The Vampires of Coyoacán (1974)

Original title: Los vampiros de Coyoacán

Warning: there will be some third act spoilers!

A horrifying elderly luchador known as El Espectro (Nathanael León aka Franquestain) kills his opponents in the ring, despite moving as slow as an old man, um, zombie. Apparently, making a habit of this sort of thing is okay per Mexican law as of 1974 as long as it happens in the ring.

While the elderly threat is hanging in the background, lucha heroes Mil Máscaras (Mil Máscaras) and, alas, Superzan (Superzan) are called in by one Dr Thomas (Carlos López Moctezuma) to help him out with a little family problem: his daughter Nora (Sasha Montenegro) is suffering from a strange illness. How strange? The good doctor is utterly convinced she is being targeted by a vampire, who regularly visits her to slowly suck her dry. Mil and Superzan are easier convinced of the supernatural threat than the more sceptical El Santo or Blue Demon would have been, so they are soon staking out creepy mansions, watching a group of little people vampires carrying a coffin through the darkness and wrestling said little people vampires (because this is an Agrasánchez production), as well as hipster vampires. They are ably assisted by paranormal investigator Dr Wells (Germán Robles, cast as a vampire hunter instead of a vampire, probably to confuse us).

And what of El Espectro? He is obviously part of the vampire problem.

If you are into the joyfully cartoonish side of lucha cinema – or like me, into all of its sides, except the one featuring mostly filler or comedians whose shticks don’t translate – Arturo Martínez’ Vampires of Coyoacán is a rather wonderful experience. That is, unless you’re wrestles into submission by its beginning, which features a fifteen minutes lucha sequence with no importance to the film’s plot at all, shortly followed by another one, that at least kicks off the El Espectro subplot. Though it has to be said that the cut-able lucha sequence is dynamically choreographed enough not to put one to sleep, which isn’t always that way in Agrasánchez films.

Following that, it’s all acid rock driven joy: rubber bats, cheap but cheerful Mexican 70s gothic production design lit in all the colours of horror as instituted into law by Maestro Bava in Italy, shot by Martínez with surprising enthusiasm, borrowings from Dracula as well as from Doctor Mabuse, the usual luchadores versus vampires battles, little people that are indeed vampires this time around, luchadores versus younger more gothy/hipsterish vampires (who are even somewhat creepy) business. Whatever you can ask of this sort of thing, the film offers it in spades, all driven by a huge amount of pulpy energy that isn’t always a given at this developmental stage of the lucha genre.

It does of course help that Mil and his funky wardrobe are among the liveliest presences in lucha cinema – that man can dress as well as move – so much so even the dreaded Superzan doesn’t manage to annoy me.

From time to time, the film even makes clear that it is indeed a product of the more downbeat 70s, so you also get elements of a decidedly unhappy ending, where a young vampire woman first murders here father and then, realizing what she’s done, sets herself on fire and dies screaming. Which is quite the thing in a silly movie about luchadores fighting vampires.

El Pueblo Fantasma (1965)

aka Ghost Town

Old Mexico. A mysterious gunman calling himself Rio Kid (Fernando Luján) strikes fear in the hearts of of the best gunslingers roaming the country, for he is seeking them out and killing them one by one with shooting skills that seem to border on the supernatural. There is something truly strange about the man, though. He has been working as a killer of killers for decades now, but still looks like a young man. And the bodies of the men he kills don’t stay buried, but simply disappear.

Manuel Saldívar (Rodolfo de Anda) is searching for Rio Kid. Not like the fools who seek the man out to test their mettle at gunplay and end up dead, but to learn the truth about his father, whom Rio Kid knew decades ago. Manuel’s father, also called Manuel, was a well-known, apparently particularly murderous, bandit. He even has his own corrida damning him, so he was probably a truly special kind of villain. Manuel seems to believe that hearing what Rio Kid has to say about his father will bring him some kind of closure and help him to tolerate the very special treatment most people give the son of a well-known, dead monster; Manuel’s upright, white hat personality isn’t doing the trick.

Our young protagonist manages to find the Kid’s hometown. San José was once a prosperous place but has been taken over by an air of doom, gloom and gothic decay. Only a few people live there still; they tend to avoid their famous co-inhabitant. Manuel does get a foot in the proverbial door of the town when he helps out Don Néstor Ramírez (Carlos López Moctezuma) in the desert. Néstor is just returning from a ten year stint in jail for a crime he didn’t commit and for which he holds Rio Kid responsible. He plans on taking vengeance on the man, but clearly doesn’t have a prayer against him.

While he’s in town, Manuel discovers that the case of Rio Kid might be even stranger than it appears on first view. Not only does the man not age, he is also bulletproof, can appear and disappear without a noise or trace, and only comes out at night. He’s also as malevolent as they come, so Manuel is bound to get into trouble with him.

Despite some flaws, Alfredo B. Crevenna’s El pueblo fantasma (which translates as “The Ghost Town”) is a nice entry into the Weird Western – or Weird Ranchero – genre. There are certain parallels to the US Weird Western Curse of the Undead in the nature and some of the habits of its villain, but this does turn out to be very much its own thing.

The film’s first half is quite a bit weaker than the rest of it, mostly because Crevenna (or Alfredo Ruanova’s script) has decided to squeeze most of the film’s comic relief and musical numbers into the first couple of acts. Which keeps the more dramatic parts of the film free from this sort of thing, but also makes the narrative’s beginning somewhat slower than it needs to be. Half of the musical bits are at least relevant to the plot – Manuel’s reaction to his father’s corrida is certainly important; there are no such explanations for the supposed comedy to be had.

Once the film gets into its groove, it does show some unique ideas on how to mix its very traditional Western/ranchero elements with its horror heart: there is a late scene that takes place after Rio Kid and Manuel have officially declared their enmity where the vampire (that’s not a spoiler, right?) publicly humiliates our hero by letting a frightened blind singer weakly sing parts of the corrida that doesn’t end in the final showdown but in a truly frightened Manuel getting the local sheriff to lock him up for the night for protection. This is absolutely not how you do this sort of thing in a Western, but works incredibly well in emphasizing how much the film’s vampire breaks the rules of the film world it is moving through, transgressing against genre borders as he does against human beings.

Luján’s portrayal of the vampire gunslinger is atypical and interesting as well. He’s not going for a big, charismatic Christopher Lee approach, but instead turns Rio Kid into a quiet, soft-spoken man, whose capital-E evil nature is hidden under what at first feels like reserve, but later begins to read as the sort of distanced calm you’d expect of a corpse. This does turn our undead gunslinger into an appropriately creepy villain whose malevolent influence on the world – certainly the town he calls his home – is believably hidden in plain sight.

De Anda’s performance works surprisingly well with and against Luján’s performance. Manuel’s acquired Western programmer white hat poise and his genuine fragility make a very human contrast to Rio Kid’s inhumanity.

Crevenna was generally at least a solid director in all of the dozen or so genres he worked in during a long career in Mexican popular cinema. Here, he certainly understands both of his film’s main genres, so there’s a solid foundation of stage bound B-Western filmmaking on which he can build a gothic house of horror (sorry). The film has a couple of very atmospheric moments. An early scene where Manuel crosses the shadow-heavy town at night is a fine example, or Rio Kid’s very traditional way of exiting his sarcophagus. Once the film goes all out on being a vampire movie, things evolve even more: the Kid’s attack on the the singer Carmen (Julissa), with Néstor’s attempt to fight him off that ends in him losing his mind when the vampire doesn’t react to bullet wounds is a very fine injection of Gothic horror into Western tropes indeed.

I’d have been happy with a film about vaqueros against vampires, but I’m certainly not going to complain about El pueblo fantasma adding a degree of thoughtfulness and rather a lot of gothic atmosphere to the proceedings.

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.