It takes 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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
Alex Cothren, a lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University in Adelaide, who recently hosted Enriquez as a writer in home, believed the creative lens of horror writing helped Argentines tackle "real deep traumas".
With so much of her work translated into English, Mr Cothren said Enriquez's work has "exploded" in Australia and other countries.