The cousins who learned to love horror directing a thriller about evil

SitgesTwo scout leaders, ten scout children, a mountain refuge isolated by a snowstorm, and an unexpected apparition. These are the elements with which directors Paula Serra (Palamós, 1998) and Clàudia Serra (Barcelona, 1998) build the thriller horror film 11, a story about childhood and evil that thematically coincides with the leitmotif of this edition of the Sitges Festival, where this opera prima, darker than it seems, is also the only production in its original Catalan version in the competition.

With the premiere of 11, Sitges discovers this Monday two new directors—who are also cousins—but they discover a festival they had never attended before. In fact, they acknowledge that they learned to love horror by making their first film. “Before, horror movies scared us a lot; we would watch them with our eyes covered or put on headphones with music so we wouldn't have to deal with the scares,” admits Paula Serra. “But making 11 we watched millions of horror movies and we fell in love with the genre. Being here for the first time as spectators and premiering a film is a maximum honor, and from now on we will never miss the festival again.”

The path of the cousins into the world of horror begins in the classrooms of Pompeu Fabra University, where they were studying audiovisual communication. In a narrative course, they and some classmates began to shape a story about a group of scouts on a mountain excursion who, suddenly, find another child. “Initially it wasn't supposed to be a horror film, but stories are alive,” points out Clàudia Serra. “We noticed that it was missing something, and suddenly, we considered going in this direction and everything clicked: mixing a universe like the scout troop, which is a magical place to have a good time, with a limit situation of danger, nerves, paranoia, and violence.”

That class script kept growing and became a final degree project that acquired professional quality and budget thanks to the arrival of producer David Matamoros, who had been a teacher to those two cousins for whom teaming up was so natural. “We were born a month apart and have almost grown up together; it’s as if we were sisters,” they explain. “We have a common universe and we understand each other with a look.” They admit, however, that they did not know how they would feel directing together, but that the experience has been satisfactory. “We have confirmed that it works and that we would like to make all the films that are to come together,” says Paula Serra.

Throughout the scarce 90 minutes of 11, the credible and fierce performance of Mia Sala-Patau shines above all as a monitor divided between the mission of protecting the children and the growing mistrust toward the newcomer, a mysterious figure that the film renounces explaining in psychological terms. “We were not interested in the reason for this evil or whether it is innate or acquired, but rather the debate that arises in us when evil is embodied in a child figure, whom our instinct always pushes us to protect,” says Paula Serra. Her cousin adds that for someone like the protagonist who “dedicates her free time to leisure education, to caring for and loving children who are not her own, this situation leads her to rethink all her limits and codes as a person.”