Is Netflix's The Dead Girls based on a real story? Details explored

Netflix's newest limited series, titled The Dead Girls, is a harrowing journey into the dark underbelly of 1960s Mexico. In this six-episode period drama, two sisters establish a vast web of brothels while covering their brutality with the guise of order and ambition. Director Luis Estrada structures the series with a chilling sense of inevitability, one in which corruption seems to permeate every frame. His lens doesn’t just expose the mechanics of crime; it critiques the systems that permit such horrors to thrive.

The fractured narrative reflects the tumult within its realm, hopping from testimonies to memories to institutional records, demonstrating how cruelty can hide in discipline’s guise. The two sisters at its centre, Arcángela and Serafina Baladro, are not caricatures of evil but cool-headed products of systematic rot. Part of a system that festers oppression, complicity, and one that largely remains unchecked by authority, their eventual undoing reveals the cracks and weaknesses of the empire they held together with fear.

Is The Dead Girls based on a real story?

The Baladro sisters are fictional, but clearly based on real-life individuals. The Dead Girls is inspired by the crimes of the González Valenzuela sisters, the notorious quartet known as Las Poquianchis, who ran a network of brothels in Mexico in the 1940s and 1960s. These women were involved in human trafficking, clandestine abortions, and the murders of many women, a lot of them minors. Their reign of terror was a national disgrace, a testament to how corruption and misogyny had allowed the most grotesque of crimes to remain invisible.

This chilling heritage was given literary form in Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s 1977 novel Las Muertas, which fictionalised the sisters as the Baladro sisters. The Dead Girls, based on this novel, mirrors its satirical power and its quasi-journalistic tone, takes its characters to inhumane calculations and unslakable thirsts. Sensationalism is something that the show is not interested in, although it is revealing to observe how the sisters’ empire festers from the same moral rot that is rife within the state, which facilitated its flourishing.

What is The Dead Girls about?

The Dead Girls follows the growth and demise of the Baladro empire. Serafina handles discipline within the brothels; Arcángela deals with finances and establishing connections with governmental authorities in the area. They operate across many cities, and they maintain control through captivity, force, and relentless abuse of the girls they sell. The fatal incidents involving the girls, such as Blanca, Evelia, and Feliza’s deaths, pierce through their hold and reveal the lethal impact of their rule.

With dissent brewing, the police inquiries ramp up. Serafina’s personal vendetta against her former lover, Simón Corona, sparks a shooting that draws law enforcement closer. Police discover numerous corpses on the sisters’ land early in 1964, and the sisters and seventeen accomplices are arrested. The trial lays bare years of exploitation, illegal imprisonment, and homicide, culminating in the conviction and sentencing of the sisters. The ashes of their empire are survivors marked with trauma and institutions robbed of excuses.

How The Dead Girls excels as a feat in slow storytelling

Trending

Beyond its plot, The Dead Girls is distinguished by its craft. Estrada approached the series as somewhat of a feature film undertaking, shooting over 21 weeks and building 220 sets to replicate 1960s Mexico without the assistance of digital effects. He said that every frame was “handcrafted,” which the production is steeped in, giving the whole thing hauntingly kinetic authenticity. Settings in San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, and Veracruz, and built sets at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, ensure that the narrative feels rooted in disaster and reality.

That immersive realism merges with the show’s satirical undertones to provide something more than crime drama. It emerges as a condemnation of the social and political rot that made such cruelty possible, employing the Baladro sisters’ empire as a metaphor for a corrupt moral order. In combining literary prestige, historical horror, and auteurist vision, The Dead Girls converts true crime into a haunted fun house mirror of systemic corruption and human malice.

×

Was this article helpful?

Thank You for feedback