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 providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: Mexico
If you’ve ever found yourself watching a classic Euro-gothic horror masterpiece and thought, “This is great, but what it really needs is a platinum-blonde Argentine sex bomb, a Mexican soap opera budget and a vampire who places classified ads in the newspaper for his victims,” then step right up. 1968’s La Endemoniada (A Woman Possessed) is exactly the kind of movie that I love.
We begin in Spanish-occupied medieval Mexico, a place where Princess Fausta de Santillán (Libertad Leblanc) is living her absolute best life. Hosting mask-wearing orgies? She does it. Luring studly lovers into bed? You know it. Stabbing them in the back with a dagger in the middle of passion? Well, we can’t be good all the time. Try telling that to her buzzkill husband, who catches her and hands her straight over to the Grand Inquisitor.
What follows is a shameless, beat-for-beat lift from Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. They strip her nobility, hammer an inner-spiked Mask of Satan onto her face to destroy her sinful beauty and wall her up alive in the cellar to rot for eternity. But before the mortar dries, her undead servant/lover Gonzalo (Enrique Rocha)—who happens to be a full-blown vampire—swipes her sacred necklace and slips into the night.
Fast forward four centuries and one helpful super later, we learn that it’s New Year’s Eve. A freak storm is raging, and a dysfunctional, money-grubbing family has gathered in a modern condo to endure their miserable matriarch (Bertha Moss). Suddenly, the power cuts out. A knock at the door reveals Gonzalo—looking sharp and bone dry despite the torrential downpour — and he announces he just bought the old Santillán castle next door.
Gonzalo is a busy guy. When he’s not moving next door to ruin local bloodlines, he’s luring young women from the capital to his gothic pad via newspaper want ads (“Wanted: Beautiful secretary without family ties, exorbitant salary!”) so he can chow down before rising from his coffin. His grand master plan? Reincarnate Princess Fausta into the body of Lucia (also played by Libertad Leblanc), a suburban housewife who just happens to be the spitting image of the dead princess.
What ensues is a pseudo-scientific, paranormal word salad involving bilocation, dual ubiquity, and a soul-trapping Picture of Dorian Gray-style portrait. Fausta’s spirit splits off into a physical doppelgänger, allowing her to wander the countryside in frilly pink lingerie, where she seduces local blacksmiths, poisons punch bowls and smothers rich husbands with pillows.
There is a murderous, blood-drinking vampire lurking in the shadows, yet the primary apocalyptic threat to society in La Endemoniada is the sexual energy of a woman. Sure, her kink is murder, but do we need to shame her? Her lust is so strong that it defeats time, bends our reality and tears families to pieces. Even the vampire is upset by how much burning passion she has. It helps that director Emilio Gómez Muriel gives us bright, lurid Eastmancolor, melodrama and Argentine sex symbol Libertad Leblanc sporting a blinding white-blonde wig and tight black jeans.
The movie tries to throw every single gothic trope against the wall—vampirism, possession, hexes, cursed portraits, car-stalling electrical surges—without ever bothering to establish the rules. Gonzalo gets killed with a random fireplace iron poker instead of a wooden stake, and Fausta’s curse operates on a strict Black Year deadline that claims that she must kill everyone in one year or go back to Hell. Or something, because the film never quite finishes explaining.
Running just 77 minutes, La endemoniada only drags when humanity comes in to spoil all the supernatural ribaldry. I don’t care about a police investigation. I want to see Libertad Leblanc destroy minds and reap souls.
