Let’s torch it all! Contemporary Mexican horror film as anticolonial subversion

This research seminar ponders the possibilities of contestation in contemporary Mexican genre film, focusing on its subversion of notions related to gender and sexuality through the aesthetic excess of Tenemos la carne (We Are The Flesh, 2016) and La región salvaje (The Untamed, 2016) and punk folk horror of Huesera (The Bone Woman 2022), among other pieces. It considers the timely contribution of decolonial (and ultimately, anticolonial) thinkers hailing from Latin America as a valuable methodological framework to discuss horror audiovisual culture from and about the region while vindicating otherwise jettisoned epistemologies.  

Bio: Valeria Villegas Lindvall is Senior lecturer at the University of Gothenburg, specializing in Latin American horror film with a feminist and decolonial focus. Post-doctoral research assistant for Prof. Alison Peirse’s AHRC-funded fellowship Feminist Horror Cinema and Reviews Editor for MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.