From 1939 until 1975 Spain existed under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, general of the Nationalist forces during the preceding Spanish Civil War. For close to four decades Spanish citizens lived under an oppressive, authoritarian regime that governed in cooperation with the National Catholic Church to promote and enforce a conservative Roman Catholic society and to censor or suppress anything deemed transgressive and deviant.
Absolute state control extended into artistic endeavors such as film production and release. However, by the early 1970s an aging ruling system and Franco’s waning health emboldened voices and action of dissent and resistance, including filmmakers who were able to start pushing against the limitations of state censors, at least in cuts of films produced in Spain for release in foreign markets (national cuts for release in Spain remained heavily censored.)
Upon Franco’s death in 1975 the floodgates of suppressed societal emotion opened, relaxing censorship more as the nation tried to find political footing in a post-Franco reality. Depictions of violence and sex in films increased, both for their own transgressive sake under new freedoms and to use for exploration/reckoning with atrocities going back to the Spanish Civil War and past, events that were all but ‘erased’ from mention under the fascist state.
By 1977 in this Transition period, the political powers in control decide to create an “S” classification rating system to label films being released that might offend public sensibilities. After decades of suppression, most of the Spanish public seemed to crave all the “S” classified films they could get. A label meant to be stigma quickly became a badge of honor and guaranteed commercial success whether simple titillation or provocative artistic works. Eroticism and horror flourished in particular. Plots could now include criticism of Catholicism or the State, painful historical memories avoided could now be confronted. Characters outside ‘traditional’ family structure or heterosexuality could be included.
The cinematic freedom possible even under the “S” Classification system ended five years later in 1982 when the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party was democratically elected to govern Spain and pioneering female scriptwriter/director Pilar Miró became appointed the General Director of Cinema, with full power to decide what movies could be made and released in Spain through State support. The boom of the transition years vanished, and Spanish films annually released dropped at least ten-fold. Moreover, Miró viewed the extremities within the transgressive degenerate “S” films as a cultural embarrassment and began to prioritize ‘serious artistic’ film. Really this amounts more so to a dislike of genre, and an opinion that only conventional stories rooted in realism are worthy.
As the 1980s continued and on into the 1990s and beyond, genre film fans (particularly of horror or exploitation) through the world discovered things like the giallo and horror of Italy, but the similar (perhaps even more unhinged) Spanish cinema of the “S” Classification system received less notice. In Spain it became more embarrassment than celebration, and many of the pioneering, amazing filmmakers who thrived during the period now couldn’t find work.
But things come back around. Alberto Sedano’s excellent 2024 documentary Exorcismo: The Transgressive Legacy of Clasificada “S” covers the complex background history I attempted to summarize above while discussing the interplay between politics, culture, and film-making during each period (particularly those 1977 – 1982 years) and exploration of specific films and the people involved in producing them. The historical details are narrated by Iggy Pop over stock footage of relevant events and personages. Between these historical background foundations, interviews with academics, living film-makers who worked during this period in Spain, and present-day screenwriters/directors offer their perspectives over film clips.
The documentary does a good job in its overall structure and focus of films, briefly looking at what cinema looked like at the height of fascist control in the Franco regime, into the period of loosening censorship that highlights differences between national and international cuts of horror movies that were starting to be made. The majority of the runtime then focuses on those five years producing the “S” Classification films, before concluding with that last ones in that spirit as the Miró period began and a new type of film became prominent.
Despite the two-hour runtime for the documentary, it never drags. And I wish that they had spent more time exploring the decades prior to Franco’s declining health and waning censorship of the state, particularly in terms of what ways artists still managed to resist the fascist state or whatever influence there may have been (or not) from expat filmmakers who simply left Spain to work elsewhere (like Jess Franco). Similarly I wish more time would have been spent connecting the end of the era to what came next under Miró, particularly in how Almodóvar fits in with his early films and career surviving the transition between Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) and Labyrinth of Passion (1982) and Dark Habits (1983) following.
Jesús (Jess) Franco does get attention for when he returns to Spain after Franco’s death to work within the “S” Classification system. Of all directors featured, he’s probably the most recognizable name because of his film production beyond that era in Spain. Other big names such as José Ramón Larraz, Eloy de la Iglesia, and León Klimovsky are noted for their prolific success in the era and their artistic brilliance in this crazy period of glorious depravity and cultural exorcism.
And that is really the over-riding theme of the documentary, a view raised by many of the film-makers and academics. The degenerate art of this era was a transgressive celebration of cultural liberation. Feelings long collectively suppressed and kept hidden were now free to be explored, spoken of, shown. The eroticism and the violence and the anger and the frustration had to be gotten out and this was a safe (and ultimately entertaining and financially lucrative) way to do exactly that: exorcise those demons of fascist oppression.
The academic commentators in the documentary also take time to explore the sexual depictions and dynamics of the “S” Classification era. As happened elsewhere, filmmakers discovered that sex sells, particularly anything that fulfilled the heterosexual male appetite such as steamy lesbian scenes. There are interesting perspectives when discussing the films that fall into this category, in how they often blur lines between what is exploitatively sexist or what is feminist. What role does authorial intent play compared to readings that viewers might make? As these films now could portray women stepping away from the traditional Catholic family-driven roles of prior decades, they now often featured independent female agency and power, yet also through a male perspective. How much was celebration of the greater freedom women now had versus presentations of the fears (even if unconscious) of what that meant?
These themes and gray areas are common to transgressive films of many eras and nations, but the “S” Classification films represent an extreme of the variation of what could be produced and viewed. Likewise there was greater opportunity to show other depictions blatantly and even graphically, such as male homosexuality and trans-sexual actors.
With all the seriousness of the documentary, there is one part I found amusing: the fun the filmmakers had during these five years in coming up with more and more outrageous movie titles that would bring crowds in to see a film. Titles like Swedish Bisexual Needs Stallion. Some of them reminded me of a Chuck Tingle title and I realized that those years would have been prime years for some Tinglers and cinematic adaptations.
The Exorcismo documentary can be viewed on its own of course, but it also the introductory film in Severin’s recent 10-disc boxset Exorcismo: Defying a Dictator & Raising Hell in Post-Franco Spain. In addition to the documentary the collection has eighteen film features, many of which are touched upon in Sedano’s film. It also includes a book with lots of photographs and essays related to the topic, in a vein similar to Severin’s successful All the Haunts Be Ours boxsets.
Watching Exorcismo definitely makes one ready to dive into Severin’s set and go to explore beyond. But even for someone not strongly into the genre, the documentary represents a very important historical perspective on a topic of relevance to a lot of the world today.
