{"id":4457,"date":"2014-05-23T10:21:48","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T09:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=4457"},"modified":"2014-05-27T07:16:13","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T06:16:13","slug":"alucarda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2014\/05\/23\/alucarda\/","title":{"rendered":"Alucarda"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Ilustration by James Stringer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nFormat:<\/B> DVD

\nScreening date:<\/B> 14 June 2014

\nVenue:<\/B> Masonic Temple, Andaz Hotel Liverpool Street, London<

\nPart of the East End Film Festival<\/A>, 13-25 June 2014
\nDirector:<\/B> Juan López Moctezuma

\nWriters:<\/B> Alexis Arroyo, Tita Arroyo, Juan López Moctezuma, Yolanda López Moctezuma

\nOriginal title:<\/B> Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas<\/I>

\nBased on the short story ‘Carmilla’ by:<\/B> Sheridan Le Fanu

\nCast:<\/B> Tina Romero, Claudio Brook, Susana Kamini, David Silva, Tina French

\nMexico 1978

\n74 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Electric Sheep is proud to present a rare screening of Alucarda<\/I> at the amazing Masonic Temple, Andaz Hotel Liverpool Street, London, on Saturday 14 June, as part of the Magic and the Macabre weekend at the East End Film Festival<\/A>. Acclaimed festival programmer and writer Kier-La Janisse<\/A>, author of House of Psychotic Women<\/A> (FAB Press), will introduce the screening.<\/p>\n

Having produced Alejandro Jodorowsky<\/A>\u2019s incendiary first feature Fando y Lis<\/I><\/A> (1968) as well as El topo<\/I><\/A> (1970), Juan López Moctezuma went behind the camera in 1971 to make The Mansion of Madness<\/I> (released in 1973), which was loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. He followed it up with two vampire stories, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary<\/I>, shot in the USA with John Carradine in 1975, and Alucarda<\/I> in 1978. Like Fernando M\u00e9ndez and Carlos Enrique Taboada, Moctezuma<\/I> was one of a handful of well-read Mexican directors who were interested in making horror films infused with cultural references and artistic ambitions. In Mexico, the genre was dominated at the time by populist lucha libre<\/I> movies such as the Santo<\/I> series, which pitched heroic costumed wrestlers against monsters, vampires and mummies. However, Chano Urueta\u2019s take on Frankenstein<\/I>, El monstruo resucitado<\/I> (1953), and M\u00e9ndez\u2019s influential El vampiro<\/I> (1957) had opened the way for a richer vein of horror, and the 50s and 60s were marked by a wave of delirious visions of terror that are still lauded for their visual beauty and atmospheric qualities. <\/p>\n

Visit illustrator James Stringer’s website<\/A>. <\/div>\n

Moctezuma was part of the Panique Theatre, which Jodorowsky had founded in Paris in 1962 with the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal (on whose play Fando y Lis<\/I> was based) and the French artist Roland Topor. The name was a reference to the god Pan, and the movement (or anti-movement, as Arrabal would have it) was defined by a combination of terror and humour. Influenced by Antonin Artaud\u2019s Theatre of Cruelty, Panique embraced disorder, madness and excess, the grotesque and the irrational, to create an anarchic celebration of life. From Artaud they also inherited the interest in a magical and ritualistic kind of theatrical spectacle, which used violent sensory assault to open up new perspectives in the audience.<\/p>\n

Moctezuma implemented these ideas in The Mansion of Madness<\/I>, in which the patients of an insane asylum are allowed to run free as their doctor adopts an Aleister Crowley-influenced approach to their treatment. Set in the similarly confined environment of a convent, Alucarda<\/I> took the director\u2019s interest in strange cults and rituals further. Alucarda\u2019s birth opens the film, her wretched mother, having been impregnated by the devil, delivering the baby in a crypt surrounded by diabolical, horned, half-goat statues. To protect the newborn from her terrible father, she asks a bizarre-looking gypsy to take her daughter to the convent. Fifteen years later, Justine, a young, orphaned ing\u00e9nue, arrives at the convent to find herself sharing a room with the raven-haired, black-clad, wild-eyed Alucarda. <\/p>\n

Alucarda is clearly out of place in the convent and her holy abode has not been able to suppress the devil in her blood. She draws Justine into her world, taking her to the derelict crypt of her birth where she proposes they take a blood oath, so they can be friends forever, \u2018even after death\u2019. The ritual is performed in their room at night, which, this being the 70s, involves both of them being naked as the gargoyle-like gypsy from the opening scene magically appears to make cuts on their breasts from which they drink each other\u2019s blood. They find themselves in the forest, where a ritual performed by witches ends in an orgy. Intercut with this are images of Sister Ang\u00e9lica, who welcomed Justine into the convent, praying intensely until her face becomes bloodied and she levitates, apparently able to conjure up some sort of power that strikes down the gypsy witch leading the ceremony. <\/p>\n

The clear lesbian undertones of the film come from Sheridan Le Fanu\u2019s ‘Carmilla’, on which Alucarda is very loosely based (the other literary reference is obviously Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/I>), but Moctezuma and his team of writers have made the story their own. The friendship between Alucarda and Justine has the devouring intensity of first love, but in the enclosed, all-female convent\/hothouse, the girls\u2019 repressed desires translate into demonic possession. The figure of Sister Ang\u00e9lica adds an interesting twist, turning the story into a spiritual lesbian love triangle. Her attachment to Justine is as dubiously excessive as Alucarda\u2019s and is sublimated into a frighteningly exalted religious practice. The love triangle is complicated by Alucarda\u2019s satanic nature and Sister Ang\u00e9lica\u2019s self-sacrificial (\u2018angelic\u2019) Christian figure, meaning that there is a lot more at stake than Justine\u2019s affection: demonic Alucarda and holy Sister Ang\u00e9lica are battling over nothing less than Justine\u2019s soul (the character is named after Sade\u2019s unfortunate heroine, whose virtue is repeatedly assaulted by one group of perverted tormentors after another).<\/p>\n

Alucarda<\/I> has been seen as anticlerical, yet the depiction of religion comes across as very ambivalent, confused even. For a start, the convent is a very unusual religious edifice, a womb-like cave carved inside the rock. The nuns are dressed in off-white, red-stained robes and tight-fitting bonnets that make them look like mummies. Initially, there are intimations that Alucarda may be an adept of a natural religion, a religion of life opposed to the Catholic worship of death. The witches\u2019 orgy contrasts with a later display of self-flagellation among the half-naked nuns and priests. An early, sumptuously sinister, almost painterly sermon takes place against the backdrop of a multitude of crucified Christs, creating an oppressive, macabre atmosphere. This is echoed in a later scene where Alucarda and Justine, naked, are tied to crosses for an exorcism ceremony. The dark, rich colours, the high camera angle and the cruelty of the ritual again conjure a memorable vision of religious maleficence. <\/p>\n

And yet, Dr Oszek, who interrupts the exorcism and calls the officiating priest barbaric, is soon confronted with a gruesome supernatural phenomenon that destroys his scientific certainties and validates the priest\u2019s beliefs. In one of the film\u2019s most striking scenes, an undead (and again naked) Justine comes out of a blood-filled coffin to attack the devoted Sister Ang\u00e9lica. Alucarda proves a worthy daughter to her father when she unleashes hell upon the convent, stopped only by the body of the Christic Sister Ang\u00e9lica carried cross-like by the other nuns. All in all, you could say the Christian characters come out of this looking fairly reasonable in the circumstances. <\/p>\n

The truth is that Moctezuma seems much more interested in extreme rituals of all kinds than in putting across an anticlerical message. The devil here appears in the form of Pan, as seen in the statues in the crypt and later in the goat\u2019s head that presides over the orgiastic celebration in the forest, which clearly ties in with the ideas underlying Panique Theatre. The same actor, Claudio Brook (a Buñuel regular), plays both Dr Oszek and the gypsy, so that reason\u2019s representative is also our mischievous guide into the occult and spiritual world, further undermining the rational standpoint. The many rituals, whether Christian or satanic, the orgy and the flagellation, the blood oath and the exorcism, are all marked by excess and strangeness, violence and beauty. The contrast between the beliefs that inform them is not what matters here; rather, the overall effect of their juxtaposition as grotesque and startling spectacles may well be designed to shock the audience into a new mode of perception. <\/p>\n

Virginie S\u00e9lavy<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n

This article was first published in the autumn 09 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine<\/A>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu\u2019s \u2018Carmilla\u2019, this extravagant, sumptuous, macabre tale hails from the golden age of Mexican horror.
\nReview by Virginie S&#233lavy<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,3,657],"tags":[907,904,905,729,908,902,105,900,909,903,906,901,177,910],"class_list":["post-4457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-check-it-out","category-dvds-and-blu-rays","category-screenings","tag-70s-cinema","tag-artaud","tag-carmilla","tag-dracula","tag-exorcism","tag-jodorowsky","tag-mexican-cinema","tag-moctezuma","tag-nunsploitation","tag-panique","tag-sheridan-le-fanu","tag-taboada","tag-vampires","tag-witches"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/surUP-alucarda","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6660,"url":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2016\/11\/05\/vampyres-styria\/","url_meta":{"origin":4457,"position":0},"title":"Vampyres + Styria","author":"Pam Jahn","date":"November 5, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This double bill of European vampire movies revisits oft-told stories. 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