Vamp or Not? We are the Flesh

Controversial art/horror film Tenemos la carne (which is actually 'we have the meat') was a 2016 Mexican film directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter and I feel slightly disingenuous running this as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ as it kind of isn’t – despite part of El Topo’s negative deconstruction of the film having a section entitled “Fin – we’re all rape vampires in the real world” and asking “so they’re vampires now, question mark.” Yet it certainly is a film that plays with vampire tropes. It reminded me, in part at least, of A Nocturne: Night of the vampire though that was tonally more than anything and A Nocturne has much more narrative.

Now I will also say that I don’t share El Topo’s dislike for the film but I can certainly see why it was disliked. This is non-narrative with an inner desire to shock when perhaps shock became overused. However I was mesmerised by the film and, in particular, blown away by primary actor Noé Hernández’s expressive performance as Mariano.

Noé Hernández as Mariano

So we start with him, specifically him building a still essentially. He uses bread pulped in water, as the primary fermenting ingredient to make (as he states) gas – but clearly hooch. Now I have seen suggestion that the film is post-apocalyptic and I understand why one would feel that way. He seems to be alone in a building until siblings Fauna (María Evoli) and Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) enter his world. They say that they have wandered through the city and there is nowhere to go. Later still we get others in the place, and notice that the bread he uses appears fresh and he trades the moonshine for trays of eggs through a pulley system in a wall. My feeling was this was more a rendition of a purgatory or Hell – but even that steps aside from the ending.

siblings

As it is the two siblings are coerced to work with him and they construct a cave like surrounding in the building. Building a frame and then papering it – but it does appear to be a cave once complete and also the womb. He encourages the siblings to have incestuous sex and masturbates over the scene – dying at the point of orgasm. So, we have a theme of incest, which is a theme that ties into the vampire genre, and then la petite mort leading to his actual death. The incest aspect ties in as a cause of vampirism – the act sometimes said to lead the perpetrator(s) to become vampires after their death.

the constructed cave

Vampirism is often seen to be an analogy for sex (and deviant sex at that) hence incest being a cause. Certainly there was also a connection between necrophilia and vampirism with historic figures such as Sergeant François Bertrand called vampires (in Bertrand’s case he was dubbed the Vampire of Montparnasse) due to their necrophilia. As this film lurches through deviance and excess it should come as no shock that Fauna eventually has necrophilic sex with the corpse of Mariano. However the act causes the corpse to vanish and then be reborn within the womb like cave.

feeding Lucio

Fauna is the most dominant of the characters. She not only (at Mariano’s urging) instigates the incest and becomes insatiable, she also feeds her brother her menstrual blood, rapes a woman (when more people are found for the rooms/cave) in a sapphic attack and beats the reborn Mariano because she feared he had left them and wouldn’t return. She is with Mariano as her brother lies injured and they have a soldier held captive – Lucio stabilised by Mariano putting his mysterious drug, which we have seen him occasionally use, in the wound.

feeding blood

As they hold the soldier Mariano assures him that they will not kill him for the various reasons that someone might kill. Rather they will kill him simply for his blood and his flesh and “all the exquisite substances inside you”. They slit his throat and bleed him. The film cuts to the pair looking at each other, blood on their mouths as they flap – it is almost as though they have transformed into birds (through their movements). Then they feed the blood to Lucio to revive him and, so, we have blood drinking and an apparent transformation, though I would say it is more shamanic than anything else. Mariano uses the flesh within the still as he previously used bread – making a communion connection as well as the vampiric trope. (Later Mariano will declare that those in an orgy should drink his blood, “as warm as Holy Mary’s c*nt”, underlying the religious subversion occurring in the film as well and strengthening the idea that this might be some form of Hell).

the scream

So, there is blood drinking (with transformative and restorative applications) and sexual practices that (through the genre’s development/journey) have been tied into the figure of the vampire – be that aggressive lesbianism, necrophilia or incest. This isn’t necessarily a vampire film but it certainly uses the tropes (and I’d like to think that the multi-layered film uses them knowingly). This is not for the faint-hearted, there are hardcore sexual aspects with a desire to shock, no narrative as such, ambiguousness aplenty and some gore. However if you appreciate that in a film and want to see a stupendously animated performance this might just be something you want to see. Ultimately I’d say it is of genre interest.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK