I was kind of sceptical about watching Genesis and Aftermath. Sure, from what I'd heard about Nacho Cerda he sounded like a brilliant director, winning the Spanish equivalent of the Bafta award for best short film with Genesis. But at the same time, there were a number of things to put me off, not least the gore factor. Not that I'm particularly squeamish, but it did occur to me that anything that could fuck up the mind of the guy who brought Guinea Pig to America (Chas Balun)might be something I was going to really regret watching. Besides which, on a much more basic level, we are talking about short films, which I've never been all that interested in, particularly when they feature no dialogue - this might just be me being scarred from various screenings during my film and media degree, but they tend to be just pompously arty. Still, late one night I put the tape into my VCR and waited to see what would unfold.

I had no idea beforehand that Genesis would in fact be the best short film I've ever seen. The thing that really hits you with Nacho Cerda is just how amazingly stylish he is. There's scarcely a single shot that doesn't just ooze confidence and skill. Genesis is a really lyrical film, but at the same time doesn't get bogged down in making everything 'artistic' at the expense of everything else.

Genesis is a very classical sort of horror story with a lot of intelligence behind it. I can think of about four ways of looking at it, from it being a spin on the creation myth (as it suggested by the title) to a twisted reworking of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The basic storyline is that of a sculpter working on a statue of a woman. However, even though he's created an amazing likeness to someone he once loved, the statue won't remain in its beautiful form. Cracks and cuts start appearing on it, each of them leaking blood, as, at the same time, the sculpter also starts physically falling apart, both of them rapidly changing from their initial forms until the film reaches its conclusion.

Of course, I can only describe Genesis to a certain extent by going through its basic storyline. One of the problems with short films is that they often tend to be based around one idea that just about stretches itself out for ten to thirty minutes. Genesis, on the other hand, has more concealed in it than a lot of full length features. Of course, what I'm saying here is that you have to see it for yourself to understand how truly brilliant it is. And you really have to see it!

Still in a sense of amazement from Genesis, I watched Aftermath. It features all the style that I was expecting, but I have to be honest here in saying that I just don't see the point of it. Of course, it may well be that Aftermath was his big statement in order to draw attention to himself by attempting to either make the most extreme and sick film possible or to make the world's most stylish corpse mutilation and necrophilia film. Of course, it seems to have worked in drawing him attention and therefore allowing Cerda to go onto make far finer films. Still, I don't think it's all that interesting beyond that.

As far as the storyline goes, a man working in a morgue mutilates and has sex with the corpse of a prostitute. And that's about it. To be fair, there is a fair amount of intelligence in there, or at least as much as there could be considering its subject matter, and Cerda's direction has a clinically powerful effect, but overall it comes across as a film based primarily around its shock value. Cerda can surely leave that area of horror to less talented directors - what we really need is another master of European stylish horror, ala young Argento!

With Cerda now moving onto full length, bigger budget film making, it'll be very interesting to see what he does. I should add here, by the way, that despite Cerda being an entirely independent film maker, you would never guess from the appearance of his films he had any shortage of money - he seems to have this ability to make limited budgets look like a blank cheque, so who knows what he can do with a decent budget? You can be assured that it'll have no shortage of style, and I can only hope, now that Aftermath is out of his system, Cerda can go on to make European horror cinema the force it once was.

Phil