Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Rubén Galindo Jr. was still attending college in the U.S. when his father told him he needed to come back to Mexico and make his first feature. Once home, the then 23-year-old started working on what would eventually become the Mexican cult classic, Cemetery of Terror (Cementerio del terror). The 1985 movie centers on two different groups of characters encountering the same threat on Halloween night. Firstly, six college students find a tome of black magic inside a creepy, abandoned house. After casting a spell on a random corpse they stole from the local mortuary, they revive what turns out to be a satanic killer named Devlon (José Gómez Parcero). Later, five kids are left to deal with the aftermath.
With Cemetery of Terror being a jumble of other horror movies, the biggest influence is absolutely 1978’s Halloween. Apart from an escaped psychiatric patient killing young folks on All Hallows’ Eve is an agitated, Dr. Loomis-esque parallel, Dr. Camilo Cardan (Hugo Stiglitz). At the beginning, Cardan is the only one aware of the late Devlon’s true evil and requests his body be cremated immediately. He then spends the rest of the movie hunting down his mortal enemy and helping the unfortunate children who get mixed up in this mess.
Cemetery of Terror gets its bloodshed out of the way early on before shifting the focus to the younger cast. The college fodder includes Jorge (Servando Manzetti), Oscar (René Cardona III), Pedro (Andrés García Jr.), Lena (Erika Buenfil), Mariana (Jacqueline Castro), and Olivia (Edna Bolkan). What the women thought was going to be a massive Halloween bash inside a mansion is really a private party at Devlon’s run-down lair. The men think they can arouse their disappointed dates by performing a ritual from the book they found. As idiotic as that sounds, their plan works up to a certain point. That point of course being Devlon showing up and slaughtering his revivers. Killing children is fairly taboo even in the horror genre, so adding these brainless characters satisfies the thirst for gore while also sparing audiences the sight of maimed kiddos.
The butchery is concentrated in the movie’s first half, whereas the remainder is almost bloodless. Even so, Cemetery of Terror picks up both in pace and fun as soon as young Tony (Eduardo Capetillo) and his friends — Anita (María Rebeca), Raúl (César Adrian Sanchez), Usi (Usi Velasco), and César (César Velasco) — get involved in Devlon’s rampage. It makes sense to have younger characters present because of the setting; Halloween in Mexico, or Noche de Brujas, was largely a children’s holiday back then. Nowadays, it is more widely observed among all ages.
Children in slasher movies have a reputation for being annoying and foolish; the ones seen here start off that way. Not only do they hitch a ride in a stranger’s van (driven by Galindo himself), they choose to spend their Halloween in a cemetery as part of a juvenile bravery test. Yet as they stumble into Devlon’s den of death, witness their first dead bodies, and fend off a sudden horde of zombies, Tony and the others grow up fast. They do what the adults cannot do and put an end to this nightmare.
A book being the source of trouble sounds like something ripped out of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, but the sudden arrival of zombies points to a less obvious muse. Galindo’s entire script was inspired by John Landis’ music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. This fact is evident once Tony and his pals become trapped in the eponymous setting. Shot on location in Brownsville, Texas, Cemetery of Terror does tremendous work on such a meager budget. The makeshift cemetery, constructed quickly by local carpenters, is a hotbed for undead activity and suspenseful chase sequences. The kids get a total workout as they repeatedly run away from an army of shambling zombies. Makeup artist Ken Diaz, who contributed to the “Thriller” video, worked his magic on the living dead here.
The original director of photography, Rosalio Solano, was replaced with the more productive Luis Medina. According to his interview with Vinegar Syndrome for the film’s Blu-ray release, Galindo felt Cemetery of Terror did not look quite as good as it might have with the prolific Solano. In its current form, however, the movie comes across as exceptionally eerie and dense in atmosphere. Filling the zombie’s graves with mysterious sources of neon lighting, as well as having the children tote lit Halloween lanterns as they traipse in the fog and dark are other nice touches.
It is safe to say there is nothing substantially original about Cemetery of Terror. It pulls from several sources, albeit great ones, and looks more at their surfaces rather than their structures or substance. Galindo’s forte is ultimately understanding what works well in other films, and then putting those aspects to good use in his own projects. There are essentially two different movies here; a routine slasher followed up by a zany and harrowing conclusion that feels straight out of a Fulci production. Derivativeness notwithstanding, the overall direction is stylish. Galindo undoubtedly made some of the finest schlock in Mexican horror.
