Más negro que la noche

I first saw this movie about 15 years ago when I was nine, and I still get scared when I think about it. Ooh, the old lady calling for her dead cat makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. A classic Mexican horror film. They don't make movies like this anymore. Worth watching more than once.

After inheriting her grandmother's house in the countryside, a woman and her friends stay there to help sort out matters but grow increasingly convinced something is living in the house with them and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.

This turned out to be quite an enjoyable effort with a lot to really like here. One of the biggest pluses here is the fact that this one really manages to get the look and feel of the Gothic/Victorian style house here which is quite expertly handled and gets a lot of mileage out of. Filled with the grand layouts, spacious designs of the rooms and the twisting labyrinth of walkways and passages throughout, it fits the bill quite nicely with this one keeping up appearances quite well in addition to the fact that the last half of the film takes place in the secret rooms of the house. Using the underground library and the garden outside as the main locations in these sections makes for a rather chilling time with the multitude of encounters throughout there and how the earlier scenes set-up these encounters by focusing on the actions of the ghostly housekeeper and her cat. These are handled well enough for the rather impressive finale to feel like a continuation of these scenes which is where the fun of these come from while also accounting for the chilling nature of such encounters. While there's a lot to like here, it also has a few flaws in the incredibly clichéd and contrived set-up involving her and her friends moving into the house she has just inherited which really has no point here in generating any kind of originality or credibility in forcing them onto the property to begin with. As well, the fact that the girls' stay there includes the visitation by their boyfriends who are left alive by the disturbing lack of deaths here does make their intrusion seem pointless and drags out the running time in the middle when they're featured, yet this still manages a lot more good than bad points.

Rated Unrated/R: Violence, Language, Nudity and violence-against-animals.

In Mexico, the young Ofelia Escudero (Claudia Islas) shares an apartment and expenses with her friends, the librarian Aurora (Susana Dosamantes); the newcomer Marta (Lucía Méndez), who is an unemployed model and actress; and the divorced Pilar (Helena Rojo). Out of the blue, a lawyer (Enrique Pontón) summons Ofelia to tell her that she has inherited a large real estate with an old house from her Aunt Susana (Tamara Garina) that Ofelia met once, since she is the last relative alive from her family. In her will, Aunt Susana begs only that Ofelia takes care of her beloved black cat Bequer. She moves to the house with her friends, where they meet the old housekeeper Sofia (Alicia Palacios), who lived her entire life in the house, and Bequer. Ofelia befriends Sofia, and treats Bequer, but her friends hate them both. Unexpectedly Bequer vanishes and one night, Ofelia is returning home with her fiancée Roberto (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.), her friends show her that Bequer was locked in the attic and has died of starvation. Sofia and Roberto bury the animal and soon strange and tragic things happen in the house.

"Más negro que la noche", a.k.a. "Darker Than Night" is a scary "haunted house" Mexican movie by the master of horror Carlos Enrique Taboada. The plot is very well built, with explanation for every event. The actresses are very beautiful and the screenplay is scary and creepy. It is amazing how Taboada uses the supernatural in an ambiguous way, and the story may be interpreted as Sofia impersonating Aunt Susana and the frightened women believing that Aunt Susana and Bequer are back from the beyond. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Mais Negro Que a Noite" ("Darker Than Night")

I have only seen two of director Taboada's movies, the other one being Veneno para las hadas, and both are very macabre. Mas negro que la noche is very scary because we not only hear strange sounds on a very creepy house inherited by four female relatives of the deceased old woman, but we also get to see her and I must say it's one of the scariest ghosts I have ever seen in movies. The reasons of her apparitions are related to her calling of her dear black cat who died shortly after she died. After some gruesome deaths, the ending is shocking but justifiable for people who love black cats.

I really enjoyed this. It is paced a little leisurely and is not full of startling action but it is colourful and engaging with a gentle but relentless move towards the inevitable bad ending. A fairly simple, 'Old Dark House' tale featuring four good looking young women who go to live in the aforementioned mansion. They are disrespectful from the start of the building and its 'junk' contents and the elderly Sofia, the housekeeper, magnificently played with complete eeriness by Alicia Palacios, and the film makers seem to wreak their own revenge to some extent by allowing the girls to make such asses of themselves. Also, deliberate or not the many and varied 70s outfits they sport seem to get progressively worse as the film continues. One or two moments of half baked 'soapy' melodrama, usually featuring preposterous plump and mustachioed 'boyfriends but for the most part a creepy fully focused and unusual horror that is well worth a watch. I must also mention the cat. Featuring heavily in the great opening credits, this black cat does not put a paw wrong and is caught on camera looking as mysterious and fearsome as is possible. He also features in the fine original poster.