Alejandro Amenabar has made only five main features over a 15- year period Bazin's coolness towards authorial hero worship and his acute understanding of the logics of commercial filmmaking arguably offer a useful perspective and corrective when analysing Amenabar as an aspiring popular, auteur filmmaker. By the beginning of 1998, and on the strength of only two feature films, many professional film critics and large sections of the Spanish media were heralding a new, star director and seriously promoting a 25-year-old Amenábar as an emerging auteur. This chapter also presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book combines important aspects of contextual information (historical, social, industrial) with detailed production and reception notes. The main focus is to explore the ways in which Amenabar appears to conduct experiments in generic hybridity in order to create a personal, auteur cinema which satisfies his cinephilia.