: the cinematography’s incantatory flair spoke for itself, and I now know the Portuguese for werewolf ( lobisomem ), if I’m ever caught here on a full moon. Such pagan dalliances are becoming played-out in modern horror, but the Basque-language portmanteau Gaua (Night) is a lush example with rich production design. Indulging the occultist audience with a full-on flying pandemonium to finish, it exists somewhere adjacent to the Robert Eggers-Ari Aster coven.
The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Laura Casabé’s impressive, febrile, supernatural coming-of-age tale, is almost as damning about Argentina as Poultry Farm is about rural Iran. Taking place in 2001, in a Buenos Aires of blackouts and standpipes, Dolores Oliverio is moping, petulant and ruthless, fending off a worldly rival for her childhood sweetheart. You could pretend The Fox, directed by Dario Russo, is trying to say something equally profound about small town Australia. But as it cheerfully admits, there is nothing whatsoever to be learned – or maybe just a little, about daft human desire – from this droll cautionary relationship fable. Jilted hunter Nick (Jai Courtney), eager to bring his cheating partner (Emily Browning) to heel, ignores the Antichrist rule: never trust the weird talking fox (voiced here by Olivia Colman). Not that Sam Neill’s potty-mouthed magpie is much better.
My only complaint is not encountering anything truly frightening (though I only catch a three-day sliver of the festival). Souto says finding such nerve-shredders is MotelX’s holy grail. But Monteiro counters that, now Portugal is growing into the macabre, such work has become tougher: “I think we become adults today. We don’t fear horror films. We have no nightmares. I’m trying to find films that can still make me feel as I did in the beginning, like when I first saw Alien. Because right now, it’s impossible.”
MotelX runs until 13 September