The Man and the Monster (1958)

We return to the Golden Age of Mexican horror cinema in the 1950s and 60s, and to the work of producer-actor Abel Salazar, who we last saw in the bizarre brain-sucking Dracula-alike The Brainiac. As I said in that write-up, the defining features of this era of Mexican horror film is the influence the movies take specifically from the classic Universal horror cycle of the thirties and forties (and their imitators), with classically supernatural stories and moody black-and-white Gothic visuals. This is very evident in The Man and the Monster (El hombre y el monstruo), a film produced and starring Salazar and directed by the prolific director-actor Rafael Baledón—in particular, this takes cues from The Wolf Man, as well as the various film adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (of which Universal produced exactly zero), with a little bit of Faust for good measure. But this movie is more than the sum of its influences—and is a relatively more subdued affair than the off-the-wall Brainiac—learning all the right lessons to give this seemingly familiar story a unique sense of pathos and well-honed filmcraft that transcends any budgetary limitations it might have.

Deep Dark (2015)

Although very different in execution, Deep Dark reminded me a lot of previous subject Splinter: both feel like short independent films that were expanded into feature length (it won’t surprise you to learn that writer/director Michael Medaglia’s only other credits are for short films), and both rather knowingly hinge themselves on the novelty of their intentionally strange central monster. Splinter used this as a vehicle for pure, undistilled horror filmmaking, while Deep Dark is aiming for more of a comedy-horror, although it never goes that far in either direction. It’s also attempting to spin a sort of dark modern fairy tale, one set in the absolutely-not-overused-at-all world of modern art, and with the freedom from traditional logic that would allow, the biggest question becomes just how hard it pushes into the strangeness of its own premise. The answer to that is “just hard enough, sometimes.”