ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of recent trends shaping the production and worldwide exhibition of Latin American genres films. It emphasizes the ways earlier genre formations in Latin America have evolved from what film historians had long viewed as the mimicry of Hollywood styles and narratives of the early sound period. In the 1960s, a new generation of Latin American film critics, inspired by their European peers from Cahiers du cinema, promoted auteur theory and international art cinema. The implementation of new protectionist policies by many Latin American film industries in the late 1990s has resulted today in an unprecedented boom in film production; the re-emergence of genre films is one notable aspect of this recovery. The new respectability of the horror genre and its concurrent recognition in institutional circles that previously shunned it is one example of how attitudes towards genre films have drastically changed in Latin America.
