Carlota Pereda’s strikingly bold and ominous feature adaptation of her award-winning 2018 short film of the same name, Piggy is all set to release in UK cinemas this Friday, 06 January.
Written and directed by Pereda, and starring With Laura Galan, Richard Holmes, Carmen Machi, Irene Ferreiro and Camille Aguilar, with the special collaboration of Pilar Castro and Claudia Salas, Piggy takes place in the sweltering summertime of rural Spain, centring on Sara, a teenage girl suffering perpetual bullying from her peers whilst also an outsider on the home front, internalising her feelings. One day, Sara’s usual solo dip at the local pool is disrupted by the presence of a mysterious stranger in the water and an exceptionally gruelling bout of abuse at the hands of three girls. But, in a strange twist of fate, along the way home Sara witnesses her bloodied tormentors being kidnapped in the back of the stranger’s van. In the light of these sinister events, Sara must decide whether to cooperate with the police and parents’ questioning about the kidnappings, or take her own, unbridled path – all the while discovering the power of desire and belonging, and the distinction between revenge and redemption.
In anticipation of this Friday’s release of the film, SCREAM’s Howard Gorman caught up with Pereda who revealed how she initially wrote Piggy to confront her own fears, how the protagonist’s conflict was too important to pass up the opportunity to adapt the original short film into a feature-length movie and how bullying had always been a theme that she had wanted to address and what it was that prompted her to focus the film on grossophobia; something that people cannot escape. Ultimately, she points out how the film is a reminder that monsters don’t live inside closets like they do in so many horror movies. More often than not, they live inside us and these are the most terrifying and most difficult monsters to escape from.
Words: Howard Gorman
