Hispanic horror: An introduction

Abstract

This issue of Horror Studies is dedicated to the theme of Hispanic horror, or horror texts that have some connection with cultures that can be considered to come under a Hispanic umbrella. The field has a long history that has often gone unnoticed, first because of horror's exile from the canon and the mainstream for many decades if not centuries, and second, because of the fact that many (although by no means all) Hispanic horror texts have been made in Spanish or, more rarely, languages connected with Spanish-speaking territories. This latter fact has made them less accessible to critique in the anglophone sphere, and greater awareness of them is long overdue.Spain has long possessed a fine vein of the dark grotesque, epitomized by Goya's black paintings, while nineteenth-century authors such as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Emilia Pardo Bazán consciously wrote Gothic tales without explicitly confessing that they were doing so. For the first half of the twentieth century horror and Gothic lay dormant, or appeared disguised as other genres or modes such as esperpento (a black form of the carnivalesque) and tremendismo ('a darkly pessimistic mode of realism based on deliberately crude representations of violence and crime, focusing on the morally and physically repellent') (Perriam et al. 2000: 74). Yet even though the political turmoil of much of the century, leading to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, were not propitious for the production of horror texts owing to censorship, Spanish horror began to become more prominent, particularly through the work of film directors such as Jess Franco, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (who was particularly successful in bringing horror and sci-fi to Spanish TV screens in the 1960s) and Jacinto Molina. As Antonio Lázaro-Reboll documents, Spain