Luna Nera, o Escolhido, Jinn. Netflix and Narratives of the Supernatural between Local Seriality and Global Imaginary

Abstract

The fantastic has long been a distinctive feature of Anglo-American popular culture. This narrative mode has a strong religious content due to its specific genre codes. Today, Netflix, through its geographical reach and multi-territorial commissioning strategy, enables the dissemination of the fantastic in numerous popular cultures around the world. Using the framework of the mediatisation of religion, this paper focuses on a specific dimension of the fantastic: the supernatural. More specifically, this paper addresses three Netflix ‘local’ fantastic television series – Luna Nera, O Escolhido and Jinn – that are grounded on the supernatural. All three draw on religious elements from local cultures, but all three transpose them into a universal supernatural storytelling. This paper aims to examine these series in order to understand how Netflix’s ‘local’ fantastic narratives, aimed at both local and global audiences, tend to renegotiate local religious imaginaries in favour of a global mediatised religious imaginary.