The Phantom of the Convent (1934)

Original title: El fantasma del convento

Friends Alfonso (Enrique del Campo), Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), and Eduardo’s wife Cristina (Marta Ruel) find themselves lost in the woods at night. A rather creepy man shows them the way to a monastery they have heard curious rumours bordering on fairy tales about. The friends expect the place to be a ruin, but in actuality, it is populated with monks who have taken a vow of silence they occasionally break for exposition. Thus, the ideal place for the trio to stay the night instead of staying lost in the woods.

However, the monastery seems to have a strange influence on the visitors that brings out their repressed desires and the darkest sides of their personalities. Eduardo and Cristina have been quietly lusting after one another for quite some now, but on this night in this place, this desire turns destructive – Cristina turns into a proper femme fatale, while Eduardo just can’t help but stop lying to himself about his feelings and now believes that taking his best friend’s well-being into consideration is rather less important than getting the man out of the way.

When they are not consumed by their private drama, the visitors are spooked by various strange occurrences – monks that seem to disappear where there’s no place for them to disappear to, monks badly hiding their skeletal hands, and a door nailed shut with a cross from behind which horrifying, human cries drift.

The Phantom of the Convent is a very early example of Mexican Gothic horror, featuring motives that would reoccur in movies from the country as a matter of course during the next four decades at least. Here, director Fernando de Fuentes (also responsible for the first Mexican talkie only three years earlier in 1931, or so the Internet tells me) still seems somewhat uneasy with the truly creepy stuff in a couple of scenes, whereas others demonstrate a firm grasp on the proper use of the interplay of light and shadow to create the mood of dream-like strangeness which best occurs in dilapidated surroundings that is so important for this particular style of horror, whatever its country of origin.

There are also rather a lot of hints at one of Mexican popular cinema’s great strengths in the coming decades – the ability to use genre tropes and visual hallmarks of an international tradition and mix them productively with more local interests and ideas. Here, it’s a – to my eyes, nearly a hundred years later, on a different continent – specifically Mexican Catholicism expressing itself through typical Gothic horror monks and the mood of an old-fashioned ghost story. There are also some surprisingly unpleasant looking corpses in the film’s later stages that surprised me to find in a film from 1934, from anywhere, but that are clearly inspired by the same type of mummification process we find in the mummies of Guanajuato.

As it goes with cinema from a very different era, Phantom of the Convent pacing isn’t really to modern tastes – there’s a tendency of scenes to go on a bit too long for my contemporary (non-blockbuster mode) tastes, and the feeling of a film pulling some punches it needn’t have pulled even in 1934, but there’s also a sense of languid, Gothic beauty (a Poe idea of beauty for sure) to The Phantom of the Convent that makes up for these failings in spades.