The Man and the Monster (1959)

Original title: El hombre y el monstruo

Famous pianist Samuel Magno (Enrique Rambal) has retreated from the limelight for mysterious reasons, hiding away in a hacienda on the outskirts of a small Mexican village. He’s ready for some sort of comeback, though. He has arranged the big public reveal of his protégé Laura (Martha Roth), whom he believes to be the Greatest Pianist in the World (piano fans around the world are keeping records and score tables of piano duels, I assume).

Because of this coming attraction, surprisingly two-fisted music critic Ricardo Souto (Abel Salazar) comes to town for an unarranged interview. Magno, living alone with his severe and rather creepy, cat-carrying, mother (Ofelia Guilmáin) and Laura, is very reticent about any attempts of Ricardo’s to speak with him, but Laura is rather smitten by Ricardo (he is played by the writer/producer, after all).

Ricardo for his part stumbles upon Magno’s secret. It concerns the corpse of the former Greatest Pianist in the World (also Martha Roth) locked into a side-chamber, a pact with the devil, and the fact that Magno turns into a furry-faced fiend whenever he plays the piano (because the devil has a weird sense of humour).

As regular readers know, I just love Mexican horror cinema of this era. The Man and the Monster, directed by the often genuinely brilliant Rafael Baledón, is no exception to that rule.

As usual, I find myself particularly delighted by the film’s mixture of genres and tones. At its core, this is of course a contemporized gothic horror version of the Faustian pact (with shades of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, if you want to see it that way, and I certainly enjoy doing that, if only to annoy the squares), but it is also a vigorously played melodrama, as well as the kind of monster movie that includes a wild fist fight between a music journalist and a furry fiend the journalist actually wins.

As is so often the case in his movies, Baledón is a master of drenching rooms into long and deep shadows, of having his characters throw meaningful, heavy glances at the slightest provocation – though provocations here are generally not slight – and of treating the silliest, slightest moments of the script with a heaviness of emotion and expression that to me often seems at the core of what makes Gothic cinema so impressive and expressive.

Baledón is particularly honest about where the visual style of his gothic horror is actually coming from – the nods to Universal cinema and the shadows of a – typically not gothic as we non-academics understand the term – Val Lewton production are there and accounted for (lovely as ever), but there’s also that brilliant, minimalist scene in which Magno flashes back to his pact, emoting in front of a set that’s all classical movie expressionism and could be taken directly from Caligari.

On a subtextual level, this is a film curiously fitting to our times in some regards, seeing as it concerns a man of influence and power first taking control of the life of a young woman to then be able to destroy it for his own convenience. Of course, she is also saved by her two-fisted music critic instead of doing any of her saving  herself, which would not play well in a contemporary movie, but this is still a film made in 1959. And a rather wonderful one at that.

Swamp of the Lost Souls (1957)

Original title: El pantano de las ánimas

Warning: major spoilers for a film that’s going to be older than most people reading this ahead!

The Mexican equivalent of the Old West. Don Mendoza, one of the local Big Men, has died of what is apparently cholera. Thanks to practical good sense, the local graveyard is quite a bit of swamp travel away from town; less great is that the area is supposed to be haunted by the souls of the wicked dead. There’s certainly curious stuff happening: Mendoza’s body disappears between his wife and his suddenly returning stepson wanting a lookaloo at the corpse; and when grandson galops off to fetch his cowboy detective buddy Gastón (Gastón Santos) to explain that particular weirdness, he is ambushed and dies in his friend’s arms. And once Gastón makes his way to his new case, various people are attacked or killed by a gill man style swamp monster.

It is clear early on that there’s a very human kind of conspiracy involved too. Please don’t tell me the supernatural is only faked to scare away superstitious villagers and riding detectives?

As indeed, alas, turns out to be the case in Rafael Baledón’s ranchero horror mystery Swamp of the Lost Souls. The Scooby Doo before there was Scooby Doo-ness of the whole affair is made a bit more disappointing by the fact that Baledón certainly wasn’t a filmmaker opposed to the supernatural as well as by the fact that there are quite a few Mexican movies that mix ranchero (the Mexican parallel genre to the US western) with enthusiastically portrayed supernatural shenanigans.

On the plus side, this does explain the shoddiness of the gill man costume rather nicely. The film’s not a complete loss for us more horror minded viewers anyway, for particularly the film’s first half has a couple of choice scenes of Mexican gothic. The burial sequence is done very well indeed (and by daylight to boot!), really getting an audience into a properly swampy mood, as are the first two or so swamp monster attacks. I’m also rather fond of the high-strung gothic melodrama surrounding the deceased’s wife Doña María (Sara Cabrera) and her rather handy in a pulp adventure lady’s maid Carmela (Lupe Carriles). The good lady does after all try to hide her blindness with the help of a lot of handwringing and contrived plans while still doing a good bit of snooping, all things Carmela is very helpful in doing while throwing a lot of dramatically meaningful glances her boss lady can’t even see.

The ranchero business is very much in the classic white hat against black hat style, with a pretty man dressed up ridiculously making a not terribly interesting hero (as is the tradition with this style of western) but still going through the mandatory bar fights, shoot-outs and chases with enough verve to make them interesting. The mystery elements for their part are enhanced by their minor pulp supervillain vibe, with bad guys that not only concoct plans including a fake gill man but also communicate via hidden portable telegraphs and really like to tie you up and explain their plans to you. There’s also a scene in which the – otherwise perfectly boring – romantic female lead’s horse does a Lassie to fetch Gastón like any good anipal would.

All of which makes it rather difficult for me to dislike Swamp of the Lost Souls, however much I despise Scooby Doo endings, and however creaky some of the film is. Baledón’s way of adding all of his disparate genres and ideas up is just too damn fun to complain about.

Past Misdeeds: Museo Del Horror (1964)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A series of kidnappings of young, beautiful women shakes a Mexican city at the end of the 19th Century (or at the beginning of the 20th?). The police, as they always are in the movies I watch, are clueless, even though a rather less than happy press puts a lot of pressure on them.

Unlike the audience, the police don't even know that the kidnappings are committed by a man with the face of a mummy, wearing a stylish ensemble of slouch hat and black coat, nor do they know that he brings his victims to a comfy graveyard lair where he kills them by tossing a mysterious fluid on them. We are even allowed to have suspects before the police has them. Three men living in the boarding house of Dona Leonor (Emma Roldán) are really rather suspicious, and secretive.

First, there's Professor Abramov (Carlos López Moctezuma), embalmer and hobby taxidermist who really likes to handle parts of human corpses right in his mini lab in the boarding house, and does a lot of creepy, meaningful staring over dinner. Secondly, there's Luis (Joaquín Cordero), once a famous actor before he hurt his leg. Clearly, once you have a limp leg, your acting career is over. Now, Luis owns an old theatre whose backroom carries his new passion - a handful of wax figurines of famous female theatre roles. Our third and last suspect is Raul (Julio Alemán), a young doctor who just happens to make some sort of secret experiments for which he buys human cadavers from the local grave robbers.

Raul is very much in love with Dona Leonor's daughter Marta (Patricia Conde), his childhood friend now working as a nurse in the same hospital as he does. Marta, a rather more independent young woman than typical of a film like this (and consequently an actually likeable female lead), however, has taken rather a shine to Luis, something Raul doesn't exactly change by saying charming things to her like "You only romanticize Luis because he's a cripple!". Grave robber and jerk: serial killer or our romantic lead?

While the young people are sorting out their love lives, further kidnappings and killings happen. The police are finally making their way to the boarding house and actual suspects when the first potential witness to one of the kidnappings is killed there with a curare dart, a method the killer will continue to use on people who know too much. It will still take them quite some time to figure out what's going on, and if not for the consequences of the whole love triangle, the killer would probably never be caught.

In Mexican horror cinema, the influence of the classic Universal horror and assorted movies stayed strong throughout the 40s and 50s, when most national cinemas were more interested in alien invasions. Even in the first half of the 60s, it wasn't at all strange for a Mexican movie like Museo del horror to reach back to Michael Curtiz' Mystery of the Wax Museum (and probably the handful of other wax museum based horror and mystery films), and treat its own version to all the fog and dark graveyards the budget could afford it. See also the love lucha cinema still carried for the classic Universal monsters in the 70s, when the classic Frankenstein monster or Dracula in his guise as a dark-haired foreigner with an excellent cloak had been treated as rather quaint and old-fashioned in their country of origin for decades.

Museo del horror's director Rafael Baledón's career contains so many movies in so many different genres of popular cinema, it's difficult to actually form an opinion about his body of work when one is only interested in about half of the genres he worked in, and can get one's hands on even fewer of his films. What I do know about him is that the gothic horror movies of his I've seen are quite beautiful to look at and accomplished entries in the genre that eschew much of the - generally also wonderful, but in a different way - silliness Mexican directors loved to add to the Gothic tropes.

Despite being at least partly also a mystery, Museo del horror is no exception to that rule, with much love lavished by the director on the obligatory shots of our creepy murderer sneaking through the dark, so many fog-shrouded streets you might think the film is set in movie-London, and shadows and creaking doors wherever you go. It would be interesting to know what contemporary Mexican audiences were thinking about these accoutrements of a very traditional style of horror at this point. Going by the style of films which came soon after, I assume they weren't so much getting tired of old-fashioned monsters and fiends, but were rather looking for a more contemporary (poppier) visual style of filmmaking.

Fortunately, we are now as removed from Baledón's classicist style as we are from the more colourful (and actually filmed in colour) films that came after, so we are in an excellent position to enjoy both styles of filmmaking. The gothic horror parts of Museo del horror make this proposition easy enough, with Baledón hitting every hoary plot beat not in a perfunctory manner, but with the style, class and conviction of someone working within parameters he understands deeply, and clearly loves.

Less successful, and very much perfunctory, are the film's mystery elements. I, at least, find it difficult to imagine anyone - quite independent of her knowledge of other wax museum horror pieces - will be surprised by the identity of the film's killer or his motivation, despite the two red herring suspects the film introduces. In this regard, I was rather surprised by how little the movie explains in the end. We never learn what the actual nature of Raul's suspicious experiments is, nor what the whole business with the mummy face is about, nor how the killer's lair manages to be in two places at once.


In the end, though, I can't say I actually cared about these curious holes in the film's narrative, nor about the mystery's obviousness, for I found myself permanently distracted by the excellent mood of gothic horror Baledón produced.

The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

Original title: La maldición de la Llorona

Somewhere in the Mexican countryside in the 19th Century, or thereabouts. The area is plagued by a series of horrible murders. Victims are found in terrible states – mutilated and without a drop of blood in their veins. The local police seems to have their suspicions about Selma Jaramillo (Rita Macedo), a widow apparently living completely alone in a huge, intensely creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere, being involved somehow, but thus far, there’s no actual evidence beyond the woman acting rather off-handedly, perhaps even a bit gleeful, about all the murders in her direct neighbourhood. We the audience know these suspicions about her are indeed well-founded, for the film’s first scene sees Selma – though with disturbing shark eyes in her face – her dogs and her scarred henchman Juan (Carlos López Moctezuma) making brutal work of some travellers.

Tonight is going to be special night in Selma’s house of horrors. After fifteen years during which she has kept the girl away, she has invited her niece Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her in the house; she has a bit of a nasty surprise waiting as the young woman’s present for her 25th birthday. Amelia also brings a surprise of her own – she is freshly married to the cigar-chomping Jaime (Abel Salazar).

Amelia and Jaime quickly understand that something is very wrong with Selma and her house. A single servant the woman says she’s cut from the gallows and who certainly looks the part, mysterious cries in the house and an unpleasant vision in a mirror are the sort of things that’ll get guests into an ominous mood. And that’s before Selma reveals the horrible truth about their family to Amelia – they are the descendants of La Llorona (which in this version of the legend was an evil, powerful, bloodsucking witch), fated to become just like her. Amelia, says Selma, is cursed to bring La Llorona herself back to life by removing the pike she had been staked with when a bell that hasn’t tolled in ages will strike midnight. Worse still for the young woman, she too will become an evil, bloodsucking fiend, while Jaime, like apparently all men marrying into her bloodline, is doomed to madness.

While Amelia is more than just a little disturbed by all this, Selma is all too happy with her project. After all, following in her ancestor’s (or mother’s, the film isn’t terribly clear about it) footsteps has brought her considerable power and agelessness already; she expects nothing less than “omnipotence” once La Llorona lives again.

As most Mexican genre directors of his era, Rafael Baledón made a huge number of films in all kinds of genres, and as normal for everyone whose output is quite as humongous as his was – I speak from practical experience here – not every single film he worked on was a masterpiece; some were indeed rather bad. However, his best films – and I have by now seen more than a couple that deserve this description – could be outright brilliant.

La maldición certainly is brilliant, as great a Gothic horror film as anything the Italians or Corman made around this time, breathing the mood of bad dreams and cruel fates. Where most Mexican Gothic horror on screen seems to have come to the genre mostly by way of the Universal school (with more or less hefty pulpy elements added to the mix), this entry shows some clear influences by Bava, Black Sunday specifically. Particularly the beginning scenes, the shot of Selma, shark-eyed, surrounded by her attack dogs, and the whole look of the set dominated by broken trees they take place in suggest the iconic shot of Barbara Steele surrounded by her dogs, and the coach sequence at the beginning of Bava’s masterpiece. There are some plot parallels too, but Baledón’s film takes these elements in directions too much of its own for the film ever to become a rip-off.

Baledón’s direction may not be quite on the level of Bava at his best here, yet the film is still full of the mood of dreams and nightmare imagery, putting its characters into a place perpetually dominated by fog and nature that looks broken, twisted and corrupted, trapping them in a house whose series of secret passages and elegantly placed giant spider webs, its stairs leading who knows where suggest the subconscious mind much more than an actual house people would inhabit. The performances fit these places, particularly Macedo playing her Selma much larger than life. But then, how else would you portray the character of a potentially immortal, bloodsucking witch trying to push her niece into fulfilling the family curse?

Apart from the sometimes expressionist sets and camera work suggestive of the otherworldly and the strange, Baledón also has some simple, and brilliant ideas that make the film stranger in all the best ways. Take for example, the scene where Amelia – well on her way to turning evil herself – has a crisis of conscience, and the night sky above her suddenly fills with (animated) eyes; or the one where Selma exposits some of the family history to a hypnotized Jaime but all we see of the flashbacks (which look like scenes from other Mexican horror films as far as I could make out) is in negative form, turning what could be hokey cost-cutting peculiarly disquieting.


Thematically, this is a film very much about an obsession of Gothic literature and cinema (and sometimes weird fiction following it, too, see Lovecraft): the fear of inheritance as a form of fated doom, be it biological inheritance, spiritual inheritance, or a philosophical one, very close to the idea of free will being a mere illusion. Interestingly enough for a Mexican horror film - whose solutions to this sort of conundrum, this being a very Catholic country, usually involve religion or masked wrestlers – this particular horror here is averted by the very earthly love between a husband and a wife, the climax finding Jaime – not at all like a proper macho but rather like a real man – pulling Amelia back from the abyss by pleading with her and declaring his love. Well, he does get to punch Juan afterwards too, but that’s really more an epilogue to help the audience cope with Jaime’s general lack of fighting skill, as is the traditional – and impressive - breakdown of the house where everything took place.

At 4DK: Museo del horror (1964)

Because life makes being a cult movie blogger difficult sometimes, friend and co-agent of M.O.S.S. Todd over at Die Danger Die Die Kill has invited some of his colleagues in our very serious business to fill in with a guest blog or two.

Today, said colleague is me, and I examine Rafael Baledón's Museo del Horror, a beautiful piece of Gothic horror/mystery. While you're at Todd's place, why not take a look at his awesome (in the old sense of the world) archives?

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