Format: DVD from Hanover Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.
There is a thin line between what makes a movie a horror movie versus a thriller. In my own head, I tend to think of thrillers as films based more in the real world, while horror films tend to have more of a supernatural element. Of course, that’s a line that gets blurred a great deal, more on the horror side of things. There’s nothing supernatural about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Silence of the Lambs (or Hostel for that matter), yet these are clearly horror films. The Nameless (called Los Sin Nombre in the original Spanish, and the copy I watched had the title as the Catalan Els sense nom) is a film that straddles the line between thriller and horror. There are hints of supernatural here, but are they real? Or is it just something that feels like the supernatural because we’ve been manipulated to think that way?
The film begins with the discovery of the body of a young girl. The body is found in a manhole by Spanish police, mutilated beyond recognition. The belief is that everything done to the body was done to mask her identity, but several clues—a bracelet with her name on it and the fact that one of her legs is shorter than the other—leads to her being identified as Angela Gifford. Her parents, Claudia (Emma Vilarasau) and Marc (Brendan Price) are naturally overcome with grief
