Arrebato

A newly restored 4K version of Zulueta’s 1979 cult masterpiece, a hypnotic fusion of vampiric cinema and heroin-fuelled delirium that spirals into the void between life and film.

A milestone of Spanish cinema, Iván Zulueta’s Arrebato (Rapture) is a hallucinatory exploration of addiction, obsession, and the vampiric pull of cinema itself.

The story circles around José Sirgado, a B-movie horror director adrift in Madrid’s underground scene. Trapped in cycles of heroin use and failed relationships, Sirgado is drawn into the orbit of Pedro, an eccentric young filmmaker whose experimental Super-8 recordings capture something uncanny. Pedro’s compulsive filming begins to devour everything around him until the camera becomes a portal, sucking its subject into a cinematic beyond.

Moving between the decadent nightlife of post-Franco Madrid and the claustrophobic interiors of artistic obsession, the film blurs the boundaries between creation and destruction. Arrebato fuses vampirism, surrealism, and queer desire in a fever dream that is at once gothic horror, confessional diary, and avant-garde manifesto. With its narcotic rhythms, spectral colour, and obsessive repetitions, the film stages cinema as an ecstatic abyss.

More than four decades after its release, the recent 4K restoration has led to its rediscovery – with enthusiastic screenings in New York and other cities worldwide – and confirms that Arrebato is one of the most radical works of Spanish film, a cult classic that continues to seduce, disturb, and haunt.