f I'd ever wanted children, the films showing at the 59th edition of the International Fantastic film festival of Catalonia in the coastal town of Sitges, south of Barcelona, would have soon set me straight. This year's recurring themes were explosive parturition, chewed-up nipples and the fruit of the womb turning out to be at best sociopathic, at worst inhuman.
The theme was celebrated in an evil-kiddy exhibition at the Miramar Cultural Centre, marking the 50th anniversary of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's "fantaterror" classic Who Can Kill a Child?, some of which was filmed in Sitges itself. The expo traced the subgenre from 1956's The Bad Seed, via Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, to this year's Nightborn, in which poor Rupert Grint, as the hapless husband, is no match for the developing folk-horror bond between his depressed wife, their newborn "child", and the spooky forest surrounding their house. Finnish director Hanna Bergholm, in her introduction, confessed it was inspired by her experiences of motherhood. Only up to a point, one hopes.
Postpartum depression reared its head again in Mutter: The Diary of a Mother from Turkish director Alphan Eşeli, which begins with a father taking one look at his newborn offspring and fleeing into the woods. Hazar Ergüçlü's terrific central performance keeps the focus on the social and economic plight of being a single parent, even when your baby resembles the one in Eraserhead.
As usual, a third of the titles in competition here were directed by women. Indeed, winner of this year's best feature film award was Marion Le Coroller's Sanguine (AKA Species), which followed in the gloopy French body horror footsteps of Julia Ducournau (Raw) and Coralie Fargeat (The Substance) with a medical intern developing a disfiguring skin condition that will have anyone who ever squeezed a pimple squirming in sympathy. The festival's award for best female performance went to Jasmine Trinca as a mother who enters into a diabolical pact in Paolo Strippoli's indecently entertaining The Spiral, though it is supporting actor Valeria Bruni Tedeschi who steals all her scenes as a soigné Mephistopheles in a trenchcoat.
Meanwhile, best actor went to Benoît Magimel, oozing menace in one of his sleazy white suits in Léa Mysius's The Birthday Party, a finely wrought home invasion thriller, and another of the films pivoting on a fraught mother-child relationship. It was heartening to see so many female protagonists in genre films, even ones by male directors such as Casey Affleck, whose Company, with its Russian doll structure, slowly morphs from a frontier western into a spine-tingling tale of the supernatural.
Elsewhere, young women train as mermaids (Titanic Ocean, which teases the possibility of a mermaid-shark face-off, but fails to deliver), or bond with their abductors (The Daughters), or face off against a sociopathic youngster who infiltrates her snowed-in scout troop (11).
Alas, I was so busy watching these that I missed the 4K restoration of Jimmy Wang Yu's Master of the Flying Guillotine from 1976 with its glorious krautrock soundtrack. But I did get to pay my respects to the late, great Sam Neill, who provided the voice of a magpie in Dario Russo's bawdy, unabashedly full-frontal Australian folk yarn The Fox. The stacked cast includes Jai Courtney and Olivia Colman as the voice of a wily talking fox.
My favourite films of the festival included Javier Ruiz Caldera's 5 More Minutes, which manages to put a new spin on the time-loop subgenre, its early lighthearted tone sliding into darker Timecrimes territory. Then there was The Mouths, about a cursed tree, a return to J-horror form from Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge) that gets more sinister and disorientating as it goes on, plus Sabu's Taiwanese-Japanese co-production Arrested Memory, in which a traumatised Taipei cop suffering from Guy-Pearce-in-Memento syndrome bumbles his way through kidnapping, drug deals and car chases, to deadpan but ultimately hilarious effect.
But best of all was Joko Anwar's Ghost in the Cell, in which all the usual prison tropes – rioting, brutal guards, shivs, the threat of sexual violence – are supplemented by a supernatural curse, arty splatter, interpretative dance, a commentary on Indonesian corruption, and – best of all – an unexpectedly warmhearted vibe. Fortunately for everyone, it has a UK release on digital platforms from 26 October.