REVIEW: EL HOMBRE DEL SACO (2023)
by Elena Romea (*)
EL HOMBRE DEL SACO (2023) is a movie directed by Ángel Gómez (VOCES) and written by Manuel Facal, Juma Fodde and Ignacio García Cucucovich.
Main stars are: Javier Botet, Macarena Gómez, Manolo Solo
The film explores the Spanish origins of El Hombre del Saco story: a tuberculosis patient from Almeria who will do anything to get well, even consuming the blood of the kids he kidnaps in a sack. It is not the first time a movie has gone deeply into this story. For example, a TV episode named El Sacamantecas was released in 1986, a documentary directed by Juan Francisco Viruega and named La Cicatriz was released on 21 November 2019 during the Festival de Cine de Almería.
El hombre del saco is a Spanish monster created by the collective imagination inspired by some events in Gador (Spain) in 1910. In Spain, el hombre del saco is usually depicted as a mean and impossibly ugly and skinny old man who eats the misbehaving children he collects. The crime of Gador gave rise to this term because the kidnappers used a gunny sack to carry with the children. Then it was believed that drinking the blood of a child and using their body fat to spread over the body cured Tuberculosis. According to espookytales.com Francisco Ortega El Moruno (The Moor) was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was desperately seeking a cure. He visited the local curandera Agustina Rodriguez, who in turn sent for the barber and healer Francisco Leona. Leona, who also had a criminal record, agreed to cure Ortega in exchange for some money. Leona and her son offered to find him a child. On the evening of June 27, 1910, Francisco Leona kidnapped Bernardo Gonzalez Parra, a seven-year-old from Rioja, drugged him with chloroform, and put him in a sack.
The flick tells the story of a mother and her three children who had to move to Gador after the father was killed in a car accident. The mother (Macarena Gómez) tried to do her best to educate her children, but she has long work shifts and she is absent most of the time. The kids hang with other children from the villages and make friends with some who are being bullied. Some kids have been also reported missing in the last weeks.
Even though it is set in Spain and based on a Spanish legend it is made in the American way. It is supposed to happen in Almería but none of the characters have any kind of Andalusian accent. The actors seem to be really amateur and their acting lacks emotion, professionalism… and everything you expected to find here. It is true that Javier Botet appears at the end… as a monster which reminds too much of Niña Medeiros from REC.
Basically, it is a mixture of Stranger Things and IT. Full of jump scares accompanied by loud sounds. The pace is boring, the dialogues are not credible at all…. It’s a 90-minute movie that feels like a 200-minute one.
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Elena Romea is the woman in charge of SPANISHFEAR.COM, Horror Rises from Spain and Un Fan de Paul Naschy . A literature and cinema researcher, Ph.D. in Spanish studies with a thesis about the mystic filmmaker José Val del Omar. She has published in different media and books such as Fangoria and Hidden Horror. She has also been in charge of several translations including Javier Trujillo’s complete works, La Mano Film Fest, The Man who Saw Frankenstein Cry, and many more.
