By Stuart Andrews (issue 54, march 2006)
For award -winning Tijuana -based indie filmmaker Aaron Soto, growing up in Mexico as a horror movie fanatic was often a frustrating affair.
"Mexico is really weird country" he explains, "because in one way, it's okay to have a tv show where they teach you witchcraft and how to kill your husband, but it's not okay to show horror movies." Soto continues, explaining that in Tijuana "nota roja" magazines-wich exploit the "craziest and goriest photos imaginable" of accidents and deaths-are available to children. But conversely, making horror films in Mexico is a dificult businness.
Soto - who as an adult created several imaginative horror shorts including Omega Shell and Hueso- was raised on that revered staple sombrero horror, the El Santo wrestling epic, but it wasa trip to his father's library at the age of seven that sparked a deepining curiosity with the genre and intense longing to be a filmmaker.
"I found a copy of Alejandro Jodorowsly's "El Topo a Book of the film" Soto relays. "I din't understand it at all but i fell in love with the images. That book gave me the sense that were more then entertainment, that movies were an art form, So i grew trying to get the Jodorowsky movies wich were really hard to find, even in Mexico. That's why i became a filmmaker: to find the thing i was looking for"
Taking advantage of Tijuana's close proximity to San Diego, in his developing years Soto availed himself of a wide array of horror films not easy attainable in his native land. By the age of fitteen, he had amassed a massive collection of VHS titles that boasted seminal works from such masters of the macabre as Lynch, Cronenberg, Argento and Fulci.
Soto lifelong passion fro genre filmmaking finally explode in to the screen in 2000 with his first short Omega Shell-a cyberpunk spaghetti western that details the exploits of a lone desperado and his maniacal, mechanical sex apparatus. Unfolding in a stark, desolate landscape and steeped in the symbol-laden mysticism of El Topo and the technophofic nightmares of Tetsuo, an adding the insanely kinetic camera work of the Evil Dead, Soto's debut is an evocative and intensely frenetic celebration of the genre he adores.
He went on to produce a number of award-winning follow-up films but it's the 2005 short, Hueso (a collaborative effort with fellow filmmaker Cathy Alberich), that most fully demonstrates Soto's potential as a formidable and unique genre talent. Alberich is best know for her short Color Drip, wich depict a woman's mouth in exreme close-up sampling a wide array of differing food items. It is sensual, organic film that explodes with vibrant colour and sexual playfulness.
"What we like about Hueso that it's about isolated people" says Soto. "In Mexico it's hard to be isolated. Everyone loves norteño music and football but nobody likes horror movies. So we related to be isolated as a children and not beign able to identify with anyone else."
With Hueso, Alberich's intense awarness of colours and textures blends perfectly with Soto's meditative and brooding atmosphere to tell the haunting and somewhat disturbing tale of a young girl who cannot connect with reality and so withdraws in to her own private realm where she cuts up dead crows and plays with the bones as if they were dolls. Told without a single line of dialogue, Hueso is a incredible photographed, ontensely contemplative, unconventional narrative that promise much from this higly effective creative collaboration.
The duo are currently preparing to shoot the first feature, based on a true story and set in a cementary in Mexico City. If they succed to translating the potency of their uniquely stylized shorts to feature-lenght proportions, Aaron Soto and Cathy Alberich will undoubtedly become house hold names to legions of horror fanatics everywhere.
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