Blood in the Archive: Thesis (1996)

As winds blow colder, and the idle prattle of the reign of the eminent “Pumpkin Spice Latte” cuts through shared exchanges, one knows it is time to reach again for the uncanny, for the stories that disturb the marrow rather than merely sweeten the tongue. Among the shelves of horror—visualize those exaggeratedly cracked VHS covers, those neon-streaming thumbnails—lies a film that lingers like a bruise beneath the skin: Alejandro Amenábar’s Thesis, or in its original Spanish, Tesis (1996).

Search for it and you will find reviews spiralling into superlatives: “a masterpiece,” “a contender for the best Spanish horror film.” Yet the film itself drifts into a purgatory-esque state of obscurity, absent from the canonized lists, rarely mentioned in the same breath as the transatlantic titans of the genre. Why is this so? Perhaps it was not born under the gilded aegis of Hollywood, nor escorted into the spotlight by names that glitter and shine under scrutiny. Perhaps because it refuses the bravado of salient spectacle, and instead opts to court a manifested quietude that proved more terrifying than the shriek of any chainsaw. I feel a pang of shame to neglect such a film. It is subtler, crueller than what the usual audience member may prophesize of a film enmeshed in horror, mystery, and thriller. It is akin to the dim light of a projector at the back of a lecture hall, the bulb humming, the screen flickering, a violence unfolding that is not onscreen alone but preserved in the eyes of those who watch, in the burning nucleus of their beings. Amenábar is not as overt or crass as to accuse with words, but primarily with the mirror that cinema often is: every frame reflects back at us a hunger to behold, the secret thrill of witnessing what we should not that we hold.

The premise is deceptively simple: Ángela, a university student researching audiovisual violence for her thesis, stumbles upon a hidden videotape in her school’s archive. What she discovers is not a film but a crime, a recording of a real murder, both intimate and unflinching. Drawn into the orbit of Chema, a fellow student whose obsession with horror films borders on pathological, and Bosco, a charismatic classmate whose charm is carefully embedded with shadow, Ángela descends into a labyrinth where academia, voyeurism, and genuine brutality intertwine. We willingly witness these boundaries dissolve and now fester within each other.

Released in the liminal 1990s, Thesis feels prophetic. It senses, before we ourselves did, the abyss opening in our screens. The snuff tape that Ángela, the student protagonist, discovers is not simply a plot device; it is an omen. A small rectangle of grainy violence that contains within it the whole future of our mediated gaze: the world where atrocity can be streamed, shared, replayed, devoured. The real terror is not the device of the ‘knife’, but the pause button, the rewind, the impulse to look again. We have dominion over this ability to pause just as Ángela does. Amenábar does not let us leave untouched; he does not allow us the privilege of pretending we are only bystanders. There is a paradox at the core of Thesis: we recoil, and yet we lean in. The screen blinks, the faces on it suffer, and still the eyes do not close. This paradox is the marrow of modern spectatorship, the same pulse that drives us to rubberneck at roadside wreckage, to click on headlines marked “graphic,” to sit through images we later claim offended us. Amenábar knew that violence is never only the act, but it is the gaze, the transaction of seeing. Violence with no audience is silence; it becomes violence only when witnessed.

The university in Thesis becomes a cathedral of this hunger. Its classrooms, its archives, its sterile corridors, all sanctuaries not of knowledge, but of curiosity unmoored and perverted. Ángela, a student meant to study violence from the safe remove of theory, finds herself swept into its very machinery. She becomes both archivist and voyeur, both terrified and enthralled. In her trembling, we recognize our own. Amenábar films these moments not with gore-slick bravado but with restraint: with lengthening shadows beside a camera lingering just a second too long on the flicker of a tape of depicted carnage. He understands that suggestion is the sharper blade. What we imagine in the darkness is always more terrifying than what is fully lit, or what we interpret such darkness to mean. The film becomes a study in absence, in the negative space of horror: what is obscured, what is subsequently cut away. And how eerily it anticipates the century to come.

 In 1996, the snuff tape was a relic, grainy and illicit, passed hand to hand. Today, its ghost has multiplied, finding endless afterlives in pixels, in links, in viral loops. What was once a taboo underground has become a casual spectacle: war livestreamed, police violence replayed, and tragedy folded into the theatre of social media. We scroll, we watch, we whisper “horrible,” and then—refresh. Thesis is not merely a relic of the ’90s; it is the prophecy of our digital appetite. Of course, this hunger is not new to us. This is why our acceptance and integration of social media has come with ease; it has been rehearsed extensively. This hunger, as Amenábar recognized, is not a recent invention; it’s been present, lurking beneath the surface of human behaviour, long before the digital age made it so ubiquitous and instantaneous. The very foundations of civilization, spanning the gladiator fights of Ancient Rome to the public executions of the French Revolution, were built upon a desire to witness suffering, punishment, and death…not as acts of necessity, but spectacles that affirmed the primal impulses of the human anima. 

To watch the film now is to feel that prophecy vibrating under the skin. The faces may belong to actors, the tape may be fictional, but the unease is real, pressing, contemporary. It provokes the same line of questioning every screen we open now asks us: What will you do with the violence you are offered? Will you turn away or will you linger? And if you linger, who are you becoming? Who have you become?

Eliana Abdel-Khaleq is a freshman at Barnard College majoring in Aesthetic Philosophy. She has a tremendous love for literature, the academic tradition, and philosophy in all its appearances, such as lamenting music or contemplative film. 

@scarletswell