El Alimento del miedo (lost Mexican horror film; 1994)

Juan López Moctezuma, director of the film.

Status: Lost

El Alimento del Miedo (The Food of Fear, translated from Spanish) was a 1994 Mexican horror film directed by Juan López Moctezuma, who also directed critically panned films such as Matar a un Extraño (1983) The Mansion of Madness (1973) Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975) and Alucarda (1977), with El Alimento del Miedo being his last work before he passed away one year later, in 1995.

The film was written by López Moctezuma himself and Jorge Victoria and starred López Moctezuma, Isaura Espinoza, and Jorge Russek. The film is based on a Mexican legend named “La tamalera asesina”.

Plot

The film takes place in an underclass neighborhood of Mexico City when a troupe features a circus act, led by Don Ramón (López Moctezuma himself). He and his wife Petra (Isaura Espinosa) have to take care of the daughter of a neighbor nicknamed "Flea" who has been jailed for drug trafficking.

Petra thinks that Flea must earn a living (despite her being 5 years old), entrusting her several domestic tasks; the little girl later befriends Pepito, who works as a clown on the street.

Complications arise when a person with Satanic tendencies arrives at Ramon's house and develops a romantic interest in Petra. A fight between the three adults causes Flea to suffer a fatal accident. So as not to get into any problems with the authorities, Petra uses Flea's flesh to make tamales that she sells on the street.

Status

The film has remained mostly obscure since its original screening on various Mexican cinemas, there are no available posters for the film, the film had a poor rating, and the fact that half of the cast (including Juan) passed away, makes the chances of finding a copy much harder.

The rest of the cast is still active, with Jorge Victoria making an appearance in the pilot of the TV series Queen of the South and Isaura Espinoza also appearing in a post-production series called Desvanecer. However, contacting them is hard since they do not seem to use social media.

Info available for the film is also poor, with IMDb and the site of the Mexican Secretary of Culture being the only sites with more reliable information on the film.^[1]

This movie was exhibited back on August, 2006 in the Macabro horror film festival, not to be shown again

Some photographs of the filming were revealed in an interview with Jorge Victoria on the ADR Networks en VIVO channel. In the video, some details of the production and what happened after the death of Moctezuma are told.^[2]