Santa Sangre: Finding Salvation in Sacrilege
The surreal horror masterpiece finds religious ecstasy in the profane
by Cian Tsang
When we first lay our eyes on Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky), he almost seems more bestial than human, as if he’s some organism that’s only just managed to drag himself out of the primordial ooze. Sat birdlike on a tree in the mental asylum to which he’s confined, he’s coaxed down from his perch only by the prospect of a meal of raw fish, which he gluttonously devours, his vocal chords producing avian screeches of delight. Yet there’s also something recognizably, unmistakably messianic about his appearance too: the beard, the shoulder-length hair, his naked flesh exposed like Christ on the cross. Whatever’s gone terribly wrong in Fenix’s life, whatever’s thrown him into this animalistic state, also seems to have beatified him.
So begins Santa Sangre, the 1989 horror masterpiece by legendary cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of the great cinematic surrealists, who envelops us immediately in an embrace of madness from which there is no escape. Even as the movie ventures outwards, it never really leaves the asylum—when Fenix eventually makes his way back into the world, he finds only ersatz emancipation waiting for him, a paltry shadow of true freedom. For the rest of the movie, he’s a different kind of prisoner, ensnared within a psychological tomb constructed from memories of irrevocable loss.
Nobody would ever accuse Jodorowsky of being the most easily digestible of filmmakers. His movies are notorious for their rampant symbolism, often careening into the realm of indulgent nonsense, sometimes to the point of seeming actively hostile to the audience. Santa Sangre, while still replete with strangeness, is by far his most accessible movie, more readily penetrable than his more opaque works. It’s also his most empathic, yoking itself to Fenix’s disintegrating psyche as he grapples with the seeds of masculinity, intimacy, and divinity that’ve been sown and cross-pollinated within his mental fabric during his formative years.
Those years are spent performing as a magician in a circus run by his knife-thrower father Orgo (Guy Stockwell) and his trapeze artist mother Concha (Blanca Guerra), witnessing sights that no child should be made to witness and enduring traumas that no child should be made to endure. Fenix’s memories hemorrhage from his stunted mind, running red with images of sex and violence whose power accumulates and which eventually coagulate to form a sort of poetic logic: Orgo’s knife-throwing partner, the Tattooed Woman (Thelma Tixou), flagrantly fellating a blade; Orgo hypnotizing and raping Concha after a confrontation, smash cutting to a sick elephant’s phallic trunk spurting blood; an elephant funeral of lyrical beauty culminating in a scene of almost comical savagery as the animal’s body is torn limb-from-limb by scavengers; acid consuming his father’s genitals; crimson geysers erupting from his mortally wounded parents. Bombarded with these relentless cascades of ugliness, Fenix’s eventual descent into murderous mania feels inevitable, a powder keg of latent perversion waiting to be detonated.
The world keeps revolving regardless of your agony, refusing to pause to allow you to process your loss.
And detonate he does, compelled by the lingering essence of his mother to perform gruesome spectacles that honor and transcend his circus heritage, worthy of the Grand Guignol. The violence of Santa Sangre is garish and febrile, deliciously grim, assaultive to the senses, charged with an almost luxurious sensuality. It’s thrilling, for sure, but it’s familiar territory for Jodorowsky, a known quantity within his repertoire. What actually ends up feeling more striking at times is the sheer mundanity with which that violence is tempered—the dull thud of the body hitting the floor after the iridescent frisson, the matter-of-fact intermingling with the surreal to destabilizing and poignant effect. Just look at the murder of the Tattooed Woman, a moment bathed in color and pathos. The act itself is pure giallo, all garish lighting and aggressive stylization, rhythmic thrusts of the knife set to pulsating percussion, but it’s the starkness of the aftermath that sticks: the blood caked and brown, no longer flowing in glossy ribbons of cherry red; the body motionless, no longer spasming with fear, the first signs of putrefaction setting in; the horror writ large on the face of the victim’s bereaved adopted daughter Alma (Sabrina Dennison), who neither hears nor speaks, her silent lamentations dissipating hopelessly into the ether.
Look too at the suicide of Fenix’s father, who slits his own throat in the middle of the street after suffering the humiliation of having his genitals mutilated mid-coitus. There’s the initial, ejaculative eruption of crimson, but that’s only a prelude for the more substantial mournfulness to follow. Jodorowsky lingers on the tranquility of the fallout, the stillness of it all, how those who bear witness to the act simply carry on as if nothing ever happened. A few curious dogs casually sniff the naked corpse, and a nearby group of street performers continue to play their music uninterrupted, their song no more sympathetic or dirgelike than it was before, unaltered in the face of Fenix’s devastation. The message transmitted to Fenix from the cosmos is clear: the world keeps revolving regardless of your agony, refusing to pause to allow you to process your loss.
For all of its myriad aesthetic pleasures, it’s the depth of Santa Sangre that ultimately proves most thrilling, the psychological magma effervescing beneath the patina. The real terror of the movie’s horror set pieces isn’t so much in the annihilation of the body, but in the annihilation of the self; in the prospect of being hollowed out, of being reduced to nobody. The movie is at its most conventionally moving when it’s probing that particular vein and wielding violence as a grisly tool with which to carve out a sense of helplessness in the face of life-altering trauma. In the thrall of his mother, Fenix possesses no identity of his own, playing the part of a puppet in a shoddy spectacle. Acting as the mutilated Concha’s hands, he caresses the piano, creates original displays of bombast, searches for aesthetic perfection—but none of his actions are really his own. His acts of brutality are as agonizing to him as they are to his victims, self-punitive ordeals in which the evisceration of the women he desires simulates the excision of the part of him that lusts, castrative recompense for bearing witness to the infidelities, perversities, and transgressions of his parents. The power of these moments owes almost entirely to Axel Jodorowsky, whose face is an atlas contoured with strife, trembling with effort in a show of utterly futile resistance before at last capitulating—a pathetic, murderous shell of a man.
Santa Sangre would still be exhilarating and provocative enough if it left things there, if it were satisfied with merely being a movie about desire and trauma coiling inwards and imploding, but at a certain point it might also begin to feel ever so slightly rote. After all, pinpointing the epicenter of homicidal impulses in parental issues isn’t exactly breaking new horror movie ground, and wasn’t even back in 1989. What elevates Santa Sangre and detaches it from our expectations is its seething current of religious perversity—its startling depiction of suffering as a corruptive force masquerading as a sacrosanct ideal, a false totem of perfection whose destruction is ultimately liberating. That opening image of Fenix in the asylum, Christlike in his derangement, sears the idea of trauma as transcendence into our brains, and from there Jodorowsky only buttresses that association. Fenix’s chest tattoo depicting a phoenix, a mythical inscription sliced into his young body by his father, suggests supernatural rebirth into masculinity from the ashes of perceived femininity, that a boy can only become a man once he knows what torture is, once all that’s sensitive and sentimental within him has been ruthlessly carved away.
To free himself would require nothing short of an act of heresy, heroic rebellion against the forces of heaven.
It’s Concha, though—the leader of a religious cult whose patron saint is a girl who has her arms cut off after being raped—whose fanatical spirituality proves most influential, exposing her son to a temple of sacred gore whose iconography he absorbs and carries into adulthood. The frescoes within the Santa Sangre church are the storybook illustrations on which she raises her child, gruesome scenes which depict dismemberment as martyrdom. Death and dismemberment, we sense, are the sorts of experiences that Concha would want for her child, to purify and sanctify him. Jodorowsky’s camera considers these artworks with sincere, childlike reverence, and when the church is torn down after a Roman Catholic Monsignor condemns it as sacrilegious, Fenix is despondent, not yet a fully-fledged cultist but still an eager acolyte, profoundly attached to his mother and thus already profoundly invested in her beliefs.
The sight of Concha clinging desperately to the statue of her patron saint as the bulldozers move in feels like a moment of conversion for Fenix, who exalts his mother into the realm of sainthood upon her demise. The moment in which she’s slain, both of her arms severed by the brutally castrated Orgo, is imbued with a sense of divinity by Jodorowsky, whose camera levitates godlike above it all, a witness to Concha’s almost ecstatic face as she looks towards the heavens, her earthly fervor fulfilled. Her return is messianic, guiding Fenix out of the asylum with beams of white light, appearing before him radiant, immaculate, practically angelic. Her ascension almost entirely alters the movie’s psychological complexion—Fenix is held prisoner not by a memory, but by a martyr, overcome by a religious fixation which positions his mother and her suffering as godheads, the centers of worship. He butchers his victims to purge himself of his spiritual impurities, but also to ferry these women towards holiness, liberating them so that they may resurface sinless from the grave as purified birds in graceful, dazzling flight. In his waking, killing life he’s not a sex maniac so much as a zealot, and in his fanatical reveries he’s the son of God, stigmata and all.
To free himself, then, would require nothing short of an act of heresy, the total deconstruction of his faith in his mother’s sanctity, heroic rebellion against the forces of heaven. Santa Sangre concludes not with a showdown, but with sacrilege—Fenix desecrating the temple he’s created in worship of his mother, incinerating her effigy, finally emancipating himself from his servitude. It’s also an act of philosophical upheaval, disowning the ideology that has defined him, which displaces selfhood and exalts trauma above all else.
We like to throw the accusation of pretension around these days, particularly at figures like Jodorowsky whose art, with its gratuitous doses of lofty imagery, is often interpreted as being grossly egotistical—and perhaps that accusation is justified at times. But I don’t believe an image as potent as that of Fenix lifting his hands skywards, reveling in the realization that he’s at last reclaimed his autonomy from the grasps of divinity, could possibly have blossomed from an insincere mind. Jodorowsky’s always been all about his mystique, his air of artifice which is compelling to some and frustrating to others. But he would never be more moving, I think, than when he let that mystique crumble and made a movie that genuinely believes in the triumph of the human spirit through sacrilege—that by tearing down our holy psychological sepulchers and immolating our saints, we might finally be free of the past.
Cian Tsang is an essayist and Ligotti superfan based in the UK. You can find him on Twitter @CianHHTsang.
