This highly acclaimed debut feature from Victor Erice is set in rural Spain just after Franco\'s victory in the Spanish Civil War. It offers a memorable story of a child\'s innocence amid post-war traumas and a haunting commentary on the new fascist rule. In a remote Castillian village in 1940 a travelling cinema comes to town and shows the Boris Karloff film \'Frankenstein\'. The young girl, Ana, starts to worry about the fate of the monster. Goaded on by her sister, who tells her the monster lives in a house on the edge of the village, she finally summons enough courage to visit the house. She discovers a fugitive on the run who takes the surrogate place of the monster of her imagining, and she naively tries to protect him from the villagers and police.