Director/Screenplay – Carlos Enrique Taoboada, Photography – Daniel Lopez, Music – Raul Lavista, Art Direction – Salvador Lozano. Production Company – Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Produccion Cinematografica.
Cast
Claudia Islas (Ofelia Escudero), Helena Rojo (Pilar), Susana Dosamantes (Aurora), Lucia Mendez (Marta), Alicia Palacios (Sofia), Pedro Armendariz (Roberto), Julian Pastor (Pedro), Tamara Garina (Aunt Susana), Enrique Ponton (Jose)
Plot
Ofelia Escudero learns that she has inherited a large, old house following the death of her Aunt Susana. She and her three roommates, Pilar, Aurora and Marta, move into the house, which is tended by the severe housekeeper Sofia. As the girls settle in, they see the figure of Aunt Susana around the house, along with her black cat Decquer after it is killed, and realise that the house is haunted. The girls then begin to be killed in strange ways.
The Mexican horror film of the 1950s through to the 1970s is a genre unto itself that has never been granted much due in English-speaking film studies. This ranges from the vampire films of German Robles and the popular Nostradamus series, as well as The Aztec Mummy and several versions of La Llorona, The Crying Woman. Most popular of these has been the exploits of the masked wrestling superhero Santo and others, who battle assorted monsters and villains in the ring, (See Mexican Cinema).
Darker Than Night was one of seventeen films directed between the 1960s and 1980s by Carlos Enrique Taoboada (1929-1997). Most of his films are regular dramas but Taoboada ventured into genre material on several other occasions with Even the Wind is Afraid (1968) about a haunting at a boarding school, another haunted film The Book of Stone (1969) and Poison for the Fairies (1986) about two schoolgirls exploring witchcraft, as well as script work for The Witch’s Mirror (1966) and several of the Nostradamus films.
(l to r) Susana Dosamantes, housekeeper Alicia Palacios and Lucia Mendez
Darker Than Night is another of Carlos Enrique Taoboada’s haunted house stories. Although, if anything, this adheres more to the tropes of the Old Dark House film wherein a young woman inherits a big old mansion and moves in with a group of her friends, who are progressively eliminated throughout the course of the show. Much of the haunted element sits in a state of ambiguity about what is happening and it is only towards the latter third of the film that everything comes down on the side of the supernatural. One thing that is particularly striking about the film is the richness of the art direction and set dressings, which come in beautiful colours and are made even more exquisite in the dvd restoration.
The disappointment that comes is that Carlos Enrique Taoboada’s direction is on the tepid side. The film consists of a great deal in the way of shadows and silhouettes moving or whispering voices, but little that creates much more than rudimentary atmosphere or shocks. Far too much time is spent dealing with the dead aunt’s black cat.
However, towards the end of the show, Taoboada suddenly starts to get his act together. There is quite a decent scene where Susana Dosamantes is in the library and keeps seeing the old woman’s ghost, before the others enter in search of her are shocked by the appearance of her body found hung upside down; or the scenes of Helena Rojo being pursued through the cellar and then being pushed down the stairs.
