Now through April 27 | Landmark Century Centre Cinemas, 2828 N. Clark St., Chicago
People think of the Chicago Latino Film Festival as a place for prestige drama, political documentaries, and art-house discoveries from corners of the world mainstream cinema rarely visits. And they’re right. But every year, woven quietly into the schedule between the biopics and the social realist epics, the CLFF delivers a genre slate that would make a Fangoria editor sit up straight. The 42nd edition is no exception. This year, the darkness and the dread come from Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala — and even, improbably, from a Chicago parking lot — arriving in enough flavors to satisfy anyone who prefers their film festivals with a racing pulse.
The most immediately terrifying entry is The Whisper / El Susurro, the new film from Uruguayan director Gustavo Hernández Ibáñez, and from its first frame you understand you’re in the hands of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. Hernández Ibáñez made The Silent House — that relentless, single-take horror film that turned international heads — and his latest is, if anything, more unhinged. Two siblings flee their father and take refuge in an isolated mansion, which sounds like a familiar setup right up until a cat drags in a human finger and things go several directions at once. The film premiered at the legendary Sitges Film Festival and took home the Golden Skull at Mórbido, the definitive horror festival in Mexico. It blends home invasion, folk horror and vampire mythology with a confidence that earns the chaos. Go in knowing as little as possible. Come out talking about it for a week.
If outright horror is Hernández Ibáñez’s lane, then psychological suffocation belongs to Tomás Corredor, whose debut feature Noviembre is one of the most tightly wound thrillers in the entire CLFF lineup. Set almost entirely inside a single bathroom at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá on November 6, 1985 — the day the M-19 guerrilla group seized the building while tanks blasted their way through the walls outside — it is a masterclass in pressure-cooker filmmaking. Seventy hostages. One room. No exit. The kind of tension that doesn’t need jump scares because history already did the heavy lifting. A North American Premiere that belongs on every serious festivalgoer’s shortlist.
Then there’s Soy Frankelda, which is what happens when a dark fairy tale, a Guillermo del Toro fever dream and a century of Mexican gothic literature get fed into a stop-motion machine. Brothers Arturo and Roy Ambriz of Cinema Fantasma spent years hand-crafting the first stop-motion animated feature ever made entirely in Mexico — every frame built by hand, no digital shortcuts, no safety net. Del Toro has been evangelical about it, calling it a must-see. The story follows a 19th-century woman writer whose dark tales are dismissed by a society that has no use for her imagination, until the monsters she created crawl out of her subconscious and start running the show. Technically staggering, visually gorgeous, and exactly the kind of wild, uncompromising independent film the CLFF was built to put in front of Chicago audiences.
And for those who like their dread slow-building and grounded in something that feels uncomfortably real, Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante brings Cordillera de Fuego (Mountains of Fire) — a thriller about indigenous volcanologists fighting government corruption as a new volcano rises to threaten their community. Bustamante made La Llorona, one of the most atmospherically terrifying films of the last decade, and his fingerprints are all over this one too. It doesn’t rely on genre mechanics. It relies on something more effective: the creeping certainty that power will always protect itself at the expense of the people underneath it. In 2026, that lands like a fist.
Finally, don’t sleep on the shorts program. Chicago filmmaker Nathan Suggs brings Lluvia, a local horror short, to the festival — a reminder that the genre is alive and well right here in the city, even when it rarely gets the platforms it deserves.
Tickets and the full schedule are at chicagolatinofilmfestival.org. The festival runs through April 27. For most of these films, this is the only Chicago screening you’re going to get — and there’s something about watching something genuinely frightening or nerve-shredding in a packed theater with strangers that streaming will never replicate. These filmmakers built these films for the dark and the crowd. Show up accordingly and enjoy… The Horror.