Genocide and the Plague of Fantasies in La Llorona and Sueño en otro idioma

This paper examines how two contemporary Latin American films—Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona and Ernesto Contreras’s Sueño en otro idioma—engage with physical and cultural genocide through distinct deployments of fantasy elements that reflect the evolution of horror and magic-realist genres in Latin American cinema. The films repurpose fantastical elements through horror and mythopoetic narrative in order to confront the legacies of colonial trauma. Building on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the plague of fantasies, the paper examines how La Llorona mobilizes the Mesoamerican folk figure of La Llorona to connect contemporary genocide in Guatemala with its historical necropolitical origins, while Sueño en otro idioma examines cultural genocide through the extinction of an indigenous language in Mexico. Both films demonstrate how fantasy can function in destabilizing ways in postcolonial contexts, offering distorted glimpses of horrors that resist direct representation. Through close analysis of these works, the paper reveals how contemporary Latin American cinema deploys fantasy elements, including magic realist conventions, to provide a fundamental challenge to colonial epistemologies, by exposing the phantasmatic underpinnings of colonial violence and its contemporary reverberations.