"Do you know the myth of Medusa? I never imagined it could be related to my former studies on suicide. I was reading some essays about this monster at the country house, and they became essential to my understanding of the violence in my dreams. I love reading old stories and comparing them to new remakes. I am not interested in the continuity of ideas or characters but in their mutations. I enjoy watching how they change in order to live in a new environment. That's what the art historian Pilar Pedraza does when studying mythological creatures. She follows them through several centuries, to show how they return in new stories. I traveled with her books and read them over and over again. I wanted to understand how she uses myths to build modern monsters. She is a master: she studies their genealogy, builds a new version, and introduces it into a daily situation to see what will happen. There is a dark humour in this because the monster usually ends up involved in antisocial or violent events. I am also fascinated by violent myths, and I create monsters myself, but not like hers. Mine are not made of meat. However, Pedraza taught me interesting things about Medusa. You probably know the basics of the myth: the severed head, Perseus' journey, the stone victims, and of course, the danger of looking straight into her eyes. Her gaze is death. It is a beautiful metaphor for blindness. But it is also a myth about places and stones. Psychoanalysts define Medusa as a castrator, who paralyzes people with fear. Pedraza writes that some monsters try to kill you from the outside of your body, as an arrow pierces flesh, but Medusa brings about a death that is already inside you. She is not physically violent. She just fosters your fears until they paralyze you. The victim is the one who falls on her knees and devours herself in front of the quiet monster. Medusa does nothing. She is a mirror for suicides. I love the stillness of Medusa. She waits in the bottom of the cave and it is the victim who must approach her. Maybe there is nothing physical in that cave at all. Medusa's monstrosity is related to a place, like a haunted house or a damned forest. Do you believe in the existence of evil places?"