This issue of Tecmerin. Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales celebrates six years of trajectory and pays special attention to the production of horror films across its various sections and also includes other works focused on different aspects of television and cinema.

In the opening section, Barbara Zecchi’s piece, “Uncontaining Horror: 20th Century  Spanish Women’s Meshes of Fear ,” proposes reclassifying films by Spanish female directors from the 20th century that have not traditionally been categorized as horror, using two complementary theoretical frameworks: Brinkema’s “genrelessness” and Gaines’s “uncontainment.” Valeria Villegas Lindvall’s “Bacurau tá com fome” addresses the concepts of hunger and violence as tools of anticolonial resistance in the Brazilian film Bacurau (2019). Next, in “Mexican Macabre Laughters,” Cecilia Guillermo uses two Mexican comedies, El caso de la mujer asesinadita (1955) and El esqueleto de la señora Morales (1960), as case studies to analyze how Mexican culture transforms the tragic into something profoundly human. Meanwhile, Lucie Emch explores how two contemporary television series, Normal People (2020) and Sex Education (2019-2023), offer alternative models that challenge conventional patriarchal representations of sexuality in her work titled: “Please, Can I Take Your T-Shirt Off? The Empathetic Gaze: Redefining Consent in British and Irish Young Adults Television.”

This section concludes with three video essays focused on Spanish cinema. Natalia Martínez Pérez and María Jesús Peralta Barrios focus on one of the key actors in Spanish cinema in their piece “José Sacristán, A New Model of Masculinity in Spanish Cinema during the Transition.” In “Water/Wind/Women,” Beatriz Gómez Vega offers a comparative reading of two debut films: Con el viento by Meritxell Colell (2018) and El agua by Elena López Riera (2022). Finally, Rubén Aznar Alfonso focuses on the first film by one of the most important voices in European cinema of recent years, Carla Simón, in “Looking Outside the Frame. Estiu 1993, Carla Simón (2017).”

Curated by Alison Peirse, along with our regular editors, this special horror edition of the Screen Stars Dictionary journeys across various continents and modes of production, highlighting key performers in this cinematic genre. Peirse focuses on Mia Goth, star and cocreator of X,Pearl, and MaXXXine; Quan Zhang offers an overview of the career of Taiwanese diva Ruby Lin, highlighting productions such as Blood Stained Shoes and The House That Never Dies; Katarzyna Paszkiewicz addresses the multiple roles of Chloë Grace Moretz in works such as Let Me In and the remakes of Carrie and Suspiria; May Santiago captures the immeasurable force of Aubrey Plaza in a wide variety of films, ranging from horror to romantic comedy; and finally, Catherine Grant focuses on Belén Rueda, a key figure in contemporary Spanish cinema, analyzing her performances in films as diverse as The Orphanage and The Sea Inside.

In the “From the Archive” section, Valeria Villegas Lindvall presents the extraordinary project “Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History”. In her text, she reflects on her work in this project, analyzing in depth the short films of Mexican director and screenwriter Michelle Garza. Finally, in the “Student Showcase,” we present the video essay “El cine de Makoto Shinkai,” by Mario Oliver, Sara Pacheco, and Violeta Qi, which takes a journey through the extraordinary work of the Japanese producer, actor, and director.

With this issue we celebrate the sixth anniversary of the journal and wish a happy 2025 full of video essays.