8. Thesis
Original Title: Tesis Perhaps the movie that kicked off the whole Spanish horror boom, university set snuff movie thriller Thesis allowed Alejandro Amenabar to emerge as the first of a new generation of Iberian directors. Amenabar followed Thesis up with weird psychological sci-fi Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos), remade with Tom Cruise as Vanilla Sky, and atmospheric wartime ghost story The Others to establish himself as one of Spanish film's most exciting talents. Although recently he has left horror behind for drama films like The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro) and Agora, his successors have been happy to embrace the horror themes he laid out. Thesis serves as a bridge between classic and modern Spanish cinema in casting now grown up 70s child actor Ana Torrent alongside rising stars like Eduardo Noriega, who would go on to play the lead in Open Your Eyes. Torrent plays a student whose thesis focuses on violence in movies. When her professor dies watching a video that turns out to be a snuff film, Torrent's Angela has to figure out whether she can trust the geeky Chema (Fele Martinez), a student obsessed with violent movies, or good looking Bosco (Noriega), whose former girlfriend is the one killed in the film. The plot may follow a predictable course, but Amenabar's low budget horror sets out his stall as a director of obvious talent, capable of managing to build tension in just the right places. Watching this, it's easy to see how the director moved on to making significant main stream Hollywood horror just two films later.
See this if you liked: The subject of screen violence, it's possible influences, a horror movie geek and a killer on campus were all central to postmodern slasher sequel Scream 2, which did, however, approach the subject in a more lighthearted way than Thesis.