La Noche
De Los Cerdos

When I was a child, I learned to play with fire. My grandmother taught me. She used fire to fix things. To shape what otherwise would have been discarded. To rid herself of the past. And I watched her and followed her nighttime fires. I got close to the beauty of the flame and understood the fragility of the skin. Blisters on the palm of the hand, pain and ointments. But I would come back. I wanted to watch that pure desire devour dry branches and plastic toys. It was the wildest animal putting on a private show for me.

Then rainy periods would come, and all I had was my imagination and an old television. Te-Le-Vi-Sion. A box with smiling people giving prizes to strangers chosen through mysterious devices. Boredom. But every day, the late night would arrive, and in that silent period , that box of noise sometimes brought something resembling fire. Density. Screams. Strangeness. Fear. Intense shades of red. Adrenaline.

The first horror movie I watched was my first rush. The one you spend the rest of your life trying to repeat. Sometimes you succeed, but in general, what you end up buying are almost always "benzos" in dirty packages, manufactured in rooms filled with colorful toys and occupied by adults who have never smelled chaos. Adults bonsaized with muzzled creativity, sinking into pools of leukemic courage. I truly despise what horror has become. A ridiculous self-reference, incapable of leaping from the burning building of dread for anything that might sound offensive or unpleasant. The obsession with responsibility has the collateral effect of creative suffocation. Do not dare, in order to avoid the risk of being judged.

Perhaps that's why "La Noche De Los Cerdos," by Ángel Jesús Hurtado, caught my attention. A low-budget Colombian short film, screamed almost to hysteria, with a simple script, frenetic editing, real pieces of pig, male frontal nudity, creative art direction, and a dedicated team. Simple, raw, brutal, and efficient. A work that, although coming from various references, has real consistency by being nothing but itself. Made with the passion of those who do it because they enjoy it, "La Noche De Los Cerdos" dares to be experimental, drawing freshness from it and distancing itself from the monotony of the flat and unexciting photography that inundates ninety percent of conventional horror.

Is it perfect? No. It has in its final sequence a soundtrack that extends for too long without variations, making it tiresome, and it could easily be corrected by shortening the sequence or creating greater audio variations. Simple. Moreover, it's a film worth attention for its fidelity to the freedom that an independent short film should have, and for its true artistic audacity, dangerously lacking in recent years.