10 great Mexican horror films

Guillermo del Toro was born, grew up, and studied in Guadalajara, Jalisco in western Mexico. In 1986 he co-founded the Guadalajara International Film Festival, expressly intended to raise the profile of Mexican cinema. The first edition included his own short Doña Lupe. After writing and directing more short films, and several episodes of the sci-fi/horror series La hora marcada (1988) for Mexican television, del Toro had his feature debut in 1992 with the striking Cronos, an esoteric, alchemical revamp of Christian iconography and undead mythology, and the only feature in his now extensive filmography to be set (and made) in his native Mexico. 

The film’s very title means ‘times’, and its three speculative timelines would look back to two pasts (1536, 1937) and one future (1996) for Mexico, while helping to resurrect the national cinema on the international stage. Of course, Mexican horror already had its own sporadic history, and would continue at home even as del Toro made more films abroad.

Mexican horror exposes both the contradictions of a captured, colonised culture, and the mysteries of a land on the border of north and south. For here, typically, elements of western gothic are made to merge with local myth, or Universal monsters engage in gonzo wrestling matches with masked men in tights, while imported Catholicism is forced into often uneasy cohabitation with more indigenous beliefs. 

More recently, writer-directors such as Issa López and Michelle Garza Cervera have brought a female perspective to bear on the patriarchal aspects of Mexican society.

Director: Ramón Peón

The first Mexican horror feature to treat the local legend of the infanticidal ‘weeping woman’ whose laments herald destruction, Ramón Peón’s feature is also the country’s first horror film made with sound, enabling the vengeful ghost’s characteristic cries (eerily voiced by Carlos Vallejo Espinal) to be heard by audiences.

It is also a modernist (albeit somewhat stilted) narrative about narratives, layered with different instances of storytelling. A superstitious butler (Carlos Orellana) is interrupted entertaining children with a story at the birthday party for four-year-old Juanito, and Juanito must later choose between a range of stories for bedtime. Meanwhile, his father, the sceptical Dr Ricardo de Acuña (Ramón Pereda), learns two tales from his family’s – and Mexico’s – colonial past which must be synthesised to understand the deadly threat, part intergenerational curse, part supernatural vendetta, facing young Juanito today. Accordingly, this cutting-edge talkie finds its own chapter in a long history of local horror.

Director: Fernando de Fuentes

This opens with a literal cliffhanger, as Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), out on a stroll, has to be rescued from the side of a ravine. Eduardo is on edge in more ways than one, as the eye of his wife Cristina (Marta Roel) keeps wandering lasciviously to their friend Alfonso (Enrique del Campo). With darkness falling, the trio seek refuge from this perilous environment in a supposedly abandoned monastery, where an austere community of monks does timeless battle against an evil within.

Turning an actual Tepotzotlan monastery into a gothic labyrinth of shadowy illusions, director Fernando de Fuentes creates a moral limbo where these three – especially the tempted Alfonso – will spend a long dark night of the soul, unable to distinguish dream from reality or the living from the dead. With mummies from Mexico’s Museo de El Carmen serving as props, everything here is oneiric and, as characters repeatedly assert, “strange”.

Director: Fernando Méndez

At a time when Mexican horror was in decline, director Fernando Méndez turned to the classics of American horror for inspiration, but had to disguise his sources enough to avoid copyright lawsuits. You can see the bare bones of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) in this modern-day tale of a mad scientist (Carlos Riquelme) taking bodies for experiments in brain transplantation and reanimation, although Méndez stitches in elements from other horror films.

Protagonist Guillermo Santana (Wolf Ruvinskis) may, post mortem, become the resurrected Monster, but before that he adopts the wrestling alias El Vampiro, and eventually he will undergo Wolf Man-style transformations on screen, before ending up a scaled-down King Kong, plummeting from a building to which he has carried his beloved (Columba Domínguez). Méndez’s biggest innovation was to combine horror with lucha libre, ushering in an all-Mexican subgenre whose stars would be wrestlers El Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Máscaras.

Director: Chano Urueta

Times change. 1661 was no time to be a heretic, libertine, sorcerer or necromancer, and such crimes saw Baron Vitelius d’Estera (Abel Salazar) sentenced by four Catholic inquisitors to be tortured and burnt at the stake. Three centuries later in 1961, the baron is back (via comet) for revenge against the four men’s last living descendants, only to find them all welcoming to him, critical of the Inquisition’s barbarity, even as the scion of one mortal enemy is about to marry the relative of his sole defender.

It is awkward timing, but this new enlightenment does not stop the baron regularly, even repetitively metamorphosing into a long-nosed, fork-tongued, cerebrum-sucking monster hellbent on vengeance, even as the constabulary is left baffled by the trail of brainless corpses. Chano Urueta’s schlocker revels in its B-movie tropes (and some truly ridiculous dialogue), while ringing the changes on a Mexico all at once pagan, Christian, puritanical and secular.

Director: René Cardona Jr.

A Mexican-Italian co-production with a Mexican writer-director (René Cardona Jr) and mostly Mexican cast (as well as John Huston!), this mystery follows the last doomed days of an extended family and their crew as they voyage and bicker off Bimini, and find themselves embroiled in the strange phenomena said to affect the Bermuda Triangle (closing credits list ships vanished there in the 20th century).

Characters speculate as to whether these disappearances are just natural tragedies or the result of sea monsters, aliens or magnetic fields, while little Diane (Gretha) suggests that there is “also the devil”. The devil (maybe) comes in the form of a spooky doll found floating on the water. It has, if Diane is to be believed, a penchant for raw flesh and a tendency to predict the future – but here, amid irrational time slips, phantom signals and freak accidents, uncanny ambiguity keeps everything at sea.

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Instructed by producer Claudio Argento to “make a picture where a man kills a lot of women,” midnight movie maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky would do to the slasher genre what he had done to the western with his El topo (1970). For here horror tropes are co-opted into a spiritual psychodrama about the journey of a boy (Adan Jodorowsky) into manhood after witnessing the mutilation and murder of his fanatical mother Concha (Blanca Guerra) and the emasculation and suicide of his knife-throwing gringo father Orgo (Guy Stockwell).

As an adult, Fenix (Axel Jodorowosky) remains under the controlling influence of his late mother, who puppeteers him into killing any women who catch his gaze – but eventually Fenix must break free of his guilt and trauma, and embrace reality. A macabre, maximalist tale of blood and circuses set to a mambo pulse, this is where Hitchcock meets Fellini in Mexico City’s most Freudian back alleys.

Director: Rigoberto Castañeda

It begins with a weeping woman. Driving past isolated road marker Km 31, Ágata (Iliana Fox), distracted by her teary lovesickness, hits a small child and, getting out, is herself struck by a truck. Now Ágata’s identical twin Catalina has dreams about her comatose sister, and races to uncover the mysteries of the roadway spot that has witnessed many strange accidents over the centuries, while accommodating one of Mexico’s earliest colonial legends.

Swapping a haunted house for a haunted highway, writer-director Rigoberto Castañeda remaps the weeping woman’s story onto contemporary New Mexico, while borrowing from Takashi Shimizu’s recent J-horror Ju-on cycle its cursed mother-and-son tag team, juddery spectres and chronological slipperiness. 

After La Llorona vanished for several decades from Mexican cinema, her myth resurfaced with a vengeance in this, followed by Benjamin Williams’ J-ok’el (2007), Alberto Rodríguez’s animated Le leyenda de la Llorona (2011) and Rigoberto’s 2016 sequel Km 31-2.

Director: Issa López

Opening with factual casualty figures from Mexico’s drug war, and ending with a fanciful idyll, Issa López tracks the struggles of little Estrella (Paola Lara) to survive in the streets after she is orphaned by cartel violence. This is filtered through Estrella’s imagination into a phantasmagorical adventureland. For much as Estrella is instructed by a teacher in the opening scene to reconstitute her story from a selection of fairytale motifs, the trauma of this innocent’s harrowing experience is framed in the idioms of animistic fantasy.

Of the 10 films in this list, López’s is the one most akin to the works of Guillermo del Toro – and especially to his Spanish civil war diptych The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – as it shows unspeakable actualities from a child’s perspective, and exposes, right to its bittersweet end, both the capacities and limits of genre to express and contain real-life horrors.

Director: Christopher Alender

As a troubled adult junkie, Cristina (Brigitte Kali Canales) returns from Los Angeles, where she was fostered as a child, to her native Veracruz. There she finds herself held captive by a mother and son who, convinced she is possessed by a devil, subject her to a series of ritualistic ordeals. “There are many demons,” Cristina’s relative Miranda (Andrea Cortés) tells her, and these include Cristina’s addiction to heroin, and her strong sense of emptiness and alienation in a home that is also a foreign land to her.

Through the tropes of an exorcism movie, Christopher Alender stages a cross-border, cross-cultural clash, as Cristina must negotiate a path between north and south, new ways and old, and find where her true values and identity lie. As such, this is the story of one woman’s therapeutic odyssey back to personal integrity and purged, purified selfhood – and back to her Mexican roots.

Director: Michelle Garza Cervera

Once a proletarian anti-establishment lesbian punk, Valeria (Natalia Solián) has now settled with her middle-class husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal) in an apartment on Mexico City’s nice side, and is even sacrificing her woodworking job and the independence that it represents, to become a mother. Yet, even as Valeria surrenders to the expectations of patriarchy, an unbearable tension also builds within her alongside the baby in her belly, and soon this manifests itself as a bone-cracking, spidery entity that invades her dreams and home. To resolve the contrary, increasingly dangerous feelings that haunt her, Valeria will turn to the dark arts of some curanderas to find out who she really is and what she wants.

Michelle Garza Cervera’s feature debut is all at once a psychodrama and a story of feminist (re)awakening, with an ending that will only seem transgressive to those who find the status quo acceptable.