Marián Salgado, the possessed girl who fell in love with Chicho: "What bothered me was being lied to. They thought they were protecting me, but they weren't."

"You're going to beat an old man to death. I want you to enjoy yourself, to be happy." That line is Chicho Ibáñez Serrador's. It's scary . And it's even scarier to know that the person listening to the terrifying advice, which was also meant to be a firm order, was a girl of barely 12 years old. "What I hated most was being lied to," recalls actress Marián Salgado, who now proudly boasts of being in her sixties. She continues: "When I was filming, they lied to me constantly about the meaning of what I was going to do, and they did it supposedly to protect me, but lying never protects me from anything. Chicho was always upfront and treated me like I was an adult."

Anyone who has seen the film Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) can perfectly place the director's suggestion alongside the then very young actress. Spanish cinema, in particular, and horror cinema in its entirety, knows few moments of more perfect and sun-filled panic. The innocent face of the purest of creatures commits the most brutal, bloody, and nefarious of acts . And she even sets up a piñata with the corpse with her friends, just as innocent and smiling as she is.

Chicho Ibáñez Serrador was indeed clear about the true power of fear. On the one hand, nothing leaves us more defenseless. "A frightened person gives up trying to prove to themselves what they're capable of," he once remarked. But still, who can resist? The sensation of panic, our particular Hitchcock insisted, takes us back to childhood, to that almost sacred space where everything is still possible, to the exact place Salgado herself inhabited back then.

The attraction to the terrifying, moreover, has something cathartic, perhaps salvific about it . Like religion itself, horror in its many forms of consumption places the believer, the spectator, in the proud acceptance of their helplessness. And of their faintness. We are vulnerable when we admit the secret of faith, at once fascinating and terrifying, and when we abandon ourselves to the overwhelming certainty of the unknown, of what makes us suffer. And even more so when that certainty comes to us from the hand of the child we suddenly become again. "You're going to beat an old man to death. I want you to enjoy yourself, to be happy."

Marián Salgado, who obeyed and was happy, was an actress . She is still one (as happy as an actress), but in a different way, a more occasional one and much more attentive to memory than to the present. In her time, in fact, and with permission from the Marisoles, the Rocíos, and the Joselitos of our cinema, she was the most fearsome, in the most radical sense, of the young Spanish actors. Her most notable filmography consists of just three films, all three terrifying, and one dubbing that is necessarily legendary. Hers are the terrifying performances that enliven three pillars of fantasy horror, such as La endemoniada (1975) by Amando de Ossorio, El extraño amor de los vampiros (1975) by León Klimovsky, and the aforementioned ¿Quién puede matar a un niño?

But before that, she was Regan, the character played (and killed at the same time) by Linda Blair in The Exorcist , the William Friedkin film that transformed the genre forever. Yes, she provided the Spanish voice of the devil himself. "Actually," Salgado corrects herself in a fit of modesty, "I only played the parts where the devil hasn't yet entered the body. I'm Regan without being possessed yet ." These films, strictly speaking, are just a tiny fraction of her intense childhood activity. During the 1970s, she acted in small roles in around 15 productions and approximately five plays. Her work can also be found on the then-unique television and radio programs, where she was a "voice actress," and her name appeared alongside giants like Marisa Paredes and Sancho Gracia.

She says it was Fernando Rey, the dubbing director for Friedkin's film, who was the first to notice her. "Back then, it was common for children's voices to be done by adults like Matilde Vilariño or Pepe Carabias. I was, in fact, the only girl . Apparently, they sent the audition recordings to the United States, and I was the one chosen." And despite such an honor—and that's what it was—Marian never knew exactly what was happening in the film. "Fernando told me that my role was that of a girl who was going to suffer an illness and transform, but nothing more. Then, over time, and through force, I found out everything, but, honestly, I've never seen the entire film. I feel panic. I can't, " she confesses, laughing at the same time, aware that she is probably the only actress who has been unable to see herself on screen, not out of vanity, shame, or excessive modesty, but out of pure and simple terror; terror of horror films. "I remember, at a recent film festival, I finally sat down to watch The Possessed . But I did so holding a friend's hand and always ready to cover my eyes at every gruesome scene," she recalls.

Amando de Ossorio's film was conceived as one of those productions that emerged with the barely concealed desire to reproduce and imitate the success of Friedkin's classic. In it, Salgado, now possessed by the devil, underwent endless makeup sessions, and her image transformed by latex is, in its own way, a tiny icon of Spanish cinema. Anomalous, innocent, and adorably repulsive.

"I've always been a very disciplined girl. I worked not so much out of vocation or because I wanted to be an artist, but because I had to. It was a matter of survival ," she recalls. And it's then, without any melodramatic intention, that it's necessary to go back completely. She recounts this in her autobiographical book , *The Journalist's Daughter *. There she describes a tough childhood where acting became the way she and her mother (alone in Madrid, where they arrived from Santiago de Chile shortly after her birth) lived and, when necessary, survived. "I didn't want to be the girl who appears on TV, nor the girl who wrote poems, nor the girl who didn't have a father, nor the girl who didn't have friends, nor the girl who didn't play [...] nor the girl who wasn't a girl," she writes in a fit of rage in her memoirs.

Although she admits that she always enjoyed acting, the obligation of having to do it weighed more on her. And so she tells it. Raw. " Often, all we had to eat was a little tea. How could I complain about anything? My only regret was not being able to work more to earn a little more money." She recounts how they barely managed to live more than a few months in each apartment they occupied during the 1960s, when economic development wasn't their thing. "We were evicted from every apartment or fled. I knew the script by heart: first, the court officials asking us to leave the house, Mom yelling, insulting, and when none of that worked, then she had a timely attack or fainted, which gave us a couple more days," she recounts in her autobiography.

She barely knew her father, and only when she was old enough to realize that what she'd been told—that he was dead—was a lie. "Lies don't protect you," she insists. "Something happened to me that I still don't understand. When, as an adult, I saved enough to buy a ticket to Chile to meet him, he died. I bought the ticket in December with my Christmas bonus to fly out in July for the holidays. In February, I heard about his death," she says, as if it were the horror movie she never wanted to see.

With puberty came silence. Although she never truly dreamed of becoming an actress, the truth is that cinema abandoned her . "I was left in no man's land. I wasn't young enough to be the child actress I once was, nor old enough to simply be an actress," she says. Time and the internet have allowed fantasy horror to gather followers, curious onlookers, and festivals. "It's all been incredible. I remember being invited to a sort of celebration for Chicho's film. Suddenly, a group of people stopped me and, to my astonishment, asked for my autograph. They had a photo of me in the film." In the image, she smiled just after hearing Chicho's words: "You're going to beat an old man to death. I want you to enjoy yourself, to be happy."