nada’s Reviews > Visceral: Essays > Status Update

Any story about haunted houses, Satanic possessions, alien invasions, zombies, vampires, cults, objects that come to life to destroy us, any of them, all of them are symbols of our atavistic fear of death, pain, illness, insanity, evil, loss of control, and the inability to defend our loved ones and ourselves.

The terror genre appeals to universal fears, and we as people, as societies, fear the unknown, the things that break with normality, Freud’s famous unheimlich (literally: that which does not come from home), strangeness that annihilates normalcy, the sinister. What is more sinister than death, hunger, thirst, violence, lost loved ones, war, destruction of nature, extinction, persecution for being who we are, physical pain, losing our safe spaces, the inability to resist the bulldozer of capitalism?

That’s why Liliana Colanzi (Nuestro mundo muerto, You Glow in the Dark) and Samanta Schweblin (in Fever Dream and Seven Empty Houses, for example) write ecological horror. That’s why Mónica Ojeda (Jawbone, Las voladoras), Dolores Reyes (Eartheater), Magela Baudoin (La composición de la sal), or Brenda Navarro (Empty Houses) write about the terror of being a girl, a woman. That’s why Mariana Enriquez (Our Share of Night, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Things We Lost in the Fire) writes about social, economic, and political terror, about the collective trauma of a society that survived a murderous dictatorship that buried forcefully disappeared citizens under silence, dirt, and water.