‘The Quinta’s Ghost’ Filmmakers Unravel “Punk Rock” Haunts Behind Goya-Inspired Animated Horror Short

You can’t always outrun the baggage weighing you down from your past. Emmy award winner James A. Castillo’s latest animated short film, The Quinta’s Ghost (The ghost of the Fifth), offers a glimpse into the life of a man tormented by his demons, which he tries to exorcise through painting dark artworks on his villa walls. The man in question? Francisco de Goya.

The 17-minute short film centers on the latter half of the Spanish romantic painter’s life, a period known as the dark era, when his work became increasingly gloomy and terrifying after an unknown illness left him deaf. Plagued by deafness, losing seven of his eight children, civil wars transpiring in Madrid and the decline of his mental and physical health, Goya tried to seek catharsis in The Black Paintings, a series of artworks done between 1819-1823 on the walls of his villa, The Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man), where he lived alone in isolation. Castillo uses the Quinta as the watchful eye and narrator (Maribel Verdú) to observe Goya, a man she never identifies, as he begins to paint twisted figures and demons while trying to fight his downward spiral into madness.

Below, Castillo and producer Raul Rocha talk to Deadline about trauma interlinking with art, gothic inspirations and Goya’s legacy.

DEADLINE: Why did you decide to cover this specific piece of Goya’s life?

JAMES A. CASTILLO: Well, I think there are probably two different angles to answer that question. One is I am compelled by the fact that, as successful as Goya was before The Black Paintings, which are the things that made him eternal and solidified him as one of the most important painters in history, before that, he was a romantic baroque painter from time to time. So, without The Black Paintings, he would not have been singled out as a genius. He would’ve stayed more in line with his contemporaries. That’s especially true when you see or think about the fact that to make those paintings, he had to make sacrifices that nobody at the time would’ve ever made. The idea that somebody would just paint their feelings was a very, very punk rock thing at the time. Nobody really did it. He was so expansive [in thought] and went against social norms. Also, he did all these paintings just for himself, because he died thinking that nobody would ever see them. It didn’t cross his mind that he was leaving a legacy, nor was he building his own name, so it made it such a free act of creation without any expectation of what the outcome of painting these paintings was going to be, other than expressing his own feelings and dealing with his own demons.

It was a beautiful, secluded and protected part of his life. We don’t know much about it, only through letters he sent before his wife and his best friend’s passing. So, because he was completely alone, nobody really knows what went on in the house, and that’s the perfect environment to build a fiction. I’ve been trying to find ways in my work to talk about grief, and I knew I wanted to make a horror film, which I’m committed to pushing the animation medium towards. I feel like there’s still so much to explore in the genre world of animation, and if I am going to spend years of my life fighting to get stuff made, I’d rather it go in that direction. Goya was a perfect vehicle to talk about my relationship with Spain, his relationship with Spain, and art within the physical and historical space it occupies in our lives.

DEADLINE: As a producer, was there a challenge in trying to get people to understand the scope of this project about Goya? What would you say were some differences in putting this out there between the U.S. and Spain markets?

RAUL ROCHA: When James presented this project to me, it was very clear that it was a Goya movie. This part of his life is unique, and it makes total sense to make a horror movie out of this story, which is part of what we do – adult animation. When he presented the story, I fell in love. The other part that got me into this was the idea of exporting Spanish culture, and the goal of the project has always been to bring that story to the U.S. We’ve been working on animation for years already on international projects and huge productions. We always wanted the U.S. market to see this movie. There’s a wave in the U.S. right now, for example, with Rosalía and her latest album; you can see billboards of her all around Los Angeles, or C. Tangana, who is a bit smaller here but huge in Spain. They’re trying to export our culture in a modern, cool way. So doing this was a great opportunity to try and export this part of our culture to the whole world, and I think we’re going great. We’ve shown this short at the Tribeca Film Festival and other festivals around the U.S., and people have shown interest.

Then I remember people who came to our studio to see it, who came from the U.S., and then went to the Museo del Prado the day after watching the film. So, it gets people interested in knowing more about Goya’s life, even if they didn’t know him before. I’m very happy about the effect it has on people.

CASTILLO: I’ll add to that. From the beginning, we knew we were doing something incredibly specific to our own culture. Goya is famous enough to justify doing something like this. But I did find myself asking, how much does the world at large know about Goya? Luckily, my wife is American, so she was the perfect control subject. While making this movie, she had an idea of some of the images shown in the film, but didn’t quite know enough, so she became the perfect person to run ideas by. Sometimes she didn’t understand certain things, and that would give us better direction on how to approach something from a different perspective.

With that said, we figured we should try not to rely too much on Goya or on what people know about Goya, because we cannot control how much people know ahead of time. The challenge became: can we make a film or tell a story that would work even if you didn’t know who this man is? So, we try stripping the character down and away from his branding, so to speak, as much as possible. That’s why Goya’s name isn’t mentioned in the story until the end. And that’s because we want to make sure that audiences can focus on empathizing with a man who is 74 years old, has dementia, and is a widower in a house all alone. It’s just a very sad man dealing with sad things, and if we could make people connect with that part of the story, then everything else elevates it.

DEADLINE: It is interesting that the house, known as The Quinta de Goya, doesn’t know who lives inside of it. Also, the house is the one that does the narration. Why was that the appropriate way to tell the story for you?

CASTILLO: There are certain decisions when you’re coming up with an idea that are purely creative. You have an image in your mind, or a certain sequence you really want to explore, and some decisions come more from the project’s narrative needs. The house being the speaker was not something I originally envisioned as a main part of the puzzle; it came out of trying to find the right cadence for the story.

We knew we wanted to talk about this part of Goya’s life. We also knew we had too much nuance, so we wanted to make it very clear to the audience that we could not achieve with a full silent movie. We felt it would be redundant to have him just speak about his feelings, since you’re already seeing him feel things. So, we tried different ideas, and that was one of those creative blocks we got stuck on and couldn’t quite move forward with because we didn’t know exactly how to solve it. But, because we were looking at a lot of gothic horror material as a point of reference, like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and some others, somebody mentioned that the house should be haunted. And it clicked in my mind, like, we’re not quite doing a haunted house story in the traditional sense, what if instead we flip the narrative and the house is perfectly fine and then a new tenant arrives but it’s him that brings all the ghosts with him and from the point of view of the house, we get to understand what his ghosts are. And in doing that, you’re solving the puzzle of who this man is and trying to understand what he’s going through.

So, the house is used as a protagonist because, as much as Goya is going through this stuff, it’s almost like an act of nature. He’s just sort of there, and we’re witnessing it, but we’re actually following the house, which is the character that transforms throughout the story.  She goes through a sense of admiration, love and appreciation for the fact that this new tenant is going to make her look like a palace and be this beautiful thing, but then she has to face the reality that all of his pain is almost like these paintings are wounding her. Because he paints on the wall, her own skin is taking all this pain. And in that, we thought that this was a much more interesting way of telling the story.

DEADLINE: This story is very much about trauma, but also the difficulty of reconciling with that baggage. What other themes were you trying to get across in the short?

CASTILLO: As I mentioned earlier, this also has to do with grief. When I was 21, my dad passed away, and it took a long time to be in a position where I felt like I could talk about that from a place of understanding. I think a lot of people are very touched by the moments in the film with the bull, where we go into that symbolism in Goya’s artwork. But the thing that matters most is the idea that ghosts walk with us to the grave. There are ghosts that we have that, without whom, we wouldn’t be who we are. Art can be an exercise of such expression that liberates you from your own trauma and your own pain. There are some things that you have to embrace as who you are, and they become part of who you are.

For example, the baby symbolism was so important because we looked at Goya’s life, and in one version of the story, the kids were not there. Goya had seven children and lost six of them, and then there were another six that were miscarried. So when we looked at his life and all the things that happened to him, we came up with this idea that all the external elements of him dealing with the Spanish inquisition, him dealing with the oppression of the French army coming to Spain and him dealing with all of these external forces are things that he’s able to let go, but there has to be some internal trauma that is unique to him, regardless of all the external elements, that’s the one thing that he cannot exercise. He needs to embrace this part of himself.

ROCHA: From my perspective, I think you could watch this film from four different angles. The first one would be just watching and trying to understand what happened [in the house] and just trying to see what Goya is going through. Then, it’s true that James has a very personal story, and you can see it [mirrors] his own in a way. I think all artists understand that this is a journey of hardship when we’re trying to make our careers work. Doing art is painful. The last way to look at it, I think is as a Spaniard, this is very particular to us. We are actually living in a moment where our country is experiencing difficulty and corruption. That moment with the bull represents Spain, and when he hugs that bull, he accepts our country [for all its intricate flaws].

CASTILLO: Just to add a cherry on top of that, I think one of the things that has been interesting in talking to non-Spanish people about this, some people have even asked me, “Do you have to talk to the Goya estate? Do you have to figure out any IP or rights issues? What made you think that you were the right person to talk about Goya and not somebody else?”

My answer to this is that I’ve come to accept it as very much a tenant of at least the pathos of this project: that it is every generation’s right to take the icons that make up the culture they come from, revisit them, and give them new light. I think that’s why it makes sense to talk about Goya in 2025: we can do so from a very different perspective than we could 20 years ago. We can do it from the point of mental health. We can talk about a different type of masculinity, a different type of relationship with the artwork, and show him through a very vulnerable lens.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]