Bianka (played by Ana Garberí, a newcomer to film) is looking for some easy cash, so she takes a job as a nanny, looking after the daughter of a well-off married couple of teachers. But one night, while putting the girl to bed, something or someone bursts into the house with sinister intentions. This is the promising start to the story of The Nanny’s Night, a comedy-horror flick helmed by first-time feature director Igna L Vacas, which began shooting in the Spanish capital on 8 March.

According to the director, the movie, filmed in the English language, “draws its inspiration from the most vulgar, unadorned form of cinema from within the new genre of modern horror, giving the usual standards a wide berth and concentrating on constructing a narrative thread that switches from screams to guffaws within a single shot. Not only because of its gutsy proposition, but also because it transposes it into a very topical and modern tone, despite it containing elements from the 1980s and a decent chunk of the 1990s. It also knows full well how to make fun of the tropes which eventually resulted in clichés and which it attempts to circumnavigate in a fresh or even revitalised way.

“Even so, in some way it will attempt to reach out to a broad audience – not only ravenous horror enthusiasts or curio collectors, but also viewers in search of an outlandish story set within a mundane, almost minimalistic environment, bringing the audience closer to the insanity and the huge gulf at the heart of the protagonists’ interpersonal relationships. In the end, that’s the aim: to tell a joke using the pure mechanisms of the genre and to make as many people as possible laugh without them really knowing why they’re doing so, or with them knowing that, deep down, it’s bad to do so,” sums up the filmmaker, who also works as a film exhibitor, as he is a joint manager of the Madrid-based movie theatre Artistic Metropol, which specialises in independent, low-budget films shunned by the commercial circuit.

Igna L Vacas is also the co-author of the book Manual de Supervivencia para Cinéfagos (lit. “Survival Manual for Film Buffs”) and is the editor of ScifiWorld, a magazine specialising in fantastical film. Furthermore, he is the director and a co-screenwriter of the short film #pornovenganza, which was selected at a host of international genre-film festivals. In addition, he was a scriptwriter on Wax [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film] (directed by Víctor Matellano) and on the imminent Vampus Horror Tales, in addition to being an assistant director on Vampyres (also by Matellano).

The cast of this film – which is being produced by Panic in Frames and Artistic Films – is rounded off by Juan Carlos Vellido (The Devil’s Backbone, seen recently in the series Hierro [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Jorge Coira - Regista di H…
intervista: Olivier Wotling
scheda series]), Diana Peñalver (unforgettable in her role from the equally gory cult film Braindead by New Zealander Peter Jackson), Antonio Mayans (an actor who popped up regularly in the films by late directors Paul Naschy and Jesús Franco), David Santana, Javier Bódalo, Dunia Rodríguez and Almudena Salort.