For this special presentation, part of Imagine's 2025 programme Reversing the Gaze, anthropologist Martha-Cecilia Dietrich explores how horror films produced in the Andes emerge from the intersection of ancestral mythology, colonial history and ongoing social reality. Moving beyond Western genre conventions, Dietrich examines how Andean horror draws from local stories where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, are fluid and ever-present.
The presentation will include a screening of the 2024 re-edit of Dietrich's short documentary film Horror in the Andes (2019), a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of a Peruvian horror film. In the aftermaths of the armed conflict in Peru (1980-2000), a group of film enthusiasts from the Andean highland town of Ayacucho began using cameras to visualise stories of violence in their region.
