The 10 Best Latin American Horror Movies

Beneath all unsuspecting and narrow-minded genre heads’ noses, there’s a young horror filmmaker from Argentina who’s slowly building quite the reputation for himself: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and ghouls, please cyber-meet Adrián García Bogliano. Earlier this year, we caught our first glimpse of the 32-year-old writer and director’s agreeably daft sensibilities with the DVD release of Cold Sweat, a zany variation on the whole “torture porn” subgenre that’s as kinetically paced as it's sordidly imagined. It’s the kind of what-the-fuck picture that immediately makes one want to investigate the previously unknown creator’s filmography, and the good news is that we’re now able to see what else Bogliano is working with, cinematically speaking.

Opening in extremely limited release, via IFC Midnight, Bogliano’s much slower and, if the press notes are to be believed, Roman Polanski-esque shocker Penumbra taps into the always fertile terror ground of the occult. The film’s heroine (played by Cristina Brondo, the owner of a glorious pair of twos) rents out an apartment to a strange older man, who, as it turns out, dabbles in Satanic rituals whenever there’s a solar eclipse, and, unfortunately for our new breast friend Brondo, there’s one on the horizon.

Bogliano has already staked his claim as one of Latin America’s most gifted new filmmakers, and he’s already made a film worthy of inclusion on our following list of The 10 Best Latin American Horror Movies. Sadly, Miss Brondo doesn’t star in any of them—believe us, we tried to find one with her name in the credits just so we could include it here. No dice.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Country: Mexico
Director: Carlos Enrique Taboada

Check the title’s translation: “Even the wind is afraid.” That’s certainly raising the bar quite high, isn’t it? Fortunately, Mexican horror pioneer Carlos Enrique Taboada’s Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo is certifiably creepy as hell.

In the tradition of old-school ghost stories, Taboada’s greatest film is more concerned with unseen terrors than it is showing the whole gruesome enchilada. Set in a private all-girls boarding school, Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo focuses primarily on a young co-ed (Alicia Bonet) whose vivid nightmares lead to the discovery of a malevolent female spirit that’s roaming the institution’s halls and, more often than not, the suspect clock tower.

Taboada nails all of the elements that made the subtle horror flicks of yesteryear so unnerving without resorting to overboard violence: There’s a spooky old mansion (the school itself), disquieting voices of the spectral kind, and ghosts hell-bent on revenge for reasons that are left unknown until the story’s conclusion. Of all the movies on this countdown, this one’s definitely the most reserved, though that doesn’t make it any less scary.

Country: Argentina
Directors: Daniel de la Vega and Pablo Parés

Also known as Chronicle of the Raven, this Argentinean creeper owes a great deal to older, better horror films like Italian director Dario Argento’s dreamlike masterpiece Suspiria (1977). That's not something that should be held against Jennifer’s Shadow; on the contrary, directors Daniel de la Vega’s and Pablo Parés’ supernatural collaboration does a fine job of emulating much of that older style of cinema’s dread-filled mood and unsettling undercurrents.

Gina Phillips (the hot-piece sister in Jeepers Creepers) plays an American actress who heads to Buenos Aries to take up ownership of her recently checked-out twin sister’s house, an inheritance that her mean grandmother (an effectively nutty Faye Dunaway) isn’t too pleased about. But here’s the kicker: While shacking up in the sister’s crib, Phillips’ character succumbs to a family illness that makes her think ravens attack her during sleep and peck at her innards. And, in the film’s highly satisfying and downbeat final moments, de la Vega and Parés do that sick idea plenty of justice.

Country: Argentina
Director: Adrián García Bogliano

With the darkly funny Cold Sweat, Adrián García Bogliano proved that he’s not lacking in madcap ideas. First, you start with a couple of very sexy ladies, one of whom spends most of the movie in an exposed bra that’s dripping wet. What the lingerie is soaked in, however, is Cold Sweat’s killer hook: It’s nitroglycerin, a deadly and unconventional murder weapon put into use by two elderly, slow-moving political extremists who can’t let go of the ideals that made them torture and kill innocent Argentinean civilians back in the late ’70s.

And let’s not forget the feral and zombie-like women the old guys keep stashed beneath a staircase, an obvious but still appreciated nod to Wes Craven’s slept-on The People Under the Stairs. Every step of the way, Cold Sweat winks at its genre influences with a dogged absurdist’s energy .

Country: Mexico
Director: Jorge Michel Grau

Last year, genre fans were treated to a slew of strong international flicks, from England’s Attack the Block to Spain’s Kidnapped, and we can’t forget Korea’s I Saw the Devil. One foreign horror movie that was sadly overlooked by most folks, though, was first-time Mexican writer-director Jorge Michel Grau’s seriously bleak and horrific We Are What We Are, a cinematic descent into domestic nightmares that starts off creepily and grows increasingly more disturbing as its 90-minute duration proceeds.

As Grau’s film opens, a middle-aged man drops dead on a crowded sidewalk, which leads directly into his poor family’s methods of coping with the loss of their patriarch; the responsibilities fall mainly on the shoulders of the two sons, whose primary duty is to lure innocent victims back to their decrepit-looking home for the boys, their younger sister, and their tyrannical mother to eat the visitors’ flesh.

That’s right, We Are What We Are is a cannibal movie, one that shows no real compassion toward its protagonists at any point; meaning, Grau has no problem subjecting his antiheroes to cruel and unusual retributions. Indeed, We Are What We Are is as uncompromisingly grim as they come.

Country: Mexico
Director: René Cardona Jr.

Who doesn’t love a little bit of schlock every now and then? We sure as hell do, and for such not-so-guilty pleasures one can always rely on the films of Mexican filmmaker René Cardona Jr., the late purveyor of camp behind nearly 100 B-movies of the craziest order. And for our money, his most enjoyable piece of hardcore cheese is the 1977 killer shark flick Tintorera, which can basically be considered the softcore and far inferior twin of Steven Spielberg’s Great White classic Jaws.

The majority of Tintorera’s running time is dedicated to the sexual exploits and misadventures of its two protagonists, a couple of sleazeballs who prefer to bang the same woman, and, somehow, manage to meet chicks who are down for their two-for-one cause. There is a flesh-ripping shark on hand, of course, and Cardona Jr. neatly rips off the structure of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and has his murderous fish quickly devour a female character who appears to be the film’s lead until she’s sexy chum.

Once Tintorera finally reaches its man versus shark finale, Cardona Jr. lets his gore-master flag fly, showing a dying character’s severed legs as they keep kicking for dear life while nowhere near their truly fucked owner. It’s moments like that which give Tintorera its time-worthy stripes.

Country: Mexico
Director: Guillermo del Toro

In the hands of a master like Guillermo del Toro, horror movies can serve a double purpose: scaring the bejeezus out of viewers while also making profound statements about society as a whole. For his maturely sinister ghost story The Devil’s Backbone, the Mexican filmmaker flashed back to the Spanish Civil War to present his allegorical points. The film is set in and around an orphanage where the specter of an unfairly murdered little boy haunts the grounds and selects one kid in particular, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), to serve as his messenger and warn others of impending tragedy.

Very few storytellers are capable of viewing grown-up horrors through the eyes of young child protagonists as superbly as del Toro; The Devil’s Backbone, much like his later fantasy masterwork Pan’s Labyrinth, powerfully exemplifies that.

Country: Mexico
Director: Chano Urueta

Say there’s an unhappily married guy who can’t stand his wife’s immediate family and closest relatives: For such a poor bastard, The Witch’s Mirror (El Espejo de la Bruja) represents the ultimate in frightening scenarios. In director Chano Urueta’s efficient dose of Gothic revenge, a terrible husband kills his wife and expects to live pleasantly ever after, but he neglects to realize that his ex-spouse’s old godmother is on that conjurer tip. Thinking the coast is clear, the killer hubby soon comes face-to-undead-face with his reanimated wife, a justifiably angry spirit brought back from the grave by her witch of a godmother.

Urueta’s film is a superbly staged freakout in the vein of 1959’s House on Haunted Hill; the situation itself, as any disenchanted man stuck in an unfruitful marriage will tell you, is the stuff of piss-your-bed nightmares.

Country: Brazil
Director: José Mojica Marins

Ask any shamelessly obsessive horror fanatic about Coffin Joe and they’ll instantly fawn over Brazil’s legendary mastermind of exploitative horror, Mr. José Mojica Marins. How badass was Marins? For starters, he’s known for specializing in a subgenre called pornochanchada, which essentially describes any schlocky genre flick that features an abundance of tits and ass.

More importantly, whenever the now-76-year-old Marins adopts his Coffin Joe moniker, horror lovers are guaranteed a wickedly seedy good time. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver), the second entry into Marins’ “Coffin Joe trilogy,” remains the writer-director’s crowning achievement.

The film’s premise, which isn’t all that much different from 1963’s At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, is so perverse that it’s actually quite brilliant, in the most vile sense imaginable. Marins himself stars as Zé do Caixão, a lunatic who’s obsessed with impregnating a woman and spawning a boy to continue his family’s lineage, and his biggest requirement is that his future baby mama is immune to fear. So when Zé abducts female after female, he subjects them to heinous tortures and death involving tarantulas and serpents.

Achieving a hallucinogenic tone, which is most palpable in a nightmarish sequence set in Marins’ vision of Hell, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse is a horror classic that deserves its rightful place alongside the genre’s more talked-about staples of the hippie era.

Country: Mexico
Director: Guillermo del Toro

All genre titans have to begin somewhere; for Mexican horror/fantasy heavyweight Guillermo del Toro, the origins of his burgeoning legend status trace back to 1993’s Cronos, a vampire tale that goes wonderfully against everything you think you know about the limitations of a creature-of-the-night flick.

An old antique dealer, Jesús (Federico Luppi), unwittingly turns himself into an immortal blood lover after he messes around with an ancient mechanical doohickey that sprouts spider legs and emits a liquid into his skin through a piercing needle. It doesn’t take long for Jesús to start licking red life-liquid off a public restroom’s floor, looking like a first-class ghoul, and running afoul of a goon played by del Toro’s BFF Ron Perlman.

Like all of del Toro’s movies, Cronos is only intermittently scary, but that’s not the man’s modus operandi here: He’s genuinely invested in his characters, and, consequently, his debut feature reaches an emotionally sweet level in its refined storytelling.

Country: Mexico
Director: Juan López Moctezuma

Let’s be clear here: By no means is Alucarda the best Latin American horror movie in the technical, all-around-superior-filmmaking sense. But, when it comes time to revisit a movie over and over again, what’s really more important: the facets that Academy Award voters care about, or sheer over-the-top insanity, the latter of which results in impure yet undeniable enjoyment?

Yeah, we’ll opt for the latter, and, with that in mind, Juan López Moctezuma’s incredibly sacrilegious and firmly bonkers journey into the sordid occult world is tough to beat. Story-wise, it’s fairly simple: Two sexy and often naked orphans living in a Catholic convent make a pact with Lucifer. Even better, the crazier of the two ladies, Alucarda (Tina Romero), can’t stop lusting after the other, Justine (Susana Kamini).

Impressively, though, the kinky girl-on-girl action is far from Alucarda’s best attribute. Besides, you can get that kind of eroticism in Showgirls; what you won’t see Elizabeth Berkley doing, though, is dying from a freakish exorcism, returning to life, ripping at a nun’s face with long claws, and then chomping a chunk out of the clergywoman’s neck, like Justine does here. Also of note is the fact that the male lead uncannily resembles Burger King’s creepy, mute “King” mascot.

Not to mention, Alucarda has one of the most insane payoffs in horror movie history: Alucarda transforms into a demonic witch and turns the entire convent’s worship space into an inferno that’s worthy of Stephen King’s Firestarter and stacks up more corpses than a Civil War battlefield. How do you not bow down to that?