ABSTRACT
For some years now, Argentina has been facing a new ideological social divide commonly known as “la grieta” (the “split”) which separates in mutually excluding spheres those who supported the government of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner and those who accused them of authoritarian populism. In this scenario, the dyad separating Us from Them prevails, for many, like never before. This new split made scholars, media, historians, and common citizens alike remember other historical “grietas” that divided the country into two irreconcilable sides: unitarios and federales, port and the interior, Peronist and non-Peronist groups, and military governments and democracy, all of them conflicting divisions staging an Us versus Them scenario. All these divisions, arguably, have roots in one of the most defining ideological division in Argentina’s history: the wide gap separating savages from civilized people. This ideological framework is the legacy of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s book Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie (1845), one of the most influential texts in Argentina’s literature. In the book, Sarmiento states that civilization should be imported to Argentina from Europe to supplant the barbaric ways of gauchos, caudillos, aborigines, and black people. Besides, barbaric people, those responsible for holding back progress, were to be shunned so the nation could embrace a civilizatory project.
Since horror cinema taps into social and cultural anxieties, it is no coincidence that the brief corpus of Argentinean horror films produced through the national classic era—roughly, from 1933 to 1959—addressed the trope of the Other lurking within each civilized citizen. National horror cinema—and one of the first examples of sound cinema in Argentina—began with El Hombre Bestia (The Beast Man, Camilo Zaccaría Soprani, 1934), a film revolving around a pilot who gets lost in the jungle and becomes victim of a doctor who transforms him into a caveman-looking monster. Even if filled with ingenuities, the film functions as a blueprint for the horror films to come. Una Luz en la Ventana (A Lighted Window, Manuel Romero, 1942) and El extraño Caso del Hombre y la Bestia (The Strange Case of the Man and the Beast Mario Soffici, 1951: vernacular version of Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1941) also revolved around the Gothic motif of the savage within, and the social anxieties produced by, the national civilizing project and its dark reverse: devolution to superseded evolutionary stages.
