original production:

EL ESPEJO DE LA BRUJA

Cast: Isabela Corona (Sara, the witch), Dina de Marco (Elena/Helen Hanley), Rosita Arenas (as "Rosa Arenas")(Deborah Hanley, the wife), Alfredo W. Barrón (as "Alfred Wally Barron")(Police Inspector), Armando Calvo (Dr. Eduardo Ramos/Dr. Edward Hanley, the husband), Carlos Nieto (Gustavo/Charles, the Orderly)

PLOT OUTLINE:
(From AFI): A witch using a magic mirror is unable to prevent the murder of her godchild. When the dead woman's husband remarries, the witch uses her powers to scare the couple. The ghost of the first wife emerges from the mirror, plays the piano, and causes the husband to disfigure his second wife. Watched by the vengeful ghost, the husband grafts a new face and hands onto the second wife, using skin taken from corpses.

GUEST SYNOPSIS:
by David Wilt
Housekeeper Sara, using her magic mirror, learns Eduardo Ramos is going to murder his wife Elena, Sara's god-daughter. Elena finds this hard to believe, since she loves her husband, but one evening Eduardo brings Elena a poisoned glass of milk (cf., Suspicion with Cary Grant), and she drinks it and dies. Sara, although powerless to prevent Elena's murder, swears the dead woman will be avenged.

Time passes, and Eduardo returns to the house with his new bride, Deborah. Sara is outwardly friendly, but she is merely waiting until the proper moment arrives. Meanwhile, strange things start happening: flowers that Deborah places in Elena's old room wilt and die within seconds; Elena's diary disappears shortly after Deborah locates it; Elena's favorite song is heard on the piano, although no one is sitting at the keyboard; doors open and close by themselves, and strange groans are heard. Deborah faints when she sees Elena's ghost in the mirror. Eduardo tosses an oil lamp at the spirit, but only succeeds in horribly burning Deborah. Sara is pleased.

Deborah, heavily bandaged, is despondent, but Eduardo says he is experimenting on new techniques that will restore her scarred face and hands to their former beauty. The police are soon puzzled by the thefts of young women's bodies from the morgue: Eduardo and his assistant Gustavo are preparing skin grafts for Deborah. Later, Gustavo tells Eduardo that one of his neighbors--a young female pianist--just died of a heart attack.

At the wake, Eduardo admires the corpse's hands, and decides to appropriate them for Deborah. However, when the two men dig up the grave and open the coffin, the young woman is alive! She screams and passes out, having only been in a cataleptic state. Eduardo is happy--he takes the woman to his lab and amputates her hands while she is still alive. Gustavo, squeamish, leaves. Sara confronts him and says he can only save his soul by denouncing Eduardo to the police. Turning into a black cat, she disappears.

In order to foil Eduardo's plan, Sara summons Elena from her grave, and substitutes Elena's hands for those taken from the young pianist (which are then tossed into an oven by Sara). After the transplant, Deborah starts to caress Eduardo's face, but suddenly the hands take on a life of their own and begin to strangle her husband! She breaks away just in time. The next day, the hands start to play Elena's song on the piano. Later, Deborah learns what Eduardo has done to restore her beauty, finding various corpses in his lab. She is angry, but Eduardo takes a pair of scissors and cuts off her facial bandages, demonstrating that her face is again beautiful. She forgives him.

Meanwhile, Gustavo has confessed to the police. They break into the house and find the lab. However, just as they arrive in the storeroom where Eduardo and Deborah are waiting, Deborah's hands seize the scissors and stab Eduardo to death. The hands--in the film's most shocking scene--then DROP off Deborah's arms and fall to the floor (Deborah gets back her old burned hands). Her face also returns to its scarred state. Elena's disembodied hands grab the scissors and stab Gustavo. Sara, her job done, vanishes.

GUEST REVIEW:
by David Wilt
Short but interesting fantasy film that mixes the supernatural (witches, ghosts) with science fiction (limb transplants, skin grafts). Scripters Ruanova and Taboada borrow from REBECCA, THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUSTUS and THE HANDS OF ORLAC, and Urueta directs with his usual mix of campy, crude "special effects" and interesting, well-crafted setups.

It would be easy to pick this film apart for its inconsistencies and contradictions, but EL ESPEJO DE LA BRUJA is actually quite entertaining despite these problems.

[Example: there is a nice sequence showing Calvo standing beside his wife's grave, with a good cemetary set and an impressive high-angle shot which gradually pulls back to show that Corona is watching the scene via her magic mirror. The filmmakers were so impressed with this setup that they continue to use it throughout the film, as Corona evokes the spirit of the dead woman. However, they didn't bother to change the cemetary set at all, so--despite the fact that considerable time has apparently passed--the grave has never been filled in! There is the same big pile of dirt and exposed coffin in all of the shots!]

EL ESPEJO DE LA BRUJA is apparently set in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, according to the sets and most of the costumes. It is a very insular film, mostly taking place in Eduardo's home, and there are only 7 speaking parts (well, 8 if you count the young woman in the coffin who screams once). The sets and photography are, as usual, very good; the burn makeup for Arenas' hands is competent, although her scarred face looks like she's wearing a mudpack.

The acting is also generally professional, particularly reliable Isabela Corona in a "typical" Isabela Corona role; Armando Calvo's character is a bit unpleasant--and he wears a sort of silly little hairpiece--but he's also a pro and does a good job despite these handicaps. Wally Barrón, cast completely against type, plays it straight as a police official, but his role is so small that it is not particularly significant.

The general level of special effects in most Mexican films is not particularly high, given the relatively small size of the industry and the resulting dearth of specialists in this area. Chano Urueta, however, seemed to delight in "campy" optical and mechanical effects. In ESPEJO, these include some sort of clear liquid poured over the lens (producing a distorted image), an especially poor double-exposure of Elena's disembodied hands moving on the floor, the rapidly-wilting flowers, and so on. There are also several scenes in which Sara talks to various evil spirits, one shown as a inanimate shadow, another as a sort of cloaked figure hanging high on a wall.

The "magic mirror" images in the opening sequence include a few superimpositions or back-projections, but most seem to be mechanical effects (i.e., there is no mirror, the "images" are actual objects shot in the mirror frame). These visions include a faceless figure in a dark cloak, a skull wearing a wig, a Rorschach inkblot, and a melting hand, in addition to a lot of smoke and mist.

The most impressive visual sequence occurs late in the film: there are optically-distorted shots of the bandaged Deborah in her room, with superimposed smoke and--most interesting--some superimposed spotlights which, combined with the bizarre figure of Deborah, her head completely covered in bandages, produce a genuinely eerie image.

REVIEW:
This is one of the oddest and most exciting of the Mexican movies imported by Mr. Murray. It is true gothic horror, with references to many genre sources, as well as boasting some very spooky elements that seem avant-garde, even virtually psychedelic at times.

The opening credits roll over some strange and engaging footage of two horrified women looking into a mirror, where they, and we, see some bizarre reflections: a gruesome monster (in forward and reverse motion); a burnt and severed hand; a strangely symmetrical blob, not unlike a Rohrshach ink blot. These may be mere spook show thrills, or an overt allusion to a psychological horror film, but they certainly do pass for bargain-basement emblems of the Jungian pysche!

What's most fun about this movie is perhaps its odd structure: the first segment is pure, unvarnished ghost story, and then we segway into most curious "mad scientist" territory.

This flick is full of occult action, not unlike SPIRITISM, with a touch of SNOW WHITE thrown in, via the fortune-telling mirror. Statues of saints move, and the mirror sends creepy images to its viewers.

The bimbo Deborah's plight is surely tragic, but her bandaged head is comical, looking like a swollen Michelin Man after taking Novacaine!

There is some major chatting with the devil here, yet one believes that Sarah is trying to do good with her demonic requests. Its an odd sort of theology, and after awhile, we wonder just "who" she is praying to, god or the devil? Well, as they say in the philosophy chat rooms, "the god you pray to is the prince of darkness..."

The film's obsession with distorting quasi-Catholic ritual borders on the perverse (although all Mexi-horror film of the period seems imbued with a curious pseudo-Catholic sociopatholgy...). Literary refs abound; there are touches of Hawthorne, Poe, Shelley, maybe even Lovecraft here.

The lurid, somewhat convoluted storyline gives us an opportunity to witness a veritable parade of skid-row shock icons, such as: a witch turning into a black cat; amputation; disembodied heads; severed hands; bloody limbs; inserts of owls; graverobbing; being buried alive; ghosts and apparitions; mad scientists; female mutilation; resuurection of the dead, and demonic invocations. This weird array of f/x is sort of gruesome, in a corny way.

THE WITCH'S MIRROR is a wild and wooly apparition from the borderlands of horror exotica, and the closest thing one is likely to find to an all-out Mexican "Spook Show". We love it.

COMMENTS:
* (updated 02-14-06) Thanks to a terrific new book we just received, "Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold" by Kevin Heffernan, (2004, Duke University Press), we have been able to update the U.S. television release date for this Murray horror title to 1965. The appendices to this study of the horror film in America, circa 1955-1968, include complete listings of syndication feature film packages from many distributors, including American International Television, who subleased the K. Gordon Murray film catalog under the title THRILLERS FROM ANOTHER WORLD. It seems that 1965 was the watershed year for genre film sold to television, with a veritable flood of titles released by both domestic and foreign distribs.

* (effective 05-01-03) After a very brief window of availability, this long-sought K. Gordon Murray title is once again out of print, due to international copyright issues. Used video tapes of this title may be found on online video dealers and auction sites. Stay tuned for further developments!

* According to Mexican film historian David Wilt, EL ESPEJO DE LA BRUJA was a popular enough horror film to warrant that most beloved, and missed 60's mass market tie-in: a photo-comic book!

* According to AFI, THE WITCH'S MIRROR had its US premiere on May 29, 1969 in Maryland, with its theatrical co-bill THE LIVING HEAD; another classic drive-in double bill to wax nostalgiac over!

NOTABLE DIALOGUE: