with a series of problems: it was long in the making; Aranda suffered an accident during the shooting, which forced him to work from a stretcher, and finally he had a legal battle with the producers. It would take Aranda many years to recover ownership of this film. The experience made him found his own production company: Morgana Film, which produced his next six features. In La Novia Ensangrentada (1972) (The Blood Spattered Bride), a loose adaptation of Carmilla, a lesbian vampire recruits a young bride to help her seek revenge against all men. A genre film for the cultural elite, it evaded censors by virtue of its incomprehensibility. By Aranda's own admission, he sacrificed conventional coherence for the cinematographic and phenomenological possibilities of each action. The film was distributed internationally in the United States, France and Italy. Aranda started to use the codes of melodrama with Clara es el Precio (1974) (Clara is the Price), an offbeat mix of melodrama, parody and surreal comedy. He cast Amparo Muñoz, Spain's future Miss Universe, as a naive housewife adrift in a world without taboo. She pursues a career as a pornographic film actress in order to fund a business project for her impotent husband. This was made during El Destape, a period in Spanish Cinema that had a proliferation of nudity in film under the new social liberties during the political period following the fall of Franco's regime. The Clara film's effort to shock was also its purpose. Like the Surrealists, Aranda's ability to shock was itself a political statement. "We had lived in a state of consensus and this is fatal for cinema", he complained, "We have become our own censors and all we want to do is forget, be silent, not speak." Cambio de Sexo (1976) Following the fall of Franco's regime, social censorship was lifted. Under the new permissiveness, Aranda shot more daring films such as Cambio de Sexo (1976) (Sex Change), skillfully tackling the subject of transsexuality, and using it as an embodiment of the contemporary political transition. This film marks a switch in Aranda's filmography. He began to use a more realistic style rather than the stylish aesthetics prominent in his early films. Cambio de Sexo also marks the beginning of his long collaboration with Victoria Abril, who became his favorite actress. Over the next three decades, director and star worked together in a dozen films