Morbido Fest to Promote Latin Horror With Sanfic, Starting With Chilean Noir Thriller ARACNE

Mexican horror festival Morbido and Chile’s Santiago Intl. Film Festival (Sanfic) have agreed on a long-term collaboration intended to strengthen the genre film industry in Chile and across Latin America.

 

This partnership will see Morbido representatives attend the Sanfic industry section each year to aid in the promotion of horror projects and advise those projects on their pitch processes, production design and budgets.

 

Beyond insight, each year Morbido will choose from a non-specific number of projects participating in the Sanfic Industria pitches to back to the tune of 30% of the film’s proposed final budget. The sponsorship also assures the project a commercial premiere in Mexico, representation for international sales and programming on pay TV across Latin America through the Morbido TV network. Variety

“Aracne” turns on Beatriz, a young journalist at a small Santiago newspaper in the ‘40s where the bosses have little respect for her work. When she’s not relegated to covering beauty pageants and fashion stories, she takes care of her catatonic mother.

 

With little to do in her free time, Beatriz begins investigating the corruption in Santiago’s underbelly. While working the case from home, she notices the erratic behavior of her neighbor who brings home young men nightly that never seem to leave. A foreign night club singer with the voice and allure of a siren, Cristina works for a boss as caustic as Beatriz’s own at the Ovid nightclub, coincidentally an epicenter of activity in Beatriz’s investigation.

 

Unbeknownst to Beatriz however, Cristina is a literal spider-woman, stalking the underground web of Santiago night clubs and organized criminal violence where she can hunt with impunity for survival, for pleasure and eventually for revenge. Things get particularly tense when Cristina and Beatriz both set their eyes on the same man, but with different motives. 

“’Aracne’ seemed a complete project to me with very particular aesthetic characteristics that I find personally attractive,” said Guisa. “It’s a very feminine, sensual and personal film from Florence. It has all of the characteristics a first genre film needs to position the director as an important new voice.” Variety

In the case of “Aracne,” not only is the project being led by two women, but features two strong female leads, one an antagonist that forgoes traditional horror tropes of violent hungry men hunting down helpless women, preferring a supernatural female monster which feasts on young, virile men for sustenance and sport. Variety