M.M. Olivas calls herself a “Chicana-futurist” and has had work published in such outlets as Uncanny Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, and Apex. Her debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela, will be published in November by Lanternfish Press. She talks with LJ about her interest in the horror genre, its cinematic connections, and the role of folklore in her novel.

What is it about horror that inspires you? Why did you choose horror to tell this story?

I don’t think something needs to be “scary” to be horrific. Rather, the narrative just has to focus on the sense of dread that is being built up through the story. It’s that sense of dread that compels me: how characters react and navigate and make choices in response to that dread.... Slashers are a form of body horror, a genre that explores the grotesque nature of bodies and their mutilation. Directors that drew me to the genre and were incredibly influential to me include David Cronenberg and John Carpenter; they understand that body horror isn’t just about violence done to the body, but about the physical changes building slowly through the narrative, utterly transforming the characters into something tragic, horrific, and othered by the end, something monstrous.… Transforms—get it? It’s no wonder I, and many other trans people who’ve [been] trapped within and at war with our own skin, feel drawn to body horror, to use our relationship with our bodies to explore the genre in new and nuanced ways.

This is all to say that speculative horror has the unique ability to make literal the horrors and trauma that people must endure as part of their everyday lives. I can say as a trans woman and a first-gen Chicana that horrific things happen within my communities, things that become as regular and mundane to us as getting to work. Reading about barbed wire installed in the Rio Grande, or going online to see another trans person dismembered solely because they existed as themselves—it’s fucking horrifying, but it’s real. It’s now. It’s all around us. Giving those horrors faces, making them something real that I can then use my characters to navigate, is to me horror is at its most powerful. Horror amplifies these realities, makes them tangible, three-dimensional—so that we can imagine realities where these horrors are overcome.

Sundown in San Ojuela is folk horror that relies heavily on pre-Hispanic folklore. Can you tell us a little about that background?

That’s such an interesting question, because I myself have often tried to navigate what folklore meant in regard to my story. I was very aware that the stories I draw on and take inspiration from in almost all my work come from the culture and religion of the Mexica people, who are still present and alive today. I want to also state that I myself am not Mexica, nor [do I] have Mexica blood in me. My Indigenous ancestry is Purépachan, but growing up, my family didn’t speak about our Indigenous roots.

My stories are inspired by the folktale aspects of my culture, such as the stories of chupacabras, Nagual shapeshifters, and pesky duendes [that] my mother would share with me at my bedside as a child. But it was in Aztec mythology that I found liberation and empowerment, and that’s why I choose to center it in my stories. Because those stories are at the core of so many of our cultural traditions and iconography, whether we are aware of it or not, and I believe telling those stories makes it so other Mexicans can connect with our own deities, who deserve as much reverence as Zeus or Hades. And we can feel that empowerment and use these narratives to move us towards a future of collective liberation.

You are very open about using your work to center first-generation, queer, and diasporic experiences. How does your novel explore those intersections?

[I] always sat up straight when I watched those overtly queer Disney villains and their ilk revel unapologetically in the power they have, wielding it against those who’d cast them out, othered them. It’s that sense of otherness that compels me, and I’ve been known to yap about horror movie monsters and my connection to their otherness—their isolation and their tragedy.... I am trans, and I am Latina, and I [went to] a private Christian school in the suburbs, flanked by a culture where I always felt I was on the outside looking in. I was an angry child. Then I was a bitter teen. I had so much rage and disdain reverberating through my bones, in search of where to go. Often, it went outwards, but just as often, it went inwards too. It dug in deep, made a home inside of me. It told me I was grotesque and wrong, and I believed it. It’s no wonder that I, in my own social isolation, resonated more with these horror movie monsters than with the white, male protagonists who slew them. No wonder I admired these villains who used their power to carve out for themselves the space that would not be given to them.

Monsters are innately tragic creatures, misunderstood and punished for the sole crime of existing as they are, much like many marginalized people. The monster is an incredibly powerful tool to discuss otherness, and Guillermo del Toro was the first director I was aware of who understood that. His films depicted monsters with such reverence—such grace and power and ancient, divine beauty. That [was my goal] with Sundown, depicting a beauty and power with my Nagual-inspired vampires and exploring the idea of having immeasurable godlike power in a society that deems you wretched. Vampires have always been coded with queerness—many antagonists have, honestly—and this novel’s Nagual-inspired vampires were my attempt to reclaim that queerness and choose the rules for what makes something monstrous.

Which writers do you enjoy reading?

I would first like to shout out my Latina horror-writer-in-cahoots, Cynthia Gómez, and her queer, radical short story collection, The Nightmare Box. Stephen Graham Jones…was hugely inspirational to me as a horror writer...; The Only Good Indians and Mongrels are two of the best horror novels I’ve ever read. Other Latine horror writers [everyone should read] include Carmen Maria Machado, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Isabel Cañas, and Gabino Iglesias. I hope my book is half as good as any of their masterpieces.