{"id":904700,"date":"2026-09-25T07:26:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T07:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/904700\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T07:26:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T07:26:18","slug":"how-crises-and-dictatorship-shaped-the-horror-writing-of-mariana-enriquez-argentinas-mary-shelley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/904700\/","title":{"rendered":"How crises and dictatorship shaped the horror writing of Mariana Enriquez, ‘Argentina’s Mary Shelley’"},"content":{"rendered":"

It takes quite a lot to frighten the queen of Latin American gothic horror.<\/p>\n

Yet one night as Mariana Enriquez left her local cinema for the short walk home, she was terrified.<\/p>\n

She had made the move to Launceston from Buenos Aires only a few months earlier and was struggling to get used to the darkness of Australian suburbia at night.<\/p>\n

It also didn’t help she had just seen the Australian horror film, Bring Her Back<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“This had never happened to me in my life,” she told ABC News.<\/p>\n

“I’m almost never scared of horror movies but I was \u2026 super terrified when it ended.<\/p>\n

“Usually I walk back and that day I was so terrified, I walked one block, got out of the CBD [and there was] darkness … I called an Uber and told the guy … ‘I have a problem with my leg’.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Mariana Enriquez is considered the queen of Latin American horror by literary critics and book reviewers. (ABC News: Morgan Timms)<\/p>\n

In her Argentinian home city, darkness meant danger.<\/p>\n

It was a hard lesson to unlearn at the age of 50, even in the quietude of northern Tasmania.<\/p>\n

“It is one of the biggest [culture shocks] because it’s a very everyday thing. If there’s a street where you don’t have streetlights [in Argentina], it’s because it’s dangerous, it’s abandoned. You don’t go there,” she said.<\/p>\n

“It’s a lot of adjusting from being alert always \u2026 waiting for something that can come, not just from being unsafe but from other kinds of unsafeness.<\/p>\n

“In Argentina you are always\u2026 [watching] the news to see if there was some kind of economical disaster that is going to make you make decisions.”<\/p>\n

It was the economic precariousness of Argentina which eventually led to Enriquez and her husband moving to Australia around a year ago.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Mariana Enriquez says her subjectivity was shaped by the dictatorship and its aftermath.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 (ABC News: Morgan Timms)<\/p>\n

The change has meant she no longer has a relationship with “the immediacy of catastrophe”.<\/p>\n

“So it’s a real reset for me,” she said.<\/p>\n

In the shadow of a dictatorship<\/p>\n

Nicknamed the “Argentinian Mary Shelley”, Enriquez has had three collections of short stories and a novel translated into English, in addition to her non-fiction cemetery travelogue, Someone Is Walking On Your Grave.<\/p>\n

Enriquez was around two years old when Argentina entered its “big dictatorship” years in 1976, as she calls the country’s seven years of military rule which saw the disappearance of around 30,000 people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Military<\/p>\n

During Argentina’s seven-year military dictatorship, known as the Dirty War, tens of thousands of people were “disappeared”. (Getty images: Horacio Villalobos)<\/p>\n

While democracy was eventually restored in 1983, the dictatorship cast a long shadow, even over those who were children at the time.<\/p>\n

Enriquez recalled the micro levels of control over everyday life, dictating birthday parties and the number of people who came to your house.<\/p>\n

Then there were the years where the full scale of the atrocities were broadcast, a time Enriquez says was in some ways “even more horrifying” than the years of military rule.<\/p>\n

Children were not spared from the horror and the “gore” of this very public reckoning.<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/p>\n

Photos of young people who were “disappeared” during Argentina’s military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. (Getty: Mondadori Portfolio\u00a0)<\/p>\n

“My subjectivity was formed in that period \u2026 Your whole imagination is shaped by this very dark, political thing \u2026 There’s an alert and an alarm that has to do with growing up like that.”<\/p>\n

From a young age, Enriquez had aspirations to be a writer, a resolve that was only strengthened by the discovery such a profession could get you disappeared to one of the more than 500 clandestine prisons dotted around the country.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Argentine horror writer Mariana Enriquez at the grave of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who was a huge influence on her work. (Supplied: Mariana Enriquez)<\/p>\n

“Living through that period and getting out of that period gives people an attitude of never falling for that fear again and fighting back. It was ‘They’re never going to stop me. They’re never going to silence me’.”<\/p>\n

Enriquez is considered a leading voice in the New Argentine Narrative, a contemporary movement of predominantly women writers whose dark stories confront a collective past.<\/p>\n

But in the early days of her writing, Enriquez had some trepidation about how some Argentines would react to her drawing inspiration from that very recent history.<\/p>\n

“I was a bit anxious .. if they were going to understand that this was my language as a fiction writer and my way \u2026 of taking these issues that were very serious and important to me and very important to the history of our nation and talk about them,” she said.<\/p>\n

Instead, they embraced her stories.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Three collections of short stories by Mariana Enriquez: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, A Sunny Place for Shady People and Things We Lost in the Fire. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

Alex Cothren, a lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University in Adelaide, who recently hosted Enriquez as a writer in residence, believed the creative lens of horror writing helped Argentines tackle “real deep traumas”.<\/p>\n

What is Australia’s Top 100 book? Vote now<\/a><\/p>\n

Radio National’s annual Top 100 books countdown is on. Vote for your favourite 10 books by 1 October, then tune into Radio National on 17-18 October to hear how Australia voted.<\/p>\n

“It’s not just the dictatorship; it’s the constant crises. They’ve had [at least] three huge financial crises. Every time the country takes one step forward, it takes two steps back,” he said.<\/p>\n

“It’s a generation of creatives that are trying to tackle these things but they don’t want to do that through realism because people are living through it every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“So they’re doing it through the creative lens of horror which they all grew up from.”A ‘genuine superstar’ in Latin America<\/p>\n

During Enriquez’s residency at Flinders University last month, she had given just one public talk. The ticketed event quickly amassed a waiting list, something Mr Cothren attributed to news of her visit reaching Adelaide’s Latin American community.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Mariana Enriquez will appear at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in October. (ABC News: Morgan Timms)<\/p>\n

“She’s a genuine superstar in Latin America,” Mr Cothren said.<\/p>\n

“She’s now a very big name in our literary culture too. She sells out everywhere she goes.”<\/p>\n

With so much of her work translated into English, Mr Cothren said Enriquez’s work has “exploded” in Australia and other countries.<\/p>\n

“She is an expert at creating horror that is not just trying to shock you; it is actually saying something deeper about the place that it comes from,” he said.<\/p>\n

“There is a real desire for horror that clearly has its roots in something real. It’s not enough to just have cool tropes. There is a real urge for depth.<\/p>\n

“I know a lot of our young women who are writers really identify with what she writes about.”<\/p>\n

\"Composite<\/p>\n

Mariana Enriquez’s novel Our Share of Night (translated into English in 2023) and her non-fiction cemetery travelogue Someone Is Walking On Your Grave (translated into English in 2025). (Supplied)<\/p>\n

For her part, Enriquez admits she is still mystified how readers could resonate with her stories, even with one of them, My Sad Dead, forming the basis of a new Netflix series which is due out this week.<\/p>\n

“What I do is very personal and very dark. I always find it very weird when people relate to it,” she said.<\/p>\n

“But I guess young women are now in a place where there’s lots … of anxieties.<\/p>\n

“[And] horror speaks perfectly to anxious times … This era that we’re living through, it’s an era of anxiety.”<\/p>\n

Mariana Enriquez will appear at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival<\/a> in October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My Sad Dead premieres on September 24 on Netflix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It takes quite a lot to frighten the queen of Latin American gothic horror. Yet one night as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[472887,472881,472880,64,63,6678,472886,472879,134,472892,472885,82052,472884,472893,472894,472891,472890,82078,472889,472882,472883,472888,472895],"class_list":["post-904700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-a-sunny-place-for-shady-people","tag-argentina-dictatorship","tag-argentine-horror","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-buenos-aires","tag-contemporary-horror-writers","tag-dirty-war","tag-entertainment","tag-horror-shows-2026","tag-horror-writers","tag-mariana-enriquez","tag-military-dictatorship","tag-my-sad-dead","tag-my-sad-dead-netflix","tag-netflix-horror","tag-new-horror-shows","tag-our-share-of-night","tag-short-story-collections","tag-the-dangers-of-smoking-in-bed","tag-the-disappeared","tag-things-we-lost-in-the-fire","tag-whats-new-on-netflix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}