Lloronas, Chupacabras, and Other Creatures: Latin American Folklore on Screen by Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez

The story of La Llorona—the weeping spirit everyone recognizes but no one wants to face—has been passed down orally for hundreds of years, spanning nearly all of Latin America and tracing its origins to Mesoamerican myths. Yet despite her prevalence, La Llorona is far from the region’s only folkloric monster. Others, such as the Pishtaco, the Qarqacha, or the Curupira, have haunted Latin American cinema throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Lloronas, Chupacabras, and Other Creatures (University Press of Mississippi, 2026) traces the representation of these creatures in Latin American horror films. Author Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez analyzes how filmmakers translate oral folkloric legends into Latin American horror and the sociopolitical implications of a continent often portrayed as “monstrous.”

Focusing on different regions of Latin America, Eljaiek-Rodríguez looks at the ways filmmakers use folklore to preserve local traditions and confront colonial legacies. Through their depictions of local monsters, directors amplify decolonial narratives. They denounce gender violence, expose exploitation, and reclaim cultural pride. Compared to local perspectives, US and Eurocentric media often portrays these same creatures as signs of superstition, underdevelopment, or cultural inferiority, as in Chupacabra films and series like The X-Files, Supernatural, and Grimm.

Positioned within the expanding field of global horror studies, this volume bridges film analysis, folklore, and cultural history, revealing how Latin American horror transforms folkloric monsters into vehicles of cultural critique, political resistance, and global storytelling.

Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez is scholarly programs research manager at the National Humanities Center. He is author of Baroque Aesthetics in Contemporary American Horror, Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature, and The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinema.

Lloronas, Chupacabras, and Other Creatures is part of the Horror and Monstrosity Studies Series published by the University Press of Mississippi.