When a man mysteriously survives a massacre and is interrogated by the police, a kind of Pandora’s box opens: legends, demons and vampires with a Latin American flair appear, protagonists of the anthology “Satanic Hispanics”, which premieres in the USA.
At the start of the Halloween season, this horror feature film was released in American cinemas on Thursday, containing four short stories with typical Latin American horror elements and interpretations from across the continent.
The massacre survivor, identified only as “The Traveler” (Efrén Ramírez), acts as a chronicler of terror, weaving the stories together.
Its directors, the Argentines Alejandro Brugués and Demián Rugna, the American Mike Méndez, the Mexican Gigi Saul Guerrero and the Cuban Eduardo Sánchez, each directed one of the four stories and the central story.
“The horror films we all grew up with don’t have Latin characters,” said Brugués, responsible for the play “The Hammer of Zanzibar.”
“Part of the idea of this project was to take back the reins of our narrative,” he said.
According to Méndez, who directed “The Traveler,” the film’s backbone, Latinos are “the main audience” for horror films. “Why shouldn’t they come to a (film) about ourselves?” he asks.
But the production is not aimed exclusively at a Latino audience.
“It’s something risky because I think the audience is very intelligent to see it,” said Sánchez, director of the painting “The Vampire” and the 1999 award-winning film “The Blair Witch Project,” along with Daniel Myrick.
“For us, it was also about doing something real that came from our hearts and telling the stories that matter to us.”
– Horror Latino –
Sánchez staged a vampire story in the region, with a touch of humor and distinctive cultural elements.
“You’ve seen vampires, but you haven’t seen a Latin couple as vampires,” he said.
The story, starring Hemky Madera and Patricia Velásquez, portrays a vampire couple who are in a marital crisis and, to make matters worse, the dawn is breaking.
“You don’t really associate vampires with Latin America (…) there are variations, but it’s nothing very Latin,” the Cuban director continued.
Rugna believes it is difficult to define the genre of Latin American horror.
“Showing our own culture, our own idiosyncrasy and adding terror to it is a different color,” said the director of the story “I Saw It Too,” set in his native Argentina.
The directors said it was no challenge to combine the different perspectives in a single production, recorded in English and Spanish.
“The only thing we said was, ‘You can do whatever you want, the only thing is that it looks good,’ because you know, as is often the case with minorities, we only have one chance and us.” “I have to accept it and make the best of it,” said Brugués.
“That freedom was great because you rarely have the opportunity to actually do what you know exactly what you want to do,” Sánchez added.
When it comes to Mexican Guerrero, she found a number of ways to approach the genre and tell the “Nahuales” story with local flavors.
“We are spiritual, we have superstitions, we have too many stories, legends and mythologies in everything that it means to be Latino,” justifies the filmmaker.
“Our perspective comes from the love of the inexplicable.”
