If you’re new to classic Mexican horror, make note of the names Carlos Enrique Taboada and Chano Urueta. Among them you’ll find the popular lucha libre versus monsters movies (Urueta) and the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired horror mysteries that influenced generations of filmmakers (Taboada). One of their best movies is a 1962 macabre witchcraft story titled El Espejo de la Bruja (The Witch’s Mirror in English), in which dark magic, murder, and vengeance combine for a gleefully ghoulish experience that features incredible practical effects and smart use of gore.
Directed by Urueta and written by Taboada and Argentinian writer Alfredo Ruanova, El Espejo de la Bruja centers on a housekeeper that practices the dark arts. She owns a mirror that she uses to communicate with the dead and to show those closest to her their fate. Through it, her goddaughter learns her husband intends to kill her so he can marry another woman. When the vision comes to pass, the housekeeper decides to avenge her goddaughter’s death while making the husband suffer as much as possible before it all comes to a head.
El Espejo de la Bruja is a movie built on the macabre. Urueta, Taboada, and Ruanova essentially dropped a chest-full of body parts, superimposed ghost images, and gruesome special effects to give viewers a horror experience that indulged in the supernatural since the very beginning. It gives the movie a haunting feel that imbues each shot with a sense of rising fear, as if a ghost or poltergeist were going to manifest at any moment. It’s an exercise in tension that current filmmakers could learn a lot from, especially in how it teases the imminent arrival of terrible things and then delivers on them. No need for delayed terror here.
Urueta, Taboada, and Ruanova’s efforts result in a movie that’s emblematic of Mexican horror. It really shows just how much it stood apart from the rest. Sixties’ American horror, for instance, was also quite intense in terms of keeping the audience on the edge of their seats throughout, but it was not as relentless as Mexico’s take on the genre (with La Maldición de la Llorona standing as another great example, which built upon the horror offerings of the 1950s where movies like La Bruja and La Momia Azteca stood tall). El Espejo de la Bruja will make you want to seek out more Mexican horror. You’ll quickly find there’s a whole world of it, and that you’ve already seen one of the best ones in it.
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