Pere Portabella's Umbracle and the Francoist crusade narrative

By tracking a tenuous narrative that threads its way through the otherwise radically fragmented and open text of Pere Portabella's Umbracle (1972), this essay examines how the film undermines the codes of the invasion narrative model that characterizes the classical horror film. These codes are analogous to the narrative with which Francoism often justified itself, by generating fear of an other, in order to maintain a permanent state of exception. Umbracle's intervention prompts the following questions: Does a monstrous other threaten the social body? If not, could the regime itself be a threat? In this "untraining" of a spectator well-trained in generic expectations lies the political dimension of Umbracle I discuss. The tenuous narrative I examine functions in the body of Portabella's work as a hinge between his earlier, more avant-garde films and the next two films he made, El sopar (1974) and Informe general (1976), whose politics are far more direct in their opposition to the Franco regime.