The Witch’s Mirror (1960)

Original title: El espejo de la bruja

Elena (Dina de Marco) lives a seemingly carefree life with her husband, Doctor Eduardo Ramos (Armando Calvo), protected by her godmother and the doctor’s housekeeper Sara (Isabelle Corona), who is a real witch – demonic pacts and all – with a nice mirror to see the future in. But when the mirror promises a sad fate for Elena, Sara’s demon master forbids her to act, and Eduardo murders his wife to make room for his new love, Deborah (Rosita Arenas).

Deborah knows nothing of the true nature of her husband, yet Sara still decides to take vengeance on Eduardo through Deborah, with the help of the royally ticked off ghost of Elena. After an increasingly intense heap of gothic spookery descends upon the household, Eduardo accidentally ends up throwing a gas lamp at Deborah, who survives but is horribly disfigured. Eduardo, for once in his life feeling guilty for something, decides to use his medical skills to cure her, or rather, his mad science skills. Skin transplantation from fresh corpses is the name of the game, but he’s even happier when he and his assistant discover a woman who has been buried alive. Why, now he can even transplant a fresh pair of hands to his beloved!

Obviously, the mad science horror and the tale of nasty supernatural vengeance will eventually collide.

In the right week, Chano Urueta was one of the great directors of Mexican genre film; in the wrong one, he made The Brainiac, which is an achievement of a different kind.

The Witch’s Mirror was certainly made when the stars were right, various genre tropes and clichés colliding in manners that become increasingly delirious the longer the film goes on. In a different movie, the scene where Sara and the mirror trick Eduardo into throwing the lamp at Deborah with its gruesome depiction of a woman screaming her lungs out while burning up would be something that happens in the final act; here it’s the point where things just start to become really wild, grave robbery and mad science meeting medical horror of the kind many horror viewers still seem to think was invented for the screen by Eyes without a Face (which is a wonderful film, of course, just not that different on a story level from earlier films, some of them made in Mexico by Urueta) on a collision course with gothic vengeance from the grave. And witches.

It’s the maximalist approach to horror filmmaking, going by the logic – shared by many other Mexican films of the time as well as a decade later by Paul Naschy in Spain – that more sub-genres in one movie are always better. And in a film like The Witch’s Mirror, that approach is perfectly right.

While it’s impossible to not describe the film’s series of set pieces as delirious, Urueta actually seems to have a lot of control about the insane amount of fun and weird stuff he throws at his audience here: while the pacing is fast (the film’s short, after all), Urueta still manages to build up to the more extreme second half with some care, using all the tricks in the gothic book at first. From the deep shadows and threatening frames, the slightly stiff yet highly effective overacting (particularly Corona is a wonder), Urueta works his way up to the more explicit parts like Deborah’s burning (looking really nasty for 1960) and her make-up afterwards. The film also has time for the more human horror: the way Sara hides her hatred behind her calm demeanour, Eduardo’s madness hidden behind his gentility, or the quickness with which Deborah gets over the shock of learning how Eduardo is healing her – everybody in this one has a dark and corrupt side that really only needs to be brought out. This, of course, makes a mirror a very fitting central object of magic here.

As a whole, the film has a curiously amoral, nearly nihilist, vibe to it, with no innocents on screen for any length of time. Why, even Elena stops being innocent after her death. This is rather atypical for Mexican gothic horror at the time, where the demarcations between the guilty and the innocent were usually very clear; most Mexican films of this style would certainly not have countenanced a vengeance plot working on a woman who is innocent until the vengeance has been wrought on her. I’ve seen this interpreted as “Catholic misogyny” but given that the male main characters are murdering graverobbing Eduardo and his money-grubbing accomplice/assistant, I really read it as a very un-Catholic kind of misanthropy. That’s a good thing, mind you.

Apart from all that, the wonderful gothic on a low budget art of the filmmaking results in a movie that’s also plain fun for the refined horror movie fan, at least those among us who like a bit of the grotesque and the mean-spirited in their old-timey horror movies.

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.