A priest wants to outshine a younger rival, so he hires a fake exorcism. A seaside mayor needs visitors, so a sea monster becomes an economic plan. A U.S. ambassador wants an abduction staged in exchange for visas. These are jobs for the friends at the center of Los Espookys. Their monsters are handmade, but their clients’ motives are painfully real: publicity, money and power.
The 2019 HBO comedy follows Renaldo, Úrsula, Tati and Andrés as they turn a shared love of horror into a service business. Renaldo brings the obsession with gore; Úrsula runs logistics; Tati tests the effects; Andrés brings the resources of a chocolate heir. In HBO’s episode descriptions, their tasks also include frightening rivals for an inheritance and building alien specimens for a researcher’s government presentation. The frightening part is not a creature. It is how readily respectable institutions buy one.
Creators Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen set the largely Spanish-language series in an unnamed Latin American country and shot it in Santiago, Chile. Torres is Salvadoran; Mexican actors Bernardo Velasco and Cassandra Ciangherotti play Renaldo and Úrsula. Fernando Frías directed the pilot. Those particulars matter. The setting refuses the familiar demand that a Latino story serve as a tourist guide to one country, while the cast and production remain grounded in identifiable people and places.
A fake scare requires craft. It also requires a customer who already knows the effect they want. The priest does not pay for spiritual truth; he wants attention. The mayor wants a new attraction. The ambassador treats visas as a bargaining chip for a personal spectacle. With each contract, Los Espookys shifts the joke away from gullible witnesses and toward the authorities commissioning deception. The team sells illusions, but the clients sell legitimacy.
The show’s oddness does not erase its affection for the four friends. In a Television Academy interview, Fabrega described the premise simply as friends who “do horror,” and HBO comedy executive Amy Gravitt recalled that Armisen wanted the project to be good-natured. That warmth keeps the workers from becoming cynical masterminds. They take absurd assignments seriously, argue over the details and make things together. Their friendship gives the comedy a center even as a job leads to another preposterous institution.
By its second season, Renaldo is haunted by a pageant queen and Andrés is no longer the chocolate empire’s scion. The series lets its characters change without cleaning up the world around them. There will always be someone ready to purchase a convincing monster. Los Espookys asks a better question than whether the monster is real: who ordered it, and what will they gain once everyone is afraid?