Introduction: The Atrocious Gaze In the opening minutes of Lex Ortega’s 2015 film Atroz (Atrocious), a caption flashes across the screen stating that an extremely high percentage of the hundreds of thousands of murders occurring in Mexico City go unsolved. This statistical statement is the film’s epistemological foundation. Ortega’s feature debut, famously labeled “the most violent film from Mexico,” does not traffic in supernatural demons or mythical monsters. Instead, it declares that the most terrifying entities are not otherworldly but wholly human, born from the mundane horrors of domestic life and the systemic failures of a society desensitized to brutality. The film’s structure is deceptively simple. Two men, Goyo and Gordo, are arrested after a fatal car accident. When the police search their vehicle, they discover a camcorder containing footage of a brutal torture and murder. As the investigation unfolds, more tapes are uncovered, each one documenting increasingly depraved acts of violence. What emerges is a fractured portrait of a serial killer’s psyche, a cycle of abuse that began not in a dark alley, but in the family home. Atroz is a film that forces its audience to confront an uncomfortable proposition: that homophobia is not merely a prejudice but an ontological weapon—a tool for the violent enforcement of a specific, fragile mode of being. By examining the film through the lens of queer ontology, this essay will argue that Ortega’s extreme cinema functions as a philosophical autopsy. It dissects how discrimination is not an external feature of a violent society but the very engine of its monstrosity, operating through a ritualistic, intergenerational logic where the abuser was once the abused, and where the gaze of the camera becomes an accomplice to an ontological crime. I. The Ontology of Homophobia: The Joto as the Abjected Other To understand the violence in Atroz, one must first understand the ontological status of its victims within the film’s fictional universe. The first videotape, the one that launched the project as an iPhone short film intended to go viral as real snuff, depicts the torture and murder of Esmeralda, a trans sex worker. The choice of victim is not incidental. The trans feminine body occupies a unique position of vulnerability in the heteronormative imaginary. It is a body that, by its very existence, challenges the binary certainties upon which patriarchal power rests. This dynamic is rooted in what scholar Sergio de la Mora has identified as the foundational logic of Mexican machismo: the masculine identity requires its negative reflection—the joto (a derogatory term for a gay man)—to define and reproduce itself. The joto is not simply a different kind of person; it is the abjected other, the living proof of what the macho is not and must never become. This is not a matter of mere social disapproval; it is a matter of existential necessity. The macho’s sense of self is ontologically fragile, a fortress built on the denial of its own potential for queerness. In Atroz, this logic is literalized through violence. When Felix, Goyo’s father, discovers his son’s stash of gay pornographic magazines, his response is not one of disappointment but of ritualistic annihilation. He subjects the young Goyo to a campaign of “toxic masculine and homophobic actions from public humiliation to sodomy as forms of punishment”. The father’s violence is pedagogical; it is an attempt to beat the queer potential out of his son, to enforce a “correct” ontological alignment with the dictates of machismo. The film’s relentless focus on the body—its penetrations, its mutilations, its orifices—is a philosophical argument: homophobia is a practice of ontological policing. It is the violent art of making the queer body conform, of erasing its perceived “wrongness” through an excess of physical pain. II. The Cycle of Atrocity: Violence as Inherited Language The most potent critique Ortega offers is the revelation that the monster (Goyo) was, himself, a victim. The film’s final and longest tape transports us to Goyo’s dysfunctional childhood home, where we witness the origin of the horror. This narrative choice aligns with Ortega’s own research into serial killers, during which he noted a consistent pattern of childhood abuse—not always sexual, but always contextualized within “violencia intrafamiliar” (domestic violence). In Atroz, this is not an excuse but an etiology. Violence is presented as a learned language, a toxic inheritance passed from father to son. The film thus depicts a horrifyingly efficient system of ontological reproduction. The father, Felix, enforces a rigid masculine identity through homophobic brutality. The son, Goyo, internalizes this logic not as a trauma to be healed but as a template for power to be wielded. Unable to confront his own repressed desires (his stash of pornography is a secret self he must destroy in others), Goyo externalizes his self-hatred onto bodies that remind him of his own abjected state. His victims—Esmeralda, the sex workers—are proxies. In torturing them, he is attempting to exorcise the queer self his father tried to murder. This is where Ortega’s vision becomes truly nihilistic and philosophically sharp. Unlike a traditional tragedy, where the cycle of violence might be broken by an act of moral awakening, Atroz offers no such catharsis. The film’s tagline might as well be “inhumane acts beget inhumane acts”. The abuse is not a deviation from the social order; it is the social order. Machismo is not a set of beliefs held by flawed individuals; it is a structural ontology, a system of being that reproduces itself through the very violence that seeks to enforce it. The homophobia of the father becomes the internalized self-loathing of the son, which in turn becomes the homophobic murder spree of the adult. III. The Gaze and the Gun: Police Power and the Complicit Spectator Ortega complicates this already dense moral landscape by introducing a third party: the police. Commander Juárez, upon discovering the snuff tapes, does not simply arrest the perpetrators. He and his men begin to “deal out some justice of their own — justice that would make even the criminals cringe”. The police torture Goyo and Gordo in the interrogation room, using the very logic of brutality they claim to oppose. In this, Ortega extends his critique from the family to the state. The police are not presented as a solution or even an alternative. They are a mirror. Their violence, while framed as retribution, is structurally identical to the killers’ violence. It is extrajudicial, sadistic, and ultimately self-serving. The film suggests that the ontological violence of machismo is not confined to the domestic sphere; it is the operating system of the entire society, from the father’s belt to the state’s badge. The opening statistic about unsolved murders is not just about police inefficiency; it is about complicity. The state, Ortega implies, is not a neutral arbiter but a participant in the same economy of brutality. Crucially, the film implicates the viewer in this complicity. Atroz is constructed in a “found footage” style, meaning the audience watches the torture tapes alongside the police. We are positioned as Juárez’s silent partner, staring at the same grainy, POV footage of genital mutilation and sexualized assault. This is a calculated aesthetic strategy. By forcing the audience to adopt the perspective of the person viewing the snuff film (whether it be the detective or, by extension, the online viewer the original short was designed to shock), Ortega collapses the distance between observer and accomplice. To watch Atroz is to participate in the act of looking, and to participate in the act of looking at such violence, within the logic of the film, is to be complicit in the ontological violation it depicts. IV. The Spectator’s Ontology: Disgust as Philosophical Encounter The extreme nature of Atroz—its coprophagia, its necrophilia, its relentless sadism—inevitably raises a question about the spectator. Why make such a film? Why watch it? The answer, from a philosophical perspective, is that disgust is not a failure of art but a mode of knowledge. Ortega himself has stated that he wanted the audience’s response to be “shockeante” (shocking), a feeling he first experienced as a teenager watching extreme films. This shock is an epistemological event. The smooth functioning of heteronormative society relies on the invisibility of its violence. Atroz makes that violence visible, not in the abstract terms of statistical reports, but in the concrete, unbearable terms of the violated body. It refuses the comfort of allegory or metaphor. The homophobia on screen is not a symbol for something else; it is the thing itself, rendered with a raw, quasi-documentary realism. This approach is deeply controversial. Some critics have argued that the “association of violent sexual perversion and homosexuality is not something that has any place in horror”. They worry that the film, in its attempt to critique homophobia, may simply be replicating the very homophobic imagery it claims to condemn. This is a legitimate and crucial debate. However, to dismiss Atroz on these grounds is to miss its central, perhaps maddening, argument. The film does not show homophobic violence because it enjoys it; it shows it because it believes that the only way to truly confront the ontology of homophobia is to stare directly into its abyss, to refuse to look away from the atroz reality of what that ideology does to flesh and bone. The film runs the “risk of losing these key messages in the film with acts of genital mutilation, sodomy, masochism, and just awfully graphic, bloody violence”. This is the central aesthetic and philosophical gamble of the movie. Does the extremity of the depiction overwhelm the critique? Ortega seems to bet that it does not—that for a spectator willing to endure the journey, the horror is not the gore itself, but the cold, systemic logic that produces it. The feeling of sickness, of moral violation, that Atroz induces in its audience is the somatic registration of an ontological truth: that homophobia, in its most distilled form, is a technology of death.