The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 8-14
El Vampiro (1957)
Directed by Fernando Méndez
Just as the second wave of Universal Horror was dribbling back to sea, Abel Salazar got to wondering why his native Mexico didn’t have its own horror boom. Who is Abel Salazar? He was a leading man with the charm of Clark Gable and a face like Anthony Quayle crossed with Peter Sellars. He could get movies made and he singlehandedly invented the Mexican cult film as we in the States understand it. His production company, formed for the express purpose of scaring the Mexican public, made just over 15 films in ten years and each deserves to be better known. El Vampiro was the first and set the gothic foundation for later gonzo romps like The Crying Woman and The Brainiac. Salazar plays plays the Van Helsing to Germán Robles’s Dracula stand-in Count Lavud in a fight over the hearts and minds of a tiny, besieged Mexican town. Atmospheric, funny, romantic and great fun, El Vampiro did for Mexico what The Horror of Dracula did for the UK. Mexico went vampire crazy over the next decade and change, each new foray into the fanged and hoary indebted to Salazar’s vampire hunting. June 9, 14, 10pm; June 28, 7:30pm at the Spectacle’s Mexican Gothic Horror series)