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.