Did you know that the church of San Martin de Noya starred in one of the darkest and most tragic episodes of Spanish Fantastic cinema?
Between January and February 1973, at the Roma studios in Madrid and the towns of Betanzos and Noya, The Bell from Hell by Claudio Guerin, one of the most promising filmmakers in the national cinema at that time, was filmed. It was a Spanish-French co-production, in which Guerin was also a producer, based on a script by the writer and playwright Santiago Moncada.
The film, starring by Renaud Verley, Viveca Lindfords and Alfredo Mayo, tells how after the death of his mother, a young man leaves the psychiatric hospital where he had been admitted by his aunt, and returns to his town to carry out a terrible revenge against her and her three cousins.
During the last day of filming, on February 16, 1973, the tragedy happened. Guerin was preparing to film one of the scenes in the film before the gaze of numerous neighbors and onlookers attracted by the event it involved. The team had built a papier-mâché tower to house the bell that gives the film its title, as this beautiful Gothic church was left unfinished without one of its towers.
It is said that so that the church did not rival in beauty with the cathedral of Santiago, it was cursed and anyone who tries to finish off the second tower will suffer a fateful fate, just as happened to the master stonemason who built it at the time and who died when he fell from it.
True or not, the case was that the filmmaker climbed a scaffolding at the top of the church to place a camera and lost his balance when he jumped into a cantilever. Falling from twenty meters high, in front of the astonished gaze of those present. Sadly, Guerin passed away before reaching the hospital in Santiago de Compostela. A small cross, a silent witness of the unfortunate accident, marks the place where he fell on the ground in the Plaza del Tapal.
Juan Antonio Bardem was in charge of completing the film that, after its premiere on September 16 of that same year at the San Sebastián Festival, won the awards for best actor, for Alfredo Mayo, and for best technical achievement of the National Union of the Show.
If you do not know the place, you are already taking time to visit this church-fortress built in the 15th century, to be amazed by its spectacular rose window, flanked by four angels that announce the Apocalypse, by its gargoyles, and by the magnificent tympanum on its facade, in which you can see the image of the pregnant virgin and the archangel Gabriel, or the twelve elders of the Apocalypse. The Church of San Martin de Noya was declared a site of cultural interest in 1931.
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