A year ago, Movistar Plus+ opted for the fantasy genre with ‘Paradise’a kind of ‘Stranger things’ nineties and the Spanish who pulled a lot of nostalgia and drank from references as diverse as ‘The Goonies’, ‘Blue Summer’, ‘V’, ‘Stories to keep you awake’, ‘The Prophecy’ and ‘The People of the Damned’, to give just a few examples. The music of Meccano and OBK It contributed to reviving the memories of that decade, as well as winks to events of the black chronicle of those years. The platform opens this Thursday June 16, straight away, the second season of fiction, composed of seven episodes that will put an end to the story of a gang of teenagers who must face evil forces after death.
The series darkens even more in this new installment, pulling towards terror. “It seems to me that it is the natural journey of these types of stories”, he is justified Fernando Gonzalez Molina (‘I feel like you’, ‘Palmeras en la nieve’), director and co-creator of ‘Paraíso’ together with Ruth Garcia and David Oliva. It contributes to this that there is a new universe of villains that are much more present, the Novavisa group of Undead that can endanger the seaside town of Almanzora de la Vega in which the fiction is set.
“In the first season we had built some bad guys in the shadows, which were almost silhouettes, and now we put the camera on them much more,” explains González Molina, who understands that there are certain parallels between ‘Paraíso’ and ‘Stranger things’ to be addressed the fantastic genre through some kids. “Although what we are telling is a story of ghosts, dead and zombiesand they talk about something else,” considers the director, who was always clear that he wanted protagonists who were the same age as his teenage characters.
Teenagers as protagonists
“It seems obvious but for me it was essential,” he stresses. “In fiction, so as not to complicate your life on set working with minors, we tend to have these high school characters in their twenties, but here we wanted to do something authentic that would connect with 15- or 16-year-olds,” he says. 3,000 kids appeared at the ‘casting’, of which they were chosen Pau Gimeno, Cristian Lopez, Leon Martinez, Hector Gozalbo, Maria Romanillos and Patricia Isertewho are accompanied by veterans like Macarena Garcia, Inaki Ardanaz Y Gorka Otxoa. This season they add, in addition, Alvaro Mel (‘La Fortuna’), with a character with a certain ambiguity; Begona Vargas (‘The Border Laws’) and Laura Laprida, like the leaders of the bad guys, and the young Carla Dominguez, as an unexpected ally of the boys.
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The action of this second round of episodes begins three years after the previous one, in nineteen ninety fiveand to the rhythm of one of the great successes of Heroes of Silence, ‘Between two lands’. We wanted to start with groundbreaking music and that song seemed to us to mark how the characters had matured and darkened,” says its creator, who was inspired by crime stories from past decades such as that of the girls of Alcàsser, the murder of Anabel Segura and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann to give mysterious touches to the story. “Instead of traveling to a dark and terrifying ‘thriller’ to tell what happened, we wanted to give it a fantastic explanation.”
González Molina recognizes how difficult it is to do fantasy in Spain. “It is very expensive and has its risk, because there is not such a clear culture of this type of product. Although in recent years the conditions and the budget of the televisions have changed a lot in Spain, we compete face to face with series that have 10 times more budget,” he stresses. To be up to the task, ‘Paraíso’ has required more than nine months of digital post-production to create increasingly complex effects, almost 700 VFX shots and the creation of new universes, some of them, such as the Abyss, generated entirely in CGI (Computer Generated Imagery).