While preparing for Melevill’s Hades Theater Episode 15, which includes a short video essay showcasing Melevill’s Favorite Puerto Rican Horror Movies, we went down a long trip of nostalgia—reliving our childhoods in the south of P.R., watching “televisión de antenna” (Antenna Television) or “Cable” (cable TV) and later, when our parents could afford it, the holy grail: “ Televisión de satélite ” (satellite tv).
From the 1980s to the 2000s, local Puerto Rican television stations aired a variety of locally produced horror or horror-related programming. However, finding those films and TV shows, and information about them, has been more challenging than finding native Puerto Rican movie hosts.
Melevill (the 1st Boricua Horror Host) mentioned a few of them in Episode 15, and we added one more here.
The reality is that, unlike Mexico—which has a fantastic history of classic Horror cinema—Puerto Rico doesn’t have much horror entertainment. Or a big cinema scene for that matter.
The corrupt P.R. government doesn’t care about funding its native arts. And why would they? They don’t even care about funding essential services like hospitals and housing.
Thus, local filmmakers must find their own funding, or, worse, fund entire productions themselves and risk losing everything—ending up on the streets where the government won’t care about them.
( Thunder: “I can see one of those porcine bureaucrats plowing through Ponce on a Mercedes-Benz, looking at all the homeless filmmakers on the sidewalks through glazed yellow eyes and shouting at them: “¿No querías hacer películas? ¡Pue’ chupate las películas ahora! Whahah.” I sure hope one of those ‘government officials’ crashes soon and that the flames from the fire turns them into lechon asau.” )
It’s challenging to think about making films when you have to pay your bills first, worry about hurricanes disrupting your schedule, or risk having your equipment stolen if you go out to shoot on the streets at night guerrilla-style.
On the business side, even non-genre Boricua films receive little support, so anyone investing in a Puerto Rican horror production knows it would be a miracle if they recoup their investment.
And yet, there were a few filmmakers, writers, and actors whose passion for genre cinema led them to create the films and short films on this list.
1: Sunshine’s Horror Parodies
One of our favorite Puerto Rican comedians, Sunshine Logroño, created two Horror Parodies that we vaguely remember watching on TV, either when they aired or via bootlegged recordings.
Chona, la puerca asesina (1990), about a giant killer pig, which was more famous for giving bullies a name to yell at overweight women, and Cafri-Zombies (90s?), about Sunshine dying and being resurrected as a slasher-type zombie that at one point even breaks into a musical number like Michael Jackson in ‘Thriller’.
Of the two, Cafri-Zombies is our favorite. It’s surprisingly gory for that time, and if you watched it as a kid back then, it probably gave you nightmares.
2: Celestino y el vampiro (2003)
I purchased the DVD of this movie sometime in the mid-2000s at Plaza Las Américas. I can’t remember the name of the store. Was it Suncoast Video Store? I looked to see if Suncoast had ever been in PR, but I couldn’t find any information about that (you’re going to read this complaint about PR information many times on this site). No one I knew had ever seen Celestino, and it wasn’t until recently that I was able to find some information about it.
I can say the same thing about:
3: Vampiros (2004).
At least the Vampiros DVD’s special features have some good information about the production. You can argue with us about it, but we say Vampiros is the greatest Puerto Rican horror film ever made. It’s the greatest Puerto Rican movie, period.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0438551/?ref_=ttfc_ov_bk
4: Los Condenados (2012) was a big surprise to us as it is sort of based on the crimes of Cornelius P. Rhoads.
( Melevill: “Rhoads was one of Rockefeller’s henchmen ‘scien-tists’, and was in charge of injecting cancer cells into Puerto Rican patients as part of the elite’s plans to eliminate ‘poverty’ on the island, by killing as many natives as they could. What? You say this is one of my typical conspiracies?
Well, what about the ‘La Operacion,’ the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women?…”)
This is not a thorough blog about Puerto Rican horror films. As that would take years to research, and resources that we do not have. We are creators of Pulp Stories remember? We’re not researchers dedicated to cataloging the history of cinema. But we hope this inspires other native Puerto Rican horror fans to write or document this subject in English.
We found a few Spanish articles with info about these films, and we even contact a few native Puerto Rican creators, but like always, we never heard back from them.
(Warning. With the exception of quoted material from the web, all blogs in this website are the copyrighted works of Melanie Ramos © Neo-Pulps! LLC. Some of these works are based on her personal experiences growing up in Puerto Rico or the experiences of her relatives and friends. We do NOT give permission for anything on these blogs to be used as “AI content”, or to be copy-pasted and share on social media by confused individuals trying to pass this experiences as their own. Salamaya! )
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