A Dinner Party, a Convent, and the Chair Buzz Drainpipe Threw Through the Window

Crease Magazine dispatch from the Mexican double-feature chapel

by Buzz Drainpipe

There are films you watch, and there are films that find a room inside your skull and refuse to leave.

Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda are not “art movie plus horror movie” in any clean museum-label sense. They are siblings with different table manners. One wears evening dress and slowly becomes a goat in the parlor. The other wakes up in a Catholic convent already screaming blood at the ceiling.

Together, they form a perfect Mexican double feature because both movies understand a sacred truth:

Civilization is just a room everyone agreed not to flee from yet.

And Mexico, in its cinema at its strangest and most illuminated, knows that the room is never just a room.

The room is class.

The room is God.

The room is sex.

The room is death.

The room is the old world pretending not to sweat through its shirt.

I. The Dinner Party That Eats Itself

In The Exterminating Angel, a group of wealthy dinner guests gather in a mansion and then, for no explainable reason, cannot leave the room.

That’s it. That’s the machine. That’s the trapdoor. No monster with fangs. No villain twirling his opera cape. No big booming explanation from Professor Plot Device. Just a room full of well-dressed people who discover that the invisible rules holding them together may be less rational than superstition.

At first, they are civilized.

Then they are embarrassed.

Then they are thirsty.

Then they are animals.

Buñuel does not need to kick the door down because the door is already gone in the only way that matters. These people have been trained their whole lives to obey codes they do not understand. Etiquette. Class. Ritual. Dinner sequence. Social hierarchy. Polite laugh. Correct chair. Correct fork. Correct lie.

And once the ritual breaks, they cannot function.

That is the genius of it. They are not trapped by architecture. They are trapped by the spell of being themselves.

It’s surrealism with a knife under the napkin.

II. The Convent That Bleeds Like a Bad Dream

Then comes Alucarda, kicking open the other side of the altar.

Where Buñuel gives us the ruling class trapped in a room, López Moctezuma gives us girls trapped inside Catholic enclosure, where holiness and hysteria have been braided together so tightly they start to resemble the same rope.

This movie does not behave. Thank Christ.

It shrieks, bites, burns, writhes, prays, curses, kisses death on the mouth, and then asks the nearest nun why the furniture is on fire.

Alucarda is what happens when repression stops being polite.

The convent is supposed to contain desire. It is supposed to process grief into obedience. It is supposed to turn adolescent intensity into kneeling, silence, confession, and routine. Instead, everything erupts. The religious imagery becomes flesh imagery. The sacred becomes erotic. The erotic becomes demonic. The demonic becomes theatrical. The theatrical becomes the truth, or at least the closest thing anyone in the building can stand.

The movie is Catholic gothic pushed through a fever hole.

It does not ask, “Is this possession real?”

It asks something better:

What if the institution calling this possession is itself the haunted thing?

III. Two Buildings, One Curse

This is why the pairing works so beautifully.

In The Exterminating Angel, the bourgeois room cannot be escaped.

In Alucarda, the religious room cannot be survived.

Both films are about ritual spaces turning against the people inside them. A dinner party. A convent. Two places built to regulate bodies, language, appetite, and shame.

The rich people in Buñuel’s room cannot admit that their order is absurd.

The nuns and priests in Alucarda cannot admit that their order is combustible.

So the buildings do the talking.

And brother, the buildings have notes.

Buñuel whispers:
“You are trapped because your civilization is imaginary.”

Moctezuma screams:
“You are trapped because your holiness is hungry.”

Same sermon. Different organ.

IV. Catholicism as Wallpaper That Starts Moving

Mexican cinema often treats Catholicism not merely as religion, but as atmosphere. It is in the walls. It is in the furniture. It is in the heat. It is in the guilt that arrives before the sin and stays after the body cools.

In this double feature, Catholicism becomes less a set of beliefs than a haunted operating system.

Buñuel, lifelong blasphemous surgeon that he was, slices open social ritual and finds church logic inside it: repetition, taboo, sacrifice, unspoken obedience, irrational collective paralysis.

Moctezuma goes straight for the red meat: crucifixes, convents, blood, possession, martyr poses, religious authority reduced to panic when the girl-monster refuses to stay symbolic.

Neither movie is “anti-Catholic” in the boring pamphlet sense.

They are anti-false-containment.

They know that once you build a system around denying the body, the body eventually comes back wearing antlers, perfume, ash, or lipstick.

V. Morning-on-Mute Verdict

Now, as morning movies on mute?

Perfect.

Maybe even better.

Because both films are intensely visual. You can let them flicker while coffee brews and the apartment slowly remembers it is daytime. You do not need every line. The faces tell you enough. The rooms tell you more.

Watch The Exterminating Angel for bodies arranged like social furniture slowly realizing they are meat.

Watch Alucarda for Catholic horror staged like someone set a fever dream loose in a chapel supply closet.

Together they form the first proper entry in this Mexican cinema run:

Double Feature #1: The Room That Refused Mercy

The Exterminating Angel
plus
Alucarda

A dinner party where the rich cannot leave.

A convent where the damned cannot stay contained.

Two films about people trapped inside rituals that have outlived their explanations.

And if anyone says one is art and one is trash, throw the chair.

Not at them.

Through the window.

Because sometimes criticism needs ventilation. 🪑🪟