Within the vast geography of horror literature and film, “Gotico Tropical” (Tropical Gothic) has emerged as a haunting and provocative voice from Colombia.
Born in Cali during the 1970s, this movement has been far more than a regional reinterpretation of European Gothic. It is an aesthetic with its own identity—a way of narrating the sinister and the fantastic that springs from the jungle, violence, delirium, and the humid heat of the tropics.
Tropical gothic is not limited to the horror genre: it is a political critique, an aesthetic rebellion, and an authentic way of viewing the monstrous.
If classic Gothic embodied terror in shadowy castles, vengeful spirits, or the decadence of the nobility, tropical gothic locates its horror in decaying colonial mansions, Afro and Indigenous myths displaced by mestizaje, Catholic sexual repression, and the ghosts of political violence. It is a homegrown horror—exuberant, baroque, and profoundly Colombian.
Gotico Tropical: A cursed cinema with literary roots
Though the term “gotico tropical” has gained traction more recently in literary circles, its origins are deeply rooted in Colombian experimental cinema of the 1970s.
Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, central figures of the so-called Cali Group, developed the concept through audiovisual works. Their celebrated short film Agarrando pueblo (1978)—a devastating satire of social issue cinema—already contained the seeds of what would later be identified as “tropical gothic”: an unsettling blend of horror, misery, magical realism, and political irony.
But it was with Carne de tu carne (Carlos Mayolo, 1983) that gotico tropical found its foundational work. Set in Cali during the 1948 Bogotazo, the film tells the story of two incestuous youths living in a colonial house infested with spectral presences and blood secrets.
The suffocating heat, moral repression, and historical violence merge into a charged atmosphere, indebted to European horror cinema yet infused with a distinctly Colombian sensibility. The house is not merely a setting, but a character; the past is not history, but a curse inherited through land and blood.
Luis Ospina also left a deep mark on this aesthetic. His film Pura sangre (1982) reimagines the story of a dying magnate who survives through blood transfusions obtained from murdered youths in working-class neighborhoods. It portrays a homegrown vampirism where economic exploitation transforms into literal horror. In this work, as in all tropical gothic, the political is inseparable from the supernatural.
From Caliwood to paper: A literary aesthetic
Although tropical Gothic was born on the screens of Cali, its influence has since permeated literature. In recent years, several writers have embraced this aesthetic through narrative, developing a poetics of tropical horror that blends the popular with the refined, the fantastic with the political.
One of the most visible precursors lies in the work of writer Andrés Caicedo, also a member of the Cali Group. His novel ¡Que viva la música! (‘Long Live Music!’, 1977), while not a horror work, shares with tropical Gothic a sensibility for the marginal, the feverish, and the urban. Adolescent delirium, the pursuit of pleasure, and self-destruction amid a hallucinatory city are part of the same atmosphere breathed by Mayolo and Ospina.
Currently, writers such as Giuseppe Caputo, Pilar Quintana, and Juan Cárdenas have been associated with a renewal of this tropical Gothic sensibility.
In La perra (‘The Bitch’, 2017), Quintana presents motherhood marked by abandonment, violence, and rural superstition, while in Ornamento (Ornament, 2015), Cárdenas unfolds a universe of desire, degenerate science, and modified bodies that recalls the unsettling settings of more experimental Gothic.
These authors don’t necessarily identify with a specific school or movement, but their work resonates with that Cali legacy of tropical horror, where the sinister emerges from the social environment, the Latin American body, and historical violence.
An aesthetic of excess and a living legacy
What defines Tropical Gothic is its embrace of excess. Unlike the minimalism of many contemporary narratives, this aesthetic revels in baroqueness: the blood is redder, the desire more incestuous, the heat more oppressive. It’s a sensory style that sets out to unsettle, provoke, and seduce.
Tropical Gothic does not fear the ridiculous or the kitschy; rather, it champions them as legitimate forms of expression in a country that has normalized the absurd and the grotesque.
In the words of Carlos Mayolo, Tropical Gothic was “a way of looking at the horrifying from within our own culture, without having to ask anyone’s permission.” That phrase captures the irreverent spirit of a movement that, without setting out to do so, ended up announcing a new way of narrating the fantastic in Latin America.
Today, Tropical Gothic lives on in literary, cinematic, and visual projects exploring the edges between the real and the imagined. The rise of Latin American horror at international festivals, the renewed interest in Colombian cult cinema, and the proliferation of independent publishers betting on the genre are all testimony that this aesthetic continues to grow.
Far from being a regional curiosity, Tropical Gothic has proven to be a powerful tool for narrating what other aesthetics cannot reach: the open wounds of history, the fears embedded deep within the social body, the guilty pleasures of repressed desire.
With roots in Cali but branches extending across Latin America, this movement continues to invite exploration into the dark jungle of what it also means to be human.