México Bárbaro

México Bárbaro, also titled Barbarous Mexico, is a 2014 horror anthology from Mexico. It brings together eight short films, each helmed by a different Mexican horror director. Five of these filmmakers—Lex Ortega, Isaac Ezban, Aaron Soto, Ulisses Guzman, and Jorge Michel Grau—were already established in the Mexican film industry, while the other three—Laurette Flores, Edgar Nito, and Gigi Saul Guerrero—were newer to the scene.

The film had its debut at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival on October 8, 2014. It later came out on DVD and video-on-demand in the United States in 2015, and reached a global audience on Netflix in 2016. During the Le Marché du Film at the 2015 Cannes Festival, distribution rights were sold to six countries, including to MPI/Dark Sky Films. The project belongs to the emerging Cine de Terror Mexicano movement.

Plot

The anthology is split into eight chapters, each tied to a distinct Mexican legend or myth. Directors were given freedom to pick a subgenre and craft a story around their chosen legend. The myths range from real-life nota roja (crime-focused news) to fantasy folk tales.

The chapters are as follows: Tzompantli by Laurette Flores, about drug dealers whose rituals echo Aztec practices; Jaral de Berrios by Edgar Nito, where two criminals hide in a cursed hacienda and face its legends; Drena by Aaron Soto, in which a teenage girl smokes a spliff from a corpse and has a vision about draining her sister’s blood; La cosa más preciada by Isaac Ezban, about a couple’s romantic night in the woods disrupted by trolls; Lo que importa es lo de adentro by Lex Ortega, featuring a girl with special needs who fears her building’s custodian, whom she calls the boogeyman; Muñecas by Jorge Michel Grau, where a woman escapes a butcher only to be recaptured; Siete veces siete by Ulises Guzmán, about a man who tries to dispose of a body but performs a ritual to revive him for atonement; and Día de los Muertos by Gigi Saul Guerrero, in which strippers take revenge on the Day of the Dead.

Reception

According to Rotten Tomatoes, 60% of critics gave the film a positive review.