I was asked this question in a radio interview very recently, and since I got a chance to give the URL to this blog, I figured people might be arriving here curious about it. Hello, Norwegian P3 listeners! So, there’s a small essay on the Mexploitation genre and its history up. I might add images and whatnot later, but for now, that’s where to go. It also contains some links to the most relevant mexploitation-themed posts on this blog.
I’ve just spent a few hours getting the content from the old Mexploitation blog online here. It was a bit more work than I expected, especially given some character set issues, and the lack of images, but it should be all fixed now. Feel free to browse backwards and take a look if you haven’t seen it before, there’s quite a bit of decent content here.
Yes, it’s a new year. And the hosting on my old blog went down, so I’m here on new hosting, with a new domain, etc. The old content will be moved here relatively soon, in the meantime I’m going to try to write some new stuff here. I’ve been reading a lot of horror theory lately, some good and some not so good, so I’m going to be reviewing that, I think. In the meantime, happy new year, and stay tuned.
What few readers I have might have noticed that I’ve not been writing much here lately. I’d like to, but I’ve been insanely busy. I’ve hinted at this before, and not said why, since I’ve been trying to establish a few things. But well, here it is. I co-founded a postproduction company (preliminary website) with my good friend Øyvind Stiauren, another Norwegian living in Mexico. We’ve been at it for about 8 months now, and results are starting to show, specifically, the first movie we’ve worked on to show up in IMDB, Ana Laura Calderón’s “La Isla de la Juventud“, a documentary shot on Cuba. That’s not the first movie we’ve worked on, though, the first was a feature film that was shot mostly during April-May. They’re doing pickups now, and post starts in November. There’s also a couple of other documentaries we’re working on right now, as well as several large feature films coming at the end of the year/beginning of next. We’re doing very well, and I’m quite happy.
This also means my IMDB page got updated. There’ll be much more there very soon.
In a round of poster-hunting in second hand shops, I came across this gem. It really doesn’t need much explanation, it’s the definition of Mexploitation right there: Half-naked women, foreigners (and US border patrol agents, even!) as bad guys, even more half-naked women, etc. You need to click on this image to take a closer look. And probably also make it your desktop wallpaper. Or print it and hang it on the wall.
As an additional bonus, the scantily-clad woman in the photo on the right is Lyn May, an ex-prostitute and stripper turned actress who is one of the central characters in Mexploitation history. As if that wasn’t enough, she has an enormous ass. She probably warrants a post of her own, and since I know you want to know more about enormous mexploitation asses, I will give it to you. Just not right now.
The title of the movie, Las Braceras, is the feminine plural of “Bracero”, roughly “guest worker”, but read up on the Bracero Program for some important background on US-Mexico relations and immigration.
(And yes, I blog too little. People have let me know. But I’m doing very cool stuff, and it’s definitely worthwhile, I just want to wait a little longer before I announce it here. Be patient.)
I’m on the Horror Roundtable over at The Horror Blog again this week. Go over and take a look.
This week’s horror roundtable over at The Horror Blog features me again, as well as a lot of other people, talking about movies that scared us when we were kids, but don’t anymore.
I’m in the Horror Roundtable over at The Horror Blog this week. Go and check it out, and The Horror Blog in general is worth reading too.
About two weeks ago, I asked the horror blogosphere what made them get into horror. Due to external circumstances not limited to celebrating a friend’s birthday (with absinthe), celebrating my own birthday, and going to a casting, I haven’t answered my own question yet. But others have. Son of Michael May answers, and talks about his exposure to classic horror films, which is how a lot of people got started, I think. Sean T. Collins has an origin more similar to my own, with no clear defining moment, but a gradual discovery of the genre.
And with that, over to my own origin story.
Far from the archetypical teenager who covertly reads horror comics their parents would be appalled at if they knew, I come from a long lineage of horror fans. Well, at least one generation back. My mother, Edel, was and is into horror, although she’s a bit out of touch with the latest of the genre. In Norway in the 80s, there was a series of cheap paperback horror novels called “Casino Grøsser” (literally “Casino Chiller”, I never figured out where casinos came into the picture), little black paperbacks with a hole in the cover to show a tacky illustration on the first page, and the title in metallic green letters.
Most of them were cheap and pretty unoriginal, but there was also the occasional gem, Stephen King’s Carrie, and a book that from what I remember must have been Dean R. Koontz’ Phantoms were a couple of the early ones. I can’t have been much more than 10 or 11 years old when I started working my way through everything in my mother’s bookshelves that looked interesting. I read Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain around the same time, and also Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Alien, long before I saw the movie, and it scared me to death, much like the movie did a few years later.
My mother was sceptical to video rental (and given a friend’s collection of uncut pirated VHS tapes his father had brought from Lebanon, she was probably right), so she never got a VCR. However, there were rental VCRs you could get from the rental places, and she was happy to get one of those and a movie once in a while. Early horror movies I still remember include Night of the Demons, early H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Curse, aka. The Farm, The Outing, aka. The Lamp, and TV sci-fi horror series V. My mother also reluctantly let me watch The Omen and Cat People on TV.
The next big revelation was reading the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft at the age of 15 or so. I liked the more low-key stories the most, like Dreams in the Witch-House and The Rats in the Walls, but At the Mountains of Madness is also very influential in my love for the “slow reveal” and creeping unease in horror narrative, I think.
Around the same time, I started reading Clive Barker. Most teenagers start out with the Books of Blood when they read Clive Barker, which I think are imaginative and interesting, but not great. For some reason, though, I got my hands on The Great and Secret Show from a friend who had bought it, but found it impossible to get through. It wasn’t a problem for me, I was hooked a couple of pages in, and finished it in one all-night sitting. Imajica and Weaveworld followed, and to date I love “hidden world”/”urban fantasy” as a genre, as exemplified by mid-period Clive Barker, as well as Neil Gaiman and others. I think I also liked the mixing in of sex that Barker delighted in. I already felt instinctively that sex, violence, and magic were closely intertwined, and his novels confirmed that for me.
There are other watershed moments, like when I discovered David Cronenberg (I think I was sitting completely still and slack-jawed through Videodrome), and with it the metaphorical power of horror, but in general, these are the things that shaped me.
There are a bunch of classic horror that I didn’t get around to until I was already a full fledged horror fan, and sought them out for completeness, including George Romero’s movies (not entirely true, I’d seen Monkey Shines in the 80s, but that doesn’t quite count), most of John Carpenter’s production (I like the old stuff, generally hate the newer), and so on. The slasher stuff never interested me much, and some horror was too sadistic for my tastes; I empathize too much with the protagonists, I think.
I keep learning about horror. As I’ve taken more of an interest in movie production, I’ve started analyzing more, which leads to some of the articles on this blog. I’m interested in fear as an emotion, and the evolutionary psychological reasons for why certain things are scary, as well as the metaphorical power of art-horror. Fear is a very basic human emotion, and one of the most commonly manipulated. I think it must be understood to be overcome, and one of the ways to understand it is to challenge it, poke at it from the safety of a movie screen or a printed page, to try to understand ourselves.
Screamwriter tagged me for answering this set of questions about me and my tastes. It’s a good warm-up to writing my “what made me get into horror” post, which I haven’t gotten around to yet.
ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:
I remember watching Linnea Quigley’s infamous lipstick scene in Night of the Demons, which my mother perhaps irresponsably rented and let me watch. It scared the shit out of me, but was also exciting, both sexually and otherwise, and it probably warped my little mind for life.
TWO (2) favourite lines from movies:
I’m not big on lines, I’m more of a context guy, but probably a couple of those that run a chill down your spine, like:
THREE (3) jobs you’d do if you could not work in the “biz”
FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside of the industry
THREE (3) book authors I like
TWO (2) movies you’d like to remake or properties you’d like to adapt
ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated
David Cronenberg. In addition to being one of my favourite directors, he actually managed to make amazing adaptations of Naked Lunch and Crash, and great original material, like Dead Ringers.
THREE (3) people I’m tagging to answer this meme next
Sean T. Collins
I apologize for not knowing any more writers online.