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).
But Moreno-Garcia wasn’t the first to come up with a body-hopping white family who target people of color. Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out follows Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a black man visiting the liberal white family of his girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams). Chris endures uncomfortable comments and microaggressions, until he finds out that the Armitage family lures black people like Chris to their home, then auctions them off so that affluent white people can possess their bodies via brain transplant, prolonging their lifespans.
Mexican Gothic and Get Out use similar storylines to explore the abuse faced by two marginalized groups: women in 1950s Latin America, and black men in the contemporary United States. The Doyles and the Armitages objectify Noemí and Chris based on racial stereotypes, but these experiences are also shaped by gender-specific violence.
After reading Mexican Gothic and watching Get Out, it would be impossible to ignore the narrative parallels. Virgil manipulates Noemí by using the “gloom”—the “spider web” of fungus running through the house in which the Doyles preserve their generational memories—to influence her mind and body (Moreno-Garcia 211).2 As Francis, the least nefarious Doyle, explains to Noemí, “The fungus is in the walls of the house and it’s in the air. You don’t realize it, but you’re breathing it in. Slowly, it has an effect on you […] It can burn out your own self” (Moreno-Garcia 212). The Armitages employ a similar tactic in Get Out; early-on in the film, Rose’s mother Missy (Catherine Keener) hypnotizes Chris under the guise of helping him quit smoking. Through this hypnosis, she is able to incapacitate him, sending him to the “Sunken Place”—a liminal void similar to the Doyles’ “gloom”—where he has no control over his own body. “The sunken place is a rupture in time and space where traumas from the past are conjured into the present to be weaponized,” writes Kevin Wynter in his book Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. “It is a condition of physical arrest where the Black body is rendered immobile so as better to answer the demands issued by a Master” (113-114).3
What Virgil and Missy do aren’t just mind games; by infiltrating their victims’ psyches, they assert complete control, a sort of mental colonization. Both families look at Chris and Noemí not as human beings, but as objects to be used and filled. In Mexican Gothic, the Doyles see Noemí as a vessel to impregnate, someone to breed with and carry on the bloodline. In Get Out, the Armitages literally sell Chris’s body — unsubtly evoking slave auctions — as a product to be controlled and inhabited by a white man.
Both Noemí and Chris are explicitly fetishized by the white families based on their races. Upon first meeting Noemí, Howard Doyle remarks that she is “much darker than [her] cousin” and immediately begins asking about her “Indian heritage” (Moreno-Garcia 29). Noemí realizes that the Doyles see her as “[d]ark meat,” after their plan to impregnate her is revealed — “Nothing but meat, she was the equivalent of a cut of beef inspected by the butcher and wrapped up in waxed paper. An exotic little something to stir the loins and make the mouth water” (Moreno-Garcia 237). The Armitages and their collaborators view Chris similarly; at the auction party, guests flaunt the black bodies which hold their partners’ consciousnesses as though they were a new pair of shoes—nothing more than fashionable accessories to be worn and gawked at.4 Chris, as a black man, is the desirable make and model. As one of the partygoers tells Chris and Rose, “Fairer skin has been in favor for the past, what, couple of hundreds of years? But now the pendulum has swung back. Black is in fashion!”
Noemí and Chris’s bodies are seen as exotic objects to be filled, controlled, and used, in total disregard of their autonomy. In both cases, their racial and gender identities intersect to make them into fetishized commodities. Noemí is especially enticing to the Doyles because her “pretty face,” “dark skin,” and “dark eyes” make her a “novelty”—but they imprisoned Noemí and Catalina in the first place because they are women, with whom the men could procreate (Moreno-Garcia 237).5 Chris’s blackness is what makes the Armitage family target him, but his identity as a black man leads him to be hyper-sexualized and hyper-masculinized by white characters throughout the film.
In Mexican Gothic, the role of women in the Doyle household is to bear children. Howard tells her explicitly that “A woman’s function is to preserve the family line” (Moreno-Garcia 75). The women are only valued as incubators for Howard’s next body—or if the child is female, as his next mate—and as objects to grant the men pleasure. Throughout the novel, both Virgil and Howard sexualize Noemí, Virgil even going so far as to attempt rape (Moreno-Garcia 261).
Noemí’s experience is shaped by gender roles and expectations of women in the 1950s. She agrees to her father’s proposition that she visit Catalina in the first place because he offers to let her enroll in graduate school if she complies. Noemí’s parents disapprove of her desire to pursue a master’s degree because she is a woman, and women “were supposed to follow a simple life cycle, from debutante to wife. To study further would mean to delay this cycle, to remain a chrysalis inside a cocoon” (Moreno-Garcia 13). Further, all of Noemí’s initial interactions with the men of the Doyle family are painstakingly calculated, because if she acts in a way that isn’t attractive or ladylike, they will view her as deviant: “She thought that men such as her father could be stern and men could be cold like Virgil, but women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her” (Moreno-Garcia 58).
The white characters in Get Out impose assumptions of sexuality and masculinity onto Chris, based solely on stereotypes of black men. One woman at the auction party (Ashley Campbell) forgoes speaking to Chris entirely, instead looking him lasciviously up and down and asking Rose, “So, is it true? Is it better?” Rose’s MMA-obsessed brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) tells Chris “with your frame and your genetic makeup, if you really pushed your body…you’d be a fucking beast.” As Peele notes in his Annotated Screenplay, “The thinly veiled racism of ‘fucking beast’ plays into this idea that Jeremy thinks Chris’ natural athleticism puts him at an advantage, and if Chris had Jeremy’s determination or effort level, he would be unstoppable” (Peele 171). These moments reveal the assumptions so often made about black male bodies—that they are sexually and physically superior—and how these assumed traits mark Chris as a desirable commodity.
Moreover, because Chris is a black man, Rose is automatically seen as a potential victim by those outside the Armitage family.6 In the final scene of Get Out, when Chris and Rose are locked in bloody combat, what should be Chris’s salvation—a police car—is instead identified as a potential death sentence. Rose knows that, because she is a white woman appearing to be attacked by a black man, she will automatically be seen as the victim in the situation, and “[a]s a Black man living in America, Chris knows that any encounter with institutional authority, regardless of circumstances, the die has already been cast” (Wynter 146). At best, Chris would simply be arrested; at worst, he would be faced with the lethal sort of police brutality that so commonly victimizes black men.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Jordan Peele’s Get Out mirror each other in concept and storyline, though their central characters come from vastly different backgrounds. While racial fetishization is perhaps the main focus of both works, Noemí and Chris’s experiences also hinge upon their respective genders. The Doyles feel entitled to use Noemí’s body, both for procreation and sexual gratification. Chris is sexualized and sought after by the white auction-goers for his perceived physical superiority, and as a black man, he fears violent repercussions from the police, despite only injuring Rose in self-defense.
I am not insinuating that gendered violence is a more important issue than racism in either Mexican Gothic or Get Out—instead, I think it’s necessary to acknowledge how race and gender intersect in these works, marking the bodies of black and brown characters as objects of fetishization and sites of exploitation. In the end, though, Noemí and Chris both escape the control of their oppressors with their bodily autonomy intact, and their stories can ultimately be viewed as narratives of resistance.
Notes
- For an interesting conversation surrounding Moreno-Garcia’s literary and filmic inspirations for the novel, listen to her interview on the Talking Scared podcast.
- In her article “Grotesquely Gothic Textual Overflow: Depictions of Generational Female Trauma in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s ‘Mexican Gothic,’” Whitney McClelland argues that the gloom, in its function as a web of memories, also allows “silenced generations of women to communicate their trauma”—that because the previous women the Doyle family exploited can transmit their experiences through it, the gloom is what informs Noemí of the Doyles’ power and allows her and Catalina to escape (36-37, 41).
- Kimberly Nichele Brown, in her book chapter “Stay Woke: Post-Black Filmmaking and the Afterlife of Slavery in Jordan Peele’s Get Out,” describes the Sunken Place as “the geographic hinterland in this present conjuncture that replicates the political reality of the Middle Passage—a space in which blacks are stripped of agency, rendered mute and held in limbo, stuck between being and nothingness” and writes that “Peele envisions black life as characterized by its fugitive status, where blacks must always actively resist falling into the Sunken Place” (108).
- For another in-depth examination of Get Out, see Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, edited by Dawn Keetley. In her introduction to the collection, Keetley notes that “every guest at the Armitages’ party objectifies Chris: he is a lump of flesh to them. Nothing more” (6).
- McClelland describes how “[t]he grounding of this novel in the parallel Female Gothic and postcolonial genres further underscores the novel’s tyrannical men, emphasizing how generations of women under their control have been exploited like the land they colonized” (34).
- Kelly Wilz’s article “Getting the Final Girl Out of Get Out” asserts that the film challenges “prevailing depictions of white women as ‘innocent’ victims or heroes” which “contribute to villainizing depictions of Black men” (326).
Works Cited
Brown, Kimberly Nichele. “‘Stay Woke’: Post-Black Filmmaking and the Afterlife of Slavery in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.” Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination, edited by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal, University of Washington Press, 2020, pp. 106–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvthhdqx.9.
Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele, Blumhouse Productions, 2017.
Keetley, Dawn, editor. Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror. Ohio State University Press, 2020. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.2131182.
McClelland, Whitney. “Grotesquely Gothic Textual Overflow: Depictions of Generational Female Trauma in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s ‘Mexican Gothic.’” Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature, no. 5, 2024, https://doi.org/10.34739/fci.2024.05.03.
Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey, 2020.
Peele, Jordan. Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay. Inventory Press, 2019.
“Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Mexican Gothic, NOT Romance.” Talking Scared, 16 Sept. 2020, https://open.spotify.com/episode/7jmn8quCJLPoALq8YD1LGd.
Wilz, Kelly. “Getting the Final Girl Out of Get Out.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 44, no. 3, 2021, pp. 323–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2020.1834035.
Wynter, Kevin. Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Ava DeVries is an MA student at Western Washington University, where she also received her bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Her research interests include folk horror and the gothic in film and literature. Ava also writes fiction and can be found @ava_devries on Instagram, @AvaDeVries04 on Twitter, and @avadevries.bsky.social on Bluesky.
