This time Netflix could not avoid the spoiler. Nor did he know how to stop the theories and assumptions that, well under way, were forged on social networks among the most fanatical. But it is the toll that is paid when a master of horror cinema of the stature of Paco Plaza goes to the distributor to direct his next film. A visit to the set and everything is under suspicion. And no, it’s not the Vallecas of the 90s, but it’s hot. This time, it is in a natural area in Valencia, close to Gandía but where you can’t even see the sea, between two mountains is the monastery of Cotalba and “silence!”
It is set in a post-war Spain, where the real monastery turns into a convent in fiction and the monks into nuns. ‘Sister Death’ is the new film by the director of ‘[REC]’, ‘Veronica’ or ‘Who kills with iron’ and spoiler: no, it’s not another horror story of nuns, even the title of the film gives clues. ‘Sister Death’ is the nickname of one of Veronica’s characters. The director implies that this new fiction is a prequel, which “will help us better understand the things that happened there” and recovers that universe through “some characters and there will be several surprises that connect both films.”
And here for now. The story begins with Narcisa, played by the actress Aria Bedmar, a young novice who has come to become a teacher in a convent, which has ceased to be a convent because the nuns transform it into a school for orphan girls. Her supernatural powers lead her to perceive secrets surrounding this convent.
The team has continued to work despite the visits, even despite the weddings and events hosted by the monastery of
Saint Jerome of Cotalba, which are not few. Even the guides have become accustomed to giving the explanation of a monument declared a Site of Cultural Interest (BIC) between the “cut” and the “action” after almost two months of filming. Finding the location for the film’s art and production teams wasn’t easy, but it fit for Plaza, who later figured it out; I had never recorded in his land before.
Among orange trees, watered by the sun and with a Mediterranean aroma, it is the place that Paco Plaza was looking for, one in which a fiction film could seem like a true story. «Our aesthetic commitment was to try to avoid the images that we all have in our heads of horror movies in a convent. We wanted to give it a very own and very local identity, because that is what later becomes universal, I think that is what seduces, when the cinema opens a window to the world, and does not force reality, it is a place that we love, that in some way gives the film a personality”, says the director.
At the entrance to the monastery there is a catering service and as you move towards the cloister the corridors are filled with cables, extension cords, spotlights, panels… The construction that housed the austere monks now seems to welcome another type of congregation with a different habit: they dress in black but they could also practice the vow of silence. Nothing is heard. The producer, Enrique López Lavinge, and the production director, Alberto Álvarez, act as guides on the route through the rooms in which it has been recorded and in which the plot takes place.
What is not seen and fear in broad daylight
The nuns created by Paco Plaza for ‘Hermana Muerte’ make sweets. The kitchen is an important space in fiction. They have finished recording all the scenes that take place there, but the team’s passage through each room leaves a trace. There were three interventions in the Cotalba monastery, which is now owned by the Trenor family, but the guide of this space of cultural interest likes to joke that the fourth intervention was that of the film crew.
The setting made by the art director, Laia Ateca, is barely noticeable, it even seems to be just another part of the building. “Last week a lady on one of the visits told me that the tiles on the kitchen wall were beautiful and she asked me what time they were from, I hardly knew what to say because they put them,” says the guide.
The kitchen wall is covered with these blue tiles, which end at eye level. Among them, the director leaves his own nod to the viewer, leaving a dedication to music and the horror genre. Almost everything is measured in figuration. The work of the art team has left nothing to the imagination and takes care of every millimeter. His intention is to hit the button of the viewer’s collective memory.
«Everything seems familiar, or we have seen it in photos of our grandparents and our parents or we associate it with childhood, it is very recognizable, it is part of the history that we have been told, of the post-war period and nobody could doubt it because the obsession It has been to create fear from what we all know, from things that are close by and prevent spaces from seeming to come from other places, from other countries that are far away from us, but to make it real”, explains producer Enrique López Lavinge.
There is a lot of light coming through the small windows and the walls are painted white. Plague epidemics are to blame, with each of them the walls were covered with lime. But neither the light nor the white have been a problem for the filming of ‘Sister Death’ because the director was looking for the most real fear, the one that is in what cannot be seen in broad daylight.
«It is a bet of horror cinema that does not shy away from daylight or whitewashing, it is a challenge for the director of photography and also for the viewer himself, because it is not what you initially expect from a scary movie and that instead of being an inconvenience, it becomes an incentive”, recognizes Paco Plaza.
A picture of the movie. /
White crochet bedspreads cover the small beds, the crosses on the wall above the headboards, and on the nightstand a small brush, a tin box, and a bible. The small cells of the monks of Cotalba are transformed into rooms for the girls of the school in the fiction and in that of Sor Narciso, the protagonist, even the cracks in the wall have been used.
It was between these corridors that some of the most important sequences were shot due to their spectacular nature. They report it in the team. The most intense scenes of the film emerged from those two weeks of confinement in the cramped rooms. «There is a feeling of living something that only real spaces give you, that exist, it is something that is difficult to achieve with sets. We have spent six weeks in the rain, and this feeling was very powerful. It is really being a complicated and intense shoot, “acknowledges the art director, Laia Ateca.
White is still latent in the wardrobe and flees from the idea of the nuns’ black uniform. The bet is all on white. «It is something that all departments have had to do, because this film opts for white, for light, and from there we have had to invent the habits of our nuns, which has a real historical basis from the 50s but which also has a part of fantasy and imagination of some nuns that don’t exist”, explains the winner of a Goya for the costumes of ‘Las Leyes de la Frontera’, Vinyet Escobar. The costumes are part of the characterization and are 90% made by Escobar’s team, something that does not happen often, according to her comments. “You don’t always have the freedom to design whatever you want, and there’s no limit here.”
Poltergeist on set
Two weeks locked up in those rooms and it is there, in those corridors that connect the cells of the nuns, where the most intense sequences were recorded, especially those starring Sor Narcisa. Taking into account that it is the shooting of a scary movie, the team could have been suggested, but what has been happening in one of the rooms is something that the organization of the Cotalba monastery keeps secret and does not usually reveal under any circumstances to visits. “It is that with this some television program mounts three seasons”, jokes the guide.
What they say is that there was a poltergeist, but that the team itself could have altered it. In one of the big heavy doors of a room at the end of the hall was the problem. «I am a skeptical person, but it is true that there is a door that we close before leaving and the next morning when you arrive it is open, we had not told anyone from the filming team about this but when they began to ask us we had to admit it» says the guide.
The producer acknowledges that none of the filming staff knew anything, but they all asked for that door. «It was not an anecdote, it is that on the fifth day the same thing continued to happen, nobody dared to enter that room. We have removed the door and used it for another space, it may be that we have altered this phenomenon, “says Lavigne. And the guide recognizes that this is the only inexplicable thing that happens in the monastery.
On the set of the movie ‘Sister Death’. /
The nuns and Paco Plaza
The story of ‘Hermana Muerte’ arises from a secondary character in ‘Verónica’ because Paco Plaza thought that “it had a movie in itself”. That’s where it all started, in a mysterious character about whom little is known: a blind nun, with wounds on her face who at one point explains to one of the girls that it was she herself who was injured.
“If I had been that girl, I would have asked her why,” says Plaza. And that’s exactly where her new movie comes from. Her fascination with nuns ensures that she comes from afar. “I have always liked them”, she explains that it is the uniform that generates the greatest intrigue for her to meet the person underneath. «It seems that nuns were born and fifty years old, but there is a person behind, a woman who has a life, and that is reflected in one of the protagonists because the nuns’ uniforms have something of annulment of individuality that I like very much. , nullify yourself in the service of something else. Each uniform carries its servitude”, explains the director.
For him they are an enigma and have something mysterious and at the same time true. Something that also happened in ‘Verónica’ is the mix between the real and the fantastic. In this film it is allowed to play with that intrigue of camouflaging a fictional story framed by a location that exudes truth from every corner. The director admits that despite the complexity of the shoot, the challenge has motivated him even more. And again spoiler: “It’s all fiction.”
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