Santa Sangre (1989) • 30 Years Later

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless mother (the leader of a religious cult), and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name as he becomes “her arms”…

Santa Sangre is a volatile cocktail of lurid imagery and cruelly twisted characters. It’s so intensely harrowing at times that it borders on farce and puts one into an uncomfortable position, somewhere between a gasp of horror and nervous guffaw.

30 years on and it’s still a refreshingly unusual horror film, crammed with images that would be sickening if it weren’t for their raw beauty. It’s a shining example of just what can be achieved by a passionate filmmaker working outside of the Hollywood system. It still feels dangerous and has a habit of prodding the tender spots of one’s psyche. It feels like Grand Guignol, burlesque style; a deranged circus with a defrocked priest or maybe a disgruntled psychologist as its ringmaster. No surprise there then, as it springs from the mind of Mexico’s maestro of the seductively macabre, Alejandro Jodorowsky — who, among many things…