Past Misdeeds: Una Rata En La Oscuridad (1979)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Two sisters are moving into a rather shabby looking old dark house. Josefina (Ana Luisa Peluffo), the older of the two, has taken the role of replacement mother for her sister Sonia (Anais de Melo), although that doesn't seem to discourage her from practicing a rather problematic kind of sisterly massage women practice. When they are not having pillow fights or pyjama parties.

As is so often the case with old dark houses, strange things begin to happen to the sisters. At first, it's just the appearance of an unnaturally persistent rat (played by an anonymous rat method actor of the highest calibre), or the shadow of a woman (Ricardo Cortes) roaming the house - the simple spooky things. Soon the strange activities begin to increase. The camera and the furniture develop an unpleasant tendency to shake, and the female shadow turns out to belong to a transvestite sneaking through the house. The sneaker being a transvestite (or a cross dresser, the film really isn’t going into details here, or anywhere) seems to be supposed to be something of a twist reserved for the film's ending, but it should be quite obvious to anyone with eyes, so I see no reason not to spoil the "surprise".

A bit later, our transvestite friend begins to grope Sonia in her sleep, which the woman enjoys quite a bit. After their night of sweet sweet copulation, Sonia doesn't want to leave her bed anymore, develops a drinking (in bed, oh no!) habit and tells Josefina that she wants to kill her. Later still, Sonia actually tries her luck at strangling her sister. But don't worry, Josefina will live and she will get some of that sweet sweet groping love too. In fact, Josefina will do her sister one better and dream of doing jazz dance during her big sex scene.

Alas, it all will have to end in tears and more flying furniture.

I don't know much about the state of Mexican horror cinema at the end of the 70s when Una Rata was made, but going by the film's rather impoverished look and the way other Mexican genre movies of the time I’ve seen worked out, it's not much of a stretch to theorize that it was in its death throes. There's an aura of shabbiness surrounding everything I find all too typical of the products of film industries which have seen better days.

Una Rata is one of only a handful of films directed by Alfredo Salazar, brother to Mexican genre film impresario Abel Salazar and writer of just about every horror or lucha movie made in Mexico not written by Fernando Oses, and on one hand, it's not much of a surprise he didn't direct too many films. Salazar's style is just a bit too dry, the pacing of his film just a bit too much on the slow side (even by the rather relaxed standards of Mexican filmmaking of this type), his talent for mood-building just a bit too skewed to the patently weird side of the tracks. On the other hand, Salazar - at least in this film - seems much more interested in making a film bound to entertain its audience than many of his contemporaries, who all too often were making strings of filler instead of movies.

Fortunately, Una Rata is heavily influenced by the wild and weird world of Italian 70s horror in just about every aspect, and I for one can't find fault with the decision to at least make a mind-blowing film when you can't make a "good" one.

The recreation of Italian horror taking place here is a highly successful one and only begins with a soundtrack of perfect mock-Goblin quality, random moments of sleazy lingering on naked female bodies and the over-heated melodramatics of the acting. The core experience of Italian-style horror does of course not lie in in minor things like the soundtrack, a bit of inappropriate nudity, or hysterics, but in a film's insistence of making no sense whatsoever.

Salazar's film is especially successful in this regard. The film doesn't answer even a single question it brings up, gives no explanation for anything that is happening and does not care a lick about character motivations. In short, the sort of viewer who complains about the (imagined) lack of explanations in the finale of Lost would probably go mad from frustration watching this like a Lovecraft character having read his family tree. Who is the transvestite? Why is he doing what he does? Is he an actual transvestite or just a guy dressing up as a woman to disguise himself for some reason? What's up with the portrait of a woman the camera and Sonia's gaze linger so lovingly on? Is the rat causing the telekinetic phenomena? Salazar and the film don't tell, and frankly, I don't think Salazar knows or cares as long as his film causes its viewers to stare in disbelief and befuddlement.


I'm quite sure Una Rata En La Oscuridad's main goal is to trap its viewers in this blessed state of perpetual confusion, and man, does it ever.