Mexican Vampires

Mexican vampires may not initially strike as prominent or popular in literature and film. Still, the figure of the vampire has become engrained in popular culture in Mexico, featuring in horror narratives that attempt to challenge the discourse of national identity during the twentieth century and question the implications of globalization in the twenty-first century. Vampires in Mexico highlight this monster’s capability to adapt its specific metaphors about colonization, consumption, gender, and sexuality to the particular anxieties of the modern Mexican state. Mexican vampires demonstrate this adaptive process as it navigates from Hollywood cinema to Mexican film and literature. The vampire thus becomes a symbol that helps manifest everything that is deemed other in a heteropatriarchally driven culture. This chapter explores how the vampire transforms itself in Mexico, by incorporating what it already symbolizes to project particular fears in the Mexican cultural dynamics of identity, as it goes through its historical transition from national modernity to contemporary transnationalism.