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.