Lloronas, Chupacabras, and Other Creatures
Latin American Folklore on Screen
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Book Presentation:
The story of La Llorona—the weeping spirit everyone recognizes but no one wants to face—has been passed down orally for hundreds of years, spanning nearly all of Latin America and tracing its origins to Mesoamerican myths. Yet despite her prevalence, La Llorona is far from the region’s only folkloric monster. Others, such as the Pishtaco, the Qarqacha, or theCurupira, have haunted Latin American cinema throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
Lloronas, Chupacabras, and Other Creatures: Latin American Folklore on Screen traces the representation of these creatures in Latin American horror films. Author Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez analyzes how filmmakers translate oral folkloric legends into Latin American horror and the sociopolitical implications of a continent often portrayed as “monstrous.”
Focusing on different regions of Latin America, Eljaiek-Rodríguez looks at the ways filmmakers use folklore to preserve local traditions and confront colonial legacies. Through their depictions of local monsters, directors amplify decolonial narratives. They denounce gender violence, expose exploitation, and reclaim cultural pride. Compared to local perspectives, US and Eurocentric media often portrays these same creatures as signs of superstition, underdevelopment, or cultural inferiority, as in Chupacabra films and series like The X-Files, Supernatural, and Grimm.
Positioned within the expanding field of global horror studies, this volume bridges film analysis, folklore, and cultural history, revealing how Latin American horror transforms folkloric monsters into vehicles of cultural critique, political resistance, and global storytelling.
About the Author:
Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez is scholarly programs research manager at the National Humanities Center. He is author of Baroque Aesthetics in Contemporary American Horror, Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature, and The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinema.
Press Reviews:
Lloronas, Chupacabras, and Other Creatures is well-researched and fresh, inscribed in (still recent) studies in Latin horror. Eljaiek-Rodríguez focuses on the study of local folklore and how it is legitimized (or, in some cases, distorted) by horror cinema and opens his discussion with local scholars, providing a particularly rich interpretation of a topic that has only recently gained visibility. This volume is sure to be of special interest not only for its novel subject matter but also for its readings largely guided by local thought. -- Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, coeditor of Bloodstained Narratives: The "Giallo" Film in Italy and Abroad
Timely and seminal, this volume is a key text, if not the key text, on Latin American folkloric horror figures. -- Ann Davies, author of The Nightmares of Presence: Space and Place in Spanish Gothic and Horror Film
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