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Review of The Supernatural Sublime: The Wondrous  
Ineffability of the Everyday in Films from Mexico and Spain 
Shannon Skelton, Kansas State University 
 sbskelton@ksu.edu 

 

Book Review 
Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández and Claudia Schaefer, The Supernatural Sublime: The Wondrous Ineffability of the 
Everyday in Films from Mexico and Spain. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. xii + 304 pp. ISBN 
9781496214249, $55.00 (hbk)  

 

 
New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. 

 
This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part  

of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press

Volume 8.2 (2020)  |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.297  |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 



     CINEJ Cinema Journal: Review of The Supernatural Sublime 

  Volume 8.2 (2020)  |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.297 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 469 

Review of The Supernatural Sublime: The Wondrous  
Ineffability of the Everyday in Films from Mexico and Spain 
Shannon Skelton 
 

Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández and Claudia Schaefer, scholars at the University of Rochester 

(USA), have constructed a compelling and indispensable volume that examines the supernatural, 

gothic and sublime as presented through the cinema of Mexico and Spain. With a focus on filmic 

iterations that reflect cultural concerns and anxieties spanning from the 1960s to the present, The 

Supernatural Sublime – an entry in the New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies series, is a 

thorough and eloquent examination of films that have eluded many surveys of Spanish language 

cinema. The text probes films that feature “strange and wondrous iterations of the supernatural 

found in both expected and unexpected hybrid cinematic genres” (1). This is accomplished through 

case studies and close readings of selected films through theoretical and generic positions. The 

Supernatural Sublime does not pretend to be an exhaustive, comprehensive overview of gothic 

and horror cinema from Mexico and Spain, but rather specific films and how those films reckon 

with – and represent - a variety of concerns.  

Organized into seven chapters, including an introduction and conclusion, The Supernatural 

Sublime is impeccably researched and elegantly executed. The introductory chapter – titled 

“Anxiety, Awe, and the Changing Shape of Fear” – states that the study is “framed by the shifting 

manners in which the natural and supernatural are inextricably woven together during moments of 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Shannon Skelton 
Volume 8.2 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.297   |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

470 

crisis in Mexican and Spanish culture” (1). Rodríguez-Hernández and Schaefer note that the place 

of the supernatural and the sublime in quotidian life in Mexico and Spain is unique, for “rather 

than [possessing] a clean break with the past” (274), both nations possess hybrids of the historical 

and the present and this is evidenced in supernatural Mexican and Spanish films which expose 

“cultural dilemmas and fears” (9). With globalization and modernity, the “invasion of the nations 

of the developing world by the myths and technologies of advanced societies” has resulted in 

“terrifying, fascinating, awe-inspiring, sublime wonders and supernatural events of ancient times 

recast” (2) producing a distinctive form of the gothic and monstrous in Mexican and Spanish 

cinema.  

The next chapter, “Porous Landscapes of the Modern World: The Witch as Sublime 

Intruder”, considers cinematic depictions of the witch as a “shadowy figure . . . who offers 

spectators the promise of power over the seemingly authoritative, dominating, and masterful 

masculine worldview in charge of progress” (42). Chapter 3, “Haunted Houses: Inheriting the 

Supernatural” considers “diegetic space as contradictory, confrontational, and even home to the 

irrational” (24). From those domestic spaces to sinister educational places, “Evil in the Classroom: 

The Fascination and Danger of Schools for Girls” views learning institutions as “sites of 

indoctrination and experience, as well as breeding grounds for the imagination and for the paranoia 

of social anxieties” (133). Analyses of films by Carlos Enrique Taboada, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 



 

 CINEJ Cinema Journal: Review of The Supernatural Sublime 
Volume 8.2 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.297 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

471 

Juan López Moctezuma and Guillermo del Toro uncover a cinema that invokes “gothic visual 

modes to establish a nexus between past and present” (135) to uncover cultures “haunted by the 

phantoms of the violence and repression that reign supreme outside their walls”(135). These films 

allegorize the “class issues that maintain the social status quo” (135), while the “sublime sexuality 

in the gendered confines of schools for girls” is often accompanied by “the threat of violence” 

(25). As the authors note, educated women in 1960s Mexico and 1970s Spain were seen as 

“tantamount to demonic threats to the nation” (25). Though these institutions may provide 

homosocial security in the face of a patriarchal culture, offering “the chance to learn spectacular 

revelations about humans” these same schools can “resuscitate memories and terrors that impede 

the future” (174). 

The dynamics of the female protagonist/antagonist are at the center of “A Desperate 

Longing for Order: The Masks of Innocence.” In films such as Carlos Enrique Taboada’s Veneno 

para las hadas (1984), Daniel Gruener’s Sobrenatural (1996) and Nacho Vigalondo’s 

Extraterrestre (2011) women “forge a new language related to their experience of the 

contemporary world” (176) as they are depicted in possession of subversive powers that counteract 

the patriarchy as a “interruptive supernatural” force (176). Chapter 6, “Patterns of Temporal 

Terror: A Repetition Compulsion?” centers on chronology and how contemporary concerns are 

integrated into cinema by “shifting attitudes toward the natural and supernatural” and “temporality, 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Shannon Skelton 
Volume 8.2 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.297   |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

472 

bringing into the open shared concerns over what we might term the terror of time” (224). Utilizing 

Rafael Baledón’s La maldición de La Llorona (1963), Rigoberto Castañeda’s Km 31 (2006), Alex 

de la Iglesia’s Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (2013) and Nacho Vigalondo’s Cronocrímenes (2007), 

the authors investigate how legends of the past and myths of the present create cinematic 

experiences of destabilized thematic and structural temporalities. These films scrutinize time, 

resulting in reconsiderations of traditional folklore in the contemporary while also ruminating on 

the existential chaos that is the product of temporal manipulation.  

 “Sublime Afterimages” serves as a summation and reiteration of analyses provided. In 

sum, the authors proposed that genre “structures that might provide us with some meaningful ways 

of approaching the unanswerable enigmas depicted in the films” (278). When these are 

scrutinizeded within the supernatural and sublime cinematic output of Mexico and Spain, critical 

issues of the 21st century emerge, namely the crisis of “how to reconcile oneself with history, how 

to resolve the conflicts of capitalism, and how to recover a transcendent aspect of life lost in the 

process of modernity” (264-5). Indeed, the gothic “continues to pervade the cinemas of Mexico 

and Spain, but what audiences experience as frightening, gruesome, or dreadful has become part 

of the everyday” (280) consequences of contemporary capitalism and political institutions. An 

enjoyable excavation of neglected films and a thoughtful reconsideration more familiar titles, The 

Supernatural Sublime not only fills a scholarly void regarding Mexican and Spanish cinema, it 



 

 CINEJ Cinema Journal: Review of The Supernatural Sublime 
Volume 8.2 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.297 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

473 

serves as an extraordinary volume demonstrating the potential for scholarship that blends critical 

theory, formalist approaches and close readings, then subsequently presents the findings in an 

accessible and engaging manner. 

 

Shannon Skelton,  
School of Music, Theatre, and Dance, 
Kansas State University 
sbskelton@ksu.edu