Madres: A Return to Gothic M(other)hood and Why the Reviews Got it Wrong
In the vein of other horror films and series like Jordan Peel’s Get Out and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country, the real horror behind Ryan Zaragoza’s Madres is not the supernatural, but the racist environments the characters must traverse. Although The New York Times’ Lena Wilson’s review of this film proclaimed it “a bit half-baked” with “some sloppy construction.” Madres is actually a very well-made horror film with nuances that may be lost on some reviewers. Unlike other so-called horror films that claim to represent Mexican culture like Christopher Alender’s The Old Ways, this one depicts Mexican folklore without caricature and exposes systemic racism and capitalism as the true monster. In fact, it is a rare horror film that actually mirrors the gothic genre’s original intention as “a response to and reflection of anxieties about the female body and about technological and medical advances,” especially about brown women’s bodies and the power in reproductive rights.
Written by Marcela Ochoa and Mario Miscione, Madres is set in 1977 in California’s agricultural Golden Valley where a pregnant Diana (Ariana Guerra) and her husband Beto (Tenoch Huerta) relocate from Los Angeles. What starts out as a work opportunity for Beto, and a chance for journalist Diana to write her book, turns real-life horror as Diana discovers the threat is not the ghost of the home’s previous tenant Teresa (Vanessa Motta), nor the pesticides being used in the fields, but the town’s racists who are forcibly sterilizing Mexican women. Gothic studies scholar Jerold Hogle explains how gothic elements reveal a “deep male need for the maternal and the feminine...set over against patriarchy’s sidelining of women as science takes even giving birth away from them.” In the case of this film, birthing is literally taken away from these women. “Science” in the form of Dr. Bell (Robert Larriviere) takes away reproduction from women by forcibly sterilizing them, declaring, “When there is an epidemic, it’s my obligation to cure it.” Diana appropriately screams “You monster!” as she is tied up to the birthing table, set to be the next victim. Dr. Bell is the gothic mad scientist, altering the natural order of motherhood and reproduction.
Photo by Alfonso Bresciani/Amazon Studios/Alfonso Bresciani/Amazon Studio - © 2021 Amazon Content Services LLC
A major oversight of the reviews also includes the misreading of gothic elements that have non-anglo cultural significance. For example, Nick Allen, who reviewed the film for RogerEbert.com said, “One scare is based on a bloody egg yolk, accompanied by Diana clutching her belly, as if we didn’t get the parallel. It’s not freaky, disturbing, or interesting. It’s an egg yolk, albeit an inedible one.” The significance of the egg goes beyond what Allen declares a cheap scare. Scientifically, blood spots develop when tiny blood vessels in the hen’s ovaries or oviduct rupture during the egg-laying process” which itself is some powerful symbolism. Culturally, eggs are used in cleansing rituals in several non-Christian traditions including Santeria and Voodoo, where an egg is rubbed over the body and then cracked open. If it is anything but clear, it is an indication that the person has been the target of negative energy (the evil eye). When Diana cracks the egg, it reveals a bloody, oozing yolk, which mirrors the bloody eyeballs Diana finds hanging from her tree. Diana is educated and rational. She does not buy into the superstitions. In clutching her belly, we see her start to accept the presence of the supernatural, a major and necessary turning point in any Gothic horror story.
Beyond its Gothic storyline, director Ryan Zaragoza also creates visual parallels that critique the capitalist undertones informing the forced sterilizations. First, there is a camera pan of empty fruit crates ready to be filled with the harvest and then a fade into the maternity ward with empty cribs. Later, we see the transition between a machete being used to harvest crops and the doctor’s scalpel slicing into Marisol’s (Evelyn Gonzalez) womb after she is forced to sign a consent for sterilization form while in the peak of labor pain. Such careful camera work signals the connection between the products of labor—one fruitful, the other barren. It is no accident then that the film is set in 1977; Golden Valley’s centennial. If the town had been established in 1877, it meant it was founded in the industrialization boom “dominated by large-scale industrial farming, and [. . . a] succession of ethnic groups provided this labor, beginning with Native Americans in the 1850s and 1860s, followed by Chinese, Japanese, Hindustanis, Filipinos, and Mexicans.” This is a town built by and maintained by exploited immigrant labor.
This film also combines this critique of capitalism with the racist agendas that have always upheld it. From the opening scene where Diana and Beto drive through the town’s main street where there are businesses with names in English and Spanish such as “Muñeca Preciosa Beauty” alongside a diner with signs that say “English Only.” Beto’s boss, who goes by “Thomas,” not “Tomás,” (Joseph Garcia) asks Beto if he came to the country “legally” within minutes of meeting him, even though he is the descendant of bracero immigrants himself. Later, at a picnic he gives them a welcome basket complete with an American Flag. It is no surprise that he turns out to be in cahoots with the Dr. Bell, making the women sick so that they end up in the hospital where they will be “treated” by Dr. Bell.
Photo by Alfonso Bresciani/Amazon Studios/Alfonso Bresciani/Amazon Studio - © 2021 Amazon Content Services LLC
Critiquing misogynist beliefs is another feature of the gothic. Diana shares with her sister that she was fired when she got pregnant and her sister corrects her saying, “You mean you got fired because you got pregnant.” Here we see that women’s labor is not valued the same as men’s and yet conversely feared by the racist eugenicists. In her article, “Gothic Medicine: Murderous Midwives and Homicidal Obstetricians,” Diana Perez Edelman explains how, “These themes have important parallels with midwifery and obstetrics: anxiety about the blurring of boundaries, the horrors of the female body and its reproductive potential, and monstrosity. Though set in 1977, the film ends with text revealing the parallel to recent forced sterilizations of migrant women in U.S. detention centers, emphasizing again the anxieties over women’s bodies and the power/threat in reproductive rights as a stronghold on white, male dominance.
This film also intersects history, feminism, and ongoing debates within the Latinx community itself about identity, language and privilege. Diana represents the educated light-skinned Mexican American, while her dark-skinned husband is the immigrant farmer with a thick accent. Diana is the otherized by who should be considered her people, because she doesn’t speak Spanish. Her husband quietly resents her education, at one point he saying, “Here we go, the white savior comes in to protect us, the poor dumb farmers.” But it is her journalist training and sharp mind that lead her to put together the clues, saving her life, her baby’s life and the lives of other women. It is also the humbling of the non-believer. While Diana begins as a by-the-book thinker, by the end, she and her baby are donning the protective amulets, signifying her acceptance of supernatural beliefs alongside her empirical research. At the end, it is revealed that the inspiration for the film was the “class-action lawsuit in federal court claiming that the Los Angeles County U.S.C. Medical Center was systematically sterilizing Spanish-speaking mothers who delivered their babies via cesarean section.” The real monstrosity is revealed, circling us back to the Joseph Conrad quote at the beginning of the film:
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
Variety Magazine’s Michael Nordine, said this film is “the kind of distraction you might pad a midnight-movie marathon with, likely sandwiched between more accomplished films with similar thematic underpinning.” Screen Rant’s Mae Abdulbaki said Madres “is a horror film that obviously has something to say, but doesn’t know how to say it well. The film introduces a lot of plot threads, none of which are given enough attention or adequate depth. The characters and story are flimsy at best, gimmicky at worst.” Reviews like this miss the point. I guess the more colored details of this film had some reviewers asking, “Did you just use symbolism on me?” Reviewing a film needs to be more culturally insightful. Film reviews “decide” what is good, but are written by people who don’t understand deeper meanings. As Denzel Washington explained, “It’s not color, it’s culture. [...] Steven Spielberg did Schindler’s List. Martin Scorsese did Goodfellas, right? Steven Spielberg could direct Goodfellas. Martin Scorsese probably could have done a good job with Schindler’s List. But there are cultural differences.” In the end, Madres is a victim of the very thing it is trying to combat—a sterilizing of the other.
Yollotl Lopez is the queer daughter of Mexican immigrants. From the Mojave desert of California, she is now a doctoral candidate at New York University. Her work centers on youth immigration narratives and the rhetoric of storytelling. She is also an editor, writer and historical costumer, bi-coastally-based in New York and California. Her work has also been featured in Tin House and Drizzle Review.