Gothic Latin America

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Gothic Latin America Why has the Gothic become such a powerful mode for representing Latin America? This course examines how writers and filmmakers use horror to give form to violence that continues to shape everyday life across the region. We will consider the afterlives of dictatorship and political repression, as well as the ways gendered violence enters domestic and public spaces. The course will also explore how poverty and social crisis reshape the Gothic, and how local beliefs and popular forms of spirituality become entangled with experiences of fear. Moving from earlier works to the contemporary resurgence of Latin American horror, we will also examine the growing importance of the natural world within the genre. The course will consider how toxic environments become sources of unease and how plants or geological forces acquire disturbing forms of agency, especially in works concerned with environmental destruction and extractivism. Throughout the semester, we will ask how Latin American artists transform the Gothic in response to specific histories and environments, and why horror has become such a compelling language for imagining the region's past and present.