Ava DeVries
In the horror genre, scholars tend to view gendered violence as solely a women’s issue—the victims are so often young (white) women, and the crazed axe murderers are so often (white) men. When the opposite is true, it’s considered subversive or even feminist. Similarly, analyses of feminist horror are frequently filtered through a white lens, ignoring intersectional perspectives. In recent years, however, more and more horror has been produced by creators from historically underrepresented backgrounds, who use the genre to comment on the intersections of race and gender.
One such author is Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose novel Mexican Gothic was published in 2020.1 The story is set in 1950s Mexico and follows Noemí Taboada, who receives a letter from her recently married cousin, Catalina, claiming that her husband has been poisoning her. Noemí decides to visit Catalina and her husband Virgil Doyle, who live with his eugenics-obsessed family of British expats. Eventually, she discovers that the Doyle house is overrun with a network of fungus which the family’s patriarch, Howard, has used to transfer his consciousness into the bodies of his children, allowing him to live for centuries. The family’s symbiotic relationship with the fungus requires their bloodline to stay “isolated” through inbreeding, but they now need to procreate outside the family—with Catalina or Noemí—to continue birthing viable children (Moreno-Garcia 213-15).
