Horror is often associated with Gothic imagery . Think of how many classic horror films have thunder storms sweeping over bleak desolate moorland and there in the middle of the frame lies a foreboding castle . But often banal everyday objects can be used for instruments of horror . Classic DOCTOR WHO was very good at this and one of my earliest memories was watching the story Terror Of The Autons where a child's doll came alive and tried to attack the Doctor's companion Jo Grant. The Pertwee era was full of this type of imagery where the banal suddenly became dangerous . It continues today and 35 years from now middle aged people will say they are instinctively frightened to look away from statues
LA CABINA follows this type of trend . Spain has a rich history of morbid cinema and perhaps this 1972 horror short is the closest the country came to having an equivalent of DOCTOR WHO . Everyone knows what a phone box is and before everyone had a mobile phone we all used a public phone box which were dotted around cities , towns and villages. No one gave them much thought and after seeing this LA CABINA you'll never look at a phone box in the same way again as the story starts off in a everyday manner and becomes more and more terrifying as an unnamed man finds himself trapped in one
Earlier tonight I saw a documentary by Mark Gatiss where he stated Spainish horror didn't confront its fascist past until Guillermo Del Toroarrived on the scene but I disagree . You don't have to read between the lines very much to realise LA CABINA is a statement on fascism . The trapped man could be a marrano converso or a leftist or any other undesirable living in a fascist regime . It's interesting too that the man's fate takes place for the most part in public and one wonders what excuses would be offered by the witnesses ? " I didn't hear anything , I didn't see anything , I didn't know what was going on " . It's also co-written by Jose Luis Garci whose later work often used the transition from Francoism to democracy as a theme
That said if anyone watched this as I did on Channel 4 sometime in the late 1980s the political subtext would be quickly forgotten by the audience but the gloomy ,doom laden ending wouldn't . I'd even forgotten what the title and I'm glad I've found out " The Spanish film about the man trapped in the telephone box " is called LA CABINA
