Paco Plaza, the director of La abuela which competed yesterday in the Official Selection, acknowledged that a festival like San Sebastián wasn’t the natural setting for a film like his, but that they were delighted to have been invited. He did think however that horror films have begun to move into areas that border on arthouse cinema. His producer Enrique López Lavigne agreed: “this year a film like Titane won at Cannes that was able to make use of genre film to delve into themes that otherwise it would be difficult to talk about.” In fact, Paco Plaza admitted that he had aimed to make use of horror to talk about more complex questions. “I wanted to make a film about demonic possession in which the devil was old age. I’m worried about all this excessive glorification of concepts like youth, beauty or joy, while at the same time we are horrified by aging, both our own and that of others.” Plaza also revealed that he felt he had been getting stuck on the early versions of the script so he had turned to fellow director, Carlos Vermut, to help him out. Vermut, for his part, said that horror is a genre that had always fascinated him, and that when writing this script he had been able to play around with horror without being restrained by the straightjacket of reality.