A Virgin Among the Living Dead

He was only 6 years old when he started composing music under the protection of his brother Enrique. After the Spanish Civil War, he was able to continue his studies at the Real Conservatorio de Madrid, where he finished piano and harmony. Being a Bachelor of Law and a easy-read novel writer (under the pseudonym David Khume), he signed on to enter the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográicas (IIEC), where he was only for two years, while he worked simultaneously as a director and theatre actor. Later, he went to Paris to study directing techniques at the I.D.H.E.C. (University of Sorbonne), where he used to go into seclusion during hours to watch films at the film archive. Back to Spain, he started his huge cinematographic work as a composer, with Cómicos (1954) and El hombre que viajaba despacito (1957), and later worked as an assistant director to Juan Antonio Bardem, León Klimovsky, Luis Saslavsky, Julio Bracho, Fernando Soler and Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, among others. He also worked at Ágata Films S.A. [es] as production manager and writer.

His first works as a director were industrial and cultural short films. However, he soon applied all his knowledge and experience to direct his first feature film: We Are 18 Years Old (1959). From that moment on, all his work was supported by co-production. His film Succubus (1968) was nominated for the Festival of Berlin, and this event gave him an international projection. His career got more and more consolidated as the years passed by with his endless creativity, tackling all kind of genres, from B series horror films to pure hardcore sex films. His productions have always been low-budget, but, nevertheless, Jesús managed to work extraordinarily quickly, even releasing several titles at the same time, with the use of the same shots in more than one film. Some of his actors remember that they were hired for one film and saw later their name in two more different ones. As the Spanish cinema evolved, Jesús managed to adapt to the new circumstances and always maintained a constant activity, activity that gave a place in his films to a whole filming crew.

Apart from his own production company, Manacoa Films [es], he also worked for production companies like Auster Films S.L. [es] (Paul Auster), Cinematográfica Fénix Films [es] (Arturo Marcos), Comptoir Français du Film [fr] (Robert de Nesle), Eurociné [fr] (Daniel and Marius Lesoeur), Elite Films Productions (Erwin C. Dietrich), Fervi Films [es] (Fernando Vidal Campos) or Golden Films Internacional S.A. [es]. He acted in almost all of his films, performing the roles of music men, lawyers, porters, all of them sinister, maniac and comic characters, and using, apart from the names Jesús Franco, Jess Franco or Franco Manera, many pseudonyms (reaching the point of using the name of other people in the credits): Jess Frank, Robert Zimmerman, Frank Hollman, Clifford Brown, David Khune, Frarik Hollman, Toni Falt, James P. Johnson, Charlie Christian, David Tough, Cady Coster, Lennie Hayden, Lulú Laverne, Betty Carter… The actress Lina Romay has been almost a constant in his films, and it’s very probable that in some of them she has been credited as the director instead of him.

In the main bulk of his directed films (more than 180) he has also worked in one or more of the following roles: composer, writer, cinematographer, editor. Jesús’s influence has been notable all over Europe (France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Portugal…). He even contacted Roger Corman in the USA. From his huge work we can deduce that Jesús Franco is one of the most restless directors of Spanish cinema. Many of his films have had problems to be released, and some others have been made directly for video. His work is a craftmanship work, a do-it-yourself work. More than once his staunch supporters have found re-editings from an older film, as well as modifications and mixes of scenes, scenarios…, and some of his titles have become cult films.

Jesús Franco is a survivor in a time when most of his colleagues tried to please the government administration. He broke up with all that and got the independence he was searching. He always went upstream in an ephemeral industry that fed opportunists and curb the activity of many professionals. But time doesn’t pass in vain, and Jesus’ production has diminished since the 90s. —Miguel Ángel Díaz González