Editorials
‘The Last of Us’: Pedro Pascal and Five Other Great Latino Horror Heroes
HBO has secured another ratings hit with their new video game adaptation “The Last of Us,” and while it’s as exciting and epic as the original video game, it also has the distinction of having a Latino leading man. Chilean actor Pedro Pascal plays the protagonist Joel, who is tasked with trekking across the horrific landscape to help find a cure with young Ellie in tow.
With a Latino actor leading such a massive hit for the horror genre, it got us thinking about other great Latino Horror Heroes from pop culture. Here are five of our favorites.
Pablo Simon Bolivar – Ash vs. Evil Dead
Pablo (Ray Santiago) is an Ash fan boy when we first meet him, referring to him as “El Jefe” with admiration. When he’s pulled into the war against the Deadites, the seemingly non-threatening blue collar worker becomes a vicious foe against evil, even building Ash a new prosthetic hand that comes equipped with various tools. Channeling his background in Brujeria, he becomes one with the Necronomicon and acquires some of his own powers to help Ash in combat. Despite some tumbles (and death), he fights with Ash until the very end, and proves very useful. Thankfully, Pablo (and cohort Kelly) has been somewhat canonized in the “Evil Dead” expanded universe – both characters, for example, are featured as playable survivors in Evil Dead: The Game.
Princess (Juanita Lopez) – The Walking Dead Comics
“What a cruddy term when it gets down to it, right? Ever think about that? There were less of us, so they called us ‘minorities’. It just sounds so negative, like the word was designed to make everyone dismiss us immediately.” Originally introduced in issue 171 of “The Walking Dead,” Princess is an eccentric and seemingly unhinged survivor who builds herself a small environment to soothe her isolation and loneliness, even propping zombies up for her amusement. With a large personality and somewhat childlike temperament, along the way Princess gains the trust of Eugene and proves herself among Rick’s group (and Alexandria). She ultimately survives to see the end, as one of the most formidable foes of the walking dead; as well as one of the more colorful heroes of Robert Kirkman’s series. Princess was played by Paola Lázaro in the AMC series.
El Santo – Santo Movie Series
I spent a lot of my childhood watching my family consistently tune in to the El Santo movies on Spanish television. They’ve managed to become massive cult classics and widely appreciated over the years. El Santo, whose name is Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, is a classic Latin folk hero whose luchador status has given him the abilities to fight a plethora of horror villains and a variety of monsters. In his massive fifty four movie series, El Santo has fought many monsters in movies like “Santo vs. The Zombies,” “Santo vs. The Vampire Women,” “Santo in the Treasure of Dracula” (infamously satirized in MST3K), and “Santo vs. The She Wolves,” to name just a few.
Sam Carpenter – Scream, Scream VI
In the vein of her predecessor Sidney Prescott, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) is the new “final girl” heroine of the Scream franchise. While she’s basically fighting to protect her sister Tara, she manages to muster up many clever plans and sneaky attacks on Ghostface. This is especially true when she saves her sister in the hospital alongside Dewey, as well as her attack on Amber and Richie during the climax. Sam has been passed the torch by Sidney to carry on the legacy of Scream heroines, and what makes her even more of a razor edged horror heroine than Sidney is that she’s the daughter of Billy Loomis, a bonafide psycho whose own legacy she’s always at risk of following. Just how long before Ghostface pushes her over the edge, is the question…
El Wray – Grindhouse Presents: Planet Terror
What we know about El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) is shrouded in mystery, but we do learn over the course of Planet Terror that he was a military special agent who served in an unspecified place, where he learned the deadly art of killing. When we meet him, he’s a wandering stranger who arrives in Texas, and gets caught in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. He’s basically the hero of Robert Rodriguez’s zombie splatter film, driven by the love of Cherry Darling, and he goes through literal hell to save her when she’s stuck in a zombie ridden hospital. He also manages to lead the trek to salvation for his comrades in the climax, sacrificing himself for the rest of the human race.
Along with Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun, El Wray had massive spinoff potential for a big action movie series in the wake of Grindhouse, but alas, he only got the one movie.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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