Now Watching: 30 Coins
Tags: Horror, 30 Coins, Possession, Demons
We finally started watching Spanish horror streaming series 30 Coins (2020) and judging by the first 3 episodes, it’s going to be a wild ride. Warning: SPOILERS.
CRAZY WEIRD
Most of the series takes place in the small town of Pedrazia, where Elena, the local veterinary, Paco, the mayor, and Father Manuel, the town’s priest, deal with weird phenomena. However, there are also glimpses of a shady group of Cardinals in the Vatican that clearly have some very nefarious goals involving the titular coins, one of which was in possession of Manuel. There’s blood and some humour, but mostly blood. The series isn’t afraid of getting weird and violent. In the first episode, a cow gives birth to a human-looking baby, who’s adopted by the dairy farm’s owners. Carmen, the new mother, becomes obsessed, and in addition to being willing to do everything to keep the ‘baby’, including stabbing her husband to death with a knitting needle, also makes a spider web of wool strands where she hangs her victims upside down in woolly cocoons. Naturally, she’s also possessed by a demon that demands Manuel give the coin to a mysterious Them. As for the ‘baby’, it grows a little too quickly, until it sheds its skin and becomes a big insectoid creature that Carmen can control with a creepy ‘toy’ made of wires and doll parts. Paco tells Elena to destroy the ‘toy’ when the creature is attacking her, but while it does leave her alone, it escapes down a nearby well. Is it dead? Because it looked pretty mobile and whole when it did. However, no one seems worried about the possibility of it coming back. We had a bit of trouble with the cow/baby plot because, apart from Elena, everyone kept insisting it was a hoax, as if that wouldn’t have necessitated someone pulling out the calf and sticking a human baby inside the cow in the brief moment Elena left the animal’s side. How the hell could anyone have done that and so quickly? They seem to conclude it was Antonio, whom Paco calls the village idiot, but, again, how the hell would he have been able to do that? In addition to his alleged shoving-babies-up-cows skills, Antonio also receives instructions from Them, though given that he tries to kill the ‘baby’, helps Manuel, and had stolen the coin, he could be playing both sides. Oh, and how did Manuel get his coin? It came out of the arm of an Italian boy he was trying to exorcize and who ended up dying, which landed Manuel in jail. In between the madness and the blood, 30 Coins adds some humour thanks to Paco and his interactions with both his ambitious wife, Merche, and Elena. We can see that the series is pushing Paco’s feelings for Elena, but we’d rather they remained as friends. Especially as Merche is nowhere near the level of nagging wife needed for us to start rooting for more.
30 COINS
The Them who want the coin are revealed/confirmed as the shady Cardinals in Episode 2, where they’re shown to be on the other end of a Ouija board seance. After Carmen’s possession, we thought they had demons doing their bidding, but here it doesn’t look like they need a middleman. They also have the power to make people disappear and reappear, and tear down roofs with a sudden cyclonic wind. This last bit was a bit confusing, as the roof reconstructs itself after they’re pushed away, but Elena finds Roque, who was taken by the wind, outside. There are some creepy moments in this episode, as the evil Cardinals force Sole, the teenage girl whom they turned into their latest minion, to first cut a finger and hand it over to Manuel, and then slice her face, which results in a wide gash that shows way too many of her teeth, to force him to give up the coin. The shady Cardinals really want those coins, as seen in 2 bloody sequences in which a relentless, unstoppable man wearing a silver medallion shoots and tears his way to a coin. It seems their efforts paid off, as each of them has one, and are only missing Manuel’s. They’re also being nicer to him because they want him to join them, something that he already refused once. By the way, Elena ended up with the coin, which she found among Antonio’s things, in Episode 1. Considering that Manuel knows what the coin was and how far the people who are looking for it are willing to go to get it, we found it odd that he let her keep it; especially when the series explained everything about the Cardinals and the coins. Unfortunately, at no point did Manuel tell Elena and Paco why he had never destroyed the coin. Just guilt over Giacomo, or are there practical reasons for why that would be a bad idea? This is important because in the end of Episode 3, Elena throws the coin off a bridge. Since Manuel was unconscious in the hospital at the time, we’re curious to see what his reaction is going to be. Somehow, we have the feeling that things aren’t going to get better.
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION
Episode 3 reveals more (all?) about the villains, including their origins and their ultimate goal. Like Stigmata (1999), 30 Coins went fishing in the apocrypha pool. And what did they catch? The Gospel of Judas, which claims that Judas’ infamous betrayal was part of God’s plan. A proposition that also turned up, albeit in a catchier version, in Jesus Christ Super Star, where Judas goes out with an accusation (okay, he then comes back for Superstar, but this is his death scene):
My God I am sick I’ve been used
And you knew all the time
God! I’ll never ever know why you chose me for your crime
For your foul bloody crime
You have murdered me! You have murdered me!
This interpretation of Judas’ betrayal leads to the argument that all evil is in fact good, and doing evil could be seen as doing God’s work, which connects with that question no one has ever been able to answer in a satisfactory way: why does God allow bad things to happen? For Manuel, it’s because without evil there would be no good, and there’s no free will without the possibility to choose evil. The Gospel of Judas is the holy book of the Cainitas, a sect that has infiltrated the Vatican and whose worship is the opposite of the Church, revolving around people and relics that have made God suffer. The bigger the pain caused, the bigger the power, and the greatest of these relics are Judas’ 30 coins. According to Manuel, if the Cainitas manage to get all of them, it could bring down the Church. We’re guessing that this will also affect everybody else, as well, because honestly, just bringing down the Church doesn’t seem that bad. If you’d like an ever more heretic take on Judas, Jorge Luis Borges had his scholar lead in Three Versions of Judas conclude that God went to live among humans as Judas rather than Jesus.
THOUGHTS SO FAR
The mix of craziness, blood, and Christian weirdness is pretty good, though we’re kinda dreading the development of the Paco/Elena relationship. We’re curious about what the series did with The Gospel of Judas, which is a Sethian text and more complex than Manuel’s description. Was it chosen merely because of the name, or is Barbelo going to show up at some point? 3 episodes in and we’re definitely hooked!
By The Snarky Cats of Ulthar