by Jeremy Webster

 Spanish horror film director Nacho Cerda spent the 90′s crafting a trilogy of half-hour horror shorts that, despite their being rarely seen on North American shores, marked his as a name worth watching in the future. The latter two films of that trilogy – the offensively nasty Aftermath and the beautiful, bittersweet Genesis – immediately garnered Cerda with a cult following, despite the fact that the absolute grotesqueness of Aftermath and the stigma of having made it would dog the director for years, making it difficult for him to finally get a full feature-length film project off the ground. That moment finally arrived with The Abandoned, and the result was well worth the wait.

At first glance, The Abandoned looks to be the the sort of haunted house flick we’ve seen on a relatively constant basis over the last few years – a woman who’d never known her birth parents and had spent her childhood shuffled from one foster family to another through various countries travels to Russia upon getting the news that she’s inherited a farmhouse that had belonged to her birth parents. She arrives to discover that the place is haunted by a sinister intelligent force. None of this is a surprise in the slightest. But there’s far more to this film than that simple surface synopsis, and upon viewing it’s obvious that the audience is in for a decidedly different film from the standard.

Gone are the pretty twentysomethings that populate current ghost films like maggots in rotting meat. Here our protagonist is a 40-ish woman, unglamorized, who refreshingly looks her age. The few Russian characters she encounters in the film are furtive, and seemingly untrustworthy, including a long-lost brother who arrived at the farmhouse several days earlier and has already found himself trying to deal with the horrors that exist not just in the farmhouse but in the land itself. There are no softly clanking chains, no pale, black-haired phantoms fiddling about at the edge of the screen. We discover very quickly that the force haunting the farm and surrounding lands is very active and very aggressive.

All of these elements separate The Abandoned from the usual fare, but the biggest difference between most haunting/ghost films and this one is that the world presented onscreen utilizes a distinctly European trait that most critics who’ve reviewed the film seem to not be recognizing – the plot is constructed not as a literal, logical reality, but in what could be most easily titled as Nightmare Logic.

 In interviews and writings, Cerda has revealed over the years that he’s a huge enthusiast of 70′s and 80′s era European exploitation horror, much of the best and most influencial of which – the most-revered horror films of Italian goremeister Lucio Fulci such as The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, and House By The Cemetery in particular – were built with the Nightmare Logic as the key foundation cornerstone.

The best explanation of Nightmare Logic is that the reality of the world onscreen emulates that of dreams. Strange things can seemingly happen at random with no explanation. Nothing in the physical universe is static, and things can change at a whim in entirely illogical and regularly impossible ways. The previously mentioned Fulci films utilized this concept to great success in terms of their visual style and overall effect, but that old Italian maestro had been obsessed with creating narrative-less moving images of horror onscreen – think of Goya’s more horrific and disturbing artwork come to life through animation if you will – and thus, with their one-dimensional characters and complete lack of logical storytelling, are difficult to appreciate for those who don’t already have some knowledge of what the filmmaker was trying to accomplish in the first place.

Drawing upon this type of inspiration, Cerda has created something unique in today’s horror cinema – a film that, on its surface, does indeed have a literal plot structure, but uses nonliteral Nightmare Logic by which to illustrate it. Characters sometimes disappear from the film with no overt explanation and no follow-up as to why. The house sometimes ruptures, breaks, or reconfigures itself. Characters who try to escape the haunted farmland by crossing the river only find themselves arriving right back where they started. The law of cause and effect gets fuzzy, and even time itself is corrupted to sinister purpose before the film’s completion. In a clear homage to Fulci’s works, our protagonists find themselves continually stalked by what appear to be shambling, blankly white-eyed undead versions of themselves that represent a possible future fate if they aren’t able to escape the haunted house and lands surrounding it. The near-complete unpredictability and breakdown of logic, combined with the dark, oppressive cinematography and set design and immacculately chill-inducing sound design gives The Abandoned a pervasive atmosphere of unrelenting doom the likes of which is rare in modern horror cinema.

One of the biggest problems with the utilization of Nightmare Logic in a film is that, by design, it isn’t necessarily supposed to make sense. For those to whom this sort of film appeals to, that is, in fact, a high degree of the attraction in the first place. After all, in concept, what’s more frightening, someting with a clear explanation or something unknown and thereby unexplainable? What will be mistaken as plotholes by many will be events that are intentionally left unclear, unresolved, and without explanation. Plus, it leaves the film more open to personal interpretation of its events.

The Abandoned is a masterpiece of a sort of filmmaking that largely doesn’t exist in big studio canon – a pondering on the solid, identifiable concepts of identity, heritage, and destiny that is related in a very decidedly abstract way. Just like Cerda’s short films of the past it is a risky but unique endeavor that will be thoroughly rewarding – and terrifying – to those able and willing to appreciate its nonliteral world and insurmountably disturbing atmosphere of impending doom. Just as Neil Marshall did with The Descent, Nacho Cerda has delivered a genre film that shoves all the splat pack nonsense coming from filmmakers like Rob Zombie and his seventies-obsessed splatter-minded ilk aside like tinkertoys and shows that truly scary conceptual films can still exist when the big boys come out to play.