What scares 'Argentina's Mary Shelley'? Australian suburbia at night

It takes quite a lot to frighten the queen of Latin American gothic horror.

Yet one night as Mariana Enriquez left her local cinema for the short walk home, she was terrified.

She had made the move to Launceston from Buenos Aires only a few months earlier and was struggling to get used to the darkness of Australian suburbia at night.

It also didn't help she had just seen the Australian horror film, Bring Her Back.

"This had never happened to me in my life," she told ABC News.

"I'm almost never scared of horror movies but I was … super terrified when it ended.

"Usually I walk back and that day I was so terrified, I walked one block, got out of the CBD [and there was] darkness ... I called an Uber and told the guy ... 'I have a problem with my leg'."

In her Argentinian home city, darkness meant danger.

It was a hard lesson to unlearn at the age of 50, even in the quietude of northern Tasmania.

"It is one of the biggest [culture shocks] because it's a very everyday thing. If there's a street where you don't have streetlights [in Argentina], it's because it's dangerous, it's abandoned. You don't go there," she said.

"It's a lot of adjusting from being alert always … waiting for something that can come, not just from being unsafe but from other kinds of unsafeness.

"In Argentina you are always… [watching] the news to see if there was some kind of economical disaster that is going to make you make decisions."

It was the economic precariousness of Argentina which eventually led to Enriquez and her husband moving to Australia around a year ago.

The change has meant she no longer has a relationship with "the immediacy of catastrophe".

"So it's a real reset for me," she said.

In the shadow of a dictatorship

Nicknamed the "Argentinian Mary Shelley", Enriquez has had three collections of short stories and a novel translated into English, in addition to her non-fiction cemetery travelogue, Someone Is Walking On Your Grave.

Enriquez was around two years old when Argentina entered its "big dictatorship" years in 1976, as she calls the country's seven years of military rule which saw the disappearance of around 30,000 people.

While democracy was eventually restored in 1983, the dictatorship cast a long shadow, even over those who were children at the time.

Enriquez recalled the micro levels of control over everyday life, dictating birthday parties and the number of people who came to your house.

Then there were the years where the full scale of the atrocities were broadcast, a time Enriquez says was in some ways "even more horrifying" than the years of military rule.

Children were not spared from the horror and the "gore" of this very public reckoning.

"My subjectivity was formed in that period … Your whole imagination is shaped by this very dark, political thing … There's an alert and an alarm that has to do with growing up like that."

From a young age, Enriquez had aspirations to be a writer, a resolve that was only strengthened by the discovery such a profession could get you disappeared to one of the more than 500 clandestine prisons dotted around the country.

"Living through that period and getting out of that period gives people an attitude of never falling for that fear again and fighting back. It was 'They're never going to stop me. They're never going to silence me'."

Enriquez is considered a leading voice in the New Argentine Narrative, a contemporary movement of predominantly women writers whose dark stories confront a collective past.

But in the early days of her writing, Enriquez had some trepidation about how some Argentines would react to her drawing inspiration from that very recent history.

"I was a bit anxious .. if they were going to understand that this was my language as a fiction writer and my way … of taking these issues that were very serious and important to me and very important to the history of our nation and talk about them," she said.

Instead, they embraced her stories.

Alex Cothren, a lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University in Adelaide, who recently hosted Enriquez as a writer in residence, believed the creative lens of horror writing helped Argentines tackle "real deep traumas".

"It's not just the dictatorship; it's the constant crises. They've had [at least] three huge financial crises. Every time the country takes one step forward, it takes two steps back," he said.

"It's a generation of creatives that are trying to tackle these things but they don't want to do that through realism because people are living through it every day. 

"So they're doing it through the creative lens of horror which they all grew up from."

A 'genuine superstar' in Latin America

During Enriquez's residency at Flinders University last month, she had given just one public talk. The ticketed event quickly amassed a waiting list, something Mr Cothren attributed to news of her visit reaching Adelaide's Latin American community.

"She's a genuine superstar in Latin America," Mr Cothren said.

"She's now a very big name in our literary culture too. She sells out everywhere she goes."

With so much of her work translated into English, Mr Cothren said Enriquez's work has "exploded" in Australia and other countries.

"She is an expert at creating horror that is not just trying to shock you; it is actually saying something deeper about the place that it comes from," he said.

"There is a real desire for horror that clearly has its roots in something real. It's not enough to just have cool tropes. There is a real urge for depth.

"I know a lot of our young women who are writers really identify with what she writes about."

For her part, Enriquez admits she is still mystified how readers could resonate with her stories, even with one of them, My Sad Dead, forming the basis of a new Netflix series which is due out this week.

"What I do is very personal and very dark. I always find it very weird when people relate to it," she said.

"But I guess young women are now in a place where there's lots ... of anxieties.

"[And] horror speaks perfectly to anxious times ... This era that we're living through, it's an era of anxiety."

Mariana Enriquez will appear at the Brisbane Writers' Festival in October.