Pura sangre

Pura sangre, Colombia’s first horror film, is based on the crimes of a never identified or caught serial killer nicknamed ‘The Monster of the Mangones’.

Roberto Hurtado is a very rich man – but also a seriously ill one. The main cure for his ailment is the fresh blood of young men. And so, ever so often, his driver, Perfecto, must walk the seedier streets of town to trap boys of a fitting age. Then he drains them to death, sometimes helped by Hurtado’s nurse, Florencia, or Ever, the driver of Hurtado’s son Adolfo. But, there’s another killer with similar tastes on the loose…

The film is a very fine example for Ospina’s aesthetics: he takes a topic of current affairs and turns it into a class politics-dense pulp scenario. He films with a documentarist’s eye for reality and the genre professional’s cool disdain for the conventions of realism. A masterpiece!

– Olaf Möller