General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20265 min read

History of the Occult

History of the Occult (Spanish: Historia de lo oculto) is a 2020 Argentine supernatural horror film directed by Cristian Ponce, shot in black and white and set in the 1980s, in which the final live broadcast of a television news program becomes the setting for an attempt to expose a government linked to occultists¹. It is Ponce's directorial debut, produced by Tangram Cine, and it runs 82 minutes in Spanish¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Title / original title	History of the Occult / Historia de lo oculto¹
Year, countries, runtime	2020; Argentina and Mexico; 82 minutes¹
Director and writer	Cristian Ponce, his first feature; he also wrote the screenplay¹^•³
Principal cast	Germán Baudino (Adrián Marcato), Nadia Lozano (María), Héctor Ostrofsky (Alfredo)¹^•³
Setting	An alternative 1980s Buenos Aires, during the last broadcast of the news show "60 Minutes to Midnight"¹
Awards	Best Opera Prima and Best Argentine Breakthrough Actor, Mar del Plata International Film Festival 2020¹
Release	Direct to TV on 6 November 2020; later streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, and other services³^•²

Spoilers

Premise

The film takes place during the final broadcast of 60 Minutes to Midnight, described as the most famous journalism show on Argentine television¹. The studio guest is Adrián Marcato (Germán Baudino), a self-professed warlock who claims to be in cahoots with the country's political elite, and who is willing to admit everything on live television for a price¹. Since a notebook was found at the scene of a killing in Buenos Aires, the show's journalists have been investigating occultists who appear to be controlling Argentina from behind the scenes, and they race against the clock to expose the conspiracy on air¹.

The Mar del Plata festival catalog describes the setting as an alternative 1980s Buenos Aires in which the government of a businessman, President Emilio Belasco (Guillermo Perelstein), is about to collapse under multiple corruption accusations and conspiracy theories involving black magic⁴. The supporting cast includes Casper Uncal as Abel, Agustín Recondo as Jorge Federici, Hernán Altamirano as Senator Matías Linares, and Lucía Arreche as Natalia².

Production

Ponce developed the idea over two or three years and, when production became possible, wrote the screenplay in a little over a week⁵. He described the film from the start as a very low-budget project, and securing the financial base was what determined that it could be made⁵. The production company was Tangram Cine, based in La Plata, where Ponce had previously directed shorts and web series⁶.

The film was shot in three blocks, one for each location seen on screen, so the crew rarely worked with more than five actors at a time; the television studio scenes and the journalists' off-air investigation were handled with different tones and dynamics⁵. The street chase segment was written as a self-contained short and was shortened further in production, because winter shooting and a lack of lights made illuminating long streets impractical⁷. Casting drew almost entirely on actors from the La Plata scene whom Ponce had worked with or knew socially⁵.

Style and influences

The black-and-white photography has both narrative and aesthetic motives for Ponce: the story gives a specific reason for the film to look this way, and he values black and white as an expressive tool for a film in which what is told and what is hidden move between shadows and light⁵. SensaCine summarizes the approach as moving the 1970s conspiracy thriller into the territory of horror³.

Ponce names three concrete influences: Alan Pakula's All the President's Men for the political-thriller narrative, Rosemary's Baby for a progression from a film that does not present itself as genre cinema to one that unmistakably is, and, on a formal level, The Salesman, the Maysles brothers' documentary about Bible salesmen in the United States⁵. He has cited John Carpenter and David Lynch among his favorite directors⁵.

On history and fiction. Asked whether the film's world is a ucronía (an alternate-history setting), Ponce rejected the label, calling it instead "the illusion of a false past" and pointing to the reference to the Malvinas as the most specific difference from real history; within the story, he said, it is the antagonists who construct a false past for their own benefit⁷. He built the screenplay from a realistic journalistic-investigation case, modeled partly on the investigative methods described in a book by the journalist Daniel Santoro, and then replaced realistic elements with fantastic and horror elements, so that a murder becomes a complete disappearance from reality⁷. He deliberately cut explanatory material in the script and the edit, aiming to give viewers enough elements to imagine their own version of what they had seen⁷.

Reception and awards

At the Mar del Plata International Film Festival 2020 the film won Best Opera Prima and Best Argentine Breakthrough Actor, and it was later an official selection at the Tromsø International Film Festival 2022¹. TV Guide lists additional 2020 nominations for Best Motion Picture (New Visions Award), Best Argentinean Film, and an ASA Sound Design Award, plus a win for the Special Jury Award for Best Latin American First Feature⁸. An Argentine industry document reports that the film was chosen Best Horror Feature Film of 2021 by the platform Letterboxd⁹.

Audience measures have been moderate: JustWatch records an IMDb rating of 6.4 from about 2,500 votes and a 63 percent JustWatch rating², while Rotten Tomatoes shows a 69 percent Popcornmeter audience score with no critic reviews counted¹⁰. The film reached a wide United States audience through streaming: it is available on Amazon Prime Video, fuboTV, Tubi, and other services, with a digital release dated December 6, 2022²^•¹¹. Rotten Tomatoes describes it as "a supernatural thriller from the creators of Netflix's The Kirlian Frequency", referring to Ponce's earlier animated series La frecuencia Kirlian¹⁰^•⁴.

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026