Memoria traumática y espectralidad en Silencio en la nieve de Gerardo Herrero

Abstract

Gerardo Herrero’s film Silencio en la nieve (2011) takes place in the bitter Russian winter of 1943 on the Leningrad Front just before one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. It revolves around an investigation of a chain of vicious killings that is causing panic among the Spanish troops of the División Azul. This essay explores the narrative strategies of the horror genre to illustrate the fear, violence and the traumatic effects of a silenced past. The horror film tropes are used to exorcise what Derrida calls “the specters of the past”, the traces of the traumatic memory of the Civil War that come to haunt the living. The protagonists embody the ghosts of the past, the forgotten victims of history, looking for justice and moral reparation to be remembered in the collective memory of all Spaniards.