Spooks South of the Border

Mexican film making appears to be the most active of the Hispanic industries but outsiders continue to ignore it. We know it's there because observers, who would never go in, pass their U.S. Spanish language theatres and international celebrities occasionally have worked in their films - Toshiro Mifune, Alida Valli, John Carradine, Max Von Sydow.  Mexican cinema broke into the festival circuit a couple of times, once after World War II, with the films of Emilio Fernández, María Félix, Pedro Armendáriz and others. More recently, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón launched Gael García Bernal.  

Mexican trash cinema is more relevant for our purposes - fat comedians slapping the bottoms of naked women, Latino kung fu fighters and masked luchadore wrestlers.  Mexican monster movies penetrated VHS, notably with the collection that K Gordon Murray dubbed for the 'States. However the history, nature and quality of the country’s vast output remains largely mysterious.

A corner of the curtain has been pulled back with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the Film Project restoring two nineteen-thirties titles alongside their more austere ventures.

Ramon Peron’s 1933 la llorona (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwtlaAV) is said to be the first example of the Horror films which became a staple of the busy Mexican film business. It is clearly intended for the market that was absorbing the contemporary Hollywood entries. Among the Spanish language parallel versions of the first sound films, George Medford’s Dracula, shot on the decors of the Lugosi version, would have been an obvious model. Peron’s film got points locally for utilising Mexican subject matter, the legend of the wronged woman who becomes a weeping, child-drowning ghost.  The story comes back at regular intervals in their country’s films.

This production is clearly the work of people still learning sound filmmaking.  It is too slow and drab to be more than a curiosity for most of its run time. Severely padded, not unlike the first feature-length silents, this one kicks off with one of its unnecessary subplots, where a man passing a cemetery gate is terrorized by the Llorna shriek - CU of face with rictus grin and dissolve from the victim’s hand on the footpath to it on a sheet in the operating theatre. 

Ramon Pereda, the doctor there, goes home, where all is not well. His young son is enjoying his birthday party, unaware that he is menaced by the family curse, which claimed an earlier member at his age, while a sinister hooded figure with an Aztec ring is using secret passages that no one seems to have noticed.

In the library (a bookcase, a desk and a couple of suits of armor) Paco Martinez, the boy’s grandad, reads the story of the viceroy-era ancestor (also Pareda) who wouldn’t acknowledge his out-of-wedlock child, to the anguish of the kid’s mom, Adriana Lamar. In the street, frill collar foot-pads set upon Pareda in an unequal sword fight (passable choreography but dull choice of angles). Witness Marquis Alberto Marti comes to his aid, sending them on their way. Turns out that the aristo. is an admirer of Lamar and takes a dim view of the faithless lover, starting another duel.

     La llorna - wedding

Dastardly Pereda marries better in a lengthy church service and doubles back to collect his child from what he sees as his own house. In the ensuing friction, the mother dies and flies off as a double-exposed ghost. Back in the then-present, we get more action from the hooded figure, comic retainer Carlos Orellana  and  servants who have been in the family for generations. It’s time for Martinez to crack open another book of which the contents are represented by double-exposed shots of steel helmet conquistadors montaged rotating. Grandpa is killed with a stubby antique knife and the cops are called but the black hood figure makes off with the child,  placing it on the Aztec altar in the cellar, before the good guys catch up with them. Police inspector Alfredo del Diestro proclaims that there was no ghost, only to see a manifestation of La Llorna.

La llorna : secret passage

Simple minded stuff with a nasty/tacky quality not unlike like Edgar Ulmer’s contemporary U.S. The Black Cat, nothing particularly imaginative or accomplished here. Their Llorna doesn’t even weep let alone drown children, though it does manage the character’s shriek.  

However the second recovered piece, the following year’s El fantasma del convento/The Phantom of the Monastery (https://ok.ru/video/6739623611120) is a genuinely scary movie, more so than its Hollywood prototypes were prepared to be, and a distinct advance. Put that down to the Mexican industry’s growing experience and the promotion of  Fernando  De Fuentes from script collaborator to writer-editor-director, confirming his status as their leading pre-WW2 film maker. We are lucky that it arrives in an impressively restored, English-subtitled copy.

        Carlos Villatoro & Ruel

Credits cut straight to leads, elegant Marta Ruel with husband Enrique del Campo and their friend Carlos Villatoro stumbling about in some studio bushes, which the film assures us are a ravine. They look for shelter to Victorio Blanco, the cowelled monk encountered with his huge dog and he ushers them to the nearby monastery (locating long shots don’t match) where they get the whole treatment - vows of silence and separate cells, the shadow of a bearded monk flagellating, mummified hands, a meal that turns to ashes, a door barred with a decaying wooden cross and a Jeremiah quotation, and a howling wind which sends the anguished monks into despair.  Blacno & the dog, who Prior Martinez (la llorna’s grandad) told them didn’t exist, show up - don’t ask!

We get the backstory of Brother Rodrigo, who deployed a satanic book to steal the wife of his friend and who the monks attempt to contain in the closed cell.

Villatoro

When the visitors turn in, things get really spooky with the inexplicable bat shadow on the wall (an ingenious deployment of the film’s glass shot technology). Villatoro’s lusting for Ruel parallels that of the cursed Rodrigo. When he finds the barred cell open, he uncovers a shrouded body (clumsy face make up) wlth a shrunken hand which falls on the book beside it - and Ruel arrives, desire gleaming in her eyes.

Comes the dawn and the disturbed trio encounter jolly caretaker José Ignacio Rocha, who assures them there are no monks there and shows them the inexplicably decayed dining hall (which still has the accusing word “corbade” Ruel scratched on the long table) and a vault with the mummies of long-dead monks. The trio exit into sunny rural normalcy.

Despite the limitations of Mexico’s early sound filmmaking (dodgy make-up and wardrobe and some unsteady pacing evident), this one mounts to the genuinely disturbing scene in the finally opened cell. The film has an intensity that its US models couldn’t or wouldn’t match. Fuentes had mastered ignoring logic and narrative in favour of atmosphere and shock. It is not the simple-minded affair it resembles with Ruel’s cynical take on events set against formula elements. “Quien sabe?”

Long before The Exorcist, Mexican cinema had brought into play the exploitation potential of Catholicism -  religious robes & ceremony, damnation, scourging, crucifixion, resurrection. A comparison between this film and European Biblical movie drama makes a viewer sharply aware of differences. La Llorna has its extended Cathedral marriage and a third restored film, Juan Bustillo Oro’s Dos Monjes is also set in a Monastery. My favorite touch in Fernand Méndez' 1957 El Vampiro is the disinterred aunt who spends the whole film proffering a giant ceramic crucifix.  Mix this with indigenous religion, as in The Day of the Dead.  When it came to a battle of imageries, contemporary Marxist states were totally upstaged. Best they could manage was a few Union Parade banners or maybe a panorama of hands raising rifles above the heads of the crowd.

Fantasma - Martinez, Del Campo, Ruel & Villatoro with Last Supper mural.

The personnel on these films continued working into the fifties and beyond. Generally, despite determined effort, I’ve never been able to see their other work, about which I remain curious. De Fuentes' excellent Vamonos con Pancho Villa did slip into my grasp a few years back, another film that is not as simple-minded as might be expected. That makes the current discoveries more valuable than they might be. The fact that The Ghost of the Monastery proved remarkable is a nice bonus. It really is time that I tried to track down Fuentes's other work. 

Santo's Mummies of Guanajuato -  compare Fantasma.

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Barrie Pattison 2025.