Since the entirety of October is officially Halloween this year (shut up, you!), we at Psycho Drive-In have decided to attempt to fill the month with thirty-one recommendations for horror-related movies, comics, books, TV shows, toys, games, and everything in-between. It’s gonna be a grab-bag of goodies we feel you should be exposed to, whether you like it or not! But don’t expect your standard suggestions for Halloween fun, we’re digging into some stuff that we love in the hopes that you might make this October a little bit weirder than usual.
Weirder in a good way. Not like what’s going on outside in the hellscape of 2020.
Diablero is a Mexican horror comedy from Netflix about a group of demon hunters. But don’t let the comedy angle through you off. This is comedy along the lines of Ash Vs Evil Dead, where the characters are enjoyable, but the stakes are high, and the laughs come from their interactions and lack of self-awareness. Each season follows a single story arc and the effects are a nice mix of practical with CG enhancement. Overall, this is some good creepy horror that will also make you laugh.
The first season (eight episodes ranging from 35 to 45 minutes each) focuses on Father Ramiro Ventura (Christopher von Uckermann) and his search for the stolen daughter he didn’t know he had. When it becomes clear that demonic forces are at play, he turns to Elvis Infante (Horacio Garcia Rojas), an irreverent demon-hunter, or Diablero, Elvis’ sister Keta Infante (Fatima Molina) whose baby mysteriously disappeared a decade or so earlier, and their friend Nancy Gama (Gisselle Kuri), a woman who can summon demons to temporarily possess her, giving her supernatural powers. As you can probably guess, there’s a religious conspiracy to be dealt with as well as the main supernatural threat, Mama Chabela (Dolores Heredia), who is planning to sacrifice Father Ramiro’s daughter along with other children she’s kidnapped, in order to bring about the end of the world as we know it.
There’s a lot of great world-building going on throughout the first season, as we discover an occult black market where demons are bought and sold, an underground network devoted to demonic cage fights, a secret Catholic order called The Conclave, and all the characters get a lot of good attention and are allowed to grow and develop – even some characters who start out as a threat, end up helping out in the face of apocalypse.
The second season (six episodes ranging from 30 to 40 minutes each) continues to build on what the first accomplished and opens up the world even more with a group of female Diableros – something that is virtually unheard of – along with a strange demonic drug that’s being sold on the streets, a deep dive into the Conclave’s conspiracy, and the mystery of Keta’s vanished baby, Mayaken, is brought full circle. There’s also a trip to the underworld that is hilarious.
Apparently, Diablero is based on the book “El Diablo me obligo” (The Devil Forced Me) by F.G. Haghenbeck. The book sounds pretty cool but doesn’t seem to be very closely related to TV show.
Season 2 premiered on January 31, 2020 and as of right now there’s no news about a third season, but I really hope somebody’s working to make it happen because that S2 cliffhanger was fantastic.