SACER

"Taking advantage of the ‘closet screenplay’ format to emphasize the cinematic ritualistic structure of contemporary imaginaries, Nicola Masciandaro’s SACER is an extraordinary techno-mystical, meta-cult fiction about the recurrently sacrificial nature of life and art. Following a set of characters linked to the cult horror movie FORSAKEN—including members of an enigmatic secret society, actors, filmakers and scholars, some of them suffering the hallucinatory effects of a neuro-hacking, virtual-reality Baphomet—, SACER is an audacious narrative investigation of, as Bataille would say, the sacred as sacrifice and the genuine ecstasy as violently negative. Under the explicit influence of E. Elias Merighe’s Begotten and Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Masciandaro invokes Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Cioran, Bataille, Klossowski, and the Hindu mahavidya Chinnamasta to explore the links between ecstasy, sacrifice, death, re-birth, and the neuro-alchemy of demonic possession deeply embedded in our technologies of perception." Germán Sierra