Refuse and the City: Repurposing the Human in Jorge Michel Grau’s Somos lo que Hay

• In Event: Hibridez, interdiscursividad y géneros cinematográficos

Abstract

In 2010, Jorge Michel Grau directed Somos lo que hay, a horror film about a family of cannibals living in Mexico City. Three years later, Jim Mickle directed the U.S remake, relocating the narrative from the Mexican metropolis to a quiet town in the American countryside. The claustrophobic urban industrial landscape that Grau posits as the space of dread is in sharp contrast to that of Mickle, who locates the abject within the confines of the small town and the vast expanses of the natural world. In this paper I will show how both directors use space as a critical construct in the deployment of the cannibal metaphor, and how the displacement of urban space to rural space across national boundaries (between Mexico and the U.S.) not only alters the aesthetic language of horror, but also reveals the possibility of a political reading of both films. Specifically, I will show that in Grau’s film, the depiction of the city as the grand inquisitor that oversees the consumption of human flesh serves as a metaphor for a late stage capitalism rooted in an anxiety about the dominance of neoliberal market forces in a global Mexico City. Mickle’s film, in contrast, locates the terror in spaces that are marked as “safe havens” from the destructive forces of global capitalism, revealing them to be beset by the same cannibalistic forces, and thus showing these boundaries of social and economic containment to ultimately be porous.

Author

• Hugo Ríos-Cordero, Miami University Oxford Ohio