I Would Like to See It: Alucarda

There’s a moment in Alucarda, Juan López Moctezuma’s 1977 cult lesbian horror classic, where garish melodrama spills into bitter reality. From the top of a ponderous stone staircase the titular novice lashes out with her Satanic powers, engulfing the nuns and friars who tormented her and her beloved Justine in sheets of roaring flame reflected in her eyes, which shine flat and gold like those of an animal caught in a car’s headlights. Her impotent thrashing and spinning throughout the film culminates at last in power, a Carrie-esque display (Alucarda came out about a year after De Palma’s horror classic) of rage and grief. The sublimation of pubescent girls’ emotions into supernatural violence is a staple of horror, one tied to many and varied societal pressures. In Moctezuma’s film Alucarda’s suffering and sexuality lie at the intersection of morbid Catholic mysticism and modern Rationality, two forces grinding together in the Mexico of the late 1970s like tectonic plates and which the movie casts as worse than impotent to help her.

The Catholicism of the film is grotesque but all too recognizable, the sets dripping with tangles of bizarrely layered crucifixes, the rituals glamorously ornate punitive torture. The somber rationalism personified by tall, slender, and serious Dr. Oszek (Claudio Brook) seems at first like a safe haven for the damaged girl, but no sooner does it encounter something over which it does not already possess mastery than it dissolves into grim, matter-of-fact violence no different in function or aim than the church’s. When Justine rises from her bloody coffin as a creature of the night, the calm self-sacrifice of Sister Angélica, willing to die at the transformed girl’s hands, stays her claws and seems to bring her back into herself. She pauses. Then Oszek murders her with holy water, using Angélica’s sacrifice as bait to destroy what is, no matter its form and power, a young girl the same age as his own daughter, Daniela.

In the swirling flames of the film’s climax, melodrama does for Alucarda and Justine what neither modern medicine or ancient ritual could accomplish, voicing their inchoate pain in the universal tongue of violence. What culture lacks the words to circumscribe, horror expresses in broad brushstrokes of grave dirt and half-congealed blood. What nourishment we are denied by the world around us we drink from a cut in our lover’s breast or claw out of the rich, dark soil where old bones lie dreaming and insects curl in pale, fat sleep. This is the cost of repression, the consequence of crushing and battering anything which fails to conform. Sooner or later, dripping with gore, it rises from whatever shallow grave you’ve forced it into and flits away into the night to claim its pound of flesh.