The Mexican Cinema of Darkness: A Critical Study of Six Landmark Horror and Exploitation Films, 1969-1988
Doyle Greene
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: B009F0IQOS
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Following the national and international upheaval and tragedy in 1968, Mexican "trash cinema" began to shift away from the masked wrester genre and towards darker, more explicit films, and disturbing visions of the modern world: films which can be called "avant-exploitation." This work covers six of those films: El Topo, Mansion of Madness, Alucarda, Guyana, Crime of the Century, Birds of Prey, and Santa Sangre.
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level. Think of something. Trick him. You can always win. Find a way!” (Emphasis added.) Midway through Mara’s harangue, the shot cuts back to El Topo submerging himself in the water, leaving only his hat floating in the pond. While a kind of oldfashioned, burlesque joke where El Topo sinks into the water to avoid his nagging girlfriend, the gesture suggests something more insidious as well: El Topo is submerging himself, even drowning, in “bitter water”—the scheming influence of Mara. In this
from a parishioner’s gun belt, reloads, and pulls the trigger while pressing the barrel to his temple. The click of the gun sends the congregation into a greater fervor, delighted a miracle has indeed occurred—until a young boy gleefully takes possession of the pistol. A loud gunshot is matched by a jump-cut of the boy lying dead, his head bathed in blood, followed by the final title card with its none-too-subtle announcement of the final act—or book—of El Topo: “Apocalypse,” the impending
In fairness to Jodorowsky and the many problems of El Topo, it is clear that his intention is to repudiate “exploitation and domination.” Yet by its very aspirations to become an epic and create a myth, El Topo is inherently tied to authoritarian ideology, despite its 1960s revolutionary aspirations. The film’s emphasis on the hero’s epic journey of suffering and triumph that culminates in the formation of the stronger and smarter individual can easily be construed into the gross misreading of El
provide the fuel for the ovens. The shot cuts to a high-angle pan moving slowly across a massive dinner table and a surreal feast, the sequence that makes up the bulk of Poe’s original story. The banquet plays out as if Fellini directed Salò, concluding the film in scenes combining carnival and degradation: a fantastic celebration taking place in the middle of the human-fueled furnaces—a bizarre dinner party in the midst of the Holocaust. Like the people in glass cages over the furnaces, children
Dr. Maillard in Mansion of Madness). Accompanied by a woman fortune-teller, the Gypsy is a traveling merchant selling “magical” objects, including a dagger which greatly interests Alucarda. In close-up, she holds the dagger vertically in front of her face, and admires it with perverse fascination and erotic interest (in a vulgar Freudian sense, the dagger symbolizes a vaginal opening as well as its phallic connotations); this also foreshadows the pivotal role the dagger will play in