Álex de la Iglesia, the filmmaker who made Spanish horror laugh and mean it

Álex de la Iglesia

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 4, 1965 Bilbao, Spain
Occupation	Film Director, Screenwriter
Known for	The Day of the Beast, The Bar, Perfect Strangers
Awards	Silver Lion · Osella · 2 Goya

There is a scene in El día de la Bestia where a Basque priest methodically performs evil acts — stealing from beggars, insulting strangers, committing small cruelties — because he believes this will summon the Antichrist on Christmas Eve so he can kill it before it is born. The premise is pure horror. The execution is pure farce. Álex de la Iglesia made that film when he was twenty-nine years old, and Spanish cinema was still debating whether it was allowed to be funny about the devil.

He grew up in Bilbao drawing for underground fanzines — science fiction grotesques, satirical comic strips, figures that didn’t fit anywhere — before studying philosophy at the University of Deusto. Both the comic page and the lecture hall gave him tools that most filmmakers get from neither: a visual grammar for the absurd and a tolerance for ideas that refuse to resolve. A short film in the early nineties caught the attention of Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar, who produced his debut feature, Acción mutante, in 1993 — a sci-fi satire about a terrorist cell of disabled outcasts targeting society’s beautiful people.

That debut announced the pattern. De la Iglesia’s cinema is built on bodies in the wrong places: figuratively (characters who don’t belong in their social settings) and literally (his action sequences carry the almost cartoon lethality of a comic-strip panel). El día de la Bestia, two years later, won six Goya Awards including Best Direction and made Santiago Segura a recognizable face in Spanish comedy. La comunidad, in 2000, put Carmen Maura into a Hitchcock setup about neighbors circling a dead man’s hidden fortune — and topped the Spanish box office for the year. These were not cult films tucked into midnight screenings. They were commercial hits that happened to be strange.

The collaboration with screenwriter Jorge Guerricaechevarría, which runs through almost the entire filmography, has been one of Spanish cinema’s more productive working relationships of the last three decades — specific enough in voice to be unmistakable, flexible enough in register to move from political allegory to domestic horror to road comedy without losing coherence. Their best joint script, for Las brujas de Zugarramurdi in 2013, swept eight Goya Awards and grossed over fourteen million euros in Spain. It was the kind of commercial and critical success that resolves the question of whether genre filmmaking and mainstream recognition can coexist in the Spanish industry — at least until the next debate on the subject.

Venice settled the international question earlier. The Festival’s jury in 2010, chaired by Quentin Tarantino, gave Balada triste de trompeta — known internationally as The Last Circus — both the Silver Lion for Best Direction and the Osella for Best Screenplay. The film follows a sad clown and a violent clown fighting over a woman in the final years of Francoism, and doubles as a political allegory, a love story, and a meditation on historical wound. Critics called it ambitious. Some called it excessive. Tarantino’s jury simply gave it two prizes and moved on.

What de la Iglesia’s international reputation has not fully recovered from is the structure of genre film criticism in English: his films occupy an uncomfortable middle ground between horror (too funny, too literary) and comedy (too violent, too dark) that leaves them without a natural shelf in a market that wants to know which section they belong in. The Nerdist put it plainly: he remains largely unknown to American fans of both commercial genre films and traditional art cinema, which is surprising given his skill at bridging the divide. The bridge is the point. The refusal to choose sides is the whole argument.

The industry episode that reveals most about him is not a film. In 2009, de la Iglesia was elected president of Spain’s Academy of Cinematographic Arts — the most visible institutional position in the Spanish film industry. Less than two years later, in January 2011, he resigned via Twitter. The cause was the Ley Sinde, an internet piracy bill drafted without meaningful input from the creative community it claimed to protect, negotiated between the two main political parties as an afterthought. His statement was not diplomatic: politics, especially in polarized times, is incompatible with art. He left the institution he had been given to represent rather than attach his name to a law he didn’t believe in.

The years since have been characteristically restless. 30 Monedas, his HBO series, delivered two seasons of horror-thriller built around a Judas coin and a widening conspiracy in a small Spanish village. The network cancelled it before the third season — already written — could conclude the trilogy he had planned from the beginning. He has said publicly he will do everything possible to find another platform to finish it. Netflix, meanwhile, is in postproduction on La cuidadora, a thriller shot in Madrid in 2025 reuniting him with Carmen Maura alongside Blanca Suárez, and is developing Felicidades, a comedy adapted from an Argentine play.

The project that completes the picture arrived in early 2026: his animation debut, Ages of Madness: The Howling of the Jinn, an adult animated feature set within H.P. Lovecraft’s universe, co-produced by a Tenerife studio and a Basque outfit, with production beginning in late 2026. De la Iglesia connected the project directly to where he started: “I began creating comic books, and animation has always been there.” He is returning to the drawn image not as nostalgia but as extension — one more register for the same questions his films have been asking since 1993. What happens when the grotesque becomes funny? What happens when the joke stops?

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Tags: Spanish cinema, 30 Coins, alex de la iglesia, Balada triste de trompeta, Carmen Maura, El día de la Bestia

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