28 - Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia

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In this episode, we descend into Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 bestselling novel set in 1950s Mexico. When glamorous socialite Noemí Taboada receives a disturbing letter from her cousin Catalina, who claims she’s being poisoned in her new husband’s remote mountain mansion, she travels to High Place to investigate. There she finds a crumbling English manor transplanted into the Mexican countryside, steeped in decay, silence, and red flags. Catalina is wasting away under the watchful eye of her sinister husband Virgil, his ancient patriarch Howard, and the sanctimonious housekeeper Florence. The house reeks of rot, the wallpaper pulses, and mushrooms bloom in the foggy graveyard. Mexican Gothic explores inherited trauma, the stain of colonialism, eugenics, and the horror of being reduced to a vessel. We discuss gothic tropes, gaslighting, fetishisation, how we feel about dream sequences and complicity v. victimhood.

Content & Spoiler Warning:

This novel and our episode includes discussion of sexual assault, incest, coercion, eugenics, racism, fetishisation of women of colour, colonial exploitation, gaslighting, medical abuse, cannibalism, body horror (including bile and vomiting), disturbing dream sequences, and reproductive coercion. We also fully spoil Mexican Gothic.

Palate Cleansers

After all that bile, we recommend:

• The new Muppet Show (Disney+) - joyful chaos, nostalgia, and Seth Rogen involvement.
• Encanto – also explores intergenerational trauma and a characters repeats, “Open your eyes.”

Recommendations

• Talking Scared - Interview with Silvia Moreno Garcia (the novels include Certain Dark Things & The Bewitching)
• The Yellow Wallpaper (episode 15) - a big inspiration
• Rebecca - all the gothic tropes
• Rosemary’s Baby - for gaslighting, reproductive horror
• The Shining - isolation and atmosphere of dread
• The Others – sheets over furniture in unused rooms
• The Skeleton Key - no spoilers, just watch it
• Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough – quite a twist
• Venom, Stranger Things, The Last of Us, The Girl with All the Gifts, What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher – fungal and hive mind horror
• Midnight Mass - corrupted communion ritual
• Get Out - fetishisation & bodily appropriation
• The Portrait of Dorian Gray - immortality and decay
• The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter- gothic fairytale retellings
• Wuthering Heights & Jane Eyre – gothic classics
• Ghostbusters - When someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes.”
• The Crow - “It can’t rain all the time.”
• The Fall of the House of Usher - a creepy crypt
• Starling House by Alix E. Harrow &Old Gods of Appalachia (podcast) - mining horror
• Always Mean Girls, Blue, Andor, and Arrested Development

Homework”

Watch: Sugarcane (National Geographic documentary, available on Disney+)

We’ll be examining residential schools, colonisation, cultural erasure, and the lingering trauma of eugenic ideology, continuing our discussion of how history haunts the present.

Until next time: clean your black mould, trust your red flags, and when someone warns you to leave while you still can… take the hint and GTFO.

Special thanks to Nancy Azano for our cover art (Instagram: @nancyazano) and Harry Kidd for our music (Instagram: @harryjkidd, Spotify).