Vincent Toro | Latinxorcismos: Semiotic Study of the Gringo Horror Film (Required Reading)

November 2019

Vincent Toro

Latinxorcismos: Semiotic Study of the Gringo Horror Film (Required Reading)

The killer is always Brown. Even when they aren’t. The killer is Brown and not human. A damp alien drenched in scales. Shell-backed, their wrecked ship mangles the corn field. Or they’re ghost. An intruder who has always been here hovering. Ghostly and transparent but nevertheless Brown. An autochthonous stranger clawing at the wainscoting, sprouting from sacred ground. You can count on mention of sacred ground. Defiled. The rational plea of a burnt spectre mistaken for houndwail because the family of the house live monolingually. The house itself installed over an unmarked grave. The Brown howling from the basement, a plea. A howl that preceded the basement. Or the town itself. Though no one seems to recall this ginger wraith with many tongues ever living there. Now they whisper rust flavored secrets through the floorboards, announce their refusal to leave. Reciting the secret unleashes fire, so the viewer is taught to tread lightly through the halls and cover their own mouth, to never speak the Name, an admission of all they’ve shuttered up in the walls, a secret about the family and how they acquired the house, the woman

they buried to possess it. She is a mist in a hollow. Always hollow. A mist who does not carry the mortgage but insists on haunting the gang from the suburbs who just camped here for fun, moved in to flee some addiction, bought the place because it was cheap and came with a caretaker who is also Brown. Brown and loyal, but not to be trusted, says a green sheriff with a drawl. The sheriff also warns nice visitors to keep an eye out for Strangers. Strangers are frowned upon in these parts. When he says Strangers he means Brown. See, all these new residents really want is a quiet spot to raise children or fix their marriage, and Brown only comes to disturb it, bursting through the walls as blood-drenched omen. This used to be a nice place, the green sheriff says, before the auburn swarm arrived, returned, refused to leave or whatever, and now none of the light bulbs work and every day is a fog of sharpened incisors, and the citizens have all gone sick from digging up tombs where their pools should be. All because some comemierda wraiths won’t stay dead, won’t be banished, won’t turn down their music and accept subpar working conditions. Can’t even fish in the creek anymore without being dragged to the bottom by a belligerent relic. Faith in the good book just isn’t enough to cast these phantoms back into the nether regions built by CoreCivic for just this purpose. This is going to take a rifle, some gasoline, a couple of flares, and a booby trap nailed to the old tractor. Once their arms are caught in its claws and the remaining townsfolk douse them in conviction, a blind old white woman is dragged into the frame to perform an utterance,

one that will drive the tawny spirits out of the cellar and back into the cupboard to fix supper for the master of the house that is also their sepulcher. And there are children, always children screaming for help, aimed to garner sympathy so the new inhabitants are not blamed when they dump the ashes of the enemy onto the steps of the courthouse, because they’ve already got the neighbors believing Brown is succubus, djinn and imp risen from beneath, and the pestilent coop they’ve pitched around what’s left of amber specters is entirely for the viewer’s protection. As credits empty the seats, the threat is shown one last time to announce there will be a sequel, cast in silhouette, or just their boots, a close up of their gloved hands clenched around the steering wheel where they have taken their place as the relentless,

resentful chauffeur for the white protagonist who, above all else, fears requital, redress.

This poem draws conceptually from theories of Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta on xenophobia and horror films. An Afro-Latinx scholar and author, and avid horror film fan, Dr. Acosta has observed that many of these films use the narrative structure of a foreign person or species entering (read: invading) a community or a group of protagonists visiting (read: invading) a space only to be tortured and then killed by some supernatural force. The films using either of these structures seem to subtly, or sometimes not-so-subtly, present the source of horror in the film as an entity that is clearly not white, which is to say the entity is not committed to whiteness. They are designed as monsters that do not speak English (usually they are just a screeching creature or sometimes mute), often brown or dark in hue, and they are rarely given their own back stories that might allow the viewer to identify with them, occluding any space for empathy toward the film’s monster. Moreover, so many of these films take place in big houses where property — territory — becomes central to the conflict, taking the colonizer’s position of defending land that they have stolen and now claim as their own. Dr. Acosta has said that this is why when watching these films she tends to identify with the monster rather than the protagonists. Read through the lens of the Latinx experience, one can’t help but notice how, in the real world, nonwhite people of the Americas are very much demonized and painted as a threat to the notion of the nice American (read: white) family. Considering the proliferation of such films in the horror genre and how they run parallel to the transmission of anti-Latinx rhetoric in the public sphere in the U.S., it seems like something more than coincidence that the storylines created by the film/policy-maker in both of these arenas are built up around the same attitudes and symbolism. My aim with this poem was to play with the genres familiar tropes and imagery to build an extended metaphor that illustrates Dr. Acosta’s theory of the horror genre as Anti-Latinx propaganda delivery system.

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