Sometimes People Should Be Swindled
Los Espookys feels like this joyous playtime, operating in a surreal mode of scam artists and lowkey magic.
In my horror film class in college, my friend and I took pictures of the textbook in front of our face—Mrs. Bates’s decaying corpse on the cover superimposed over our features. When we read (and held the book just so), we became the monster too.
Our professor paired critical texts with each film. We studied the uncanny, the fantastic—monstrosity to learn what happens when monsters displace our sense of the other. What does this story achieve by drawing upon the tools of the horror genre? Why do people become the monsters?
Enter Los Espookys, the offbeat brainchild of Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, and Fred Armisen. The series follows a group of friends—Renaldo, Andrés, Úrsula, and Tati—who start a spooks-for-hire company. A priest in need of respect hires them to stage a demonic possession so he can perform an exorcism. They do sea monsters and inheritance scares, recalling some of our favorite horror moments along the way. To spook the heir to a fortune, they create a bed that swallows him à la Johnny Depp in Nightmare on Elm Street. The show brings a genre- and self-awareness along with a bizarre sensibility and unique humor to tell the stories of these friends, all caught between competing desires, looking for what’s next for them at this juncture.
Andrés is the heir to a chocolate fortune. Adopted by chocolate magnates after being left at an orphanage as an infant, he looks into mirrors and communes with the ocean and bodies of water to find answers about his past and guidance for his future. His parents want him to marry a cookie heir to create a processed sweets empire; Andrés loves and hates him. He meets a demonic water parasite that lives inside him and will give him answers, but only if he watches The King’s Speech—she really wants to see it. Tati is indestructible, always finding odd jobs—breaking people’s shoes in for them, acting as the second hand for a belltower clock, and eventually becoming involved in the multi-level marketing scheme Hierbalite—a spoof of the very real Herbalife.
The show feels like this joyous playtime, operating in a surreal mode of scam artists and lowkey magic. Andrés slices a mirror with his finger to receive a vision. The group buys a cursed mirror for one of their gigs. The show’s aesthetics and color palette exaggerate our sense of the world, and Andrés’s blue hair—and blue everything—is iconic.
This brand of horror and comedy—the spooky—pulls back the veil on what people want and how others will exploit them. Hierbalite helps people gain, lose, or maintain weight, and the founder Mark Stevens threatens Tati’s life if she doesn’t pay them back for all the product she purchased (and subsequently consumed). Various clients hire Los Espookys to con a scare for tourism PR or to convince the government their alien research is going swimmingly. People are embroiled in plots and scams at every level.
Los Espookys use their spooks to find joy, purpose, and a livelihood. They become aliens and sea monsters, spooking for hire and their own satisfaction. While the characters’ various journeys to find themselves are often absurd, they all find something gratifying to the work they do together. Part of the pleasure of the show is how Los Espookys have created for themselves this line of work to stage supernatural scares; they’re not swindling the people they frighten, but getting paid to help swindlers swindle. Though the show works through the absurd and fantastic, their spooks are juxtaposed against the very real predation and oppression of MLMs and government agencies, a backdrop of a reality that is very much of our world.
In their inheritance-scare episode, they meet Melanie, the US ambassador. Melanie needs a translating gem to understand Spanish. She wears only pink and is more akin to an influencer than a government official. She leaves Renaldo her business card and drops green cards on the ground, telling him to keep them, they’re bad after they touch the ground. In a subsequent episode, she hires Los Espookys to stage an abduction in exchange for US visas. She’s going on a weeklong vacation to Tulum but really needs another week to enjoy it. To abduct her, they purchase a cursed mirror, but instead of sucking her inside a hidden chamber behind a two-way mirror, the cursed mirror sucks her into an alternate mirror world. She’s trapped there after the mirror breaks—her influencer interns can’t figure out how to piece it back together—and the only competent person at the embassy tells Los Espookys that, of course, they can use a bribe to get their work visas. It’s the American embassy.
If Andrés and Tati tilt more towards the absurd, Úrsula and Renaldo tend to anchor the group. Úrsula architects their scares and balances her sister, Tati. Renaldo is the chipper face of the group, and his draw to the work is the most earnest.
Everyone assumes his name is actually Reynaldo, with a Y, but his mom was forgetful and named him Renaldo. Growing up, he was always in search of his missing Y. Renaldo found comfort in a horror movie, The Woman with No Eye. The kids at school made him feel like a monster for his missing Y, just as the film’s monster was a woman with no eye.
Through its unique lens on reality, horror film asks us to see things anew. While the genre oftentimes comes down harshly on any marginalized group—think of the conservative gender politics of slasher movies and final girls, or Venn diagrams of marginalized identities and monstrosity—it can also be employed to reveal systems of oppression. Though horror might seem to exist in a world apart from our own, our own reality might be even more horrific if we reconsider it.
Los Espookys takes the tools of horror and employs them in a completely new way. Blending the absurd, the bizarre, the spooky, Los Espookys offers a biting social commentary and a celebration of horror. Because sometimes people should be swindled. Because sometimes when you’re a misfit, you can find pleasure in horror.
