aka The Brainiac
This delirious Mexican horror film was produced at a time when Mexican fantastic cinema was teeming with straitened but agreeably oddball productions, like Rafael Portillo’s Aztec Mummy series (1957), Fernando Mendez’s El Vampiro (1957), Federico Curiel’s Nostradamus serial (1959) and the delectably weird El Santo vs. The Vampire Women (1962). El Barón del Terror offers an intriguingly, specifically Latin take on both common horror movie motifs, and the key theme of colonial ills of transplanted European terrors in the new world. The opening sequence depicts an Inquisition trial, as the infamous Baron Vitelius d’Estera (Abel Salazar, the producer, who often cast himself in his films), a nobleman with a mysterious background, is condemned as a necromancer. Like many horror films around this time, this opening betrays the long shadow of Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio (1960), with the familiar template of the incinerated Satanist who pledges revenge as the flames lick higher and returns centuries later to exterminate his tormentors’ descendants. Familiarity is nonetheless undercut by an impudent sense of humour, one that steers the opening close to the ribald anticlerical satire of Buñuel and the farce of Monty Python. The Inquisitor reading the indictment becomes increasingly frustrated and furious in recounting Vitelius’ contempt for their efforts to torture and abuse him. Local maidens he’s supposed to have defiled and disgraced loom and leer over his fiery end with cooing fondness. Vitelius simply wishes away his chains, leaving the Inquisitors, encumbered by their own penitential weights, try to give him chase.
Vitelius calmly goes to his death, however, vowing from the pyre to return when a comet passing through the sky overhead next circles back to Earth. This proves to be exactly three hundred years later. The comet plunges to Earth, and Vitelius steps out, grotesquely transformed into a demon, with pincer hands and a long spiky tongue that proves to have a most excellent use. Director Chano Urueta’s grasp on a very basic production proves vigorous as Vitelius attacks the first man he comes across, and casually restores himself to his old appearance, albeit now suavely adapted to life in the 20th century. He hits the bars like a good lounge lizard and sates his immediate hungers on the local strumpets. He robs a shady nightclub owner, and sets himself up in a mansion. He invites the contemporary progeny of his cursed strain around for a party and then kills them one by one.
The make-up for the demonic Vitelius, the form he returns to before each killing, is amusingly tatty but intriguing as a form of goblin chic. Vitelius penetrates the back of his victims’ necks with his forked tongue, which apparently can burrow with the strength of an electric drill, and sucks out their brain matter. The compulsory bland young romantic leads, Victoria Contreras (Rosa María Gallardo) and Reinaldo Miranda (Rubén Rojo), are students of astronomer Professor Millán (Luis Aragón). Ironic mixture of genetic material is imminent: Victoria is the descendant of one Inquisitor, whilst Reinaldo is the scion of a cavalier who tried to defend Vitelius, whom he believed to be a progressive patron, at his trial. Millán anticipates the return of the cursed comet, and sends his protégés out to track it: they meet Vitelius, who charms them at first, but also recognises them as prey. Urueta’s sense of humour, backed up by the conceits of his screenwriters, Federico Curiel, Adolfo López Portillo, and Antonio Orellana, continues to percolate as Vitelius greets his guests, seeing the faces of his Inquisitors on their descendants, except that where some have the faces of the originals minus their cavalier fashions, a couple of them are women, in wry little switchbacks of gender expectation, contrasting a more standard variation on this idea, as in Corman’s The Haunted Palace (1963).
Urueta’s best scene sees Vitelius insinuating his way into the company of one descendant, Indalecio Pantoja (Germán Robles, who had played the title role in El Vampiro), who is, conveniently, an eminent historian with records of the original Inquisition. Vitelius is then introduced to Pantoja’s daughter, María (Magda Urvizu), providing the perfect, deliciously kinky vengeance. Vitelius hypnotises both of them (lights flash like traffic warnings on Salazar’s face whenever his mesmeric powers are utilised) and forces Pantoja to watch as he sucks out first his daughter’s brains, and then moves in for the kill on her father, with queasy-making speed and eagerness. Vitelius’ death-dealing with his phallic tongue feels like a rough draft for later genre monsters, like the penile-proboscis of Alien’s (1979) xenomorphs, boiling over with intimations of forbidden and unnatural penetration. In context, the not so metaphorical mind rape of a luscious daughter in front of her father, who then meets the same fate, feels like the ultimate desecration of Hispanic paternalism and filial purity, whilst also suggesting an externalised fulfilment of incestuous tastes kept in check only by social norms, norms Vitelius gleefully and repeatedly annihilates. Vitelius’ hazy, seemingly Eastern-European background might arguably retard the metaphorical reflection of colonial blowback, in portraying the imposition of European cruelty on the new world creating monsters filled with smouldering enmity. But it doesn’t entirely dispel the theme, especially as it’s hinted Vitelius originally turned to alchemy as part of his reformist labours in assaulting the old order.
Urueta’s wit continues to bubble to the surface constantly throughout, and dovetails with his intriguing visual sensibility, which is largely restrained by the low budget, but refuses to be caged entirely. Cars drive before photos of landscapes and night skies; the comet is a blurrily filmed lithographic cut-out. Vitelius’ magically permeable form dashes through a castle after his prey, passing straight through the antagonist trying to catch him. Murders are committed in the desolate neon districts of Mexico City, as a prostitute’s desperate loneliness offers only another snack to the demon. When he first returns to earth, Vitelius literally reconstitutes himself in demon form out of the comet’s material. Vitelius kills the first man he meets, and then, with his magic powers, is able to remake his old self, with the victim’s clothes disappearing from his body and reappearing on Vitelius, snug as a glove, with a similar note of wry gentlemanly poise to James Bond peeling off his wetsuit to reveal a tuxedo beneath. Packing a different sort of coldly humorous punch is an odd sequence in which Vitelius goes after another descendant, Ana Luisa Vivar (Susana Cora). He corners in her hotel room after she marries Francisco Coria (Carlos Nieto), and she rushes to appeal to her husband, only to find him tied upside down in their bathtub, drowned by shower flow.
This strange, cruel, suggestively sacrilegious image segues into a bit of Expressionist shadow play as Ana faints on her marriage bed with Vitelius’ grotesque form silhouetted bending over her, about to deliver a very different sort of deflowering. Another great touch is Vitelius’ habit of keeping bowls filled with brains around his mansion for light snacks: when he starts getting too many visitors, he’s forced to start hiding his repasts away. The black sense of humour here feels again anticipatory of the bolder bent of many later horror filmmakers: the outré sensibility of Stuart Gordon, early Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, as well as the ideas snaking through David Cronenberg’s and Frank Henenlotter’s horror works, and of course the oeuvre of Guillermo Del Toro; all gestate here. David Silva and Curiel are the comic relief detectives who thankfully prove good enough at their jobs to intervene in the finale with a flame thrower, as Vitelius finds that even the traditional attack of mad monster lust for the heroine can’t quell his need for revenge. Urueta made many more horror films, including the less admired La Cabeza Vivante in the same year, whilst his 1960 work El Espejo del Bruja has been called his best.
