Santa Sangre

The producer was Claudio Argento, Dario Argento's brother; Italian horror money financed Jodorowsky's most comprehensible film. The script came from two places. Screenwriter Roberto Leoni developed the idea while working in a psychiatric hospital, thinking about dissociative identity disorder, and the story also draws on the real case of a Mexican mass murderer. Fenix grows up as the boy magician at the Circus Gringo in Mexico. His mother Concha is a trapeze artist, his father Orgo owns the circus and throws knives. After what he witnesses as a child he is committed to an asylum; years later he escapes and returns to his mother, who has lost her arms and now leads a cult. From then on Fenix becomes her arms: she moves, the hands are his, and he commits the killings. Axel Jodorowsky, the director's son, plays Fenix. Who it is for: viewers who like Jodorowsky's symbolism but want one of his films that also has a narrative. Who it is not for: anyone disturbed by violence or scenes involving animals. The film contains explicit and repeated brutality, and its use of mental illness as spectacle draws criticism now.