Urban Avatars of \"El Maligno\": Sacredness in Alex de la Iglesia\'s \'El día de la Bestia\' and Manuel Martín Cuenca\'s \'Caníbal\'\"

CHAPTER 7

Urban Avatars of “El Maligno”: Sacredness in Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia and Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Caníbal Antonio Cordoba At first sight, El día de la bestia (The Day of the Beast) (1995) and Caníbal (Cannibal) (2013) seem to have little in common, besides the fact that both films revolve around the figure of the Devil, literally in the former, figuratively in the latter. To understand how different these two films are, one only needs to look at the production process and public reception, the general feel of each movie, and the historical context in which they were written and shot. El día de la bestia was produced by one of Spain’s most prominent producers, Andrés Vicente Gómez, who had just signed an agreement with the media conglomerate Sogetel (PRISA). After a carefully orchestrated media campaign, in which Álex de la Iglesia got coverage in the biggest Spanish newspapers and was allowed to shape the reception of his film before it was released, it immediately gained critical and commercial success. De la Iglesia’s movie is a fast-paced quest fueled by the urgency of an impending apocalypse that will erase the heterogeneous cityscape of Madrid that the film very calculatedly displays. The climactic sequence in the KIO Towers highlights the deep connections

A. Cordoba () Manhattan College, New York, NY, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 A. Cordoba, D. García-Donoso (eds.), The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain, Hispanic Urban Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60020-2_7

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