Blumhouse is ready to terrify audiences again with the latest round of Welcome to the Blumhouse films, including the psychological horror title Madres. The plot revolves around Diana (Ariana Guerra) and Beto (Tenoch Huerta), a Mexican-American couple who move to a migrant farming town in 1970s California with the pregnant Diana suffering from strange symptoms and terrifying visions seemingly tied to a local curse.
Screen Rant spoke exclusively with star Ariana Guerra to discuss what she calls "Mexican Get Out" and her personal connections to the Welcome to the Blumhouse film.
Screen Rant: This movie is really moving and terrifying and has an important message at the same time. What about it really drew you to the project?
Ariana Guerra: The script. I remember just reading the scripts - I've said this to many interviewers, so it feels redundant to me [chuckles], but it felt like a Mexican Get Out. I immediately wanted to work on this project because I thought diverse stories [like this] are not a very common practice; we're getting there, we're working on it, which is super helpful. But also having a Latina who was a lead and really following the narrative of this character was extremely attractive to me.
Then Diana herself, she's a Mexican American who is having to experience what motherhood is like for the first time. She's having to really confront her identity, which in L.A. at that time was just very solidified and now she feels like she has to really come to terms with how Mexican or how American she really wants to identify as. I think for me, being a second-generation Latina who is also from a border town, I've had these conversations with my friends and my family.
We're on a spectrum, the way that we see ourselves and how we choose to assimilate versus how we choose to preserve our culture. That to me, I think, was the coolest discussion and it felt very nuanced as far as Latino media comes.
Since you had some of those own personal connections with your upbringing, was there anything that you felt you needed extra research or conversations for your role and for diving into the story?
Ariana Guerra: I'm not a mom, so I had to do a ton of research on motherhood and what's interesting is, when I looked it up, there were articles that discussed a lot of the problems that women deal with both pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy and post-pregnancy. But it was interesting that a lot of the videos I tried to look up as far as people being super authentic with the journey of pregnancy. It felt very glamorized, it felt just like moms wanted to show, "I'm okay, I love this. It's the most incredible thing."
When I talked to my friends or when I talked to family members about this, people who had just had a baby, people who were pregnant, they were like, "I f**king hate this, everything is difficult." Like to the point where, you know, some of this stuff my friends would share with me they hadn't even shared with their partners, because it's almost like that space doesn't exist for women who have children or women who are going through pregnancy.
Like, they can't complain about how much we hate, at times, the baby, the pregnancy, the position that they're in, and they don't want to feel like bad moms. So, yeah, it took a lot of research for me to kind of get to the truth of what it's like to have a child and then realizing that a lot of your choices are driven by being a mom and wanting to be a really good mom.
Since you do bring up partners, what was it like building the rapport with Tenoch Huerta before the cameras started rolling?
Ariana Guerra: He was amazing! Tenoch is such a giving actor, but as a person, he's so f**king cool. It was super easy, I felt like we really just kind of meshed really well. I enjoyed any time that we were on set together and that's all you can ask for.
Madres is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video on October 8.