Queer Horror in Post-Authoritarian Argentina:
Haunting, Memory, and
Resistance in the Gothic Imagination
by Estela Braun Carrasco
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process, they do not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Despite Nietzsche’s warning, this essay will explore the imaginative, political, and even utopian potential that becoming a monster holds. To do justice to this undertaking, we shall analyse, within a psychoanalytical Kristevian framework, a movie and a novel that unfold towards a gloomy and noir sphere.
The 2023 film Almamula1 by the Argentinian director Juan Sebastien Torales tells the story of a 14-year-old boy, Nino, who, after a violent homophobic attack, moves with his family to a conservative village in northern Argentina for the summer. There, he becomes intrigued by the local legend of the Almamula, a mythical creature said to punish those committing carnal sins or impure sexual acts. Bajar es lo peor2, first published in 1995 by Mariana Enriquez, is a gothic, queer coming-of-age novel set in Buenos Aires. It follows a troubled young man, Narval, who becomes entangled in a toxic love triangle with a mysterious, possibly supernatural figure named Facundo and his girlfriend, Carolina, as they navigate addiction, desire, and the city's dark underbelly. In both works, the main characters are haunted by monsters and, at the same time, are monstered by society. Arguably, this position at the threshold that Facundo, Narval, and Nino occupy can be made useful for disturbing the hegemonic apparatus under which they suffer.
Exhausted by the hypocrisy of repressive Catholic-conservative morals, Nino is emancipating himself from his guilt and shame. Film still from Almamula. Courtesy of Bendita Film Sales.
What is of particular interest in this essay is both protagonists' adolescence and queerness. Facundo, Narval, and Nino share a multiple liminal position – all three are in a constant state of transgression, continuously navigating borderlines. First, the emancipation of the infantile self, which is confined and regulated by their families and the Catholic morals imposed on their education. Thereby, they are embarking on an infinite challenge of constructing a self beyond that oppressive and hostile moralistic corset fashioned as good. Good in this case equates with the Catholic notion of purity and cleanliness. Secondly, being queer is a transgression by default within a landscape of heteronormative and patriarchal sex, gender, and desire. Thirdly, the three youngsters are doomed to hover between reality and fantasy, haunted by monstrous creatures that they are slowly becoming themselves. Fourth and finally, after being attacked, Nino is geographically expelled from his neighbourhood in Santiago del Estero and relocated to the periphery of civilization, a no man’s land where his father works in the wood industry. Narval and Facundo, on the other hand, because of their vagabondish lifestyle, live a subterranean and nocturnal life geographically isolated from Buenos Aires's daily business.
The multiple liminalities the three figures operate on, and the horror it evokes in us, shall be explored through Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical concept of abjection, elaborated in her book Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection.3 The abject, she claims, is neither subject nor object but that which persists at the borderlines. Abjection happens with the transgression of a rule or doctrine. Inherently, within abjection lies the quality of the disturbance of “identity, system, order.”4 It is precisely the unnameable of the horrific – that place where language fails – that Kristeva helps us to reach. The abject lingers within the (im-)possibility of an old and a new. For her, literature is the attempt to bridge this void called the abject:
Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis
of the Word.5
One could argue that cinema is the most exacerbating of abject experiences because it carries a surplus of gore, gothic, and spectral elements, including imagery and sound, that by far exceeds our imagination. On the other hand, arguing in favor of Kristeva’s claim, what is different while reading a book is that we, as readers, draw from our imagination. It is not unfamiliar, distant images and sounds that force us into a state of bodily discomfort, but our imagination produces the abject feeding on the information of the familiar. In that process, familiar faces, voices, and places become stripped from their context and reappear as estranged scenery for an unfamiliar story. Hence, the practice of reading itself gains another psychoanalytical quality, that of the uncanny.6 In Horror. A Very Short Introduction, Darryl Jones summarizes that “Freud suggests that the uncanny occurs when the meaning of unheimlich collapses into its opposite, heimlich (homely) – when the strange and the familiar meet.”7
Horror is beyond being merely a genre to consume through books, movies, songs, or artworks. Conversely, it does something to us; it consumes us as well, for it operates physically closest to us, that is, on our body. The sweat-inducing discomfort is felt poignantly and is sometimes not easily shaken off again. It is interesting how popular gothic and horror become in moments of crisis, as if the suppressed anxiety is finally allowed to burst out, but merely in a regimented manner. Societal and individual anxiety, fear, and paranoia seem to become fragmented and depoliticised into small digestible bites.
It does not have to be that way. Both horror and gothic as genres carry a heavy load of political potential precisely because they resemble the distortion of how it feels to live through alienation. The profit-oriented economy logic has long seeped into our cultural imagination, making the horrors of the market an all-encompassing experience of monstrosity. For the author Jon Greenway, horror is a phenomenological element of life under capitalism; what is haunting is the spectre of possibility for a better system.8 Moreover, Greenway introduces the concept of Gothic Marxism, whereas on top of the political, there is also an imaginative utopian potential in Monstrosity and Spectrality. Horror thus becomes a vehicle for political and historical change, disposing over a “double function: expressing the dialectical possibility of the re-evaluation of the past, and thus the recuperation of the future.”9
The gothic horror novel Bajar es lo peor, written by the then merely twenty-one-year-old Mariana Enriquez, was published for the first time only twelve years after the Argentinian Military Dictatorship (1976-1983) ended. Because of its frenetic and chaotic structure, disregarding all style and narration guidelines, the novel became iconic amongst her contemporaries. Enriquez's punkish outburst of lust, nonconformity, and madness resonated with the Argentinian youth that had just freed itself from violent, Catholic-conservative authoritarianism. Due to popular demand, it was republished in 2022 for the first time. Only one year later, Almamula, directed by Juan Sebastien Torales, premiered in 2023 at the Berlinale film festival. What has happened in Argentina culturally, politically, and socially in the twenty-eight years between 1995, when Enriquez’s novel was published, and 2023, when Almamula premiered? Can the gothic imagination of the novel and film make its double function useful, simultaneously re-evaluating the past and recuperating the future? Are the monsters in Bajar es lo Peor, republished in 2022, and Almamula timeless, serving as harbingers of the future in the past and present, as Greenway argues?10
The Argentinian military dictatorship established by the Military Juntas in 1976 was rather short and only lasted until 1983. Nevertheless, it was extremely brutal in its modes of terror. One of its tools to spread fear and thus prevent resistance from forming was the structural abduction and, eventually, murder of political opponents in what is called the death flights.11 In the foreword of the report Nunca Más, published in 1984 under President Raúl Alfonsín of the newly democratic Argentina,12 it is written: “In the name of national security, thousands and thousands of human beings, generally young people and even teenagers, became part of a gloomy and ghostly category: the Disappeared.”13 One could argue that horror and film noir serve as post-Dictatorial modes of healing authoritarian trauma, that through those genres, monstrosities of the past are projected onto the present to be acknowledged and thus prevent their repetition.
To ward off the monster Almamula, Nino hangs up a cross in the forest near the house. Film still from Almamula. Courtesy of Bendita Film Sales.
Commonly, analyses regarding authoritarian legacy are written and thought from within that very positioning of the “present," thus neutralizing their own positionality. It is in this sense that the prefix post- means “after.” This interpretation aims to challenge the construction of a post-authoritarian narrative that implicitly establishes itself within a temporal “after” by arguing for a use of the prefix post- in favour of that which exceeds and goes beyond the “before”, rendering “after” a loose negotiation of that which has been and that which is. During the Argentinian dictatorship, the regime’s terror and torture apparatus was veiled under what was framed as “war against subversion,”14 and with it the systematic erasure and murder of (political) opponents, which was predominantly aimed at the youth.15
While reading Bajar es lo Peor, one is easily absorbed by the dark and punkish nocturnal Buenos Aires. Forming a turbulent love triangle, Facundo, Narval, and Carolina turn their nights into days; while Facundo is trying to escape the nightmares haunting him at night, Narval too is trying to escape something, that is, his spine-chilling paranoia, which seems to get worse every day. The three monstrous figures and, with them, a spectral world chasing Narval relentlessly become more and more prominent as the narrative unfolds. To an extent, even as a reader, one fails to distinguish the spectral from the real world. The reader is driven through Enriquez’s novel in the same schizophrenic manner as Narval when the two worlds he moves in blur into one. There is no option for a reader other than to close the book to escape this mental state of maddening confusion.
It is not by coincidence that Enriquez opens the novel's first pages with a discomforting scene at the shore of the river Riachuelo, flowing into the Río de la Plata. Indeed, since the Military Dictatorship, porteños16 have an ambiguous relationship to the waters of the Río de la Plata that flows uncaringly through Buenos Aires. The subliminal anxiety that Narval feels wandering around the harbour, or how Schindel has formulated it in her analysis, “the discomfort posed by the proximity to the river,”17 is transmitted to the reader through claiming all their senses. While reading the words, one suddenly hears Facundo's clicking boots in the distance, feels encapsulated by the fog of dawn, and suffers from an unbearable smell, getting goose bumps imagining the taste of sticky grease. It is in that antagonism of liveliness and death that the river seems to contain – with its dirty water hitting and kissing the motionless, emerging dead boats – that the spectres of the drowned desaparecidos fill the absences they left for their fellow citizens, friends, and family. Although silenced, kept motionless, dead, and abandoned – having disappeared physically and thus condemned to a ghostly non-physical presence – the desaparecidos seem to revolt and invigorate the dark water, discomforting anyone who comes near the river, reminding them of a past too cruel to visualize.18
With the aforementioned in mind, it is no surprise that Enriquez chose to repeat the motif of the river at the end of her novel. There, Narval, haunted by three frightening creatures whom he calls “Them,” is so consumed by his increasing schizophrenic hallucinations that he cannot distinguish anymore whether the love of his life – Facundo – is real or has been one of Them this whole time. As they walk through the desolate shore of La Boca, Narval fears that Facundo might transform into something monstrous, more terrifying than the entities he already knows. Near the decaying waters of the Riachuelo, Facundo shares a recurring vision of a lost house of the family Mora Acevedo — a once-beautiful mansion now swallowed by the river, haunted by absence and decay. He obsessively searched for this place that lingers between reality and dream. In this scene, Facundo’s persona seems to blur into a spectral world that neither exists nor does not exist when he reveals to Narval that Mora Acevedo is indeed his last name.
Bajar es lo peor resembles various characteristics of Freud’s uncanniness. For example, when Facundo describes the appropriation of something alien over his former home, now turned into something unhomely, it is only remembered as a once welcoming place through a glimpse into past times. The haunted house became a horror phenomenon popular in post-authoritarian Argentine literature, as Mandolessi explains.19 As the heart of the private sphere, the house Mora Acevedo becomes haunted once its edificial skeleton has been drenched by hypocritical Catholic morals and finally swallowed entirely by the greasy grip of fascism. What once had been beautiful and full of life now is a dead place full of absence, unbearable smell of rot, decay, and enclosure. Conceptually, the uncanny of the haunted house is not exhausted by the argument that what once was heimlich has now become unheimlich, but by understanding how both collapse into the very same. Just this juxtaposition of both elements does not allow the house to fully disappear into darkness, but dooms it into an eternal hovering at the shores of possibility, perhaps as simple as it is – of love.20
In one of Facundo's nightmares, he relives a traumatic childhood memory of his mother dragging him around the house, forcing him out of his room, shaking him, and demanding that he behave "normal." Her harsh words, filled with accusations of rejection and inherited flaws, intertwine with a palpable physical oppression as he feels ghostly hands constricting his lungs and severing his lifeline. This disturbing vision leaves him with an enduring sense of fear and loss, as the suffocating presence of his past refuses to release its grip.21 It is interesting how violently his mother’s aversion towards Facundo displays in his dream. His mother, who is repeatedly described as a “good” Catholic, seems to be afraid, even terrified, of her son, whom she does not seem to understand and feels rejected by. She desires a normal child, and as becomes very clear in the novel, her child has always been anything but normal according to heteronormative parameters.
Facundo is queer, has prostituted himself since his early adolescences, and is a drug-addict – to put it blankly: he is a vagabond, an outsider. Moreover, his mother abhors his being in the world because she perceives him as crazy. He states that as a child, he was consumed by the fantasy world he had created for himself,22 which, perhaps ironically, was more welcoming than his real social environment. Later, as a teenager, when Facundo runs away from home, his mother seems almost happy to be relieved of the burden of having an abnormal child.23 It is when she realizes that her son is the opposite of what she considers good or normal that her desire and affection turn into fear, into aversion. In a twisted way, although Facundo does seem hurt and traumatized by his childhood, he is also unbothered. He rejects his family, and with it, their values.
Nino finds refuge in the darkness of the forest. Film still from Almamula. Courtesy of Bendita Film Sales.
Nino, the protagonist of Almamula, is also dragged around, beaten up, and locked away first by the bullies of his neighbourhood and later by the village priest. The opening scene of Almamula unrolls in the darkness of a confined space, where Nino and his love interest hide from neighborhood bullies. Through this staging of the protagonists, Torales somewhat ironically references a queer experience of self or forceful enclosure, or to spell it out literally, the experience of being closeted. When they are found, Nino is brutally beaten and thrown in a truck full of toads. After that incident, the family decides to leave the city for several months, following the father to his work site near the forest. There, a rumor spreads that a monster – Almamula – chases young individuals like Nino. The movie progresses slowly like a hot summer day, contrasting Bajar es lo Peor’s chaos and confusion. Almamula’s horror is subtly lurking in the stillness of everyday life. It makes us reconsider our definition of the mundane.
Nino’s mother checks her and then Nino’s appearance before both leave the car. Film still from Almamula. Courtesy of Bendita Film Sales.
Similarly to Facundo, it is Nino’s mother who rejects him the most because of his queerness. She, a good Catholic, sends him to confirmation classes at the local church. Almost every time Nino is near his mother, she hums religious songs – one of the few recurring sounds that cut through the heavy silence. Through this, she is praying, and it seems that through this prayer – through language – she is constantly trying to purify Nino and herself from defilement. Nino’s presence automatically becomes a pollution of identity, system, order24 – their disturbance. He is shown in dark, closet-like scenes, some of which take place inside the confessional. After confessing that he touches himself while thinking about Jesus Christ, he is dragged out of the confessional box and locked up in a dark shed outside the church by the priest. It is as if Nino understood just too well that confession is:
A source of evil and mingled with sin, abjection becomes the requisite for a reconciliation, in the mind, between the flesh and the law. […And thus,] all speech perhaps, already harbors in itself something that is mortal, culpable, abject?25
The protagonist’s attitude towards guilt and shame progresses visually throughout the movie. At first, Nino confesses, prays, and hangs Christian symbols in the woods; later on, he physically acts out the perversion inherent in religion, morality, and law. Kristeva elaborates further, saying that “the abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them.”26
Out in the country's hinterland, the boundaries of the possible and impossible seem to have loosened. While Nino’s sister explores adolescent desire and foolishness under the hot summer sun, his mother secretly fantasizes about one of the housekeepers. His father is out there, illegally deforesting the mountain. Nino himself is pushed further towards the moral margins, as he is suspected of committing perversion and is thus under the constant threat of being taken by the monster. It is said that when committing carnal sins or impure sexual acts, Almamula comes at you screaming and hauling chains. The tingling sound of chains, close by but faint, is the second recurring sound throughout the movie. Towards the end, the viewer, like Nino, awaits the appearance of Almamula almost with eagerness. With the scenes unfolding, Nino is drawn more and more into the spectral world of the forest, searching for the monster with whom he begins to identify. Like Facundo, Nino finds comfort in the absence of the real world.
A glass of what seems to be milk with a drop of blood and the instruction to sin more appear to Nino in a vision, guiding him towards Almamula. Arguably, Nino, through that sequence, understands that being abject does not necessarily mean being immobilized within a threshold. Abjection is movement – physically and ideologically – a rotation from within towards a without. Kristeva conceptualizes the abject as that which is opposed to “I.” The abject contrasts with stagnation and enclosure; therefore, it shocks and disrupts the symbolic order. Instead of confining his lust as demanded by heteronormative expectations, Nino’s desire bursts out without fear of contamination. Moreover, he moves and behaves freely towards the end of the movie, disregarding the rigid eyes of society. His adolescent unbotheredness ricochets off the disgust and loathing ascribed to his queerness. Being abject is to be a mirror to “I” – to expose the limits and hypocrisy of the self.
During a daydream, Nino has a vision of how to get to Almamula. Part of that sequence is a glass of what seems to be milk contaminated with a drop of blood. Film still from Almamula. Courtesy of Bendita Film Sales.
When Nino’s mother tells him that the priest is right and that Nino is indeed strange, he defends himself, asking, “Have you never had impure desires?” Greenway would argue, perhaps, that Nino is embracing his “monstrous potential.”27
The monster points to an outside, to the horrifying potential that life need not be like this; thus, the monster is a reconfiguration of life struggling to come into being.28
The moment Facundo’s mother wishes she had never had him and says that she regretted a thousand times having brought him into the world,29 and the moment the priest locks Nino in the shed, out of everyone’s sight, both characters become abject. But let us not forget that the abject’s power lies in its impudent disregard of sovereignty. Akin to monstrosity, abjection serves a double function of revealing and obscuring, of judging and being an accomplice.30 To be monstered in a world full of loathing and monstrosity is not the same as becoming a monster and thus re-imagining a different kind of epistemology. A “monstrous epistemology”31 is one of continuous transgression. Inherent to the struggle of becoming someone who is part of something, the monster/the abject is a movement that helps us escape totalitarian enclosure. To make abjection conceptually useful is to embrace ambiguity and its infinite transgression from this into that. The utopian potential imagined in both the novel and the movie comes about through the protagonists – Facundo, Narval, and Nino – who refuse to let their curiosity, desire, and love be suffocated by identity, system, and order.
Estela B Carrasco studied cultural studies, art history and sociology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Among others, she studied at University College London in the UK, the University of Pretoria in South Africa and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. Her fields of research are horror, queerness, Marxist and anarchist theory, psychoanalysis, and curatorial studies.
This article is partly based on her BA thesis “(Re-)Assembling a Threshold Horror, Film Noir and Queerness in Post-Authoritarian Argentina and Spain.”
1 Almamula, directed by Juan Sebastian Torales, Produced by Tu Vas Voir, Co-Production by Twin Latin Films (Argentina)/ Augustus Color (Italy)/ Palermo (Paris), World sales through Bendita Film Sales, 2023. 2 Mariana Enriquez, Bajar es lo peor (First published in 1995 Buenos Aires, Madrid: Editorial Anagrama 2022).
3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press 1982).
4 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
5 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 208.
6 Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche”., in Studienausgabe Band IV. Psychologische Schriften, (First published in 1919/ Fischer Taschenbuch [1970] 1982), 241-274.
7 Darryl Jones, Horror. A Very Short Introduction (First published in hardback as “Sleeping With The Lights On” in 2018/ OXFORD University Press 2021), 15.
8 Jon Greenway, Capitalism: A Horror Story. Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination (London: Repeater Books, 2024), 7.
9 Greenway, Capitalism: A Horror Story, 11.
10 Greenway, Capitalism: A Horror Story, 169.
11 Estela Schindel, “A Limitless Grave: Memory and Abjection of the Río de la Plata,” in Spaces and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception, Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (Eds.), (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), 188-201, 190.
12 Emilio Crenzel, Memory of the Argentina Disappearances, (Routledge 2011), 112.
13 Nunca Más: informe de la Comisón Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, (Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires [1984] 1987), 9. Translated into English by the author of this essay.
14 Crenzel, Memory of the Argentina Disappearances, 29.
15 Nunca Más, 8-10. Also, Crenzel, Memory of the Argentina Disappearances, 81: “Their age distribution reveals that the disappeared were predominantly young people. Seventy-one percent of the disappeared were 21 to 35 years old when they were kidnapped, and another 10 percent were even younger (between 16 and 20 years of age).”
16 Porteños is the name of people from Buenos Aires and means literally “people of the port”.
17 Schindel, A Limitless Grave: Memory and Abjection of the Río de la Plata, 193.
18 Ibid., 199: “Furthermore, a transgression has been made that surpassed all cultural boundaries by violating the mandate to bury the dead and by leaving the abjected other – the desaparecido – inhabiting an ambiguous zone in between life and death.”
19 Silvana Mandolessi, “Haunted Houses, Horror Literature and the Space of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Literature”. In Spaces and the Memories of Violence. Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception, Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (eds), (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), 150-161, 155-156.
20 Greenway, Capitalism: A Horror Story, 172.
21 Enriquez, Bajar es lo Peor, 254.
22 Ibid., p.135.
23 Ibid., p.116.
24 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
25 Ibid., 127-128 and 130.
26 Ibid., 15.
27 Greenway, Capitalism: A Horror Story, 180.
28 Ibid., 108.
29 Enriquez, Bajar es lo Peor, 187.
30 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 16.
31 Greenway, Capitalism: A Horror Story, 107.