Huesera: The Bone Woman‘s Michelle Garza Cervera on Bone-Snapping Foley Work and Feminist Horror

Pregnancy has long been a horrifying emblem in film, indicative of something infiltrating our most intimate boundaries. In Huesera: The Bone Woman, Michelle Garza Cervera re-treads this territory, reassembling the undead parts of this trope and animating it in unsettling shapes.
Huesera opens with Valeria praying for fertility, desperate to get pregnant for an unspecified reason, longing bearing down on her and her husband. Over the course of the film, her pregnancy consumes her, isolating her in an impending sense of doom. Cervera chooses to push past the birth of Valeria’s child as a natural conclusion, sitting with the physical toll of motherhood and measuring its twisted longevity. Cervera lends pregnancy a terrifying heft, crafting a distinctly inhuman visual to accompany the experience. Women’s bodies bend in impossible positions, forming a multi-limbed monster that slithers towards the protagonist with terrifying speed—a nihilistic spin on being welcoming into the fold of first-time motherhood.
Paste talked to Cervera about her experience directing, questioning social codes and her place in the “maternal horror” subgenre.
Paste: There are so many horror films about maternal figures who break social codes (from Hereditary and The Babadook to Psycho and The Innocents). What got you interested in this subgenre? What did you think your film could bring that would be different from the rest?
Michelle Garza Cervera: I was developing for so long—it took me almost four years to put it together—and through that time I did a lot of investigation. It’s crazy, since the seeds of every genre…horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, there is so much about motherhood! Of course it has to do with the fact that it is so in our psyche: All of us are daughters and sons and all of us have the possibility of becoming parents. All aspects of motherhood and fatherhood are so normalized. There are so many social rules, deep down there is so much guilt and so many instincts and so many emotions that are completely taboo around that.
I started doing horror—like short films—a long time ago, but when I picked this theme, I was completely, 100% sure that horror was perfect for it because it just allows you to do a certain kind of focus and introspection into these things that are very hard to speak of. And sometimes we already think it’s very normalized to speak about these other aspects of parenthood but it’s really not—at least in my country! And I feel like in every place I have gone with Huesera I have very deep down conversations about how this is all still such a taboo.
Also motherhood is such an institution, it defines our lives completely, like it tells you how your life path has to be. When you are at home growing up with your mother, and it has to be done in the correct way, and then you’re leaving home and your path to follow is that you should become a mother. This is the path to happiness, so every other dissident path is fucking scary. To me, that is suffocating! It’s horrible! And there are so many expectations about how to be a good or a bad woman everywhere. I feel like what makes Huesera special is that I was really rooted in the experience of being a woman going through an identity explosion…living in Mexico City with that kind of family, I really tried to keep it very specific to how that feels.
Could you tell me a bit about working with sound designer Christian Giraud? How long did it take to create the perfect bone snapping sound?
Cervera: Well we knew we had this sound-like motif since the script. We went through so many different materials and concepts. He was even telling me since the pre-production, “Oh, I think I’m going to use this animal bone!” The actress [Natalia Solián] really cracked her body, she’s really good at cracking her fingers. But [Giraud] has a niece who’s super young and she particularly loves cracking her bones, and he remembered that and he had a long recording session with her!
But honestly it was a mix of different things. He went to this barbeque place, which was very gross, and that one really didn’t work, it was too much. We also used a lot of food. It was a lot of experimentation. I love that process of finding the foley, the foley sessions are one of my favorite parts of the process.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the end of the film. Did you ever consider any other conclusions?