Chromatic Ritualization and the Reorganization of Religious Agency in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (1989)

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (1989) places a disputed blood cult, an armless martyr, and a mother–son performance at the center of a narrative of violence and release. This article examines how these religious images acquire authority through their relationships with bodies and repeated actions. Bringing ritual theory into dialogue with material approaches to religion and film color, it develops chromatic ritualization as a term for the way recurring colors connect sacred objects, bodily roles, and obligations across changing narrative situations. A qualitative analysis follows the red pool at the destroyed shrine, Concha’s identification with the wounded saint, Fénix’s performance as his mother’s arms, and the removal of his red artificial nails before the final surrender. The argument is that color helps transfer authority from a contested religious site to an intimate arrangement in which devotion becomes bodily obedience. The ending interrupts this arrangement without establishing an unmediated or entirely autonomous self. Liberation appears instead as the possibility of refusing one command while entering other relationships of assistance and accountability. This reading locates the film’s religious significance in the reorganization of embodied agency, while distinguishing represented transformation from untested claims about cinema’s therapeutic effects.