In 1974 director Julián Soler released "Satanás de todos los horrores", a new version of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", suggesting the influence of Juan López Moctezuma's 1972 horror drama "The Mansion of Madness". For López Moctezuma, though, Poe's name and work were as incidental as Sheridan Le Fanu's, whose novella "Carmilla" inspired this masterpiece of gore. The sound and visuals of "Alucarda" went over the top, prompting the publisher of the "Psychotronic Video" magazine to declare that the film had «more blood, loud screaming and nudity than any horror film» he could think of. I suppose that indeed it was, at least in 1978, and it surely called into question the "appropriateness" of the Mexican mini-epics of terror for the middle class that were in vogue, and the stiff upper lip of Hammer vampires and victims of the 1970s. It also came up against the presumptuousness of those Mexican genre directors who denied their cultural roots, in search of a horror cinema made in limbo. In the times of Mexican genre masters Fernando Méndez, Chano Urueta and Rafael Baledón, the Eastern European names and locales of their movies were naïve attempts at worldliness, that made us giggle and panic, as also did products like Portillo's "La momia azteca", that toyed with pre-Columbian cultures and Mexican folklore but was also aligned with the Egyptian mummy of Universal Films. Here worldliness became universal and it was simultaneously rooted in the weirdness or excessive emotion that Mexicans can elicit from themselves as a cultural trait. The representation of fanaticism, guilt, vice and death in "Alucarda", among demented (and lascivious) nuns and monks, proved one more time how correct André Breton was when he declared México «the most surrealist country in the world». Juan López Moctezuma's film gave a grand finale to an era of undeniably wonderful, non-expensive and evocative works in the history of humankind's creation of cultural works of horror, from 1953 (the year when Chano Urueta's "El monstruo resucitado" was released) to 1978, in México.
