"Brasil Num Caixão": Masculinity, Socio-Political Anxieties and the Brazilian Horror Film

• In Event: Engaging Cinematic Turns in Brazil

Abstract

This paper examines the horror film genre in Brazil and questions of masculinity and sexuality in the work of directors José Mojica Marins, Ivan Cardoso, Walter Rogério, and David Cardoso. While horror film had its beginnings in the 1930s in Brazil (O jovem tataravô, Barros 1936), it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that the Brazilian horror film industry gained popularity. This was in part due to its interaction with the Udigrudi film movement and the flourishing Boca do Lixo cinema industry in São Paulo. The burgeoning genre took advantage of production accessibility, incorporated elements of the low-budget pornochanchadas, and gained a readymade spectatorship hungry for these exploitation flicks, both the pornochanchadas as well as the horror films. Beyond this, the political turmoil of those years, marked by heightened censorship and socio-political anxieties proved fertile ground for the popularity of this strongly allegorical genre. This paper considers how horror film allegorically broaches socio-political and cultural anxieties by inquiring into horror film production from the 1960s and 1970s. I will focus my discussion on how Brazilian horror films from this time period allegorize society’s fears and anxieties surrounding questions of masculinity and sexuality, shifting gender roles and their interface with the socio-political instabilities and violence that marked Brazil in the later-half of the twentieth century.

Author

• Jeremy L Lehnen, Brown University