I was thirteen or fourteen, awake the night before an oral presentation I dreaded. Public speaking terrified me then. Anxiety had a way of keeping me up.
My parents were asleep. I turned on the old analog TV—the kind with thick glass and a dial—kept the volume barely above silence, and landed on À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul) halfway through.
Zé do Caixão was at a card table, taking a man’s money hand after hand. The man begged him to stop. It was all he had. Zé broke a bottle against the table and brought it down on the man’s hand, slicing his fingers. Then he told someone to call a doctor. He would pay the bill. He added that everyone there had seen what happened: it was an accident.
I didn’t flinch. That’s unbelievable. That’s incredible. Or something close to it.
The next morning, I stood in front of the class and somehow made it through the presentation without passing out. I want to say Zé do Caixão had something to do with it.
Years later, I learned that Tim Burton had grown up watching the same films and eventually flew to São Paulo to meet José Mojica Marins, the man behind the cape. Burton could claim him as an influence. In Brazil, Mojica had spent decades fighting for recognition. Respectable Brazilian cinema had little use for him; the dictatorship censored his work, critics often dismissed it as exploitation, and audiences watched anyway.
At 13, I knew none of this. I had no word for what I was watching. I only knew I wasn’t supposed to be awake for it.
Latin America has never lacked monsters. The vocabulary used to explain them, however, has often come from somewhere else.
Magical realism gave some of Latin America’s supernatural imagination a language that traveled extraordinarily well. Other stories circulated as folklore, superstition, exploitation, or simply horror. Trouble starts when those labels harden into expectations—when a Latin American ghost must become a metaphor before it can be taken seriously, or local belief is treated as cultural texture rather than the force driving the story.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia has described the problem more bluntly. In a 2020 PEN America interview about Mexican Gothic, she said that “when you are Latin American, everything you write is called magic realist by default,” adding that the title itself was meant to make clear that “this is not magic realism.” The habit is not confined to publishing. A Los Angeles Times review of Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona calls the film political horror in its headline, then says it “avoids the tropes of horror” and instead feels like “cinematic magical realism.” That slippage is the problem: horror gets translated into a category already expected from Latin America before it can stand on its own.
Across criticism and publishing, “magical realism” becomes shorthand for supernatural stories that might be called horror elsewhere. The distinction matters because classification shapes how we read and watch. A monster understood primarily as metaphor is no longer allowed to frighten on its own terms. A local belief becomes something to decode rather than something the story asks us, at least for a while, to believe.
Bustamante embraced that complexity in his 2019 film La Llorona, bringing one of Latin America’s most recognizable ghosts to Guatemala and placing her within the memory of the country’s Indigenous genocide. The ghost does not make the history less real. The history does not make the ghost less frightening. Neither has to apologize for the other.
The supernatural is not decoration laid over history. It is one way history is told.
Seven years later, the scale is different.
I Am Frankelda arrived globally on Netflix this June, carrying its Mexican references without disguise: aluxes, the ceiba tree, even a monstrous Porfirio Díaz. Its underworld draws on longstanding traditions, then builds something stranger around them. Frankelda inhabits that world without translating it for anyone. The aluxes and the ceiba are simply part of the architecture.
These traditions have not suddenly become useful to horror. What has changed is that a global platform is betting on their appeal without first making them more familiar to audiences abroad.
El Ritual del Nahual takes another route. Built around Huasteca folklore and the nahual, and partially spoken in Tének, the film went from Rotterdam and Cannes’ Blood Window showcase to more than 500 screens in Mexico. A language and cosmology that could easily have been reduced to local color instead carried the film. Someone expected people to buy tickets. Indigenous specificity was not treated as an obstacle to commercial reach; it was part of what the film was selling.
The shift also reaches the intersection of prestige filmmaking and global distribution. In Argentina, Mariana Enríquez has spent years putting ghosts inside apartments, family histories, and political memory. This September, Netflix brought four of those stories to the screen in Pablo Larraín’s adaptation. My Sad Dead premiered at San Sebastián before arriving globally on Netflix on September 24, during Hispanic Heritage Month in the U.S.
Here, stories rooted in Argentine history reach a global horror audience without losing that specificity or softening into literary allegory.
Mexico, at least institutionally, has gone further. Macabro International Horror Film Festival turns twenty-five this year with 137 films, its largest program yet. When the festival began, its founders were trying to carve out serious space for genre cinema. Today, founder Edna Campos counts more than twenty horror festivals across Mexico.
What once survived at the margins of national cinema now has a festival network built to sustain it as both an industry and a craft.
More and more, the people closest to these stories are deciding where their monsters belong. Filmmakers let local cosmologies drive the narrative. Regional festivals make space for genre cinema. Local audiences buy tickets, and streamers carry the stories beyond their countries of origin. The old categories haven’t disappeared, but they no longer have the final word.
I think again of the television in my parents’ house, its volume almost muted, and a man in a black cape doing something horrible before casually offering to pay the medical bill. That night, I didn’t know whether what I was watching belonged to serious cinema, exploitation, folklore, or anything else. I only knew I wanted to keep watching.