Myth as Memory, Horror as Testimony: Cinema, Gendered Memory, and Decolonial Feminism in Bulbbul and La Llorona

• In Event: Memory and Postmemory in Post-Conflict South Asia and Latin America

Abstract

This paper offers a transregional feminist reading of Bulbbul (Anvita Dutt Guptan, India, 2020) and La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala, 2019), two contemporary films that reimagine folklore and the supernatural to confront the persistent legacies of patriarchy and colonialism across South Asia and Latin America. Drawing from Barbara Creed’s concept of the “monstrous-feminine” and seen through the lens of decolonial feminist thinkers such as María Lugones (Argentina) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (India), this paper examines how both films subvert conventional horror female figures to critique the historical disciplining, erasure, and commodification of women’s bodies, both living and supernatural, under patriarchal power.
By blurring the line between the human and the non-human, these films position the female body as a political tool, one that bears witness to violence long after death. In Bulbbul, the figure of the ‘chudail’ (witch) is transformed from a feared other into an avenging spirit born of a child bride’s exploitation in colonial Bengal. Meanwhile, La Llorona reclaims the haunting ghost from patriarchal mythologies, recasting her as a force of indigenous resistance against Guatemala’s genocidal past. In both narratives, these women once silenced and now monstrous, refuse to remain in the shadows. They speak from the grave, unsettling dominant historical narratives and resisting their own erasure.
Through their aesthetics of haunting, embodied memory, and myth making, Bulbbul and La Llorona articulate a feminist retelling, one that refuses historical amnesia and calls out the gendered exploitation and atrocities of the patriarchal world. This paper argues that these films act as cultural interventions, revealing how gendered violence cuts across national and historical boundaries. When reframed through a decolonial feminist lens, the monstrous-feminine emerges not as a figure of fear, but as a powerful symbol of justice and collective memory. Ultimately, both films reveal that even in death, women’s bodies are not granted rest; they return, mythic and avenging, to challenge the systems that once tried to silence them.

Author

• Trisha Trisha, Amity University