2025/02/20 by Jennessa Hester · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Cuban History and Society
paper · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197624807.013.10
openalex publication_date 2025/02/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Alejandro Brugués’s Juan of the Dead (2011) is often considered the origin point of Cuban horror film. This chapter challenges this myth, arguing instead that while horror movies existed in Cuba before the 2000s, they were omitted from the generic canon by white imperializing forces. This process, termed curatorial colonization, resulted in the erasure of Afro-Cuban subjection as constitutive of actual terror, rendering invisible a Black horror tradition within the nation. Through a re-curation of one such colonized film, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper (1976), this chapter details how the horror genre and its fans have unassumingly swept away narratives of Black marginalization and terror. To re-curate Cuban cinema so that it includes Black terror is to proclaim to the world that it is not just those fictional zombies that matter, but also the corpses of atrocity and enslavement.