Monarch Productions
Monday, October 18, 2021
Welcome to the Jungle, It Gets Worse Here Everyday
The latest horror film from Monarch Productions, “Children of the Jaguar” was a critical success in the box office, breaking the domestic box office record for horror movies with a revenue of $702, 613,432. Directed by Harold Belize, the film is acclaimed not just for its fear tactics or its stellar cast, but for what it tells us about the lives of oppressed people in Brazil, especially indigenous ones. Belize based his fictional village where the movie takes place off of the actual village of Iguape.
The movie takes place in the made-up village of Santa Maria and centers around the mysterious death of the long-time drug overlord Marco and his chase for a supposed vault of treasure. Our cast of intrepid lambs for the slaughter is made up of a translator, a biologist, a grizzled veteran and a deforestation company executive and several private security guards. The setup is as old as the earliest horror movies ever made but this time, the horror movie monster isn’t a serial killer or a computer-generated monster but the will of the people, almost literally.
The movie is slow and methodical. There’s no excessive gore (apart from the jaguar, but you should have seen that one coming) or unnecessary jump scares. The terror comes from the environment, the long panning shots of characters wading through the marshlands, the anticipation of how the characters will die in the jungle, and the subversion of many horror movie expectations. At the same time you see the devastation corrupt dictators have left across the land and examples of cruelty inflicted by illegal logging overseers that nearly rival the monster in terror. Director Belize explains in an interview: “I wanted to show people what oppression in Brazil really means. As an indigenous person, this is my reality, it’s horrific to everyone else because they haven’t lived it like I have.” With a scenario so steeped in reality, you’d wonder how a monster would fit into the movie. It does, and it does so brilliantly.
The terror from the Children of the Jaguar doesn’t come from the fact that they’re the people of Santa Maria, it’s how subtle and strategic they are in the systematic murder of their opressors. Think “Home Alone” if Kevin had intent to kill. Every pot, pan, knife and stray cat is bound to come back and murder someone in some way. The twist villain is ingenious, the vault itself being a stash of weapons and used by Spanish colonists is poetic. Movies like “Children of the Jaguar ” do the impossible of drawing audiences in with their atmosphere and writing while giving them a not so subtle lesson about the world they live in.
Much like in real life, there is no black and white, good or bad. This movie capitalizes on this by making none of our original cast members likable. Even the translator, originally portrayed as the righteous, no nonsense hero who usually outsmarts the monster, ends up abandoning the biologist to die which turns out to seal his fate. In the end of the movie, it is implied that the Children of the Jaguar will move across the continent, liberating villages and murdering as they go.“A lot of people would be killed. Definitely displaced. Is it right to exact revenge on that level, maybe, maybe not. But it’ll happen,” Director Belize commented to critics.
-Fox Pressley, Rotten Tomatoes