What you see is a series of three redraws I call "Las Marías" (The Maries), which are fanarts I've made through the years of a very special piece of media for me. In this entry I will be explaining the reasons behind these illustrations and a love letter / summary to the film that inspired them.
The beggining of the loophole
I am a film bro at heart so I love many movies, but for the last 3 years or so a single movie has ocuppied the first place on my favorite movie list, for those who don't know yet (which would be rare because I never stop yapping about this film) it is "La Casa Lobo", a Chilean stopmotion horror film by Joaquín Cociña and Cristobal León.
You see, my obsession started with Supereyepatch Wolf's video essay called "Why you should watch disturbing horror movies" since he was one of my favorite youtubers at the time and I still think that specific video is a masterpiece. There he listed several films that he recommended and he briefly mentioned a movie that ressembled a fairy-tale-like nightmare; that sole description sold me to it, and the visuals were captivating aswell, I had never in my life seen stopmotion that looked like that.
I mean, just look at the trailer:
It immediatly became this huge obsession where I had to watch this movie no matter what, I researched through websites and more videos only to find out the movie was currently only in Chilean and German cinematheques, so of course I would resort to my last option... (digital swashbuckling if you know what I mean) and fortunately a kind soul uploaded it on a site I am familiar with.
I started watchinng.
Man, I fell in love.
It was the most horryifing, cathartic and depressing experience I've ever had in years, my eyes were glued to the screen and every sentence said in that broken spanish with german accent was the cherry on top of the line delivery, every single word spoken shattered my heart in a million pieces and molded it as if it was one of the materials of the film. The visuals were grotesque, animal even, but with a weird beauty and wonder that can be comparable to that of a rotting corpse. I was in awe, and even though I didn't cry a single tear my soul suddendly felt this unbearable weight that robbed me from my sleep and from normal thinking alltogether for a couple of weeks.
I started writing, writing nonstop about that feeling; on how I was dragged to the floor with my eyes on the sky thanks to La Casa Lobo, my passion was reaching a religious level and the emotional vent then became into a proper investigation of the real place and event the movie was based in only to step onto an even bigger horror.
Colonia Dignidad, Villa Baviera.
Content Warning: From this point onwards there will be discussions of child SA and exploitation, religious trauma, Pinochet's dictatorship, brief mentions of nazism and PTSD. Do not keep reading if any of those topics are triggering to you.
Let's travel to 60s Chile, where a group of german immigrants arrive to escape the nazi prosecution after WW2. One of the faces of said group was Paul Schäfer, a lutheran preacher who was adored by his people and presented himself as the next prophet who would spread God's word; this man came along with an army of educators with a mission in common: Bring the people closer to god.
What his followers weren't fully aware of was Schäfer's previous history of pedophilia and SA back in germany, italy and the middle east, where he had lived for short periods of time before being exposed and exiled. Without a place to go, Schäfer finds shelter in Chile, where he has acquaintances and allies such as militar dictator Augusto Pinochet that welcome him with open arms.
Pinochet's goverment not only recieves Schäfer and his followers, it also encourages them to settle in the farm land known as "El Lavadero" to create a "hopeful" community for the affected youth during the military regime. In consequence 300 german adults and children arrive to the place to build the "Benevolent and educational Society Dignidad", a project that suddendly became as popular as Schäfer's name.
Children from the age 11 to 14 years old were the main labor force who built the entire structure, that consisted of a set of rooms, a hospital and a school, and as time passed by many more people arrived thanks to the edification of Berlin's wall. Once the project was finished parents were convinced to leave their children to Schäfer's care so they could recieve food, shelter and a proper education based on traditional family values, loyalty and closeness to God. Of course none of this was real, and was just the start of one of the cruelest cults of the past century.
Schäfer would force the children to work on construction for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, all of this with no compensation. They were isolated culturally and phisically, since the Colonia didn't allow anyone to enter nor leave and the kids weren't taught to speak spanish so they weren't able to communicate with the surrounding natives. Schäfer would also SA of the children disguising it as a "sacred duty" that they had to carry upon. Their education was extremely censored, the children weren't allowed to learn about science and the interaction between opposite genders was severly prohibited. Many of the victims also described the Colonia's system as if it was an isolated country with its own laws and hierarchies, where only the hardest working and the most obedient would get access to food and water.
After years of living in this circumstances some of the older kids started trying to escape, although most of these attempts ended up failing, since Schäfer would hunt them with tracking dogs and return them to the Colonia. When authorities started raising an eyebrow at the number of kids attempting to escape, Schäfer would simply blame their rebel nature and the investigations would stop immediatly.
Fortunately, after what seemed like a neverending hell, one of the kids managed to escape and bring the media's attention to what was happening inside those walls and Shäfer was taken to trial shortly after. However Schäfer's influence managed to only get him five years of prision and after finishing his sentence he fled to Frankfurt where he would count on a set of people to guard him and protect him from possible attacks.
Now onto the movie.
If you read all of the previous infodump first of all, thank you :-D, second of all you may wonder why did you had to read allat to understand my drawings and the movie itself, well I shall explain it now.
La Casa Lobo (also known as The Wolf House) is a psychological horror film by Diluvio, a chilean stopmotion studio created by Crsitobal León and Joaquí Cociña, plastic artist who focus on Latinamerican political horror and dreamlike fairytale narrative.
It tells the story of María, a fictional girl that represents one of the victims of Colonia Dignidad, who runs away and hides from the wolf (an allegory for Schäfer) in an abandoned house deep in the woods; to Marías surprise she isn't alone, as she finds two small pigs living there too. María decides to take care of the pigs as if they were her own children in a way of coping with the loneliness, all of this while she slowly descends into a psychotic breakdown induced by the trauma she has lived during her time in the Colonia and a series of events that make her stay the more difficult.
The movie's use of stopmotion is one that I've never seen previously, as it shows materials such as wallpaint, sculptures, clay, charcoal and many more being transformed to create each scene. It's a whole transformative process that happens in a slow burn fashion and it lets you appreciate the amount of work that has gone into it. The beggining of this innovative concept began after a set of rules the directors created for the movie:
1. The paint is used on camera 2. There are no puppets 3. Everything can be transformed like a sculpture 4. It never fades into black 5. It's a sequence shot 6. The movie "tries" to be normal 7. Color is symbolic 8. The camera remains the same between frames 9. María is beautiful 10. It's a workshop, not a set
While also keeping a very clear goal in its creation: allude to the world of nightmares, decadence and human intimacy as they had done with the studio's first animated project called "Luis, Lucía y el Lobo" (Louis, Lucy and the Wolf).
Trauma and its display it's a key aspect to Diluvio's stories, and I could dare to say it's a character of its own as it disguises itself through the soundscape, the key props of each story and the mediums used themselves. That's why I integrated some of them on my fanarts. If you look at my most recent work "La María Tragedia" you will see how María is being suffocated by the falling honey while she's slowly laying on a house-shaped coffin surrounded by trees and a dead pig on the back. A candle and a plate are glued onto the honey while a giant eye appears from it, all of these elements allude to specific dialogues and scenes that I would like to explain but I don't wanna spoil the movie, so I just pointed them out so you can draw your own conclusions after comparing the fanart with the movie.
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