Following the national and international upheaval and tragedy in 1968, Mexican "trash cinema" began to shift away from the masked wrester genre and towards darker, more explicit films, and disturbing visions of the modern world: films which can be called "avant-exploitation." This work covers six of those films: El Topo, Mansion of Madness, Alucarda, Guyana, Crime of the Century, Birds of Prey, and Santa Sangre.