From Dusk Till Dawn: The Vampires' Mesoamerican Mythology Explained
From Dusk Till Dawn is known for its over-the-top vampire action, but the final shot of the film implies that director Robert Rodriguez had additional ideas involving the origins of the bloodsucking monsters. As the camera pulls away from the back of the Titty Twister strip club, it reveals the remains of an Aztec temple surrounded by a junkyard of automobiles, signifying that the vampires living there have an elaborate, but mysterious backstory connected to Mesoamerican mythology.
As one of the genre world's preeminent Mexican-American filmmakers, Robert Rodriguez is known for creatively incorporating his Latino background into his work. Even though Quentin Tarantino wrote the script for From Dusk Till Dawn, the matte shot of the Aztec temple at the end was Rodriguez's idea, no doubt in an attempt to connect the film's vampires to a Mesoamerican identity rather than the traditional European image. The filmmaker hung the painting on his wall for eighteen years until he finally got an opportunity to return to that imposing pyramid.
From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, created and developed by Rodriguez for his El Rey Network on television, was a golden opportunity to expand on the Aztec and Mayan mythologies of the vampires. This backstory seemed to be one of Rodriguez's primary areas of interest regarding the original film, but because Tarantino's script didn't specify the exact origins of the vampires, the director never got to fully explore the creatures' Mesoamerican roots. In an interview with Creative Screenwriting magazine, he lamented that, despite the fact that "Mexico is such a vampire-rich culture," there has never been a movie about Mayan and Aztec bloodsuckers.
There is a rich well of Mesoamerican tradition that Rodriguez was most likely thinking of when imagining the ancient history of the monsters. Aztec mythology tells of the Cihuateteo—angry, undead spirits of women who died in childbirth—compared to warrior men who had died in battle. These pale-skinned "Divine Women", as the name roughly translates to, usually escorted the sun as it made its journey to dusk. On five specific days of the Aztec calendar, they traveled down to the earthly realm at supernatural crossroads to hunt children and seduce men. Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek) certainly resembles one of these malevolent deities, especially considering her tactic of luring lascivious truckers to their demise.
The Titty Twister could also be one of the crossroads, but Maya mythology presents another inspiration for the film. The Camazotz is a bat deity associated with night and death, and one of the antagonists in the central sacred history text of the Maya, the Popol Vuh. The main characters of the epic, known as the Hero Twins, encounter Camazotz in the House of Bats, a section of the Maya underworld, Xibalba. There is an obvious connection to vampire bats within the narrative, but the twins also sound like the Gecko brothers, while the murderous monsters in the House of Bats liken the locale to the strip club. Camazotz even manages to decapitate one of the twins, paralleling Richie Gecko's death at the hands (or rather fangs) of Santanico.
Rodriguez even incorporated the Popol Vuh into the television series by revealing that the Geckos are, in fact, part of the Hero Twins prophecy that predicts their fight with the demonic forces of Xibalba. The show distinguishes the traditional bat-like vampires from its antagonistic snake creatures, called Culebras. Although the reptilian vampires are an original Rodriguez creation, snake imagery is a reoccurring motif in Mesoamerican culture, such as in the case of the Feathered Serpent deity, Quetzalcoatl. Santanico dances with a snake and transforms into a scaly monster in the movie, so the connection to the animal was already in the universe. Considering the present push for cultural diversity within all creative genres, it's satisfying to see a distinctly Latino brand of vampires in the world of From Dusk Till Dawn.