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El Paso Tunnels

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 Aaron Perez 11/06/2026 Image Credit: CBS News      El Paso sits on a fault line of history. Above ground, the Franklin Mountains, the sun-bleached streets of Sunset Heights, the steady flow of the Rio Grande. Below, a quieter network of passages, basements, and sealed corridors has long fed local legend. Some are real. Some are exaggerated. A few still turn up when construction crews dig too deep or Border Patrol teams sweep the storm drains. Together they form one of the city’s most enduring mysteries. The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Underground Railroad of the Southwest      The most substantive origin story begins in the 1880s. Chinese laborers arrived with the railroad in 1881. When the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further immigration, a well-organized smuggling system grew between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. Historians, including researcher Nancy Farrar and local chronicler Leon Metz, describe an informal “underground railroad”: safe hou...
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Obscure Legends of Chihuahua, Mexico

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Aaron Perez 9/3/2026 Image Credit: https://www.audleytravel.com/us/mexico/places-to-go/chihuahua      Chihuahua, Mexico’s largest state, stretches from scorching deserts to the dramatic depths of the Copper Canyon (Barrancas del Cobre) and the high Sierra Tarahumara. Its landscapes have long cradled stories that blend Indigenous cosmologies, colonial mining booms, revolutionary violence, and everyday fears. While some Chihuahuan tales have become widely known, many remain more localized—passed through oral tradition, local chronicles, and regional reporting. This long-form exploration focuses on those less-circulated legends, drawing from documented accounts while leaving aside already well-covered figures such as La Pascualita, Las Siete Cabecitas, La Llorona, and the Mysterious Mummy of Majalca.      These stories are not uniform “facts” but living folklore: versions vary by teller, place, and generation. Where possible, they are grounded in named s...
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Leprechaun and sequels- November 4th

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 Aaron Perez 10/04/2026 Image Credit: Trimark Pictures      There are horror franchises that aim for prestige. There are ones that chase prestige and fail. And then there’s Leprechaun—a series that never once pretended it was anything other than a greasy, low-budget, rhyme-spewing little monster movie that got progressively more unhinged with each installment. What started as a modest 1993 creature feature starring a pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston and Warwick Davis as a murderous Irish fairy has ballooned into eight films of escalating nonsense. The results are frequently laughably horrible, which is exactly why they remain weirdly watchable.      Here’s the full rundown of this cursed pot of cinematic gold. Leprechaun (1993)      The one that started it all. A family moves into a rural North Dakota house where a leprechaun has been trapped for a decade. Cue gold coins, bad rhymes, and a lot of stabbing. It’s the most “normal” of the ...
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Coco- November 2nd

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 Aaron Perez 11/02/2206 Image Credit: Disney Pixar      Coco (2017) is Pixar’s vibrant, emotionally precise celebration of family, memory, and Mexican culture through the lens of Día de los Muertos. Directed by Lee Unkrich and co-directed by Adrian Molina, it follows 12-year-old Miguel Rivera, an aspiring musician in the town of Santa Cecilia whose family has banned music for generations after a great-great-grandfather abandoned them to chase fame.      When Miguel’s attempt to perform on the Day of the Dead goes wrong, he is transported to the Land of the Dead—a dazzling, hierarchical afterlife where the dead persist only as long as the living remember them. There he teams up with the charming, down-on-his-luck skeleton Héctor while chasing the blessing of his supposed idol, the legendary Ernesto de la Cruz. What begins as a quest to prove himself becomes a deeper reckoning with family secrets, the cost of ambition, and what it truly means to be reme...
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The Exorcist October 31

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 Aaron Perez 10/31/2026 Image credit: Warner Bros.      In 1973, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist arrived like a demonic force of nature and permanently changed horror cinema. Adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own 1971 novel (itself inspired by the real 1949 “Roland Doe” exorcism case), the film follows actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) as her 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) undergoes a terrifying transformation after contact with a Ouija board. When medicine fails, two priests—Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a man of wavering faith, and the veteran Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow)—confront the ancient demon Pazuzu in a battle of faith, science, and pure evil.      The result was a cultural phenomenon. It earned ten Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), won two Oscars, and became one of the highest-grossing films of its era. Its practical effects, unrelenting atmosphere, and psychological depth still unsett...
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International Horror Films of Mexico, Part 2, October 30

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Aaron Perez 10/30/2026 Image Credit: Gilberto Agustín Martínez Solares      In the late 1950s, Mexican cinema ignited a distinctive horror wave that blended Gothic atmosphere, local folklore, and pure B-movie energy. While Universal’s monsters and later Hammer’s blood-soaked Gothics dominated global screens, Mexico crafted its own macabre tradition—rooted in haciendas instead of castles, infused with Catholic imagery, and eventually fused with the spectacle of lucha libre. The spark was El Vampiro (1957). What followed was a fertile decade-plus of vampires, Aztec mummies, mad scientists, and masked wrestlers punching the undead into submission. Image Credit: https://thefridacinema.org/2022/09/26/el-vampiro-65th-anniversary-interview-with-film-historian-dr-david-wilt/ El Vampiro : The Film That Started It All      Directed by Fernando Méndez and produced by Abel Salazar (who also co-starred), El Vampiro arrived in 1957 and is widely regarded as...
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International Horror Films of Japan, Part 1 October 30

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 Aaron Perez 10/30/2026 Image Credit: DreamWorks Films      Japanese horror—often called J-horror—carved out a distinct place in global cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike much Western horror that leaned on gore, jump scares, or clear-cut battles of good versus evil, these films favored slow-building dread, psychological unease, vengeful spirits rooted in folklore, and a sense that the supernatural could never be fully defeated. Two titles in particular became international phenomena: Ringu (1998) and Ju-On: The Grudge (2002). Their American remakes helped popularize the style for Western audiences while also revealing cultural differences in how fear is told. Ringu (1998): The Cursed Tape That Started It All      Directed by Hideo Nakata and based on Kōji Suzuki’s novel, Ringu follows journalist Reiko Asakawa as she investigates the mysterious deaths of her niece and several teenagers. All of them watched a strange videotape and died ...
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