A screening where the series was made
Netflix has published a new account of how Piedrabuena, a Buenos Aires housing complex, became central to My Sad Dead, the four-part series directed by Pablo Larraín and adapted from Mariana Enriquez’s stories. On October 15, the production held a screening of the first two episodes at Piedrabuenarte, a local cultural center. Residents, cast and crew attended after the show’s San Sebastián presentation and its September 24 Netflix debut. The event itself is a small piece of news, but the production account gives it more substance: the team filmed in Piedrabuena for more than 50 days, used recognizable buildings and streets, and included local residents as extras. The setting is part of the series’ visual logic.
The neighborhood inside the fiction
My Sad Dead follows Ema, a retired doctor grieving her mother who can see and speak with the dead. Netflix describes a world in which ordinary life and the supernatural coexist. Piedrabuena offered a particular geography for that crossing. The complex in the southwest of the city developed between the 1950s and the 1980s and includes blocks, houses and shared spaces. Production designer Rodrigo Basaez says it helped show the meeting of different social realities and carry that contrast into a symbolic register. The water tower becomes one recognizable element in the screen world. These are concrete choices about space, not simply a claim that a real location lends authenticity.
A setting that cannot be swapped
Larraín says a constructed set could not have reproduced the neighborhood’s textures, colors and identity. That statement is a filmmaker’s explanation of his choice; viewers can judge its effect for themselves. It makes sense for a story in which dread is folded into the familiar. A generic shadowy street announces horror before anything happens. An inhabited housing complex has routines, neighbors, distances and lines of sight. Something uncanny in such a place has to contend with the life already there. The camera can make an ordinary stairwell disturbing without pretending it is empty. The difference matters for Enriquez’s material, which often draws unease from social surroundings as well as supernatural events.
The residents on both sides of the camera
The production also changed the relationship between a film crew and its surroundings. Netflix says local residents appeared as extras and that filming became part of the neighborhood’s daily life. The October screening brought the finished work back to people who had made room for it. That does not settle every question about how a production represents a community or what it leaves behind. It does, however, make visible that a location is not raw material waiting for an outside artist. Residents bring their own histories and use the same streets when cameras are gone. A series that relies on those streets has a responsibility to let them remain particular rather than reducing them to an exotic texture.
Why place matters to horror
The casting and adaptation choices connect to that responsibility. Mercedes Morán plays Ema, while the series draws on several Enriquez stories, including the title tale. A character who can hear the dead is an obvious path into grief and memory. In a lived neighborhood, those ideas gain a spatial dimension: buildings hold traces of different eras and everyday encounters make private loss harder to isolate. The housing complex gives grief a physical route through corridors, shared spaces and familiar faces. If the series makes its ghosts part of the social fabric, Piedrabuena can be more than a background. It can help explain why Ema cannot simply step outside her unease.
The value of returning
My Sad Dead is already on Netflix, so the new report is an invitation to look more closely at a completed production rather than a promise of an upcoming release. The local event on October 15 also complicates the usual path of a global streaming title. A show may travel to millions of screens, yet its images still come from particular people and a particular place. Piedrabuena’s residents saw those images together at their own cultural center. The interesting question for viewers elsewhere is whether they can sense that specificity in the series itself: not just a convincing horror atmosphere, but a neighborhood whose ordinary life makes the supernatural feel unsettlingly close.