Blood Hunt (1986)

The original title is: La noche de la ira (Night of Rage).

Doctor Alejandro Liema (Patxi Andión), hoping to leave his troubles in the big city behind, relocates to a small rural village. While settling in, he meets young Ana (Yolanda Ventura) and her older sister Marta (Beatriz Elorrieta). Not long after his arrival, he begins to notice strange customs and suspicious activities among the locals. At the center of the mystery is a drug rehabilitation facility known as The Foxhole, overseen by Director Fabián (Aramis Ney). Doctor Liema’s persistence in uncovering the truth about the center quickly provokes resentment from the townspeople. Tensions escalate further when Gonzalo Cruz (Agustín González), a man of influence in the town, becomes convinced that Liema is having an affair with his girlfriend, Marta

Beneath this brewing mystery, however, the film carries traces of a very different cinematic tradition.

Although Blood Hunt isn’t strictly a quinqui film, it contains elements of the genre that dominated a certain corner of Spanish cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Quinqui movies, named after the slang term for juvenile delinquents, focused on marginalized youth caught in cycles of crime, addiction, and police persecution. These films were raw, street-level portraits of a Spain still shaking off the last shadows of the authoritarian Franco regime. They became a cultural phenomenon for the way they blended social realism with exploitation cinema. Their protagonists were often played by real-life delinquents, their settings were urban and bleak, and their narratives revolved around survival rather than being morality plays.

Blood Hunt reflects this tradition through its inclusion of drug-addicted youth and a handful of violent confrontations, but it ultimately belongs to a different cinematic lineage. The film’s rural setting immediately sets it apart from the gritty urban landscapes that defined quinqui storytelling. Instead of focusing on the lived experience of delinquent characters, the movie uses them as a catalyst for a broader mystery involving the village’s unsettling customs. The Foxhole rehabilitation center and the townspeople’s annual ritual introduce elements of folk horror and rural revenge that have little to do with the social-realist concerns of quinqui films.

What emerges is a hybrid: a film that borrows the surface texture of quinqui – such as the presence of troubled youth, the problem of addiction, the threat of violence – while steering its narrative toward something more allegorical. Blood Hunt may flirt with the aesthetics of quinqui cinema, but its heart lies in the darker, more ritualistic impulses of a rural revenge thriller.