I took FLACSO's International Posgraduate Course on Creative Writing, "Writing: Human Creativity and Communication". Online, professors from different countries worked on various literary genres with us, such as essays, chronicles and fiction. At the end of the course, an "extra reward" was that the professors chose the texts they considered the best of the course to be published. My essay "Mirar el Monstruo a la Cara" (Staring at the monster's face" was among those chosen and was published in Violeta Serrano's magazine "Continuidad de los libros".
It's a review that talks about the growth of Latin American fantastic and horror movie genre and how it uses the typical tropes of that genre to represent (and perhaps exorcise) open wounds of our common history. Historical wounds are a particular monster, a phantom presence that resists the tomb of oblivion.
It's a review that talks about the growth of Latin American fantastic and horror movie genre and how it uses the typical tropes of that genre to represent (and perhaps exorcise) open wounds of our common history. Historical wounds are a particular monster, a phantom presence that resists the tomb of oblivion.
Everyone mourned your land,
Llorona, your bloody land.
Sobs of wounded people,
Llorona, and of their silenced voice.
La llorona de los cafetales - Version of the popular song
Historical wounds are a particular monster, a phantom presence that resists the tomb of oblivion. The Third Cinema movement, integrated, among others, by the Grupo Cine Liberación (founded in the late 60's) of Solanas, Getino and Vallejo, is a pioneer in considering cinema as an artistic manifestation capable of influencing reality and, with its local productions, confronting neo colonization. In recent years, the Latin American imaginary of the region's structural problems has been reinterpreted through the lens of the horror genre. The "New Latin American Horror" is building a filmographic map of past and present horrors.
Horror films are based on primary human emotions: fear and pain. There are universal and infinite fears, such as the fear of death. But there are fears that respond to a particular context. In Latin America, horror is beginning to focus on these local fears. Laura Casabé, director of The ones that come back (Los que Vuelven) (2019, Argentina) cites as a source of inspiration a master of political horror: George A. Romero. He turned the zombie subgenre into a social metaphor. His magnum opus Night of the Living Dead (1968) is an allegory of American racial discrimination.
The main character is a black man who manages to survive a zombie apocalypse and lead a group of survivors but is killed towards the end by a police bullet. The metaphor is self-explanatory. Casabé takes this zombie archetype to the jungle of Misiones, Argentina, in 1920, where a family of white landowners exploits a group of Guarani people and enslaves them. The lady of the house asks her maid Kerana (reference to the myth of the mother of the 7 Guarani monsters) to ask “La Iguazú” to bring her dead son back to life, the maid complies, although such pacts have a cost. The child returns, but with him come back many more, victims of the devastated land. These zombies frighten with their presence, with their black, dead eyes that are a gateway to death. They corner their masters with a gaze they cannot look away from until they take responsibility for the colonial pain and violence they were part of.
Issa López's Tigers are not afraid (Vuelven) (2017) deals with Mexico's current issue with drug violence. It is the story of a girl in a remote town who loses her mother to a cartel. The city seems to have lost its adult figures, who are the protective figures, leaving children orphaned and alone. Therefore, they must organize among themselves in small communities to survive and escape from the narcos who want to make them work in their cartel. The ghosts of this violence are palpable presences that follow and haunt them constantly. And they speak, they beg for the children’s help.
Following the archetype of the ghost, a remarkable film is Jayro Bustamante's La Llorona (2019, Guatemala), which incorporates the dimension of mythology to historical facts. He creates, retaking and reworking the popular legend of La Llorona, a fable about the Mayan-Ixil genocide. It incorporates Mayan languages and a cameo of the activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.
The plot follows an aging Guatemalan dictator who is put on trial for genocide against the Mayan Ixil community during his time in power. He is convicted, but his conviction is overturned. He and his female relatives (wife, daughter, and granddaughter) lock themselves in his mansion because protesters are lurking outside demanding justice. When they welcome a new member to their Mayan servitude, a silent young woman with long black hair, the old dictator begins to hear a woman's disconsolate cries at night that drives him mad. He knows who she is and what she wants, that cry can only be heard by the guilty ones.
The character of the dictator is, according to its director, an archetype of a Latin American dictator created from the similarities that these people had in their personal lives. It especially resonates with Efraín Ríos Montt, who was in power when the genocide against the Mayan-Ixil community was committed, leaving more than 1,700 dead, during Guatemala's internal armed conflict (1960-1996). This genocide went unpunished in the country. La Llorona is the famous Latin American legend of a woman who kills her children by drowning them and for her crime is transformed into a soul in sorrow who cries for them and searches for them near the water. In the film, this woman is a Mayan woman who works in a coffee plantation and has children that the dictatorship soldiers murder in cold blood before her eyes. Then, they murder her. This turns her into a vengeful and redemptive ghost who drives the guilty mad with her disconsolate weeping.
These stories of violence find a way to be exorcised under the conventions of horror. Souls with unfinished business that do not allow them to cross over to the other side, zombies that lost their essence, these are images that metaphorize the silenced history and unjust violence that leaves victims and families shattered in a way that has no way to be put into words. Through the terrifying images, one comes to express something closer to the nature of fear, so deep that it makes words die before they can be articulated. In the face of infinite pain, paralyzing silence lurks, but the image saves. Latin America has infinite stories of pain. Horror is a portal, a possibility of redemption that comes only if you face the monster.
Read here the publication in original Spanish: http://continuidaddeloslibros.com/mirar-al-monstruo-la-cara/
