Satanic Hispanics celebrates Hispanic heritage with a horror anthology that assembles five horror filmmakers from various corners of Latin America. Each applies their cultural background and style, producing an eclectic mix of tales that take wide swings from bone-chilling to delightfully funny. That variation provides a strange yet captivating journey.
A police raid uncovers a grisly crime scene full of dead bodies. They take the sole survivor, a man that refers to himself as “The Traveler” (Efren Ramirez), into custody for answers. The Traveler attempts to explain the bizarre events that led up to his capture to skeptical detectives Gibbons (Sonya Eddy) and Arden (Greg Grunberg). He entertains them with four tales of supernatural encounters, hoping to persuade them to let him go.
Director Mike Mendez (Big Ass Spider!, The Convent) helms the Traveler-centric wraparound. Ramirez serves as the perfect storyteller to connect each segment; his Traveler feels lived in and difficult to surprise, though he tends to surprise himself between stories. The wraparound builds to a showstopper finale that makes you wish the Traveler got his own action-horror feature.
Argentinian filmmaker Demián Rugna previously unsettled horror audiences with Terrified and kicks off the segments with the equally spooky chapter “Tambien Lo Vi.” His haunted house tactics once again demonstrate an uncanny knack for scare crafting as a Rubik’s Cube expert concocts a bizarre formula with his flashlights that creates a portal for terrifying visitors. Rugna sets the bar high right out of the gate with this suspenseful nightmare fuel.
The Blair Witch Project‘s Cuban-born director Eduardo Sánchez gives audiences a reprieve from the scares with the humorous “El Vampiro.” This segment goes for slapstick charm as an ancient vampire uses Halloween as his bloodsucking playground. That is until his nagging wife reminds him that it’s daylight savings.
Gigi Saul Guerrero introduces Mexican folklore in the grim fairy tale “Nahuales,” centered around shapeshifting Mesoamerican mythology. Guerrero continues her streak of blood-drenched horror that wholly embraces cultural specificity in ghoulishly fresh ways. Keeping the massive tonal swings going, Alejandro Brugués’ “The Hammer of Zanzibar” channels Sam Raimi. This chapter goes full splatstick with an almighty phallic weapon, an infectious physical performance by Jonah Ray Rodrigues, and an earworm theme song created by Rodrigues.
The broad theme means that it’s much harder for this anthology to tie these drastically different segments together in a unified manner, at least in terms of narrative. The way these stories are arranged as it swings like a pendulum between scary and funny can also create a bit of whiplash. How and why the Traveler chooses these specific tales to tell doesn’t neatly fit into his overarching story. Yet, there’s a polished visual cohesiveness to the anthology that impresses. Every single piece of the whole holds strong on its own; there’s not a weak link among them. It’s consistent. More importantly, every story is fun in surprising ways.
Satanic Hispanics make for a solid anthology that entertains and delights. That broad approach, opening its curation to all of Latin America and its horror history, makes it trickier to unify. But it also leaves so much room left to explore. There are still centuries and many countries’ worth of horror stories that demand to be told, leaving the door wide open for future installments. I’d love to see more if they can keep up this consistency.
Satanic Hispanics made its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. Release date TBA.
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