This catalog contains a list of films that complement Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s writing and interest in Mexican horror cinema. Professor Brian Brems, co-department chair of Film Studies, offers the following 8 recommendations.
The earliest of Mexico’s sound films is a moody riff on one of the country’s most enduring ghost stories. Set in an upper-class mansion, the black and white photography pairs with the use of synchronized sound—which introduced dialogue, music, and sound effects, of course, but also silence as a tool for establishing tension—to give cinematic voice to Mexico’s “wailing woman” for the first time.
Horror’s fascination with mad scientists reaches Mexico in this chiller about two doctors who resolve to return from the dead with information about the afterlife. The film’s director, Fernando Mendez, was one of Mexican horror’s most stylish filmmakers, composing images in The Black Pit of Dr. M that take full advantage of chiaroscuro, the complex play of shadow and light.
In this ghost story about a craven husband who murders his wife, a mix of gothic horror tropes animate a story about the man’s live-in maid, a witch, who plots to expose his crime by targeting his new, much younger wife with a devilish curse. References to the works of Edgar Allan Poe abound, including guilt, madness, and the ironic inevitability of fate.
The figure of La Llorona returns again in this chamber piece set at a decaying hacienda, where a mysterious woman haunts the grounds; director Rafael Baledon made several horror films throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and he mines every square inch of the mise-en-scene for its unsettling potential.
It’s a cult of crazed women bent on blood sacrifice against a detective partnered with a masked luchador wrestler in this mysterious caper from the prolific director Rene Cardona, actor and progenitor of (to date) two subsequent generations of Mexican filmmakers who also bear his name.
The success of Jaws (1975, Spielberg) inspired exploitative knock-offs in America, but also in Mexico, and director Rene Cardona Jr. was the right man to handle the job; featuring more direct on-screen violence than the suggestive American blockbuster, Tintorera combines a melodramatic love triangle with shark attacks a-plenty. The Jaws influence is clear; one of the lovestruck men is even named Steven.
Before he became one of the biggest names in Mexican cinema thanks to his major American films, Guillermo Del Toro made this feature debut about an ancient timepiece that possesses an antique dealer, and generates in him an insatiable thirst for blood. Del Toro’s penchant for sympathetic monsters was in place early, as was his fondness for the red stuff.
She witnessed her mother’s exorcism as a child; now, a Mexican-American journalist travels back to her home country in search of answers. She enters a cave called La Boca, which the locals believe to be a dangerous and evil place, and soon finds herself trapped in a small room and subjected to a variety of menacing, terrifying rituals that intend to purge the demon that may (or may not) be living inside her soul. The claustrophobic setting gives rise to suggestive close-ups: a fist clenching around a child’s doll; a claw mark on a woman’s forearm. In The Old Ways, horror lives in the small details.