Tonight's movie was a really weird and scary made for TV horror film called "The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre" (1964), directed by Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's "Psycho" and, most notably, created the original "Outer Limits" television series, which I am a big fan of. This film was originally shot as a 52 minute pilot (which equates to one hour with commercials) for a planned TV series. "Outer Limits" was hot at the time and Stefano had a chance to expand on his brand, as it were. Apparently though, according to liner notes and IMDB comments, the TV executives were aghast when Stefano showed them the pilot. They found it as strange and creepy - and scary - as I did and as you no doubt will when you watch it.
But they also found it non-commercial, and you will understand their reasoning for that conclusion, too.
Martin Landau stars as an architect who lives in what looks like a futuristic Brutalist mansion set on a Malibu cliff. He is well off financially, but as a side gig he is also a paranormal investigator, a hobby he undertakes because he is good at it and also because he genuinely wants to help folks who are besieged by ghosts. He has a feisty housekeeper who acts as his foil. She is a determined non-believer.
Landau gets a call from Diane Baker, who wants him to look into a spooky situation in her own home, another even bigger mansion owned by her blind husband, the last surviving member of a wealthy family. It seems that the husband, blind since birth, had a domineering mother who was pathologically fearful of being buried alive. This is explained in expository dialogue between the characters. The mother was so afraid of death and burial that in her will she stipulated that her casket be kept open in her tomb, and that a telephone be placed within an arm's reach, just in case she was buried alive. That way, she could call her son, who had a telephone in his room at the other end of the line.
What is happening in the house is that the blind son has indeed been getting phone calls, and when he picks up, all he hears is terrible wailing and sobbing at the other end. And man, is it ever scary sounding! He thinks it is his deceased mother calling him. His wife Diane Baker thinks someone is playing a prank, which is why she has contacted ghost hunter extraordinaire Martin Landau. She wants him to debunk the case.
He asks her to meet him at the cemetery, so he can see the mother's tomb for himself, and inspect the telephone line inside. It is in there that he receives his first indication that the ghost calls may be real after all. All I will say about this sequence is that if I had seen it when I was four or five years old, it would have scared the bejeezus out of me and made an impression for life, as did many of the images from Stefano's "Outer Limits".
The story builds from there, on the intrigue created in the tomb. The catlike Miss Baker (a Kate Jackson lookalike) appears to be frightened of her husband's new housekeeper, and you would be too, because she is played by Dame Judith Anderson of "Rebecca" fame. Dame Judith reminds me of an even more sinister Agnes Moorehead, without any of Moorhead's smart ass charm. Judith Anderson (who was no doubt a nice lady in real life, haha) specialised in playing truly black-souled women, and here she is at her blackest, in dress as well as demeanor. She and Diane Baker seem to have some connection. Hmm, their hairdos are remarkably similar, though Diane's is a bit more fresh shall we say.
What do they know about the phone calls, if anything?
Inside the concrete mansion of Martin Landau is a painting, of a Spanish Mission called "Sierra de Cobre". In one of the earliest cases of his ghost hunting career, Landau had flown out to Spain to investigate a haunting at the mission that resulted in the death of an American tourist.
Why does Diane Baker recoil when she sees the painting? And why does Dame Judith always seem to be lurking in the background, waiting for a chance to slip Diane a vial of some dark liquid?
Is she drugging her? Just how weird is this movie, I ask you.
I mean, I ask you, but you haven't seen it so actually you should be asking me.
And just in case you are asking me, I'm telling you that it's plenty weird. In fact, it was so weird that the TV studio rejected it as a pilot for a tv series, and what Joseph Stefano did was to add 28 minutes of extra footage to make it feature length, so he could release it as a movie. I don't know where it played. Did it have an American release? I don't know. But it is clear that the extra running time had an effect on the pace. The whole movie feels as if everyone is one Thorazine, walking around in a trance. The slow pace does begin to drag a bit, as the movie approaches the one hour mark, but the stellar black and white photography - a Stefano trademark - holds your attention even when the dialogue becomes a little too abstract and causes the story to lose cohesion.
I will give "The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre" Two Thumbs Up anyway, and I also give it a hearty endorsement as an example of an early 1960s psychological or existential horror film or ghost story. This is the kind of film where an authority figure, in this case Landau, who is presumed to be an expert in his field, assumes at first that the phenomenon can all be explained by logic and examination of the facts. In these kinds of black and white films from the same time period, early 1960s, a mood was created that tried to show what a victim was experiencing inside their head, some horror that could not be understood by anyone with cynicism.
This is the dilemma of the movie, an isolated character study with only a handful of actors, photographed by the great Conrad Hall and William Fraker. This is big league cinematography.
It's just that the pace is slow and the dialogue sometimes ventures past the metaphysical into the experimental.
See it if you wish. You may love it or not, but it will surely scare the daylights out of you.
Two Thumbs Up from me, if I have not said that already. ////
Much love and I will see you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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