Blood Circuits: Contemporary Argentine Horror Cinema

by Jonathan Risner

Overview

Argentina is a dominant player in Latin American film, known for its documentaries, detective films, melodramas, and auteur cinema. In the past twenty years, however, the country has also emerged as a notable producer of horror films. Blood Circuits focuses on contemporary Argentine horror cinema and the various "cinematic pleasures" it offers national and transnational audiences. Jonathan Risner begins with an overview of horror film culture in Argentina and beyond. He then examines select films grouped according to various criteria: neoliberalism and urban, rural, and suburban spaces; English-language horror films; gore and affect in punk/horror films; and the legacies of the last dictatorship (1976–1983). While keenly aware of global horror trends, Risner argues that these films provide unprecedented ways of engaging with the consequences of authoritarianism and neoliberalism in Argentina.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438470764
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Series:	SUNY series in Latin American Cinema
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Risner is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Indiana University Bloomington.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Argentine Horror Cinema: A Constellation of Miracles

1. Reaches: The National and Transnational Coordinates of Argentine Horror Film Culture

2. Telling Carnage: Spectacles and Spaces of Neoliberalism

3. Cinematic Body Snatching: English-Language Argentine Horror Cinema and Systems of Paranoia

4. Where Punk and Horror Meet: Argentine Punk/Horror, “Cine under,” and Gore as Affect

5. Is It There? It’s Not There. Now It’s There.: Spectral Dynamics of the Last Dictatorship in Argentine Horror Cinema

Conclusion
Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Blood Circuits is an important and much-needed contribution to the fields of Latin American cinema and popular culture, and genre film studies with a focus on horror cinema. It offers original and innovative directions that will pave the way for new studies in different areas of film studies: the internationalization of horror that unfolds a problematic relationship between the United States and the Global South, the use of punk horror as a form of affect, and the development of new kinds of pleasures and displeasures in the spectator." — Victoria Ruétalo, coeditor of Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America

From the Publisher