Editorials
Intro to Mexican Horror: 8 Must See Horror Films
Since 1993’s Cronos, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro quickly became synonymous with horror hailing from Mexico. More recent releases like Issa Lopez‘s Tigers Are Not Afraid, Emilio Portes‘s Belzebuth, and even Gigi Saul Guerrero‘s Culture Shock indicate an emerging new class of talented genre contemporaries. While that’s exciting for horror’s future, there’s already a vast, rich history of Mexican horror worth exploring—a world of genre films that reinterpret culture, history, and national traumas through the horror lens.
El Santo and his respective film series that saw the luchador take on vampires, mummies, and monsters made luchadores famous on a broader scale. Still, for every El Santo movie, there’s a horror gem awaiting discovery. So much so that it can be difficult knowing where to begin. Here’s a brief, helpful primer to help get you started. One quick caveat before we start; Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s Santa Sangre is absolutely worth checking out but missed out on this primer for being a co-production and much more well-known than the other films on the list.
Two Monks (1934)
If you want to start at the beginning, you begin with Juan Bustillo Oro‘s filmography, the father of Mexican horror. When dramas and westerns were all the rage, the prolific filmmaker focused on genre storytelling. Two Monks, aka Dos monjes, tells the nonlinear tale of the rivalry between Javier and Juan. Set in a Gothic monastery, Oro employs a heavy German Expressionist style for his violent narrative told from two different perspectives. It’s moody and minimalist, biding its time in revealing the truths behind the men’s opposition. While the Oro-penned The Phantom of the Convent (1934) is much more firmly in the realm of horror, the Oro-written/directed Two Monks gives a better grasp on the filmmaker and is more easily accessible thanks to Criterion.
El vampiro (1957)
Director Fernando Méndez and writer Ramón Obón brought the classic bloodsucking monster to Mexico, marking its first vampire movie. The plot sees a young woman returning to her small hometown to make funeral arrangements for her aunt. When rumors begin circulating that a vampire infestation has taken root, she suspects her suave new neighbor, Count Karol de Lavud (Germán Robles). The Vampire proved highly popular and influential, ushering in a Mexican wave of horror classics. It’s also worth highlighting that El vampiro starred Abel Salazar, the native genre equivalent to icons Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee. Salazar also stars in two additional features on this list; The Black Pit of Dr. M and The Curse of the Crying Woman.
The Black Pit of Dr. M (1959)
To hammer home just how integral and prolific Director Fernando Méndez and writer Ramón Obón were to Mexico’s genre output in the ’40s and ’50s, this one is an underseen masterpiece of Gothic horror. Occupying the same space as Mario Bava or Val Lewton’s Gothic work, The Black Pit of Dr. M is a moody, haunting feature that makes excellent use of shadows and composition. As for the plot, two doctors make a pact that whoever dies first will return to tell the other the afterlife’s secrets. Because it’s horror, things don’t end well for many of its characters. There’s melodrama, there’s tragedy, and of course, there’s plenty of surprising terror.
Macario (1960)
Macario marks the first Mexican film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Directed and co-written by Roberto Gavaldón, the film follows its eponymous character desperate for a meal on the Day of the Dead. When his wife cooks him turkey, he’s visited by the three apparitions of the Devil, God, and Death. All ask Macario to share his meal, but he refuses each- save for Death. In return, Death grants him a potion that can cure the sick. Macario uses it for selfish gain, earning him a trip to the underworld. It’s a gorgeous and well-crafted Faustian fantasy.
The Curse of the Crying Woman (1961)
Also known as La Maldición de la Llorona, this loose telling of the legend is highly underseen outside of Mexico. It’s a fantastic gothic gem that borrows a lot from Mario Bava (Black Sunday, in particular). The plot follows Selma, who has summoned her niece Amelia to her mansion to claim it as part of an inheritance. It soon becomes clear that Amelia has been lured into playing a role in the family’s curse and reviving the witch La Llorona. This one has witches, bats, gothic set pieces, and imagery that feel straight out of a Bava film. There’s not much familiarity to the actual legend here, but La Llorona is pretty creepy.
Alucarda (1977)
Directed and co-written by Juan López Moctezuma, this English-language Mexican horror film stars Tina Romero as the titular Alucarda. Since infancy, the orphaned Alucarda was raised by nuns at a repressive Catholic convent. Now a teen, Alucarda finally has a friend her age with the arrival of a newly orphaned Justine (Susana Kamini). They become inseparable, perhaps even more so when they stumble upon a crypt and release a Satanic force that seduces the best friends and uses them as a conduit to destroy everything in their path. It’s arthouse meets exploitation grindhouse. Moctezuma weaves a sacrilegious coming-of-age story with striking imagery that slowly developed a cult following over time.
Cemetery of Terror (1985)
Rubén Galindo Jr. long since moved onto writing and producing, but in the ’80s, the filmmaker delivered a trio of solid horror movies worth checking out. The most well-known of the three is the American-influenced Don’t Panic, but it’s the Halloween-centric Cemetery of Terror that offers the most fun. A trio of college kids decides to impress their ladies by stealing a body from a morgue for a Halloween prank and party in an abandoned house. It happens to be the body of a serial killer, and reading an incantation from a book revives it. This supernatural slasher brings the bloody mayhem in the vein of Fulci and features legendary character actor Hugo Stiglitz as the occult expert.
Poison for the Fairies (1986)
Horror director Carlos Enrique Taboada is regarded as a national talent in cinema and one of the most influential. His direct influence is reflected in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. Taboada also chose to work in horror when others sometimes only did so by necessity. The filmmaker could take a shoestring budget and make it work through expert atmosphere and scare-crafting, and any of his films make a great entry point. Even the Wind Is Afraid (available on Tubi), The Book of Stone, or Darker Than Night serve as masterclasses in suspense. But it’s his final feature that’s the most regarded, and its doozy of an ending packs a potent punch. In it, a young girl convinces her schoolmate that she’s a witch, forcing the girl into a series of games that grow increasingly violent and nasty.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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