Fill In The Blank: multigenerational family curse

For the seventh day of this week of thrills and excitement we have two more fine films from the Churubusco-Azteca studios especially for the ladies:

Espiritismo (1962) is a domestic melodrama with a devilish twist. Mom and Dad are just celebrating their big anniversary and are extra happy because the mortgage on the house is finally paid off, and they feel they can ignore the dire warnings they got at that Ouija board party they went to the week before. Along comes junior who needs eight grand to start a crop dusting business and if they loved him they would mortgage the house again. Things don't seem to be working out after that and they are going to lose the house unless drastic actions are taken, so it seems like the natural thing to do is join a spiritualist cult and call upon the dark forces for aid. This takes the form of an emissary from the devil bringing Pandora's Box which, as you recall, contains a Crawling Hand that grants you your desires. Mom runs the show here, always puffing on a cig and ranting, and poor Dad can only tag along and watch the world fall apart. How it all turns out isn't too surprising. This is kind of slow and talky and is intended to appeal primarily to the housewife of those days, but it keeps a steady pace of mysterious events leading up to the inescapable conclusion that she shouldn'ta done that thing.

That's Pandora's box on the table between them but the cool thing is the shadow of the lamp on the wall behind her. I have this thing about seeing the shadow of something that should actually be emitting light. It's crazy, I know. I'm just nuts about lighting. Look how they hit that chair in the background to establish that the space goes all the way back there.

I found it interesting from a sociological standpoint; the attitudes expressed by the characters regarding their social standing and economic security, with The House being the big thing in their lives which keeping or losing meant their happiness and survival. Which may not be the way you want your horror movie to come across. This was a K. Gordon Murray release, dubbed in Florida by Floridians for the edification of the English speaking world, and it is the first time I have ever heard the narrator of a movie or anyone else use the word "quelch." Apparently the aim of this movie is to quelch our desire to get involved with Ouija boards and summoning the spirits of the dead. WELL IT DIDN'T WORK.

El maldicion de la Llorona (1963) a.k.a. Curse of the Crying Woman, is a real rip-snorter. You never know what is going to happen next. It's a multigenerational family curse story, the curse of an ancestor who made a deal with the devil to gain youth and power, with the catch being that to keep her youth and power she had to keep committing the most terrible crimes she could. This didn't go down well with the community. Most families don't keep the spear-transfixed skeleton of their most evil ancestor in the basement awaiting the day the youngest member of the clan turns 25 and pulls out the spear to bring her back to life, but this one does. And guess what. Home comes the young niece of the family who is exactly 24 and 364/365ths years old. All kinds of crazy stuff happens then. The aunt comes flying into the basement like a hideous skeleton and gets these empty eye sockets sometimes, and she's got no reflection and the niece loses her reflection the closer it gets to the fatal hour and the uncle they said was dead is actually a half human beast chained up in the bell tower but he GETS OUT when the club-footed scar-faced lackey goes up there to give him a GOOD BEATING, the dogs are let out to KILL POLICEMEN, and MIDNIGHT IS FAST APPROACHING. It's one nutty thing after another, and it all takes place in one night of terror.

You can see they light the hell out of everything and it all looks really great and spooky. They don't spare the horrors and rats and cobwebs and groping hands and sudden shocks. What's funny is that when they do the flashback explanation of the origin of the family curse they show it all in negative and a bunch of the scenes they use are a nonsensical jumble of shots from El mundo de los vampiros. I thought it was funny anyway. Oh yeah, the niece has a husband too but the great thing is he spends most of the movie in peril and really only gets useful when it comes to the climactic scenes when someone is needed to brawl with the club-footed scar-faced lackey. It's all about the ladies here and it's great. Rita Macedo as Aunt Selma is creepy as hell, always seeming weirdly elated over her evil power and not hesitating to do whatever she needs to do to achieve her wicked goals.

This concludes our week of holiday cheer and I wish you and yours all the joys of this wonderful Halloween season. Just be careful who wears the pants in the family, that's all.

Suffering sometimes brings rewards, and two nights of crap make a good night that much more pleasant.

El mundo de los vampiros (1961) was written by Alfredo Salazar, and directed by Alfonso Corona Blake who went on to bless the world with Santo Versus the Vampire Women and Santo in the Wax Museum. In the case of Sr. Blake I can assert that this movie right here was the greatest thing he ever did, probably. I have seen more vampire movies than I can count and I have never seen one quite like this. Filmed on the startlingly large and elaborate well-lit sets of Churubusco Azteca, it has a great look from the very first shot of a hand groping out of a slowly opening coffin. Multigenerational family curses seem to be a feature of Mexican horror stories, and this one is the three hundred year vengeance curse of Count Sergio Subotai, Vampire, against the descendants of the Colman family, and if he doesn't get his vengeance venged right now he will have to wait another hundred years. Another feature of these stories is hairy-handedness - when you get vampire bit the first sign of impending vampirism is you get hair on your hands. That is the universal sign of something going wrong in your life, when you get hair on your hands, because the next thing you know you are going to get claws and probably a big hairy pig nose and soon you will be running around in a cape and top hat going RAAAAAR! That doesn't happen in this though, I am just talking. You can forget about the plot and just watch the crazy things happening - the Bone Organ, the Pit of Impalement, the mob of stupid looking masked sub-vampires and spooky looking she-vamps, the fortuitous appearance of an expert on the psychological effects of music. And this:

I like to fell over when I saw this insanely wonderful human-headed bat. I have never seen that before ever. I have also never seen the main vampire suddenly in the middle of the big fight inexplicably grow big furry bat ears. To help him fight. Every minute of this movie is full of great stuff to see, even if it is just the imaginative way the big fancy set is lit - it's as gorgeously filmed as any great Hollywood b-movie of the 1940s. This is going on my list of all time favorite horror movies, second only to El espejo de la bruja (The Witch's Mirror). I have used up all my raving and will just fill this out with absolute proof of my assertions in the form of these images: