Novelist and playwright Francisco Arrabal was already considered one of the most controversial figures in Spanish literature when he boldly turned to cinema as an extension of his politically outspoken, profoundly disturbing and unremittingly dystopian vision of the modern world. In 1962 Arrabal founded the so-called “Panic Movement” with director Alejandro Jodorowsky and French animator Roland Topor (The Fantastic Planet), taking the god Pan as an inspiration to cultivate a “primitive” and blatantly non-conventional art practice that aimed especially to inject new life into what they perceived as a calcification and bourgeoisification of Surrealism, which Arrabal had known through his brief association with Andre Breton. Based on his novel of the same name, Viva la muerte is a searing cri de coeur against totalitarian patriarchy, set during Franco’s rise to power and using haunting, hallucinatory imagery to chronicle the sexual and political awakening of a troubled young boy.