Carlos Enrique Taboada’s Hasta el viento tiene miedo (Even the Wind is Afraid) is hailed as a cult classic of Mexican gothic horror, credited with revitalizing a sagging genre. What no one mentions is that if the wind itself had sat through all 90 minutes of this boarding school ghost story, it too would have begged for a cigarette break and maybe an early grave. This isn’t so much a supernatural thriller as it is detention—drawn out, joyless, and filled with teenagers you wouldn’t want to share a lunch table with, let alone your eternal soul.
The Plot: Like a Soap Opera with Cobwebs
Claudia, a student in an all-girls boarding school, has visions of Andrea, a former student who killed herself after the headmistress wouldn’t let her visit her dying mother. Sounds promising, right? Ghostly apparitions, gothic towers, a stern schoolmarm ripe for spectral comeuppance. Unfortunately, the movie pads this skeleton of a story with enough remedial lessons, piano practices, and stern lectures to make you wonder if you accidentally tuned into Deadly Little House on the Prairie.
Miss Bernarda, the headmistress, is a tyrant so rigid she makes Margaret Thatcher look like a yoga instructor. She dismisses every supernatural red flag with the enthusiasm of someone rejecting free guacamole. Andrea’s ghost, meanwhile, spends most of her time lurking in windows like a bored usher, too polite to actually haunt anyone until the runtime is nearly expired.
The Girls: Hormones, Histrionics, and Hairdos
Our cast of students include Kitty, Ivette, Marina, Lili, Silvia, Verónica, and Josefina—basically a 1960s horror version of a Spice Girls tribute band. Their collective contribution to the narrative is shrieking, giggling, and looking shocked that life in a gothic boarding school isn’t all slumber parties and Beatles records.
Claudia, our heroine, sleepwalks more often than she walks, gets possessed by Andrea, and becomes an instant Mozart at the piano. Imagine if being haunted could also turn you into a better student—suddenly possession sounds like a viable academic strategy.
The Horror: More Breeze Than Wind
For a movie titled Even the Wind is Afraid, you’d expect the wind to, at some point, actually do something scary. Instead, the atmosphere leans hard on the “spooky breeze through curtains” trick, as if a box fan on medium setting is supposed to send us running. Andrea’s ghost is mostly relegated to soft-focus cameos, the kind of apparition that would barely make the cut in a Scooby-Doo hallway gag.
When people finally do die, it’s less “terrifying horror climax” and more “staged accident report.” Claudia falls off a tower, bounces back like nothing happened, and the principal’s eventual hanging feels less like supernatural vengeance and more like the film itself giving up.
The Real Horror: The Pacing
The film’s greatest monster isn’t Andrea—it’s time. Every scene drags with the momentum of wet laundry. For every flicker of gothic atmosphere, you’re forced to sit through endless scenes of adults bickering about discipline and students whispering about boys. If gothic horror is supposed to be moody and oppressive, Hasta el viento tiene miedo takes that mission literally: it oppresses you with boredom until you beg for Andrea to show up and swing an axe just to move things along.
Cult Status or Stockholm Syndrome?
Fans hail this film as a classic, but let’s be honest: sometimes a cult following doesn’t mean quality, it just means people watched it when they were young and impressionable and now refuse to admit it was duller than algebra homework. Its 2007 remake? Even worse, proving the story wasn’t timeless gothic horror—it was just the kind of thing you could dust off and resell to people who hadn’t learned better.
Final Thoughts: A Soft Breeze in a Stuffy Room
Hasta el viento tiene miedo wanted to revitalize Mexican horror. What it delivered was a cautionary tale about how not to let your ghost take too many smoke breaks. It’s long-winded, humorless, and so committed to its “gothic” vibe that it forgets to actually be scary. The scariest thing here is the thought of sitting through it twice.
Rating: 3 out of 10 fluttering curtains.
