Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and finding them happy homes.
Today’s theme: Black and White
Yavuz Yalınkılıç’s 1970 black-and-white gothic chiller, Ölüler Konuşmaz Ki (The Dead Don’t Talk), follows a young couple, Melih (Aytekin Akkaya) and Oya, as they take a carriage ride to an isolated mansion belonging to the late Mr. Adem. The coach driver drops them off on the fateful 15th of the month and flees like a bat out of hell. Inside, the dining table is set for two, shadows swallow the walls, and an unsettling Vincent Price lookalike butler named Hassan—who weeps over portraits of lost beauties—welcomes them.
Melih is a proud skeptic of the modern age, dismissing superstitions with a wave of his gun. Big mistake. Late that night, a houl sporting a raincoat, a safari hat and a maniacal cackle that sounds like Santa Claus having a nervous breakdown stumbles in. Melih empties his revolver into the entity—leading to some genuinely cool in-camera mirror tricks—only for both lovers to meet a violent doom.
And then, just when you think the movie is settling in, it resets entirely. A new protagonist, a schoolteacher named Sema, arrives by carriage and the film gleefully repeats its own trajectory with a fresh batch of victims. Eventually, local townsfolk and an Imam join the fray to take down the laughing phantom in a climax involving sacred scripture, holy relics and a villain who melts into a puddle of blood — but not before the movie takes liberally from Nosferatu and Black Sabbath, as well as music cues that include Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the theme from Rosemary’s Baby, which feels out of time, as this was shot in 1970 but is in black and white and feels fifteen years older than it should be.
The Dead Don’t Talk is an essential time capsule for fans of wild international horror. It falls somewhere between Jean Rollin’s dreamy early work and an episode of Dark Shadows put through a delightfully bizarre Turkish filter. Also, it has a lead bad guy who laughs the entire movie, which I loved. This is the kind of find that keeps me watching movies.
You can watch this on YouTube.
