Pig­gy

It’s sum­mer in Extremadu­ra, Spain, and Sara (Lau­ra Galán) is a teenag­er being bul­lied by oth­er girls for being fat and unpop­u­lar. How­ev­er, these cru­el jokes end when a stranger appears and kid­naps the bul­lies – Sara is sud­den­ly forced to choose between sav­ing the girls that tor­ment­ed her, or stay­ing qui­et and pro­tect­ing the man who has helped her.

Writer-direc­tor Car­lota Pere­da has embarked on a risky debut with this hor­ror film that address­es bul­ly­ing, fat­pho­bia and the social stig­ma asso­ci­at­ed with obe­si­ty while deliv­er­ing on gore and shocks. The film’s jour­ney start­ed with a 13-minute long Goya award-win­ning short, set in the day, sim­i­lar to Who Can Kill a Child. Hor­ror movies that avoid dark­ness as an ele­ment of ter­ror can often be scari­er since the ter­ror will be based more on the plot and less on the atmosphere.

Pere­da delves into that hor­ror in a cre­ative way, gives us a unique pro­pos­al with­in a bizarre sto­ry and trans­forms a social issue into a tale of gore. While Amer­i­can and British hor­ror has often used the genre as a means to ana­lyze social issues, this feels quite new in Span­ish hor­ror, and the film has a con­tem­po­rary rel­e­vance since Sara’s tor­men­tors love post­ing pic­tures online to humil­i­ate her and her fam­i­ly, illus­trat­ing the role social media has found in bullying.

The psy­chopath, his lair, the bloody gore, and Piggy’s rur­al set­ting take us back to 1974, to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre, while Sara’s social out­cast seek­ing revenge against those who have humil­i­at­ed her is rem­i­nis­cent Bri­an de Palma’s Car­rie, even mak­ing a visu­al ref­er­ence to Carrie’s prom scene in its poster.

The lack of anonymi­ty in this small, sub­ur­ban and rur­al set­ting plus the oppres­sive sum­mer heat that sur­rounds these areas of Extremadu­ra trans­mit claus­tro­pho­bia. The cus­toms and the accu­rate inter­pre­ta­tion of how peo­ple live in small Span­ish towns are seen in the town fes­ti­vals, Sara’s par­ents’ butcher’s shop and gos­sip­ing neigh­bours, and Pereda’s nat­u­ral­ism cap­tures the typ­i­cal expres­sions and man­ner­isms of peo­ple from lit­tle towns. The fun­ny rela­tion­ship Sara has with her moth­er (Span­ish com­e­dy actress Car­men Machi) also brings a bit of light­ness to a very dark topic.

This is not a moral­is­tic sto­ry, and Pere­da pitch­es it right by allow­ing the audi­ence to feel close to Sara: a young woman who has been through a lot, but is allowed to har­bour her desires of vengeance. When she decides to get to know the psy­chopath who kid­napped her ene­mies, she becomes a clear anti-hero­ine – but Pig­gy invites us to reflect on the casu­al cru­el­ty of bul­ly­ing from the dis­tance that the hor­ror genre offers, and con­sid­er the price of revenge.