Una rata en la oscuridad (1979)

Warning: there will be spoilers, because there are some late movie revelations I simply cannot ignore completely

Sisters Josefina (Ana Luisa Peluffo) and Sonia (Anaís de Melo) have managed to buy a surprisingly spacious and classy house for suspiciously little money. As every viewer of horror movies will expect, the house does turn out to be haunted. At first, Sonia is in the centre of the various strange happenings that seem to emanate from the portrait painting of a somewhat intense looking woman found in the living room. These phenomena seem to travel with a single rat that makes uncommonly loud noises. In part, it’s the usual mix of poltergeist style phenomena and strange noises, but the haunting also slowly begins to influence the sisters’ personalities, turning Sonia first languid than aggressive through the magic of what is apparently pretty mind blowing ghost sex.

Fans of Mexican genre movies will probably know Una rata’s director Alfredo Salazar more as a screen writer than as a director. The ten movies he directed are small fry to the more than sixty he wrote from the 50s on. The film at hand does suggest a bit of a pet project, seeing how Salazar does his best to avoid the general shoddiness of late 70s Mexican genre films. However, pet project or not, it has to be said that some of the sleaze is too on the nose to be helpful for the film, and the acting tends to be too broad even for a film as consciously strange as this one gets.

The budget is obviously low, so complicated camera set-ups, extras or simply too many locations and sets are out, yet the film takes palpable care to use what little it has as best as possible. Salazar often manages to create a dream-like and truly strange mood on the cheap with the (I believe at least partially needle-dropped, most definitely genius) synth soundtrack, clever single camera set-ups, and slightly illogical plotting. It’s a film full of decisions like portraying a character’s ghost induced orgasm via a modern dance number in woozy white, the sort of idea that’s a bit absurd, a lot strange, and really rather brilliant. If that sounds a little like an Italian horror movie, I’d be very surprised if Salazar hadn’t been influenced by his colleagues from across the pond, or just inspired to go all out for the dreamlike and the peculiar by some very heavy food.

Also pretty strange are the film’s sexual politics. At first, the whole ghost sex angle does feel a lot like some of the good old (bad) lesbian panic angle. However, the big plot twist - as well as the explanation for why the camera is generally positioned so not to show the face of the sexing ghost, apart from this adding to the peculiar mood of the whole affair - is that the ghost is a transvestite (or a cross dresser), apparently an entity using the house as some sort of honey trap to seduce and murder people. In fact, I’m not even sure our villain is supposed to be a supernatural entity – the ending’s simply to weird to make the kind of sense that’ll lead anyone to logical conclusions about their nature. If this makes Una rata’s sexual politics better or worse, I honestly have no idea. It certainly adds another parallel to Italian horror movie obsessions and makes things more peculiar. What – if anything – Salazar actually means by any of it, I’m not able to parse.

In any case, if you’d like your weird European-style horror to come from Mexico instead for once, and enjoy being confused and mildly weirded out, Una rata en la oscuridad is most probably going to be a fine film for you.

Past Misdeeds: Una Rata En La Oscuridad (1979)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Two sisters are moving into a rather shabby looking old dark house. Josefina (Ana Luisa Peluffo), the older of the two, has taken the role of replacement mother for her sister Sonia (Anais de Melo), although that doesn't seem to discourage her from practicing a rather problematic kind of sisterly massage women practice. When they are not having pillow fights or pyjama parties.

As is so often the case with old dark houses, strange things begin to happen to the sisters. At first, it's just the appearance of an unnaturally persistent rat (played by an anonymous rat method actor of the highest calibre), or the shadow of a woman (Ricardo Cortes) roaming the house - the simple spooky things. Soon the strange activities begin to increase. The camera and the furniture develop an unpleasant tendency to shake, and the female shadow turns out to belong to a transvestite sneaking through the house. The sneaker being a transvestite (or a cross dresser, the film really isn’t going into details here, or anywhere) seems to be supposed to be something of a twist reserved for the film's ending, but it should be quite obvious to anyone with eyes, so I see no reason not to spoil the "surprise".

A bit later, our transvestite friend begins to grope Sonia in her sleep, which the woman enjoys quite a bit. After their night of sweet sweet copulation, Sonia doesn't want to leave her bed anymore, develops a drinking (in bed, oh no!) habit and tells Josefina that she wants to kill her. Later still, Sonia actually tries her luck at strangling her sister. But don't worry, Josefina will live and she will get some of that sweet sweet groping love too. In fact, Josefina will do her sister one better and dream of doing jazz dance during her big sex scene.

Alas, it all will have to end in tears and more flying furniture.

I don't know much about the state of Mexican horror cinema at the end of the 70s when Una Rata was made, but going by the film's rather impoverished look and the way other Mexican genre movies of the time I’ve seen worked out, it's not much of a stretch to theorize that it was in its death throes. There's an aura of shabbiness surrounding everything I find all too typical of the products of film industries which have seen better days.

Una Rata is one of only a handful of films directed by Alfredo Salazar, brother to Mexican genre film impresario Abel Salazar and writer of just about every horror or lucha movie made in Mexico not written by Fernando Oses, and on one hand, it's not much of a surprise he didn't direct too many films. Salazar's style is just a bit too dry, the pacing of his film just a bit too much on the slow side (even by the rather relaxed standards of Mexican filmmaking of this type), his talent for mood-building just a bit too skewed to the patently weird side of the tracks. On the other hand, Salazar - at least in this film - seems much more interested in making a film bound to entertain its audience than many of his contemporaries, who all too often were making strings of filler instead of movies.

Fortunately, Una Rata is heavily influenced by the wild and weird world of Italian 70s horror in just about every aspect, and I for one can't find fault with the decision to at least make a mind-blowing film when you can't make a "good" one.

The recreation of Italian horror taking place here is a highly successful one and only begins with a soundtrack of perfect mock-Goblin quality, random moments of sleazy lingering on naked female bodies and the over-heated melodramatics of the acting. The core experience of Italian-style horror does of course not lie in in minor things like the soundtrack, a bit of inappropriate nudity, or hysterics, but in a film's insistence of making no sense whatsoever.

Salazar's film is especially successful in this regard. The film doesn't answer even a single question it brings up, gives no explanation for anything that is happening and does not care a lick about character motivations. In short, the sort of viewer who complains about the (imagined) lack of explanations in the finale of Lost would probably go mad from frustration watching this like a Lovecraft character having read his family tree. Who is the transvestite? Why is he doing what he does? Is he an actual transvestite or just a guy dressing up as a woman to disguise himself for some reason? What's up with the portrait of a woman the camera and Sonia's gaze linger so lovingly on? Is the rat causing the telekinetic phenomena? Salazar and the film don't tell, and frankly, I don't think Salazar knows or cares as long as his film causes its viewers to stare in disbelief and befuddlement.


I'm quite sure Una Rata En La Oscuridad's main goal is to trap its viewers in this blessed state of perpetual confusion, and man, does it ever. 

At Mystic Skull Mag: Una Rata En La Oscuridad (1979)

For some reason, Alfredo Salazar, one of the omni-present Salazar brothers of Mexican genre cinema, thought it would be a good idea to make a haunted house movie in the Italian style.

I'll explain how that turned out for him (and me) in my write-up at Mystic Skull Mag.

 

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