The Colombian Gothic of the twentieth century is Tropical and Tropicalized, a hybrid product of the encounter between the sugar magnates of the Valle del Cauca and popular European and North American Gothic monsters. The twenty-first century brought with it a return of the Gothic to the mountainous regions of the Colombian Andes as well as to the underbellies of colder cities like Bogotá. This city is a vastly different Bogotá from the dark little capital in which Silva lived and wrote. It is a metropolis affected by decades of industrialization and urbanization, factors that, according to Sara Wasson, made possible the “Gothicization” of the city space in nineteenth-century Europe. According to Wasson, “by the 1880s, the labyrinthine streets of Europe had become a perfect platform for updating the themes of earlier Gothic, and in the 130 years since, cities and suburbs have remained rich sites for Gothic production” (132). Writers such as Mario Mendoza and Hugo Chaparro Valderrama have contributed to the gothicization of the city from a practice that mix elements of the Gothic with literary and cinematic genres and subgenres such as noir fiction, pulp fiction, and film noir. In this sense, several of their novels belong to what Nadina Olmedo and Osvaldo Di Paolo denominated negrótico or the noir Gothic. In this chapter, I use the concept of negrótico to approach Mendoza and Chaparro Valderrama's gothic narrative. I will assert that the selected Colombian novels engage the negrótico, intentionally mixing elements of the literary and cinematographic Gothic with the crime genre, to give the Colombian Gothic of the twenty-first century a more urban, gritty tone that reflects the socioeconomic problems of a giant metropolis like Bogotá. This hybridization also emphasizes the idea, shared by both the crime genre and the Gothic, of the monstrosity of humanity and the human capacities of the monster.

Despite the change in weather, literary and cinematographic productions of the twenty-first century maintain the transgressive character of the Tropicalized Gothic—and the Gothic genre in general. In this chapter, I also analyze a film in which the Gothic is used as a political tool to address the abject elements of the Colombian armed conflict: El páramo (The Squad, 2011) by Jaime Osorio Marquez.