By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
The Mexican horror thriller Disappear Completely (Desaparecer por completo, 2022) follows Santiago (Harold Torres), a “red note” photographer who works for a sensationalist newspaper. Although he usually captures dead people with his camera, Santiago cares about the quality of his work and is actively seeking greater recognition, i.e., having a photography exhibition.
His demanding job is affecting his long-term relationship with Marcela (Teté Espinoza). Furthermore, she’s pregnant and thus begins a disagreement between them: she wants to have the baby and their lives to change, while he thinks the opposite.
One night, Santiago manages to sneak into a potential crime scene and photograph a seemingly dead senator, whose body has been partially eaten by rats. After this, Santiago’s life is never the same: he suffers nightmares, a convulsion and, above all else, he begins to lose the senses. Soon he can’t smell or taste.
Without an evident injury or disease, the problem could be mental. Eventually, the possibility arises that Santiago may have been a victim of witchcraft. Disappear Completely focuses on a sacrificial ritual and also on a particular sound design, the latter when Torres’ desperate character continues to investigate the source of his affliction while experiencing hearing loss.
Disappear Completely began its journey in late 2022 and was featured at Fantastic Fest and Mórbido Fest. It was finally released in theaters across Mexico last Thursday, February 29 and for this reason, below is the interview I did with its director, Luis Javier Henaine.
Eric Ortiz (EO): Taking into consideration your other movies, Happy Times (Tiempos felices, 2014) and Ready to Mingle (Solteras, 2019 ), I didn’t think you were going to make a horror thriller. What interested you about the original script (written by Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes)?
Luis Javier Henaine (LJH): Around 2013, Mario Muñoz, the director of The Black Minutes (Los minutos negros, 2021) and Under the Salt (Bajo la sal, 2008), told me the premise of a character who starts losing the five senses. When he told me about that movie, which he was going to direct at one point, I thought “how had it not occurred to me? That idea is great.”
It turns out that Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes wrote that script. He asked my friend Armond Cohen, the director of Souvenir (2019), to meet me, because he had seen my first movie Happy Times. In Happy Times there are a couple of homages to horror movies: the main character is watching TV and it’s like a recreation of Halloween (1978). Then the other one is a recreation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Ricardo saw these two scenes and it occurred to him that I could be a good horror director. Then he sent me two scripts and one was precisely Disappear Completely. When I read it, I immediately made the connection with what Mario had told me and I said “this is destiny, I have to make this movie.”
But regardless of how this happened, I thought it was very interesting to put myself in the situation of someone who’s losing the ability to appreciate things, life, art, everything. To say “what would happen if I lost a sense? What would happen If I lost two or three senses?” I wouldn’t want to be in that position. Your perception of reality becomes different and your functioning within society also transforms.
On the other hand, horror is my favorite genre. I wanted my first feature film to be a horror one, I thought it was easier to make a low-budget movie, the classic stuff of getting a bunch of friends inside a cabin in the middle of a forest. But I never came up with an idea that I felt was worthwhile. That idea never came into my hands, until Disappear Completely came to me.
EO: The protagonist is a “red note” photographer. There are echoes of Enrique Metinides’ work.
LJH: I thought it was a great idea for a character who starts losing the sense, to make him a “red note” photographer because one of things that this profession requires is to be insensitive, to be desensitized, in order to take the photos and have this contact with death. It was something interesting to have a desensitized character who starts losing the senses, but as he loses the senses, he regains his sensitivity.
There are two nods to Metinides, this famous “red note” photographer and artist. He is the name to follow in Mexican “red note” photography. We saw his photographs and said “which ones can we recreate as a sort of nod?” To say that the character is an admirer of Metinides, in some way he wants to be like him.
One of the key references in this film was David Fincher, especially Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007). Both were the reference for the type of lighting we wanted to use to recreate these scenes.
EO: How was the process with Harold Torres to build his character?
LJH: The biggest challenge was to decide how to represent this loss of the senses, because much of it is an internal process that the character is having and that is going to be strengthened with the mise-en-scène or with the cinematic language.
For him the most difficult thing was to find how to represent this in a credible way that, at the same time, follows a logical continuity.
One of the hardest things to represent is touch, because if we had done that in a more realistic way, it’d have been complicated for the character to do certain things that have to happen in the movie.
You put the final touches to a performance during editing. We chose what best suited the tone we were looking for. We saw what worked of the different types of exercises we did with his representation of the loss of the senses.
EO: Tell me about your depiction of witchcraft.
LJH: That’s another reason why I loved the script, because I’m obsessed with the subject of witchcraft, I’m very curious about it.
Witchcraft is in our culture, it’s part of our life. Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, you always have friends, acquaintances or family members who have their go-to witch doctor. It’s in politics as well, there’s a book called The Sorcerers of Power (Los brujos del poder).
Even if you’re not a believer, you have a certain respect for it. I wouldn’t want to be in a place where there’s a ritual going on, or things like that that do happen.
With the film I wanted to make an approach to witchcraft that was as realistic as possible. I’ve been to sessions, to see what they are like. I’ve been with some warlocks as well, not very dark ones because obviously I do respect it.
While I was in pre-production for the movie, I went to drop off a friend at his house and he said to me “come look at this” and outside of his house, there was a little pot with a dead chicken, it was like a work of witchcraft. The more I dived into the subject of witchcraft, the more things I saw around me, which is a very strange thing. When we were filming one of the ritual scenes in the Ajusco, we found some garbage bags filled with bottles with witchcraft work. You can’t imagine the amount of things that we found in the Ajusco. Very dark stuff, so much so that the crew were bewildered.
I wanted everything that happens in this movie to be feasible, of course with fiction because it’s a movie, but it was about trying to ensure that all this could be really happening. Always thinking that what happens to the protagonist could be something medical, real, physical, but it also could be something psychosomatic, mental, that he is generating because of his own stress and worries. But also play with the supernatural.
You never know how true all of this is, but a friend told me that his grandmother, or his aunt, went blind after a witchcraft work.
EO: Besides those directed by Fincher, what other films influenced Disappear Completely?
LJH: For the screenwriter, two of the references when he started with this story were Angel Heart (1987) and Fallen (1998).
The show True Detective was also a reference: the detectives and the ritualistic murders.
There’s a South Korean movie that I really like and that we also had very present during this process: The Wailing (Gokseong, 2016).
The Witch (2015), of course. It’s a very intimate film, everything is very internal, but it has a high level of tension.
Häxan (1922), an old witchcraft movie, was part of the research. It’s interesting.
The Ring (Ringu, 1998), it’s kind of the same: something happens to a character and they have some days to resolve it. Although it has a different tone from what I tried to do, it was on our radar for structural reasons. Drag Me to Hell (2009) also worked for us structurally.
The three classics that are present in everything: The Exorcist (1973), The Shining (1980) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Rosemary’s Baby is a tremendous drama with horror elements. Thematically, Rosemary’s Baby is the closest one to Disappear Completely.