The Old Ways (2020): Postcolonial Horror and Survivant Brujeria
This film, set in a wild and jungly area of Veracruz, Mexico, focuses on a young Mexican-American journalist named Cristina who has come to her place of birth, ostensibly do to some reporting there. But by the second scene of the film, things have gone sideways: she’s being held hostage in a dank stone room by a strange man. There is a burlap sack over her head, and she primes us to think this will be a kidnapping horror movie when she prompts her captor to name his price to set her free.
But that ain’t remotely the deal.
It turns out that a group of local people saw her enter into a cursed cave called La Boca—the Mouth. They retrieved her, after she had passed out there. They brought her to her holding cell to be assessed by a bruja, or witch. The witch takes one look at her and concludes that she is possessed by a demon. She is being held not as a hostage for ransom, but so that the locals can free her from demonic possession. She, they believe, had become possessed in her childhood in Veracruz when her mother—also possessed by a demon—scratched her arm, giving the demon a portal into her body, mind and soul.
After her mother’s death, Cristina grew up in foster care in the United States. As a result, she cannot speak more than a couple of words of Spanish, and she doesn’t believe this demonic possession backstory as she slowly pieces it together from what she does understand. When she finds out that her own cousin, Miranda, was the one who advocated for her to be captured and assessed by the bruja, she feels understandably betrayed, and is determined to escape. She attempts to communicate with her captors and eventually with Miranda; Cristina’s inability to speak Spanish is super striking in those scenes. Like, she has fewer Spanish words available to her than you could reasonably expect for someone who grew up in almost any major American city.
This is all the more striking considering that, in the opening sequence, we saw her, as a child, living in Veracruz with her mother, at about the age of five, speaking Spanish fluently.
Oh, I thought, the demonic possession thing is an allegory for her trauma-induced self-alienation. Healing her of “demonic posessession” is really going to be about bringing her back to her ethnic, linguistic, and familial roots and helping her reclaim her abandoned childhood identity. Ok, not very inventive, but I’m here for it.
As Cristina schemes to escape, she recovers from her backpack a small toiletries bag that contains her supply of heroin and a bunch of needles. Cristina is an addict.
Oh, I thought to myself, we’re going to do an addiction-as-demonic-possession film, in which the goal will be to cure Cristina of the addiction, which the locals understand as a possession. Ok, again, not very inventive, but I’m here for it.
And both of these guesses I had about the allegory of the possession were partially right, and partially wrong. Because in this film, as in the film Umma (2022) starring Sandra Oh (which I wrote about last year on March 22) and as in the novel Buffalo Hunter Hunter (which I wrote about last week), the scary supernatural thing is very, very real. And it is a representation or manifestation of trauma. Cristina, in the logic of the film, really is possessed by a demon, and it really is the demon that caused her to become self-alienated and addicted. So it’s not the case that the demon is merely an allegory for drugs and alienation. Instead, the drugs and alienation are epiphenomena of the possession itself.
In order to persuade Cristina that she really is possessed, her cousin Miranda gives her a Spanish-language book about demon possession. Cristina, of course, can’t read it, so her cousin also gives her a dictionary. So, in the process of learning about this demon that possesses her, she must also study and internalize the Spanish language that she grew up speaking, but that she lost when her mother succumbed to death (by demon) in her childhood. Defeating the very real demon, that is, requires her to address the linguistic part of her childhood self-alienation and trauma, her separation from both her biological mother and from her mother tongue.
Slowly, as she learns more and more Spanish and works her way through the book, Cristina becomes convinced that maybe, just maybe she is really possessed. The tipping point for her is that she finds she cannot exit the dwelling she’s in because there is a salt line around the perimeter of the building. Try as she might to pass that boundary, she is repulsed by a magical barrier. She studies and studies, learns that salt lines are an effective prison for demons, and is now convinced of the truth of her possession. She concludes that the demon within her is the “broken man” demon and that she must allow the bruja to expel this demon from her body.
Once the exorcistic ritual gets going, things get really interesting, primarily because there is a surprisingly high degree of syncretism between this native, indigenous magical tradition of brujeria in the region and Catholicism. (Syncretism, for those who haven’t encountered this term, refers to the blending together of two different systems, such as indigenous religion and Catholicism.) So, the bruja paints red stigmata on Cristina’s hands and then drives three nails into a piece of wood. As she drives the nails into the wood, Cristina is magically/miraculously pinned to the ground at her two hands, and at her feet, which stack one on top of the other as if a single nail has been driven through both feet. So, to remove the demon from Cristina, the bruja has to reenact the passion of Christ on Cristina’s own body (probably this is why her name is Cristina—to highlight the parallel.) Moreover, the move of only using three nails to, in effect, crucify Cristina reflects the most intensive tradition of venerating the Passion of Jesus on the Cross that has ever come out of Europe, which is one in which a single nail is driven through both of Jesus’ feet. (This iconography originated in 13th C northern Europe, but quickly became a norm. The single nail through both feet was thought to be more painful than if it were two.)
We also see a red streak appear on Cristina’s side during the crucifixion ritual, strongly reminiscent of the wound Longinus delivered to Jesus on the Cross, stabbing him in the side with a spear. The bruja also paints a black cross on her own forehead, as though observing Ash Wednesday in Catholicism, as well as paint that makes her face look like a skull. It’s Day of the Dead iconography, of course, one of the great instances of Catholic/Indigenous syncretisms in Mexico: the celebration of the Day of the Dead originated in pre-Columbian Mexican culture, but by positioning it adjacent to All Saints’ Day, the colonizing Catholics tied that indigenous tradition to one that was, to the colonizers, recognizably Catholic. So the bruja in this film is costumed in part as a recognition of the history of colonization of Mexico, and of how native life-ways and religious cultures have persisted through the overlay of Catholicism that hit in the 15th-17th centuries.
The film appears to want to highlight that syncretism as a form of survivance. Even while all this Christic imagery is happening, the indigenous religious practices co-occur: the bruja paints her face in ritual colors and uses a tiny skull to compel the demon to listen to her, by blowing through it. She also somehow reaches her hand through Cristina’s abdomen to try to pull out a huge, long snake. The snake, however, gets away from her. After this ritual, there is no injury to Cristina’s flesh. None of these are Catholic moves or rites or rituals. So the removal of Cristina’s demon appears to require both the Christian and the indigenous rituals—braided together. And the bruja speaks in the film primarily in Nahuatl, a primary Indigenous Mexican language, to cast out the demon, only occasionally switching into Spanish. So we need the stigmata, but the demon appears to speak mostly Nahuatl.
Indicating the partial success of the first phase of the exorcism, during the ritual, Cristina recovers her memories of the failed exorcism of her mother, years before, at which time she herself was possessed by the demon.
The bruja appears successfully to tear out the demon’s heart, but it costs her her life. Everyone mourns. Cristina is purged of the demon, and decides to stay in Veracruz for the time being, to learn more about herself and her ancestry, as well as about the indigenous life ways that the bruja had embodied. So the literal demon is gone, but the manifestations of the demon are also gone: she’s reconnected with her roots and she’s managed to kick the heroin habit.
But uh-oh: careful viewers will recognize that Cristina scratched her cousin before the exorcism, and it turns out that Miranda is now also demonically possessed.
Cristina, having apparently picked up some of the bruja’s powers, is able to perceive that Miranda is now possessed. Cristina, empowered by the Spanish and Nahuatl she has picked up in her demonological readings, decides to conduct a second exorcism on her own. In the final stand-off, Cristina says—in English—to the demon, “I’m not what you made me. I’m a mother-fucking bruja.” And she rips the demon’s heart out and kills it decisively.
Now, ok. I love me a vigilante bitch former drug addict who slays a demon while swearing. But here’s the way this scene went horribly wrong, and violated some of the core dynamics of the film. First and foremost, Cristina says this to the demon in English, rather than in either Spanish or—better still—Nahuatl. For a film that’s clearly trying to stick the landing on a claim about the survivance[i] of indigenous faith-ways and life-ways, despite the heavy cultural tidal wave that was colonial Catholicism, to have Cristina’s final moment of coming into her healed state, her full badassery as a survivor of intergenerational demonic possession, her full power as the next generation’s resident bruja happen in English is an almost unbelieveable missed opportunity. Like, what were the screenwriters thinking here? At the very moment that she decisively merges into her new/old identity as a child of indigenous and Spanish languages, traditions, and cultures, she comes out speaking English, arguably ultimate language of settler colonialism? Come on. Do better.
And to have her speak—in English—the most trite possible phrase for her emergent, new, survivant badassery, “I’m a mother-fucking bruja?” Please. Pretty sure that Luz, the old lady bruja who had just died, wouldn’t have felt the need to say “mother-fucking” in order to prove her power. Because here’s the thing: if you are going to take indigenous iconography seriously, acknowledging its syncretic entanglement with Catholicism, but also insisting on its survivance in particular through the Nahuatl language, why on earth would you not recognize that most religious rituals tend to take place in formal, high-style? I would want Cristina, in this moment, to say something to the demon in Nahuatl that was clear, noble, lofty, and ritualistic. Something that meant My mothers and sisters and cousins and I have been bruja for hundreds of years, and together at this moment, backed by our language and our gods, we destroy you. Argh. Then, when it ends up being Miranda who finally destroys the demon’s heart, rather than Cristina herself, everything would have made more sense.
So that particular scene was a huge, huge fail.
But the film prior to that was great, and the last episode of the film is also really great: Cristina’s colleague and former drug-dealer, Carson, shows up to find her. He, too, is captured and bound, a burlap sack over his head. When the sack is lifted off, it’s revealed that he is—totally predictably—a cocky, white, male, urban, upper middle class American. When the camera pans to Cristina, her face is painted white, with blood on her chin. She has a huge scar across her eye, from where the “broken man” demon struck her. Feathers are stuck into her hair. She bends down to Carson and sees the demon in his eyes, too. She tells him he’s got a demon inside him. He offers her heroin, which she of course no longer needs, because she is, in a deep, spiritual sense, at home at last, and healed from the trauma of her childhood, the trauma of colonization, the trauma of self-alienation. She, we realize, is going to exorcize him, too.
This ending can be read in one of two ways. Either that Carson is a drug addict too, and that she needs to heal him of it by purging whatever demon is driving his addiction. OR—and this is a way more interesting reading—by concluding that the damaging forces of colonization, alienation, estrangement from one’s own home and mother tongue that bedeviled Cristina are also happening to white males. Now, if that’s correct, the movie is making the claim that white cultural imperialism is bad for everyone, producing a kind of demonic possession even in the people who appear to profit from it.
[i] I’ve used this term a couple times, now, so I better define it. Survivance means more than mere survival; it denotes a kind of insistent, truly alive form of survival—it’s a portmanteau of “survival” and “endurnace.” If you want to learn more about this excellently useful and sociologically important term, see this brief write-up, which highlights indigenous scholar and supreme badass Gerald Vizenor’s theories about Native American cultural persistence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivance
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