Spanish director Ángel Gómez Hernández had spent the afternoon teaching people how to make horror before sitting down to talk about his new killer-spider movie, Crawlers. In Madrid, he has found a classroom where a lesson can move straight into a room that looks ready for a haunting, a massacre, or a particularly unpleasant encounter with a bathroom.
For the filmmaker from Algeciras, Madrid Horror School brings together two pursuits that began long before his international productions: making people afraid and teaching others how cinema works. He still gets frightened himself, sometimes more than anyone else in the theater.
"I scream, I jump, every jump scare gets me," Gómez Hernández told this reporter. "The film affects me emotionally."
That enthusiasm runs through his latest feature, which opens in U.S. theaters October 16. Starring Matilda Lutz and Gregg Sulkin, Crawlers, which opens in October 16, follows Serena, an apartment building manager whose residents are trapped under a police-mandated quarantine as venomous spiders spread through the property. Her knowledge of the building becomes a survival tool, provided she can confront her own fear.
Gómez Hernández, whose earlier features include Voces, known internationally as Don't Listen, and El hombre del saco, describes Crawlers as a self-aware, campy creature movie. The spiders may be the selling point, but his interest in horror extends to the people performing terror in front of the camera and those constructing it behind the scenes.
He began teaching directing and screenwriting courses in his hometown at 18, he said. After 12 years with a Madrid acting school he had helped establish, he sold his share to pursue a project devoted exclusively to horror.
"My real dream was always to create the first school dedicated entirely and exclusively to horror cinema," he said.
The opportunity came through Pau Quero, founder of the horror escape-room business Madrid Terror. Gómez Hernández had experienced the attraction as a customer and emerged thoroughly frightened. In a subsequent conversation, Quero mentioned that he wanted to establish a school in the space. The director had been considering the same idea. "We have the perfect space and the content," Gómez Hernández recalled thinking.
Their collaboration became Madrid Horror School, located on Paseo de la Esperanza. Its published program includes a six-month acting course focused on horror, with practical camera work, character development, makeup, and filmed scenes.
Gómez Hernández described moving students into environments reminiscent of The Conjuring, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Saw. These are his comparisons to the sets, rather than affiliations with those franchises. The attraction's immersive spaces let him bring a camera into a setting where students can practice what they have just discussed.
Teaching someone to convey fear requires attention to more than a scream. The school's curriculum includes breathing, gaze, reactions and emotional continuity, as well as performing opposite creatures or threats that will only appear after postproduction. Students also study how acting works alongside the camera, editing, sound and music.
Gómez Hernández said the response has been a surprise. "It has exceeded our expectations," the director said. He and Quero had anticipated one long-form training group of approximately 14 or 15 students. They are now working on a third group, alongside intensive courses.
His own relationship with fear started with a less structured form of instruction: hiding behind doors to frighten people.
As a child in Algeciras, he enjoyed delivering the scare and dreaded receiving one. "I was the one scaring people, but then I didn't like them taking revenge on me because I was scared," he said. "Please don't do it back to me."
He still seeks that rush in a movie theater. Other genres appeal to him, but horror gives him a particular emotional journey, with the reassurance that the danger stays on the screen.
With Crawlers, even the film's name required an adjustment. The project was previously known as Arachnid. Gómez Hernández said the decision to change it came from above, although he proposed the replacement himself. Initially, abandoning a title he had lived with for more than a year was uncomfortable. Now, he prefers Crawlers, which he feels better matches the film's tone and its creatures.
Researching those creatures also changed his relationship with the spiders outside his professional life. After spending weeks abroad on postproduction for another film, he returned to find that spiders had settled into the upper level of his home, leaving webs throughout the space.
He had never been inclined to kill them, he said, but previously he would have removed the webs and put the spiders outside. After Crawlers, he found himself considering an accommodation.
"They've worked so hard, they've taught me so much, they've done so much for me, for this movie," he said. "Maybe we can live together."
He does have a limit. "Obviously, I don't want them taking control of my house."
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