The First Fantasy Characters of the Mexican Cinema: from Ghosts to Vampires

Abstract

This article explores the kind of fantasy characters of Mexican film between 1933 and 1969. The appearance of these characters is related to two periods of Mexican film industry: the thirties, an epoch of cinematic experimentation and the search of new aesthetics; and then later the fifties and sixties, the decline of the Golden Age of the Mexican cinema and the search for new genres, stories, characters and filmic resources which contributed to the emergence of the horror and science fiction in Mexican film. This review focuses on the description of the fantasy figures and the analysis of how these figures from European literature and cinema were adapted to a Mexican context. Likewise, the main part of this study is dedicated to the classification and analysis of the figure of the vampire, the vampire films and their contribution to the development of the Mexican horror and science fiction films.

Keywords

• Fantasy
• vampire
• mad scientist
• Mexican film
• horror film