Santa Sangre

They just kind of hovered in the middle there.

The worst one that I watched was one called Santa Sangre.

It follows a guy named Phoenix, a former circus performer who escapes a mental institution and reunites with his armless cult leader mother, becoming her unwilling accomplice in a disturbing journey blurring reality and hallucinations.

Holy crap.

Well, you mentioned Arabal before, and with the kind of sexualization of children, but really more the circus setting and the background of our two cat people.

I was thinking of Jodorowsky and Santa Sangre, and it feels like shit if not, no. see no shade against, sorry, no shade against Paul Schrader, but like, can you imagine this film in the hands of somebody like a Hodorowski?

Oh my god, Mike, your words to my heart and soul, because you know I love Hodorowski.

And Hodorowski would have done something, it would have been, I think, a lot less sexual in an erotic sense.

There are, I think, three other tracks on the score here that are credited to Simon Boswell, born 1953.

He's an English film composer whose many credits include Italian horror films like Phenomena, Demons 2, Stage Fright again, but also 89's Santa Sangre, 1990's Hardware, 92's Dust Devil, 94's Shallow Grave, 95's Lord of Illusion, and let's see, Hackers from the same year, and 1999's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

as well.

So yeah, still working to this day.

That's okay.

Santa Sangre or Exorcist 3? That's pretty good.

I like that.

That's

You know, I want to go Exodus 3 because that's where my heart is.

I think that's a massively entertaining film, but...

Like most of Jarowarski's films, I don't think there's anything quite like Santa Sangre, so I'm going Santa Sangre.

I love that movie.

I'm sure you experienced that with Possession.

I watched Santa Sangre and the whole film was sexuality triggering trauma and sexuality being the way to get beyond or transmute said trauma.

And it seems like, you know, you could say that one thing that sexual self-presence is doing is that because we're not focusing on the categorization or the context, we can really go deep in the catharsis or the exorcism of these traumas and these demons.

Or we can just really go deep in just freaky sexual fixations.

Okay.

This is a production from Mexico and Italy that was released in 1989, and it is called Santa Sangre, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless mother, who is the leader of a strange religious cult, and he is forced to enact brutal murders in her name as he becomes her arms, with the tagline, "Forget everything you have ever seen." And I had Susie watch this with me back on episode 35, one of the mixtape mashups, and she hated it.

[laughs] And I think the scene with the elephant dying and the Down syndrome kids doing a bunch of cocaine while hanging out with prostitutes was just a bridge too far for her.

But

that's when we did Santa Sangre, one of the questions was, you know, were you inspired by the Grand Guignol? And it turned out he went to the Grand Guignol as a youth.

And so we have a whole, you know, five, six minutes of him talking about the Grand Guignol and the influence of the Grand Guignol on Santa Sangre.

I mean, and ultimately says it is shit and it is disgusting, but he does not deny that it was an important influence on the artistry that went into Santa Sangre.

And then we have Guignol de Leon, which is, okay, so one of the things about the Grand Guignol is that nobody really knew what Guignol was.

OK, so guignol is such a weird word and it's often mistranslated as puppet.

You know what? I'll go with not a great Halloween movie by any means, but I think it's a movie worth mentioning.

It's Santa Sangre from Alejandro.

Oh,

very popular movie.