Gender Ideologies, Social Realities and New Technologies in Recent Latin American ‘Abduction’ Horror

Abstract

Abstract While horror film is hardly new to Latin America, film scholars have largely emphasized the paradigms of socially engaged, ‘serious cinema’ over exploring how genre, cult or other transgressive film-making modes have developed in and reflect the region (Tierney, 2014). To characterize Latin American horror, it is typified by the supernatural, which indeed contradicts serious cinema. Since about 2010, however, Latin American film-makers have revisited the ‘abduction’ subgenre of horror film. This chapter analyses three such films – Scherzo Diabolico (Garcia Bogliano, 2015), Luna de Miel (Cohen, 2015) and Sudor Frio (Garcia Bogliano, 2010) – to suggest how their representations of gender and class complicate assumptions about everyday life in the region. The chapter also interrogates how this revived mode of horror film-making reconfigures gender ideologies to challenge the Latin American sociopolitical structures of machismo and patriarchy. By integrating conceptualizations of hybridity with transnational views on horror film-making and Freeland’s (1996) reworked feminist strategy for analysing horror texts, this chapter argues that, in tandem with new means of accessing and viewing Latin American horror globally, we should rethink how the abduction subgenre reflects new realities of Latin American society.