BAMcinématek has announced the special series 'Holy Blood: Mexican Horror Cinema,' which will feature ten iconic film productions from south of the border made between the late fifties and the mid-nineties by different directors including Arturo Ripstein, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Felipe Cazals among others. The series will take place October 27 - November 2 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Since the late 1950s, Mexico has produced its own rich and distinctive strain of horror cinema, combining supernatural tales of witches and vampires with regional folklore, head-spinning surrealism, and heaps of creepy Gothic atmosphere. These high water marks of the genre include Guillermo del Toro’s lush Cronos (1993) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (1989).
The horror film series also includes: La tía Alejandra (Arturo Ripstein, 1979), Alucarda (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977), Poison for the Fairies / Veneno para las hadas (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1984), Canoa: A Shameful Memory (Felipe Cazals, 1976), The Witch’s Mirror / El espejo de la bruja (Chano Urueta, 1962), El vampiro (Fernando Méndez, 1957), The Curse of the Crying Woman / La maldición de la llorona (Rafael Baledón, 1963), and El Barón del terror / The Brainiac (Urueta, 1962).
