Contemporary Basque Horror: Legado en los huesos (2019) and the Value of Regional Readings within National Traumas

Abstract

Some of the most significant changes to the contemporary film industry are the new screen technologies and online streaming platforms that provide global reach to distinctly local productions. One of the key dangers in the globalized contemporary cinematic landscape is the occlusion of regional specificity in favor of the mainstream marketability of singular nation or genre-based categorizations. National frameworks, though not without their benefits, conflate heterogenous intranational regional identities and, as an extension, cinematic outputs and thus place interstitial cultural groups under peril of erasure. An oversubscription to the national as a singular concept triggers the silencing of the distinct and pluralistic regional cultures that exist within any given nation state. As Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie insist, “there can be little doubt that film studies today requires models that go well beyond conceptions of the nation as a monadic entity” (1). Transnational film studies emerged as the dominant framework of studying the flows, exchanges, and hybridities across national borders and film industries. Transnationalism approaches the interstices of cinema with a large focus on multinational co-productions and distribution in an effort to “rethink” the problematic question of “world cinema.” Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, for example, desire a more “positive definition of World Cinema,” one which “moves away from the iron grip of hierarchized binarism” in an effort to “create flexible geographies with no particular cinema occupying a central position” (10). Horror could benefit from similar conversations. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a “boom” in the critical and commercial success of mainstream “quality” horror cinema, of which Scott Meslow cites The Conjuring (2013) and Get Out (2017) as key examples. As the genre has grown in popularity globally, the dominance of mainstream, that is to say