ABSTRACT
In a series of shot/reverse shots, the audience discovers that the protagonist is telling the truth: what is missing is perceived only when Mateo enunciates that he has no shadow. With apparitions and missing shadows, Rito terminal presents a form of Mexican Gothic that arises particularly from issues of identity, the spectral double, memory, history, and community. On the contrary, it is an attempt to understand local forms of anxiety that surface when the sense of belonging through time and space becomes compromised by familiar and unfamiliar spiritual forces. Although sparse, Mexican horror films display an interest in monsters, the uncanny, and the Gothic, mostly in an imitative manner that attempts to simulate successful American horror cinema or the most recent and appealing Asian cinema. In Rito terminal, film itself becomes the ideal means of communication between the ghost-world and the real world. Rito terminal is Gothic through its visually mediated spectralities.
