"But pulling this kind of switch with Banderas – an actor who more often is too much or too passionate for the characters he’s playing – really pays off. He’s a great villain: cool, tastefully dressed, with a beautiful, tasteful home. He’s got all this surface and we never really come to understand what’s underneath. Even in the flashbacks that “explain” the trauma he’s been through, we still don’t see a lot of warm emotion, and his wife was still unhappy with him. This is where I think it shifts to horror for Almodóvar: melodrama’s a genre that explains everything, it’s all about naming and stating and revelation. Horror’s always got something fundamentally inexplicable about it – there’s always a nagging “why” at the centre, a sense that there’s really no rational explanation for the events that we’re seeing. Whereas the appeal of melodrama derives from the sense that there is an order to the seemingly chaotic universe, the appeal of horror comes from a fleeting acknowledgement that there really isn’t."