Today, we’re thrilled to have writer-producer Dave Alexander join us for a 31 Days of Horror guest post. Dave’s an award-winning Toronto-based filmmaker, author and journalist. Former editor-in-chief (and current co-owner) of Rue Morgue magazine, he has multiple features and documentary series in development and pre-production. His most recent producer credits are on the features This Too Shall Pass (dir: Rob Grant, 2024) and Thanks to the Hard Work of the Elephants (dir: Bryce Hodgeson, 2025). He’s also guested at fan conventions, on TV and radio shows, served on film juries for genre festivals, and appeared in documentaries such as Why Horror?, 24X36: A Movie About Movie Posters and Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business. His writing has appeared in numerous anthology projects, and he’s authored the books Monster Movies: A Creature Feature Companion and Untold Horror (Dark Horse Comics).
Ever watched a movie on VCD? If you even know what a Video CD is, you can probably name as many back pain meds as you can grunge bands. Without going too far down a retro tech rabbit hole, VCDs were basically a ’90s format in which video was compressed enough that you could fit a feature on two compact discs. While still popular in some countries, in North America, they were a blip between VHS and the much higher image quality of DVD. Yet I owe this largely forgotten format for introducing me to a modern master of horror.
Twenty-five years ago, when I was a film studies nerd creeping Edmonton’s Chinatown for foreign rarities and cheap bootlegs, I found an oddball among the mostly Asian releases: 1999 film The Nameless (Los sin nombre), the first feature by Jaume Balagueró, the Spanish writer/director who’d go on to be celebrated for atmospheric creepers such as Darkness, Fragile, the [REC] series and Sleep Tight. But despite its importance in his oeuvre, it’s an adaptation of a novel by famed British horror author Ramsey Campbell, and although it was a hit in Spain, The Nameless remains obscure in North America. At the time of this writing, the only way to stream it is a YouTube version without English subtitles, and the only physical media release in North America is the 2005 short-lived DVD release. (For the record, no Nameless VCDs are listed on eBay – sad.)
The story centres around Claudia (Emma Vilarasau), whose life was destroyed five years earlier when the badly-tortured body of her six-year-old daughter, Angela, was found in a sewer and no one was arrested for it. But then she gets a call from someone claiming to be the girl, who begs to be rescued before the line goes dead. With the help of the former cop who investigated Angel’s disappearance and a journalist knowledgeable about cults, Claudia uncovers a conspiracy involving a sect with Nazi ties that goes by The Nameless and believes in the practice of cruelty as a path to sanctity (a reverse sainthood kinda situation). Mounting evidence suggests Angela is still alive, but time is running out.
The Nameless has many of the hallmarks of Balagueró’s work, including a mastery of exploiting claustrophobic spaces, storytelling steeped in occult mystery, and a fascination with old medical devices. But it also occupies a unique space in genre film history, sitting right between the ’90s and ’00s. For starters, it’s clearly influenced by the modern noir aesthetic and journey-into-the-heart-of-human-monsters narrative driving ’90s movies such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Se7en (1995), and Kiss the Girls (1997). And – with a few filthy locations, a lingering shot of a very slit throat, and a grotesque autopsy scene – the movie prefigures the spectacle of abject decay and grand guignol glee of post-9/11 genre hits such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005).
I’d call The Nameless more transitional than influential, as distributor Miramax buried it, but it was decades ahead of its time in breaking a taboo that’s only recently fallen in mainstream cinema, which is the depiction of violence towards children. Box office successes such as It, Hereditary, Bring Her Back, When Evil Lurks and even Weapons – show terrible, often bloody, things happening to pre-teens. And while The Nameless doesn’t have, say, a woman eating her own child (When Evil Lurks), the detailed description of torture, the aforementioned autopsy scene, and the final shot of the film remain shocking.
Also shocking: it’s been remade as a miniseries that just premiered in Latin American territories on none other than… Disney+! If you needed an example of the mainstreaming of horror, that’s it. Hopefully, it’ll make its way here and help finally make a name for 1999’s The Nameless. Just don’t hold your breath for a VCD release.
