La cabina (1972)

La cabina (1972) - The scariest horror film ever?

La cabina, the 1972 short by Antonio Mercero, may be the perfect horror film.

If you haven't seen it, don't worry, there are no big spoilers in this article.

La cabina is only 36 minutes long but its effects will last for a lifetime!

You can see La cabina for free on YouTube.

Watch La cabina on YouTube 

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Like all great art, La cabina makes strong and simple statements on humanity and on social conditions, while still being an entertainment.  You don't need to be a genius to analyse it, but at the same time La Cabina doesn't lay it on thick.

Your response to La Cabina is therefore somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, and this is why it succeeds in being of the most memorable horror films of all time.

What Is La Cabina About?

This extreme portrayal of the human condition gets to the viewer so effectively because it plays on fears of exposure.  It's the glass of the cabina that makes the experience so awful.

José Luis López Vázquez as La Cabina man - happiness

José Luis López Vázquez at Wikipedia

The La cabina man is laughed at all the way through the film, until he reaches the fringes of the city, and there in the ruins are some circus performers, one of whom is quite deformed. 

This is a classic cinematic trope - the outcasts.  Of course these outcasts do not laugh at the La cabina man.  They only look on gravely.  They have seen it all before.

As the La cabina man progresses on his journey of confusion, first isolated in a society without care and then removed via an existential wasteland and into a bizarre tecnological tomb, his pain, and the viewer's pain, is heightened by an image of his son.

Of all the aspects of La cabina, this is the hardest to stomach.  When a vision his son hits La cabina man near the end, it is then that we truly feel the pain of all this pointlessness. 

The genius of La Cabina lies in this concrete expression of the abstract pains of life. Life's stupidity.  Life's traps.  Life's regrets. The fact that life ends with so much undone.  The fact that life ends at all.

José Luis López Vázquez as La Cabina man - doubt

The Finale

Even if you haven't seen La cabina, its reputation and pedigree is such that you may already know what happens in the end.

It is still however worth seeing.  The build up to the finale is much stranger than you would expect as the action veers into a strange industrial setting.  I guess this is the film saying that industrialised society is confining and killing us . . . . but that is not what you will be thinking.

You will be thinking: "WHY WOULD ANYBODY DO THIS?!" And even if you want to get away, like the La cabina man, you are seeing this through to the finale.

José Luis López Vázquez as La Cabina man - horror

Who would do such a thing as this? 

There is of course only one answer . . .  it is God.

La cabina is God's sense of humour and only God can know why God finds this sort of treatment acceptable, and that in the nutshell is the logic of La cabina.  

More than any speculation on industrial society, all of life is felt in this predicament.  As Hombre de la cabina nears his final destination, a mysterious helicopter appears and he pleads to it for help, and I couldn't help thinking that somehow this was representitive of God.

Ach . . . I'm getting too heavy.  Either way, La cabina sums up much about life.  A pointless journey, during which you are exposed to confusion, ridicule and baffling emotions.  And it is a trap from the off.

Beware

The fantastic thing about La Cabina is that it is one of these films that you may only see once, but which will stay with you for life. 

 

La cabina at Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_cabina

La cabina at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKkfGG9q32c

 

Dracula 1958 (Hammer)

The Keep by Paul F. Wilson

A massive novel, and an Epic Volume, The Keep starts strong and gets better and better. The book has corpses, castles, Nazis, medieval evil and terror hardened villagers and soldiers.  There are mysterious messages written in blood, an unknown evil wreaking havoc, and an ancient sorceror from the 'First Age' of humans. There's something so satisfying about Nazis getting it in the neck.  It's not hard to pinpoint, and the physical and psionic assaults on the hapless German soldiers stay satisfying til the end.

German soldiers and SS einsatzkommandos are being slowly killed off in a mysterious castle (the "Keep" of the title) high in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania in April 1941. A Jewish History Professor living in Bucharest, Theodore Cuza, and his daughter Magda, are collected and delivered in a desperate effort by SS Sturmbannfuhrer Eric Kaempffer to find out what is murdering his men.

It’s shocking to discover that there are Romanians out there who do not believe in vampires, but they come to their senses before long. The Keep is a full on operatic novel, with pedigree, partially let down by a film version by Michael Mann for Paramount in 1983. The film was a disaster but retains a cult following, partly due to Tangerine Dream's work on the soundtrack.

Every night I was reading this (the book is better than the film!) my delight increased, and approaching a bedside table that has a copy of The Keep on it is a thrill not to be undervalued. The Keep has runes in it that say ‘stranger leave my home’ – so everything is perfectly laid out, and executed. To the last Nazi.

'Cowed by the amplified sounds of his own terror, Grunstadt stood transfixed as the walll into which his friend had crawled bulged outward, minute cracks appearing along the jagged edges of the heavy granite blocks.  A wide cravice jagged up from the space left by the stone they had removed.  The few puny lights strung along the corridor began to dim, and when they were nearly out, the wall burst open with a final convulsive termor, showering Grunstadt with shards of shattered stone and releasing something inconceivably black that leaped out and enveloped him with a single smooth swift flowing motion.  The horror had begun.'

The horror continues at Epic Volumes
More horrific doings at http://peterburnett.info/horror

The Nameless by Ramsay Campbell

Ramsay Campbell is unpredictable, and it’s kind of hard to guess what you’re going to get. I wouldn’t put The Nameless (1981) at the forefront of the Ramsey oeuvre, because although it starts well, it transitions to the climax too slowly for me. It depends what you’re reading for I guess, and I'm more of a shock a minute type of reader.  So although Epic, Ramsey Cambell's volumes are to be treated as personal.

The story is about a woman who has lost her daughter, only to receive a phone call nine years later from a person she believes is the girl – and it all leads her into the world of a hideous and sadistic cult of people with no names – among other things.

As far as I know, The Nameless is the only one of Ramsey Campbell's many novels to have been filmed – so far. It’s a pity, yes, but it certainly is the easiest in terms of plot. I can't say I enjoyed the film, which is something of a modern gallio, if you know this Italian genre.  I had no idea they were still making them, and I was surprised they even optioned this novel for it, as it bore so little relation. A proper, even British, film of The Nameless would be more satisfying.

The highlights in The Nameless come pretty early, when the hero Barbara is creeping around the deserted safe houses used by the cult, making shocking discoveries.  These are truly creepy scenes with an atmosphere that isn’t caught again until near the end. During these genre-perfect thrill-a-page passages, which seem in parts as stock as anything James Herbert might produce, the book is diverting, enjoyable and possessed of a down to earth suspense that is best served late at night.

As is common though in the horror game, The Nameless doesn’t lead to a ultimatell, full-on, epic and fulfilling ending; I mean, the end is good, but perfunctory, given the build-up was so fantastic. 

Horror fans are fussy like this, and I know among the most demanding. A lot of horror reading is about enjoying the moment as opposed to imagining a fulfilling and entire work. It means that the great build up , which really comes to very little, proves in a way that the high hopes enjoyed throughout the book must be valued – not dismissed merely because they are dashed aside in closing.

Finishing is so hard to do, and we can never know if there are sadistic forces at work behind the scenes in a writer’s life. It is after all, a horrific business.

The Nameless at the Epic Volumes Vault
http://peterburnett.info