The Lisbon Horror Film Festival will open with a screening of films censored by Estado Novo and Portuguese short films.

A beefed-up selection of Portuguese short films, films banned by the Estado Novo and Edgar Pera’s new feature film, Telepathic Letters, are just some of the new releases at MOTELX, the Lisbon International Horror Film Festival, this Monday.

MOTELX will be held for the 18th time from September 10 to 16, at the San Jorge Cinema, with several proposals from the latest horror films, such as Cuckoo by German Tilman Singer, the Canadian production The Humanist Vampire Seeking Consent, Suicide Man by Ariane Louis-Saize and Sunset of Bigfoot, presented as a fantasy by brothers David and Nathan Zellner, screened this year at the Sundance Festival and inspired by the figure of Bigfoot.

This is also the edition of the “Manifesto of the Superior Form of Terror”, created in Portugal and included in the official competition.

Eight films are competing for the Méliès Award for Best European Short Film: Before Moonrise by Mário Patrocínho; Chameleon by Thiago “Ramon” Santos; Canto by Guilherme Daniel; Esteril by João Pais da Silva; The Hunt by Diogo Costa; Nuclear by David Falcão; How Much Does a Body Weigh? by Gabriel Neri; and The Hunt for the Unicorn by Miguel Afonso.

Ten films will also compete for the MOTELX Award for Best Portuguese Horror Short Film 2024: After Link (Catarina De Cézanne), Holofote (Camille Ciardi), Menor que Três (Dan Martin, Sofia Pessoa Padua, Mariana Cabecinha and Cláudio Monteiro), The Night Stalker (Paulo Leite), Stop Looking at Me (Carolina Aguiar), Penrose (Alessandra Roucos and Maria Teresa Teixeira), The Procedure (Chico Noras), Putto (Carlos Cálica), Santanario (João Pedro Fração) and Umbral (Miguel Andrade).

MOTELX will also host Edgar Pera’s film Telepathic Letters, which explores the literary works of Lovecraft and Fernando Pessoa and uses artificial intelligence to create images, after its premiere at the Locarno Festival.

This year, in the Lost Room section, the festival presents “Guilt” (1980), a film by maestro and composer Antonio Victorino D’Almeida that is “one of the first examples of fiction after the events of April 25, about a colonial war.”

Also highlighted is a new section, the “Hall of Worship”, with “unrivalled works of the seventh art”, where the festival returns to the television film “Experiência em Terror” (1987) by Andrade Albuquerque and screens “O Velho ea Sword” (2024), by Fábio Powers, filmed in Beira Baixa.

This year, the MOTELX exhibition also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, with the series “A Bem da Nação – Horror Films Banned by the New State”, featuring four works that passed the censorship.

These are Brunello Rondi’s Il Demonio (1963), John Gilling’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966), Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place (1971), and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders by Jaromil Giress (1970).

According to the festival, between 1944 and 1974, only 23 horror films were released in Portuguese cinemas, 16 were banned outright and only one was released uncut.

At other points during the festival, presented this Monday, the little ones will be shown the full-length animated film by Gints Zilbalodis, Flow, which was shown in Cannes and won an award in Annecy, about an independent and lonely cat who must learn to live with other animals on a boat after the floods.

Behind the scenes, Heidi Honeycutt’s encyclopedia I Spit on Your Celluloid: A History of Women Making Horror Films about women who have made horror films will be presented in a talk moderated by the association MUTIM – Mulheres. Trabalhadoras das Imagens em Movement.