Robots, Aliens, and Wrestlers. B Movies and Science Fiction at the Museo Panteón de San Fernando

• On August 13, the exhibition "Robots, Aliens y Luchadores. Ciencia Ficción y Cine B en México" will open at the Museo Panteón de San Fernando, featuring posters and lobby cards.
• This exhibition will be on view until September 13, 2022.
• Some of the titles included in this exhibition are: Santo el enmascarado de plata vs. la invasión de los marcianos, El robot humano, Las Luchadoras vs. el médico asesino, El hombre que logró ser invisble and Santo vs. asesinos de otros mundos.

"Robots, aliens y luchadores. Ciencia ficción y Cine B en México" gives its name to this poster and lobby card exhibition of 10 titles representative of that cinematic hybrid that mixed monsters, horror film iconography, science fiction, thriller and espionage with lucha libre. These films, considered B movies because they were made on shoestring budgets, became a box-office phenomenon from the 1950s through the late 1970s.

The common thread running through all these genres is precisely the presence of lucha libre's leading figures: El Santo, Blue Demon, Mil Máscaras, and Tinieblas, who in this universe 一possible only on celluloid一, fought alike against robots, Martian women, monsters, vampires, zombies, and mad scientists. Battles in the wrestling ring are, of course, a given.

As researcher Orlando Jiménez notes in his book Terror del rudo (Samsara-Macabro FICH, 2015), lucha libre cinema “is the product of a historical process that established it as such; it is made up of a vast body of films sharing common traits that managed to generate writing guidelines for their production, as well as having built an aesthetic of its own, which in turn triggered a whole series of cultural phenomena.”

One of these phenomena is, without a doubt, its blending—especially with science fiction—through characters, universes, and storylines that, although they became a repetitive and often absurd formula, achieved major box-office results and left a mark on popular culture not only in Mexico but in many other countries.

The exhibition is an initiative of Antonio Cortés, lead coordinator of the Museo Panteón de San Fernando, and is part of the activities of the 21st edition of Macabro FICH; curatorship was handled by Edna Campos Tenorio and Mario Valencia in collaboration with the collections of the UNAM Film Library and the Cineteca Nacional.

The exhibition will open on August 13, 2022, at the Museo Panteón de San Fernando at 5:00 p.m., and will be accompanied by a talk on the B movies of this period, given by José Luis Ortega Torres and the concert by the surf band Los Morton Surfers.