Haunted houses, bodies suspended in time, bloodthirsty goings-on in college libraries and characters slipping in and out of life and death, fleshed out by a star-studded cast that includes Nicole Kidman and Penélope Cruz and screenplays in two languages, the films created by business and media studies graduate Alejandro Amenábar have crossed international frontiers and even reached the Comunidad Valenciana.

Terrifying and suspense-filled enough to appeal to horror-film fans, they stop just short of the gore and nightmare-inducing properties found in traditional thrillers such as Carrie or The Exorcist, meaning that even scaredy-cats will be hooked, unable to leave their seats or lose concentration for a second. Indeed, doing so could mean missing a crucial scene that contains the key to the whole story – every second counts in this successful young director’s masterpieces.

Exploring the dark side of life and putting a new angle on death, Amenábar’s films cause their viewers’ minds to race, analyse and search for new meanings, provoking debate and discussion and, it has to be said, just a little discomfort, too.

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1972, Alejandro’s family fled to Spain, his mother’s native country, amid the looming threat of Pinochet’s coup d’état when the child prodigy was just 18 months old, settling in the capital. It was here that Alejandro studied at the Complutense University and began to write and produce short films which were immediately successful – his first, La cabeza, won an amateur filmmakers’ award and the second, Himenóptero, took 20-year-old Alejandro to the Valencian region and netted him the best short film prize at Elche Film Festival. Three years and several more shorts later, Alejandro’s first full-length film hit the cinema screens in Spain.

Tesis tells of Ángela, a university graduate preparing a dissertation on audiovisual violence, who uncovers what appears to be a snuff movie trafficking network when she discovers her director’s body in the college library. The film won its creator a Goya, the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar, and a prize in the Annecy Film Festival the following year.

“My films are not about giving answers, but about raising questions,” Amenábar once proclaimed, and this sums up succinctly his next project, Abre los ojos (‘open your eyes’). It would not be long before the young scriptwriter became a household name worldwide, particularly in the USA and Great Britain, as the haunting film, starring Penélope Cruz, Eduardo Noriega and Najwa Nimri was remade in English under the title Vanilla sky. A more glitzy, glamorous version of the original, Vanilla sky included Penélope in her old role as César’s girlfriend Sofía with the latter two replaced by Tom Cruise and Cameron Díaz.

Abre los ojos and Vanilla sky tell of César’s chilling journey into the depths of his own mind, told to a prison psychiatrist from his cell, revealing cryptic clues in the form of flashbacks that led to his motives for killing Sofía. A car crash involving the dangerously-obsessive Cameron/ Najwa that leaves him facially disfigured, a mysterious man in a bar who tells him to control his own dreams and the name Eli, a name whose face he cannot recall.  What starts as a deeply-tragic tale of crimes of passion has a bizarre twist at the end that crosses the fine line between life and death, dreams and reality, and leads viewers to question everything they have seen in the first hour and a half.

Critics have suggested that the later-produced Box Office smash hit, The Matrix, followed on from where Abre los ojos/Vanilla sky left off, which Amenábar attributes to ‘a certain obsession that exists’ about virtual reality, higher forces of nature and mankind’s potential to control its own destiny. “I think, in the future, they’ll be able to experiment with it,” he claims. “The problem is that...an individual could decide to live constantly in a fantasy as opposed to reality.”

Alejandro’s real crossover into the world of international film came with The Others, an intriguing, suspense-filled tale produced by Tom Cruise and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace, a mother of two who moves to an isolated house in Jersey when her husband does not return from fighting in the Second World War. The kids, who suffer a strange allergy to daylight and are brought up according to strict, Victorian principles, claim to hear strange noises in the night. Remaining faithful to his trademark style and our expectations, Amenábar plants a startling about-turn at the end of the film that, again, makes the viewer want to watch it a second time to ensure that they have not missed any crucial clues.

Amenábar reveals, “I wrote it purely for fun; I then sent it to my producers who were very enthusiastic about it and suggested that it was made in English,” a language that he speaks and practises whenever he can in between filming. He adds, “working with Tom Cruise was a fantastic experience.”

Alejandro was a little less confident, however, about working with children, given that this would be his first experience of doing so. “It was one of the things that most scared me in the beginning. Not just because they were children and I had never worked with them before, nor that they say you should never work with children or animals, but because it was all in English. I didn’t want them to see me as a weirdo, as this person with a strange accent who told them what to do every day, but the good thing is that we got to know each other well before filming, established a good relationship based on mutual respect, and we got on really well,” he explains.

Alejandro’s most recent work, which hit the big screen in 2005, departed somewhat from his usual writing.  Mar adentro, which was based on the autobiographical novel Cartas desde el infierno (‘letters from hell’) and netted him a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, raised huge controversy – touching on a subject few of us like to think about, it features Ramón, who has been bedridden following a tragic accident thirty years ago on the beach that he can see from his window and who wishes to die with dignity. Amongst the other characters are Julia, the lawyer fighting his case, and Rosa, a woman from the village who is trying to persuade him that life can in fact be worth living.

Aired at around the time of the death of Christopher Reeve, some compared Ramón unfavourably to the real-live Superman who fought to give something back to the world despite being paralysed from the neck down, and never spoke of assisted suicide. Yet for others, the main character in Mar adentro represented the thousands of members of society who live in constant pain or have no quality of life and who would choose to end their lives and keep their self-respect if the law allowed it.

Every one of Alejandro Amenábar’s films is designed to keep us asking questions, challenging what we believe to be the natural order of the world around us and considering the ‘what ifs’ – could our bodies one day be frozen and later resurrected, how do ghosts really interact with the living, can we honestly control our own dreams and be masters of our own destiny? Well, Alejandro Amenábar has done precisely the latter, and will keep us questioning for a long time to come.