October may not be the time when you look to our neighbor Mexico, but, mi hombre raro cinéfilo maybe you should start. They got crazy masked wrestlers fighting vampire women, la Lorna, a vengeful ghost who drowned her babies and then wails in grief and kills people; a middle aged female insane asylum patient with the strength of ten men; a dueling pair of sisters one an evil vampire, the other a beuena fuerte flaca con a cruz grande who ends up being the one who stakes the male vampire, not the hero, and frequent scenes where a monster breaks into a woman's boudoir while she's sleeping and rather than fainting she reaches into her nightable drawer, grabs her gun, and fires at them, scaring them off and sometimes wounding them -then going back to bed like it ain't no thang. And etc. Strong matriarchal through line, is what I'm getting at. Oodles of atmosphere, no frills, and if you love the 1931 Dracula, but have you've seen so many times you can do a one man show of it without even needing a script, (Bela is finally artist of the month on TCM!) and wish they stayed at the castle instead of going to London, then viola! And if you love Mario Bava, double viola!
Even when these mid-60s Mexican horrors were good, they were a blast. But when they were bad, sublime. I collated a YouTube playlist, Mexico De Macabre, so there you are/
CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN
(La maldición de la Llorona)
(1963) Dir. Rafael Baeldon
But one thing wasn't in the cards: Amelia brought her new husband, Haime (producer Abel Salazar), who is never without a giant erect cigar in his mouth, hinting perhaps at their luna de miel interrumpia. Seriously, that cigar, and his perfectly pressed clothes, is kind of ridiuclous but it works on that lievel Instead of a nice honeymoon, Amelia is realizing her destiny is to pull a spear out of her great great-great abuela's chained, desiccated corpse (above) at the stroke of midnight--which is in a few hours! She can't fight destino. And in this case, destino means her eyes going jet black whenever the moon is full (and not obscured by clouds), flashing back to a solarized tour of their lineages evil via clips from El Mundo des vampires, la Momia Azteca, and the next two films in this post: El Hombre y la Monstruo; and almost strangling a passing wagoner as he rolls through the fog and gnarled trees on the road past the hacienda. Seriously, does anyone ever make it past that place? You'd think the local policia might hear the dogs growling and the evil aunt flying around, and the deformed clubfooted servant (she rescued him from the gallows, so he's very loyal) and finally they knock on the door, and are immediately torn to shreds by the dogs, which for some reason the cops with their guns out, are too slow to shoot. They froze! They're dead. End of. the cops.
This Lorona everything I love about classic horror and what made me such a fan of Mexican classic horror: big atmospheric soundstage forests full of fog and twisted branches to evoke trees, a whole leneage of powerful, evil women villains; and a short 'all in a night' time tick-tockable time span; haunted mirrors, a clever use of overlay (the la Lorona ghost appears over her corpse like she's merging in and out of her shell); a soundtrack of almost constant ethereal howling, whispering wind and weird slide whistle/theremin rising and falling, as if the wind regularly hits a long and twisted drain pipe in just the right way; spider webs; big rubber bats; an evil knife-throwing servant pretending to have a club foot (he always looks like he's walking upstairs, except when he's actually walking up stairs) and nary a trace of realism, daylight, morality, religion, or convention or any of the other stuff US censors would have demanded had this been made in the US. Horror movies should all start at sunset and end at dawn, if ya ask me! And this one doesn't even take that long - it's practically real-time with crosscuts from the women in the basement, and Haime investigating a plaintive scream from up in the bell tower. which the servant doesn't approve of, so pushed Haime over the banister. And guess who's up there in that prison cell, all deformed and hideous and pitiful? And who eventually steals the whip from the servant and busts out to go on a vicious rampsge? It gets pretty battle of the sexes wild; the dysfunctional boys upstairs with their insanity, deformities, and tobacco addictions, crosscutting with the three super powerful witches down in the basement, about to take over the world. In the northern devil movies, matriarchal lineages of witches are generally destroyed by one brave hombre with a cross and a smug patriarchal attitude while the women are all either devouring mothers, demure innocents or sexy 'recruiters.' With Curse of the Crying Woman we have one of the few where there are none of the three. The male gaze isn't indulged or challenged, or even exploited, but totally ignored.
There's a big thing going on with eyes -- Selma's eyes turn jet black in moonlight; a failed attempt by the make-up artist to seem inky, but she just looks like she's wearing black eye patches or closed eyes with lids painted black. It's not convincing but is unnerving. She seems truly unhinged. Ask a Latina to play amok evil and you get a force of nature out of reach of most other actresses, great as they may be. It's just a whole different level of emotion. You can totally see the way the original La Lorna could kill her kids in an jealous rage, and then lament their loss so loudly she's heard clear around the world. The results are far grimmer than anything we'd get in North America or Europe--and we never quite recover from the blunt force shock of that opener. Even the flaws are creepy. The matte colored black eyes, the soundstage insolation clearly visible behind the rickety stairs to the top of the tower, the wagging tales of the dogs in the rapid cuts of dog mouths slobbering on glass panes, screaming gendarmes, and happy dogs out for treats, all snapped together in a howl of quick cuts--the results manage to magically becomes an unnerving Dionysian sparagmos and humane endearment distancing.
As Selma, Rita Macedo avoids extremes without ever straying from her unrepentant evil stance, which is hard to do. Neither young nor old, stridently witchy, wanton or feigning innocence, she has a look that's snobby rather than sinister. It's like she saw how restrained Gloria Holden was in Dracula's Daughter--her closest relative in classic horror, and got so disgusted she vowed not to make the smallest feint towards censor-placating regret or longing to be good instead of evil and to love some smug patriarchal shrink, eager to give up her power in favor of a 'traditional' role as a housewife. And yet, she's very low-key haughty mixed with soapy sanctimonious faux emotion, a habit facing downwards and away from her scene partner, that Mexican soap opera cheating out which was once probably her doing 'demure' at the advance of a landowner or his son and now it just seems stuck-up/haughty, saying, almost boasting she rescued her deformed servant from being hanged for murder, or multiple murders that he did do, with the same bourgeois disregard as she might say, "my dear, the party was filled with the most common kinds of people" in a 'normal' movie. We can scarcely believe her evil as we're so used to the extremes of denial/deception or evil overacting, when someone gives us full evil while staying demure and aloof is so fresh it takes a few beats to react. The whole movie is kind of like that, which is why we're still getting over that opening shock during the rest of the movie, and getting over the rest of the movie never, but hey, we can go back and try again, and visit all the other Mexican horror films seen in the solarized tour of la Lorna's cursed lineage via a history of Cinematographica ABAS' other/earlier films: El Mundo des vampires, la Momia Azteca, El Hombre y la Monstruo and..
THE BLACK PIT OF DR. M
"Misterios de ultratumba"
(1959) Dir. Fernando Méndez
A movie both quiet and bombastic, a score rife with pounding timpani, a very large and empty expressionist dance/cafe, and a lush hacienda insane asylum --what could go wrong? Dr. Aldama lays dying in one of the rooms, while the tactless Dr. Mazali (Rafael Bertrand), the owner/director demands he follow up on their mutual promise that the first to die will arrange a means by which the other may experience death without dying. While a priest and colleague look on aghast, Mazali makes sure the last words he hears are Aldama's declaring his soul not rest in peace until this agreement is fulfilled. A pretty difficult thing to ask a dying man, especially as tactlessly and urgently as Masali does. But hey - a graveyard shovel shot later, his colleague’s spirit speaks through a medium during a seance to give him the date and time at which "a door will close in front of you, opening the way to the beyond".
There's no pit to be found unless you mean symbolically, or consider a grave a pit, or that big well/fountain in the center of the lush atmospheric garden sanitarium, the standing soundstage hacienda here it's at its most invitingly fecund and ultra-spooky under evocative high-contrast Stanley Cortez-style black-and-white cinematography of Victor Herrera.
Aldama's ghost's first stop: Patricia (Mapita Cortés) the daughter he abandoned, now a beautiful modern dancer at the cavernous, underpopulated dream cafe--- a perfect example of liminal space), telling her of a box she shall inherit hidden in the sanitarium, sending her towards destiny in an elaborate chain of coincidence that will fulfill his colleagues the macabre request and lead her to love with some handsome young doctor caught in the wheels of destiny. First, Dr. Mazali must contend with as seriously deranged a female mental patient as you've never seen before or since, a justifiably embittered acid-scarred orderly, and his own gnawing love for the comely dancer daughter of the man he wouldn't let die in peace. Pobrecito!
What a movie...
Take back one kadam due to the overuse of Gustavo César Carrión bombastic score (that big timapanii roll and thunderous Da-da DA!! (Zarathustra-esque timapani roll). Da...da-DA! (Zarathustra-esque timapani roll) is great the first 20 times, but after that....) Another kadam taken due to a bland daylight pastorale scenes of Masali walking to a nearby church with Patricia, and her budding love for the age-appropriate new intern (the old triangle..), But soon enough all of them, and everyone else, are swallowed up by that screaming, dark, hushed mood, expressionistic lighting and ultimately satisfying, frenzied climax --you can almost visualize it as a final splash page panel in an old EC comic, the other doctors saying "gasp!' and 'choke!' as the full measure of ironic horror is unveiled. Best of all is that high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, which wraps it all up in so many inky shadows and twisty fecund corridors, It's so clear that Mendez and Herrera have seen and loved the early Freund-shot Universal horrors as well as the Tourneur-Lewtons, honoring them in their devotion to thick Halloween-ready atmos. And remember: "science and art are equal!"
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