This is inspired by the conversations about Norse and Egyptian Horror Media. My first instinct was that Aztec culture and mythology would be particularly well suited to the horror genre, with all the human sacrifices. However, thinking about it more I'm not so sure. Human sacrifices served a purpose in Aztec society, forming a buffer to proect them from even worse consequences (among those beginning the Moon, Coyolxauhqui, overpowering the sun, Huitzilopochtli, and devouring the Earth). So perhaps, it would tend more towards cosmic horror where violence is seen more neutrally. What do you all think?
What Would Aztec Horror Media Look Like?
- Thread starter SeaBos
- Start date
If is Aztec we’re talking about in the media, their mythology may influence it. I’m thinking it would be a giant cosmic monster, that threatens the people and in the end, the hero sacrifices themselves, to satisfy the monster and assure the safety of the Aztecs
The Moon turns into the giant head of Hernán Cortés and devours the Earth.
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Now I can't help but imagine an alternate timeline where the Lovecraft-equivalent was Mexica.
Wasn't that more of a Protestant thing?
While the Catholics preferred to burn heretics?
(Which, for quite a while, supposedly included people believing in witchcraft enough to accuse others of being witches.)
That said, Civateteo (to use the spelling I can remember), the local version of "woman who died in childbirth and thus
have returned as a vampire".
The Spanish Inquisition was very into those kind of things, though they were also very creative with their methods , to be fair.
The inquisition never burned, or killed, anyone because of witchcraft. From their point of view such powers couls only come from God so witches couldm't exist and were just silly superstitions.
So the easiest way to get burned at stake by the Inquisition was actually in fact to go around accusing people of witchcraft...
Aztecs had ghost stories same as everyone else, they weren't some race of aliens for whom everything revolved around the concept of human sacrifice.
As exemplified by the one Aztec-/Mesoamerican-associated monster already mentioned here, which is the local version of
a pretty much universal type.
Although the list currently starts with a fearsome critter and has a predominance of snakes, https://abookofcreatures.com/category/mexico/ could give some ideas.
(Even if the one with the oldest source comes across as more tasty than horrific.)
*Referencing the Norse Horror thread* But surely the horror genre in a surviving/reformed/unconverted Aztec culture/society would be
utterly obsessed with Christianity, Christians and Christian themes as the source of horror?
I wonder whether, given the somewhat contrived frame of a “reformed” religion (which has presumably abandoned the most barbaric practices of the previous age), Aztecs would look on their own gods as horrific in their own right. The worship of Xipe Totec and Tlaloc is so extravagantly horrific to our modern minds that it seems impossible they’d have continued unmodified, or looked back upon sympathetically, in a society that developed analogous to our own. So maybe a Wicker Man-like horror, in which the inhabitants of some remote Oaxacan village still worship the gods “in the old ways”, could seize the imagination of twenty-first-century Aztecs - and all the more so than The Wicker Man does ours, because their own religion is a direct continuation of those barbaric practices.
But of course, that begs the question: can Xipe Totec and Tlaloc really survive the *Enlightenment? I don’t think we have a surviving analogue quite so blatant to say they can. The natural human obsession with blood, pain, death, and decay was stamped out or neutralised pretty effectively in the Old World, and it may well have been in the New even without outside intervention.
But of course, that begs the question: can Xipe Totec and Tlaloc really survive the *Enlightenment? I don’t think we have a surviving analogue quite so blatant to say they can. The natural human obsession with blood, pain, death, and decay was stamped out or neutralised pretty effectively in the Old World, and it may well have been in the New even without outside intervention.
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Looking through the site, and I gotta say, there are some weird monsters out there.