History of the Occult

History of the Occult is a 2020 thriller horror film, the first feature directed by Cristian Ponce. It was co-produced by Argentina and Mexico. The movie is framed as the last installment of a fictional 1980s Argentine TV news show called 60 Minutos Antes de la Medianoche ("60 Minutes Before Midnight"). In this episode, the journalists try to uncover a conspiracy linking their government to a corporation that practices black magic.

Release

The film premiered on 8 September 2020 at MOTELX, the Lisbon International Horror Film Festival in Portugal. It became available for streaming on Netflix in Spain and Latin America on 15 October 2021. Shot in black-and-white, the story takes place in 1987 Buenos Aires during the final broadcast of the late-night news program 60 Minutos Antes de la Medianoche. The show had been canceled after a year-long investigation into President Belasco’s economic policies, corruption, and rumored occult connections.

Plot

The episode airs at 11 p.m., just before a planned midnight protest against the president. Host Alfredo interviews Senator Matías Linares, sociologist Daniel Aguilar, and Adrián Marcato, the vice president of Kingdom Corporate—Argentina’s largest company and a suspected warlock. Two of these guests’ names appear in a notebook found at the scene of a ritual murder tied to political killings.

As the broadcast continues, the show’s producers—Maria, Lucio, Jorge, and Abel—watch from a safe house, expecting Marcato to implicate Belasco live. Their colleague Natalia searches the city for a hidden artifact crucial to the investigation. During the interview, Marcato asks Linares how many daughters he has. Linares says two, but Marcato insists he has three and that he does not remember the youngest because he “gave her up.” The argument escalates, and Linares leaves the studio.

Marcato then talks about alternate realities, claiming Linares’ third daughter no longer exists in “this” reality. Meanwhile, the journalists receive hallucinogenic tannis root from Von Merkens Labs, Belasco’s political opponents and the show’s only remaining sponsor. They use it in a ritual to help Natalia find the evidence before midnight. Marcato calmly admits on air that he is a warlock, initiated into the dark arts as a child by his grandmother.

Jorge starts seeing visions of a red light and asks Maria how many children each man in the conspiracy has. Her answers match their records, including that Marcato has no children—contradicting a call to the show where a woman makes obscene remarks about Marcato’s daughter. When Aguilar mocks Marcato, Marcato makes him bleed from his nose and eyes. Under Abel’s guidance, Maria, Jorge, and Lucio take part in a séance-like ritual, experiencing visions of a flashing red light, a burned figure, and a tentacled being.

A flashback shows that Marcato was expelled from his coven and made a deal with the journalists: he would expose Belasco in exchange for retrieving one of the coven’s hidden artifacts. After the ritual, Jorge wakes to find Lucio missing and Abel dead. A hysterical Maria claims Abel was a warlock infiltrator who killed Lucio and attacked her, forcing her to kill him. Jorge notices that Maria’s personal details no longer match their documents, suggesting reality has shifted.

Natalia secures the artifact but is chased by a coven member, whom she shoots while escaping. In the broadcast’s final moments, Natalia reaches the studio and hands Alfredo the artifact, which turns out to be a modern smartphone. Using it, a distraught Marcato calls his daughter and confesses that Kingdom Corporate is a coven that allied with beings from another world to install Belasco in power.

As midnight nears, Marcato tells his daughter to read a word from a book aloud and begins repeating it himself before the transmission cuts off. The film then shifts to color: Marcato has vanished, Alfredo asks if anyone heard the word, and Maria and Jorge—still in black-and-white—stare silently at the television. Filming took place in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The film had its world premiere at MOTELX in Portugal on 8 September 2020.

It later screened at the virtual edition of Spain’s Sitges Film Festival in October 2020, and at the virtual edition of Argentina’s Mar del Plata International Film Festival in November 2020. It was made available for streaming on Netflix in Spain and Latin America on 15 October 2021. WarnerMedia made it available on HBO Max in Central Europe, while in North America it debuted on Screambox in December 2022. Andrew Mack of Screen Anarchy called the film “a thinking person's horror thriller, not one for idle minds.