Motherhood Quote by Alejandro Amenabar

There is a quiet origin story hiding in Amenabar's offhand memory: a childhood fed on hand-me-down culture, then steered (by taste, temperament, maybe need) straight toward fear. Second-hand books from the '30s and '40s aren’t just a detail meant to sound quaint. They signal an artistic upbringing built from leftovers, not the shiny canon. That matters for a director whose work often feels slightly out of time, as if it’s borrowing old genre machinery to make contemporary anxieties throb again.

The mother figure sits at the center as an enabler, not a censor. “Any books we wanted” suggests freedom, but the economic reality peeks through: what you can want is bounded by what’s available. That constraint becomes a creative advantage. Old paperbacks carry the scent of earlier moral panics and older styles of suspense; they teach pacing, atmosphere, dread-by-suggestion. If you grow up on mid-century genre fiction, you learn that what’s withheld can be more terrifying than what’s shown - a lesson Amenabar repeatedly applies on screen.

Then the pivot: “I liked scary books.” It’s child-simple, almost defiant, and it doubles as a manifesto. Horror becomes less a guilty pleasure than a literacy: a way to rehearse danger safely, to process the world’s shadows through narrative control. The subtext is that fear wasn’t discovered in adulthood as a “serious” aesthetic; it was imprinted early, bound in yellowing pages, and validated at home.