Horror has traditionally thrived in the dark, with midnight screenings long serving as the ultimate proving ground for the genre’s visceral health. Yet, as contemporary cinematic landscapes shift, those twilight hours are experiencing a quiet transformation. At Lisbon’s premier horror showcase, MotelX, co-director Pedro Souto reflects on a changing demographic: "When we were a film club, our first ever cinema screening was Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer in 2003, and it was full. But you don’t have that many people at midnight any more. I don’t know why."
Souto’s observation captures a broader cultural reality. While a midnight screening of the gore-bathed Indonesian kung fu feature Ikatan Darah yields only a half-full auditorium—with sparse chuckles greeting meat-cleavers meeting craniums—the genre itself is far from waning. Rather than lurking solely in the margins, modern horror has comfortably embraced the light, riding a massive wave of cultural capital, critical reassessment, and commercial blockbuster success.
A Landmark Milestone: Two Decades of Macabre Cinema
Celebrating its landmark 20th edition, MotelX has expanded into an expansive 11-day cultural jugular, gorging on an era where horror has firmly established itself at the cinematic vanguard. The festival now programs more than 170 films originating from 40 countries, turning Lisbon into an immersive playground of the uncanny.
The city’s urban landscape is currently punctuated by flashy, provocative branding: inflatable PVC figures—including a howling gimp and the festival’s signature X—loom across billboards. At the opening ceremony, a towering birthday cake featuring a gimp emerging from a lake of gelatinous fake blood was systematically dismantled by enthusiastic attendees within twenty minutes. Queues stretch around the block at screenings, populated by a crowd donning what can only be described as a heatwave-induced "goth Decathlon" aesthetic of dark singlets, shorts, and sweat-slicked tattoos.
Historical Context: Breaking the Estado Novo Taboo
The festival’s current vibrancy stands in stark contrast to Portugal’s cinematic history. MotelX remains the country’s only dedicated horror film festival, born out of an underground private film club that catered to a burgeoning fascination with the dark arts during the 1990s.
"Living in the suburbs, there was nothing much to do other than go to the movies," recalls co-director João Monteiro inside the São Jorge cinema, a coffee-toned modernist palace that serves as the festival’s primary hub. "As well as the cinema, there were video clubs, so we spent the whole time renting horror movies like the seventh Friday the 13th. It was our initiation, like when kids in tribes become adults."
Monteiro’s tribal metaphor is historically precise. Portugal possessed virtually no domestic tradition of horror cinema for the better part of the 20th century. Under the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, the genre was actively suppressed and frowned upon. Filmmakers were strictly limited to producing comedies or overtly nationalistic features centered on Lisbon. Archival research conducted by the festival founders unearthed a mere 25 domestic films between 1910 and MotelX’s inaugural year in 2007 that could loosely qualify as horror. Meanwhile, neighboring Spain experienced a notable horror mini-boom during the late Franco years, and foreign imports—such as Hammer Horror productions and Italian giallo classics—faced heavy state censorship.
MotelX was explicitly engineered to heal this historical void. Beyond its international curation, the festival actively nurtures domestic talent through dedicated short-film showcases and a prominent award for the best unproduced screenplay, aiming to inject native macabre storytelling back into the Portuguese cultural bloodstream.
International Highlights: From Iranian Realism to Basque Coven Lore
The festival’s global scope remains its most potent curatorial weapon, bridging stark geopolitical realities with genre conventions. A standout international discovery at this year’s edition is Mohammad Reza Ardalan’s Poultry Farm, an uncompromisingly bleak Iranian feature that Souto and Monteiro acquired through an existing sales agent network.
Rooted deeply in the traditions of Iranian social realism, Poultry Farm unfolds as a richly characterized, slow-burning narrative. It follows a young Iraqi-Kurd recruit working the chicken sheds of a rural enterprise, where local secrets are buried as deep and stubbornly as the stones workers prise from the ground. The film successfully patrols the uneasy frontiers of neo-noir and psychological horror, offering a biting critique of a quasi-feudal society and the migrant laborers trapped within its mechanisms.
In stark contrast, the festival’s opening night featured the US horror-comedy Drag, serving as a playful antidote to the ubiquitous sprinting-zombie trope. Directed with tongue-in-cheek precision, the film stars Lizzy Caplan as an inept burglar who injures her back attempting to steal luxury hair products, requiring a painstaking extraction from the crime scene. Structured around increasingly agonizing physical obstacles—functioning much like a live-action Wile E. Coyote cartoon—the narrative takes a sharp, sinister turn with the introduction of John Stamos as an abstract-expressionist homeowner offering unsolicited musings on the male gaze.
Explorations of the male gaze and transactional intimacy also permeate Corrin Evans’s Corpus, set against the backdrop of 1990s New York. Evans, an intimacy coordinator on MaXXXine, directs a grungy photographer and small-town dealer invited to an upstate mansion by his former partner, an elite fashion model. While the film’s meandering hangout sequences occasionally lean into self-conscious hipsterdom, it finds a genuine, hypnotic rhythm in its carnal second half, examining how sexual observers and objects fuse to comment on the nature of desire.
Pagan rituals and historical folk-horror maintained a strong presence across European retrospectives. At the Cinemateca Portuguesa, a screening of the 1968 Estonian witch-panic classic Libahunt (Werewolf) proceeded without English-language subtitles. Yet, the cinematography’s incantatory visual language transcended language barriers, prompting attendees to joke about mastering the Portuguese word for werewolf (lobisomem) in the event of a full moon.
Building upon folkloric traditions, the Basque-language portmanteau feature Gaua (Night) offered a lush, visually opulent display of witchcraft and the occult. Boasting rich production design that culminates in a chaotic, airborne pandemonium, Gaua sits comfortably alongside the contemporary folk-horror movements pioneered by filmmakers like Robert Eggers and Ari Aster.
Socially critical horror also found a powerful voice in Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake. Set during the volatile backdrop of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis—characterized by rolling blackouts and public water standpipes—the supernatural coming-of-age narrative follows a ruthless, petulant teenager competing against a worldly rival for her childhood sweetheart, serving as a scathing allegory for societal decay.
Meanwhile, Dario Russo’s The Fox offered audiences a darkly droll cautionary tale set in small-town Australia. The narrative follows a jilted hunter, played by Jai Courtney, who attempts to bring his unfaithful partner (Emily Browning) to heel, only to violate the foundational rule of horror: never trust a talking animal. Featuring a cynical fox voiced by Olivia Colman—and a potty-mouthed magpie voiced by Sam Neill—the film leans cheerfully into absurd human desires without offering moral redemption.
The Evolution of Fear: Have We Grown Immune to Terror?
Despite the breadth and high production values of the 170-plus films on display, a lingering question remains among the festival’s directors: where are the truly nerve-shredding cinematic experiences?
Souto admits that tracking down films capable of generating genuine, primal terror remains MotelX’s ultimate holy grail. Monteiro, however, offers a philosophical counterpoint, suggesting that modern audiences—much like Portugal itself—have matured past simple frights.
"I think we become adults today," Monteiro reflects. "We don’t fear horror films. We have no nightmares. I’m trying to find films that can still make me feel as I did in the beginning, like when I first saw Alien. Because right now, it’s impossible."
As MotelX marks two decades of championing the genre, its evolution mirrors the trajectory of modern horror itself: shifting from the illicit, shadowy midnight corners of illicit film clubs into the broad, analytical light of international cinema.
