Traffic Accidents: from Risk to Fear
Gaspar Mairal Buil
A precise conceptualization of risk must, in addition to clarifying as much as possible the interior of the concept, draw its demarcations; risk is a concept, but fear does not. A concept needs a basis, even if it is minimal, ofknowledge and fear is characterized precisely by the absence or loss of knowledge that may exist regarding the situation that causes it. In other words, fear dilutes knowledge. I will try to argue this proposition with the case of advertising used by the Spanish Dirección General de Tráfico (D.G.T.) to raise drivers' awareness of the risks inherent in driving. It is a fact that accidents on roads and urban roads have been decreasing in Spain in a very significant way in the last two decades, and so the influence that these advertising campaigns have had on public opinion. In what proportion this decrease is due to these campaigns, it is an issue that has always been controversial, as some of these same campaigns that have sometimes been criticized for their crudity. I do not intend to enter into this discussion but rather to analyze from the perspective of the narrative of risk the advertising strategies[1] deployed by the D.G.T.
Stories of risk in advertising
The tendency to relate risk to harm or evil is quite common and therefore does not take into account the fact that risk is a fundamental safety tool. My way of conceptualizing risk clearly distinguishes the object "of" risk from the object "in" risk to determine that the core of the concept is not harm, but the relationship between these two entities and that it could cause harm. That is why we can also conceive risk as safety-oriented knowledge. This way of managing risk is now common in many areas and activities. Spain has a high rate of occupational accidents, especially in the construction sector, and in view of this, occupational risk management professionals often refer to the difficulty of promoting a risk "culture" among workers. I think this is something similar to the situation that the D.G.T. has been facing in recent decades. Traffic accidents themselves do not produce a widespread notion of risk among the population and this makes a difference with air accidents which, causing many fewer victims, have a much more powerful risk narrative. This has to do with the intensity of the narration of the plane crash on the one hand and the weakness of this same narrative in the case of traffic accidents from which a generalized narrative does not emerge. In my opinion, this has marked the advertising campaigns carried out by the Spanish traffic authorities since 1964. But from 1991 this advertising strategy acquired a narrative orientation of great intensity and it is this latter strategy that I intend to analyze here.
The television advertising that alerts citizens to the dangers and damages that are typical of driving vehicles was born in 1964 with the first advertising spot that focused on a double message: "driver, first watch out to everyone and everything". This same message was repeated again only replacing the "driver" by the "pedestrian". This formula that we could call the "advise", has been and still is one of the fundamental advertising resources. The medium used to transfer the advertising advice changed alternately and from the infomercial with a voice-over, to cartoons, to the celebrity's face that is addressed to the audience. From 1964 until almost 1991 these were the styles that predominated in the advertising campaigns carried out by the D.G.T. In these early times advertising is informative and seeks to disseminate practical advice or train drivers in a kind of extension of the teachings already received in driving schools. There is little mention of road accidents and, on the contrary, there are many references to deiving education, to the revision of vehicle lights or to the use of seat belts when this was not yet compulsory. In the 1970s a new theme appeared that alludes to the effects of alcohol consumption on driving. In the eighties of the last century the motorization of Spanish society grows with great intensity and the use of the car for leisure activities was notably a part of it. It is not strange then that this same publicity was focused on tips such as: "the weekend is to come back". The obligatory wearing of the helmet for motorcyclists was also a notable reference at this time. In any case, the decisive turn in the advertising strategy, to a certain extent friendly, that had predominated in previous decades took place in 1991 with an announcement that conveyed a message: "the negiglence is paid". It is worth stopping at this first video clip to analyze it.
There is a context in which this television advertisement must be placed and which is undoubtedly marked by several facts and among them, the very high number of traffic accidents recorded in Spain at the time and more when comparing this data with that of other European countries or the critical assessment of previous advertising strategies to which little efficiency was attributed. Friendly strategies will give way to new ways of approaching the risks and dangers of driving in advertising. Another important aspect is the use of new visual languages, such as video clips or docudrama and technical innovations such as the use of autonomous video cameras with high mobility. All these factors contributed to the fact that this first announcement had a great impact on the audience in 1991, something that D.G.T. itself had been pursuing for a long time.
This first announcement was very brief and even more we could say that it was deliberately short.It was like a "flash", fast and forceful, that hit the viewer with something new that leaft behind a certain question, something like: "but what is this?". Now we can see some images that in just ten seconds are following on another vertiginously. There has been an accident, sirens are heard and we see a very brief close-up of a young man covered with a thermal blanket and with the bloody face while the emergency services are looking after him. The dialogues are short and very fast and first we hear a voice that says: " She did not wear a belt" and to which the young man replies: "I did not because I was behind... and "God, I killed my mother!". After this very brief dialogue and with the screen on black you hear a voice-over that pronounces a phrase that is also written on the screen: "Recklessness is paid ". Finally, the label of the General Directorate of Traffic and the Ministry of the Interior appears. The undoubted quality of this videoclip lies in its ability to say everything in such a short time and this, undoubtly, gives it the ability to be the forceful beginning of new stories that will come next, because, as we will later see, this announcement was followed by many others. I have mentioned the dialogues, but it is also significant the type of camera used, its movements and the type of photography. The camera seems to be one of those used by reporters on the news and therefore with great ability to move on the shoulders of those who handle it, getting poorly framed plans or making sharp turns. The quality of the photograph is deliberately mediocre, but similar to what can be expected in a report made with immediacy and in which this matters more than its photographic quality. The staging is excellent and offers great credibility with the reliable reproduction of the place where an accident has just occurred. Everything I have described so far as characteristic of this announcement in the form of a video clip, which was broadcast throughout 1991, leads us towards narrative. Now the intention is not to advise, teach, warn or divulge, which is equivalent to using a discourse, but to[2] tell a story and after the narrative the moral comes: that recklessness is paid.
There is no doubt that from 1991 onwards the DGT began to respond to the fact, to which I referred earlier, that road accidents did not promote a notion of risk among drivers. Unlike other accidents such as air accidents, there was no story that would lead drivers to assume that when they got behind the wheel of a vehicle they were involved in a risky situation or what is the same, that there was a chance of an accident wich caused damage. The impact of this first announcement was great, but the two announcements that were broadcast in 1992 would be even greater. The formula was similar to the one we have seen before only that now the stories told were of longer duration and altogether the story had greater narrative entity. It seems clear that the first spot of 1991 had had an intentional attempt and that after confirming its impact, new ones of greater importance were going to follow. The first announcement of 1992 reconstructs an event in which a couple has run over a cyclist causing his death. Being the husband who was behind the wheel he dialogues with an agent while his wife very upset ends up reproaching him for what he has done because he only seems to worry about the withdrawal of his driver's license. Meanwhile the sirens sound and a twisted bike is seen in a quick image after the impact. The little story that is told here lasts about forty-five seconds compared to the little more than ten of the first story that had appeared the previous year. The second announcement of 1992 takes place in another scenario, access to emergency services at hospital. We see an ambulance stop and immediately and at full speed a stretcher with an accident is inserted into the corridors that lead to the emergencies room. The companions of the injured arrive at the same place and a security guard prevents them from passing. Then there is a conversation between all of them that very upset are reproached themselves for the responsibility of the accident. This conversation suggests that the driver had drunk and that it is not the injured. Finally and again with the black screen appears the message already reiterated: "recklessness is paid.... more and more". Its duration was similar to the previous one, about forty-three seconds.
It was this 1992 campaign that sparked the first controversies about this type of advertising with a criticism of the crudity used and that would end, it was assured, by frightening drivers. Actually the reference to fear as the effect caused by this type of publicity was already part of these first critical reactions. It is possible to assume that the D.G.T. itself hoped that these criticisms would be produced and even that it sought them as a fundamental element to attract the attention of public opinion. In fact, one of the objectives of this publicity was to break the indifference of the viewers towards some previous campaigns that had fallen into routine and banality. Undoubtedly this goal was achieved and the narrative displayed had much to do. For all these reasons, the first announcement of 1993 was aimed at confronting these criticisms and to achieve this it showed images at high speed that were reflecting the activities of all those who work in the regulation and safety of traffic. A voice-over was remembering how thanks to all these activities the number of deaths by traffic accident in Spain was decreasing and in response the D.G.T. itself thanked all citizens. This announcement was in response to criticism of the new publicity that had begun in 1991. Ii is necessary to emphasize about this last announcement that it was used to validate the effectiveness in reducing the number of accidents thanks to these campaigns. In this way and in the future the same argument will be used repeatedly to justify the continuity of these same campaigns. The 1990s reflected this new narrative strategy with great continuity. Certainly the stories changed their arguments and the messages were oriented according to the objectives that the D.G.T. itself was adopting and so it is possible to appreciate a first stage focused on the immediate damages and another in the aftermath when the story no longer deals with the accident but it stops at characters like those who have survived but in a wheelchair forever. All variations revolve around the central message that remains "recklessness is paid" that only towards the end of the decade will be changed by "the solution is in your hands". It seems clear that this same campaign had to resort to a basic principle of advertising because even the most effective message is exhausted after a period of time and then it must be compensated. The negative message that marked the first stage had to be counterbalanced with another rather positive and this is what happens with the replacement of "recklessness is paid" for "the solution is in your hands".
From an anthropological point of view and from 1991 the advertising of the D.G.T is characterized by its cultural understanding of traffic accidents. If the accident could have been conceived until then as a technical event, the failure or poor driving of a machine or the state or characteristics of a road, statistical, such as mathematical processing of the accident or educational, as the poor training of drivers, among other things, now the new thing was to see it as a shared human experience. The publicity of the D.G.T. was approaching this understanding already before 1991 and some of its advertisements indicated it. However, it was not until 1991 that this cultural understanding dominated the commercials exclusively to transform them into pure narration. Certainly, the previous publicity had a problem of reality or said otherwise was not credible and not for a problem of truth or lie but for the construction of reality. Everything the drivers were told was out of or strange to the very reality they themselves experienced. In this way the challenge before the D.G.T. was nothing but a narrative challenge or how to tell stories that were truthful and therefore credible. At this point the D.G.T. was absolutely right, because if the message they wanted to send was about the risk of getting behind the wheel of a vehicle, they did so using the primary material from which the risk is made, the narrative. The understanding was not as before, that the risk was the damage and for that reason it was necessary to mention until satiety the number of victims in traffic accidents that there was then in Spain, but the relationship between an object "of" risk as the driving of vehicles and an object "at" risk such as the life or health of drivers and the consequence of which could be the accident. This relationship, which is itself the risk, could only be created through narration. The other part of the problem was going to be the nature of that narrative, its truth and its reality. But here the D.G.T. also succeeded with a narrative approach of great verisimilitude that had the virtue, surely, of creating a succession of risk narratives of great effectiveness thanks to the technical resources, the scripts and the conception of the images, that they put into operation.
If traffic accidents lacked risk narratives, publicity would create them. This is an extraordinary example, as an object of analysis, of how, having failed to develop risk narratives, it was the authorities who set out to design and disseminate them. On the contrary, it would be unimaginable if these same authorities had done something similar, for example, in relation to nuclear power, power lines or earthquakes. This was then a good example of how narrative design can be a good insuring strategy against risk situations that are hardly recognized by society. Of course a traffic accident and much more if there are victims, has always been seen as a very serious damage that has affected many people, but in terms of risk each accident came to be seen as a singular fact and its tragic effects referred to that particular case. Not being the accident of traffic a massive damage his story did not come to have the general dimension and massified that usually have those others, as the air accidents, that always get a wide media coverage that is maintained for several days and that includes images or dramatic stories. The plane crash of a Hispanair plane when it took off from Barajas airport in 2004 shows us all these characteristics. Traffic accidents and their many victims are usually offered through fast images that show wrecked vehicles and are routinely presented. On other occasions, statistical data are transmitted which refer to the number of road accidents and victims over a weekend.
I have included a set of circumstances to define the state in which the consciousness of the average Spanish driver was in its distance from a notion of risk that could be activated to be effective in driving vehicles. There are a series of announcements scheduled in 1996 and in which different drivers appear bragging about the speed their cars reach, of their own exploits or their extreme confidence in driving their cars to the point that they make the accident impossible. To reverse these stories, so valid in Spanish society at the time, this other narrative strategy was designed whose aim was to impact at the stroke of verisimilitude. Narration always has a problem of truth and another of reality and the latter was the second dimension of the challenge that the D.G.T. If risk had to be transmitted it had to be done through a narrative and this narrative had to be as real as possible. Thus the truth of the narrative would be unquestionable because no one could deny the existence of traffic accidents and the victims they cause. Now, how to convince the viewer that this truth was so real that it could also affect him. This was undoubtedly the part of the challenge that had to do with reality and for more than a decade and as I mentioned before, multiple resources were used to give the images the greatest possible realism. In this way a progressive effect was produced as was the growing approximation of the real, the accident, to the consciousness of the spectators. How far was this possible? An announcement issued in 2008 shows us an interesting key. We can see a person in a wheelchair who recounts the accident he suffered driving a motorcycle and when he was accompanied by his girlfriend who died. He said he trusted a corner too much and now he's paying for it. With these images are interspersed others that reproduce in a realistic way this same accident. So far we could say that the narrative pattern is the same that has been used in the last two decades, but now there is an unexpected turn that seeks to draw the attention of the viewer because what happens is that this person leaves the wheelchair and recognizes that he is an actor and that it is an announcement. In this case it is worth reproducing the words of this actor who stars in the announcement:
"I bought the bike to go to work but then Merche and I took it on weekends..... until that turn... I do not know what happened, I trusted, I risked..... she killed herself and I.... but do not suffer for me.... I'm lucky this is just an ad and I'm an actor.
When the protagonist walks away from the wheelchair a voice-over transmits the explicit message that D.G.T. itself launches:
"Last year 528 people died in motorcycle accidents and that is the reality. You can change it."
I will stop here to analyze these advertising strategies and especially in relation to this unexpected turn that is offered to the viewer in a 2008 announcement. I am interested in focusing this analysis on the core of the narrative concept of risk that I have been using so far. Probability is part of this core. In turn probability can be understood as an access to the future conceived as truth and thus we would face the narrative challenge that arises when having to open an access like this. The D.G.T. then resorted to verism by creating stories that emphasized the representation of reality. That the truth of the traffic accidents did not reach the viewers, was surely the diagnosis made by traffic authorities or specialists who analyzed the situation and designed a response. We could say that veristic realism was a calculated strategy that inspired a good number of commercials launched throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In all this time this strategy was changing the script of the stories orienting them towards the aspects of the accident that were most interested in each moment (helmet, alcohol, belt, speed, runs, etc.). However, the narrative style, so veristic, did not change essentially. The epicenter of this style was reality and the main problem, how to represent it. In this way, short stories of the actual traffic accidents were created, scenarios were also reproduced in a meticulous and convincing way, but the main problem that remained to be solved was the plausibility, because the story, besides being real, had to be credible. This is where the visual style that was maintained throughout successive video clips played an essential role: moving camera, sloppy framing and photography and live sound. The actors' interpretation, with the total absence of familiar faces, was also highlighted by its great credibility. In conclusion, all these elements, which formed a visual style and served to produce these ads, were aimed at creating a proximity effect to obtain this verisimilitude[3] so sought.
The effect that these ads produced on public opinion is also worth mentioning, since, at least in part, it would prove the success of these campaigns, but also some problematic aspect. There is no doubt that the effect of proximity, and therefore of reality, had been achieved, but also those who believed that this type of publicity was negative because of its excessive crudeness, certainly warned of a relevant fact. The growing proximity to an object of risk can progressively lead to the transformation of risk into fear, since closeness transforms the relationship, gradually dissolves the acquired knowledge and causes a state of consciousness that is to a certain extent paralyzing. At this point I have just come to the central theme of my presentation in this chapter, the relationship between risk and fear, and I wanted to address it by describing and analyzing some facts that are recognizable to any reader, the announcements of the D.G.T., which, on the other hand, have been one of the most significant risk issues in Spain in the first decade of the 21st century. I do not mean by this that the D.G.T. intended to instill fear among drivers, but their veristic strategies to narrate risk could, precisely by their verism, instill more fear than risk. In addition, by analyzing them we can discover and it is what interests me most, that if the risk is probability of harm, fear is now the proximity of such harm. Narrative verism, by its undoubted quality, could foster more than a probabilistic knowledge of damage, a state of consciousness derived from the proximity of this same damage.
In these circumstances and with the development of these advertising campaigns from 1991 onwards, what gradually became apparent proved to be a problem of reality. Advertising messages always end up being exhausted, even the most effective. Surely and at the height of 2008 reality, as representation of course, was no longer so plausible because it had lost proximity with the viewer because by force of reiterating images so veristic, These resembled a movie seen in cinemas or on the television screen, that is, a story of what "does not happen to me". From there came the surprising twist of the announcement issued in 2008 and why its protagonist gets up from the wheelchair to say that he is an actor and that it is an ad. It was necessary to turn the story around to say: "this is not a film" and therefore the voice-over that launches the message of the D.G.T, proclaims, referring to the 528 killed in a motorcycle accident in 2007, "that is the reality". Now the message is that reality is real. We remain in the same strategy of using proximity so that once lost in part the previous one, create a new verisimilitude through another story that builds a new proximity and therefore a new realism.
Verism and constructivism
I have used the term verismo, whose best known use is given in the operatic world[4], to characterize the strategy of truth and reality that through a certain narrative made its own the publicity of the D.G.T from 1991. Also the meaning attributed to it by the dictionary of the Royal Academy of Language is clarifying: "Realism taken to the extreme in works of art". This last definition is very revealing in light of another activity starring the D.G.T. and that I will analyze from now on. It depicted a realistic representation that went beyond the images reflected on a television screen.
In 2007 the D.G.T. presents a new action and does so at a press conference in which Vicenç Navarro, General Director of Traffic and Alberto de Pinto, president of the Association of Spinal Injuries (Aspaym), appear. There both responsible explain an initiative organized so that 110 volunteers who suffer spinal cord injuries as a result of having suffered traffic accidents, accompany the agents carrying out the blood alcohol tests in 20 provinces to tell their case to those drivers who have tested positive. The core of the procedure lies in what we could call a "face-to-face" relationship, since it is now a real accident that suffers irreparable consequences who stands before the driver to tell him his case. In these circumstances the story cannot be interpreted as a fiction but as a testimony[5] and what is thus intended to convey, as in previous occasions, is reality or credible reality. The strategy continues to be to increase proximity, in a kind of "closer and closer", because now it is no longer a screen but a person, flesh and blood, which face to face tells a story in terms of "Look what happened to me and it could happen to you too". In this press conference the President of Aspaym himself comes to express this very clearly:
"Seeing a person in a wheelchair has more impact and credibility than any TV message. Our motto is. "Don't run, don't drink .... don't change wheels."[6]
The challenge remains the same, namely that the representation of the reality of an awareness campaign does not become a fiction for drivers. We must therefore continue to bring reality, now more real, into a situation, on the other hand real, because the recipients of this new story are drivers who are behind the wheel and who have just been sanctioned for exceeding the limit of alcohol allowed. Lazarus, 38, was one of these volunteers, he was disabled in 2000 after an accident and carried out this task in the early hours near Barcelona. This is his account:
"I thought something like this would never happen to me. I never thought I could have an accident and end up in a wheelchair. Until it happened to me. We think we're invulnerable on the road, accidents happen to others, but it happened to me. And that's what I'm going to try to explain to people[7]."
The veristic strategy that we can clearly see in the explanation of this person, aims to instill in the driver a narrative of risk in terms of what "already happened to me, could happen to you" or put another way, expresses the likelihood of harm arising from the relationship between an item of risk, excess alcohol when driving and an item at risk, the physical integrity of the driver or other persons. The singular thing is that now the story is oral, direct and very close. It is worth asking about the emotional state in which a driver remains behind the wheel of his vehicle, after being punished for exceeding the rate of alcohol allowed and listening to the detailed account of who has been the victim of an accident with serious consequences. Those responsible for this campaign did not doubt its effectiveness and for this they referred to data that showed that the number of positive for alcohol was falling and that the public was mostly in favour of this type of campaign.
A first conclusion that we can draw from this analysis refers to proximity and how the growth of veristic realism itself operates by progressively replacing probability with the proximity of harm, or in other words risk with fear. It is true that a damage can not be created in fact to go in this way approaching someone, but yes that the representation imagined through the narrative, visual, oral or written, can try to get something similar. This was, in my opinion, the philosophy, which consciously or unconsciously underlay in these campaigns of the D.G.T. and which somehow resembled the classic narratives of fear.
Risk and fear
Fear is a state of consciousness that arises progressively in people when they know or perceive the proximity of a potential agent of harm. The proximity of the damage is spatiotemporal and diverse in terms of the means in which it is deployed and the speed used by both the damage and who or who is affected. I think that cinema and especially the so-called genre of "terror"[8] is like a visual narrative, one of the best examples to understand what is the representation of fear. Let's go to the examples of the most classic cinema of suspense or fear or terror and in which there is a narrative structure that is reiterated when it comes to provoking in the viewer something similar to this state of consciousness that I have called "fear". A person or a group of people who are in a place are noticing the presence of something or someone who is attributed the ability to do harm either by being already known or otherwise. The story advances showing the progressive approach of this agent and at the same time the reaction of those who perceive this approach, interspersing scenes that underline this growing proximity. The story progresses in a crescendo to the effectiveness of which good music or sound effects can contribute. In the end what is intended to transmit is fear and for this a narrative structure like this is used and whose basic property is growing proximity. Classic horror stories, such as Lovercraft's, or Hitchkook's thriller, are good examples for identifying the narrative nature of fear. I have in mind and from my cinematic experiences, a film like 23 Paces to Baker Street, directed by Henry Hathaway in 1956 and starring Van Johnson and Vera Miles. He has a great final scene in which the killer accesses by the fire escape to an apartment where the protagonist, a blind writer, awaits him, who prepares to defend himself. We see how the killer, with his face hidden, although we will finally know that it is a woman dressed as a man, It is approaching the door of the apartment and at the same time they are interspersed the scenes that show us the writer who hears how the killer is going up and prepares for the defense. When this killer enters the apartment he finds the electric light cut and thus as blind as his alleged victim. This has prepared a stratagem that consists of a network of speakers distributed throughout the apartment and that are continuously repeating a voice recorded on a tape recorder and going saying: "Pass Mr. Evans was waiting for you". The mobility of this voice from one part of the apartment to another completely baffles the killer. This cinematographic example helps us to verify the resources used to promote fear in the viewer with the use of growing proximity, very well built thanks to the staging, the script and the special effects. The protagonist does not fall under the effects of fear but has managed the risk, because he knew in advance that the killer would probably try to kill him and had prepared for it. Now, the production of fear is directed towards the viewer who if he identifies with the story and it is easy to do it because the film is of great quality, looks somehow shocked. Of course we are now facing a fear that most of us like to experience since we know that it only exists in the fiction of images projected on a screen. Does it prepare us for when fear arises in us as a state of consciousness from what we are living and is not, as in these cases, a story?
The production of fear through storytelling is as old as humanity and has been part of the socialization of children in many cultures. The children's story has in this one of its tasks. There is a type of children's tale that is based on the story that someone, be an ogre, appeared, witch, boogeyman, monster, etc. is approaching as far as the child or children are. As the story progresses the story is placed through its own voice, pretended by the narrator, at the door, on the first rung of the ladder and later on the following, etc., thus signifying the crescendo of proximity. We could say that this is a way of teaching fear to children and at the same time a narrative method that puts into operation the basic property of fear, the growing proximity imagined through the story.
There is a continuum between risk and fear, just as there is between uncertainty and risk. If uncertainty comes to express the possibility of something happening without knowing what it is and the risk is likely to happen something that, although inaccurately, has already been identified, the fear would correspond to its proximity. So there could be a kind of chain or continuum formed by uncertainty, risk and fear and you can find situations that evolve from uncertainty to fear. The D.G.T. 's veristic strategy may have contributed to the transformation of risk into fear by using a narrative representation of reality that was based on a realistic approach to certain damage. This process of transformation is accompanied by the dissolution of the available knowledge thanks to a narrative of risk because what a narrative of fear achieves is just to provoke an emotional state, sometimes paralyzing, diluting all previously acquired knowledge. Fear, unlike risk, is not a concept but a state of consciousness.
[1] I have used for this purpose the compilation of all these campaigns made by the newspaper El País and which can be accessed at: https://www.elpais.com/special/videos-dgt/
[2] Here I use the concept of "discourse" as a narration that contains a proposition, while a "narration" is an account that describes something that has happened or could happen. The transition from speech to narration was the key to the spectacular turn that the General Directorate of Traffic gave to its publicity.
[3] I understand that verisimilitude is the attainment of a truth through a representation of reality.
[4] The operatic verism alludes to some Italian operas of the late nineteenth century, but especially to Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni which was premiered in 1890 and which shocked the world of Italian opera still under the powerful influence of Giuseppe Verdi. The realistic theme featured a plot built around infidelity and revenge among peasants in a Sicilian village. It was the equivalent of literary naturalism and gave rise to a certain style that continued with Leoncavallo's famous Pagliacci premiered in 1892.
[5] Truth does not lie in the nature of the story, for a novel can offer much truth and a testimony be completely false.
[6] El País, June 1, 2007. Pp.32
[7] El País, Ibid., Pp.32
[8] In this case, "terror" can be considered nothing more than extreme fear. For this reason the term "horror cinema" is surely exaggerated. Of course, in a broad sense, terror is much more complex than this brief definition.