Abrakadabra - New Onetti Brothers Horror Film Premieres At SITGES; Watch The Trailer

Magician-themed horror is a surprisingly small subgenre. There’s something shifty about stage magicians after all, they get you twice: At face value, their act is trying to convince you of their unsettling powers to defy the laws of physics and nature, and when you know their tricks, they become shifty cons who are a little too blatant about convincing you of something that isn’t true. Magicians from Houdini to Penn & Teller have known their status on the fringes of the macabre and worked to exploit it for their act.

So what if we told you there’s a new Giallo-style film where a stage magician, Lorenzo, is not only haunted by the legacy of his late father who also traded in the family business and came to a bad end after a risky trick, but is also implicated in a string of murders seemingly surrounding his present act?

Abrakadabra is the film which rounds out the Onetti Brothers’ Giallo-style trilogy (Panorama Fantastic and Blood Window), and was one of seven films picked for the “Upcoming Fantastic Films” selection at this year’s Cannes. It gets its world premiere at the SITGES Film Festival in October.

Now watch that trailer, and tell us that fetishized guillotine act isn’t an artistic piece worthy of Argento himself! There’s a glimpse of an amulet in the trailer with the letters of “abrakadabra” written out recursively in an inverted pyramid; that’s historically accurate, as the word originated as a magic charm meant to ward off evil when written this way. We just love it when filmmakers do their homework!

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