Macabre in Morelia: Exploring the Dark Side of Juan Bustillo Oro

The first film I saw at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival opens on the image of a freshly dug grave. Shovelfuls of earth fall into the open pit as two doctors stand above it, lamenting the loss of yet another patient. Some sinister mad science is afoot; the men are lit in portentous chiaroscuro. Their dialogue alludes to a frightful experiment, but an unexpected resonance shines through the genre trappings. This burial set the tone not only for the movie it opens, Juan Bustillo Oro’s atmospheric thriller The Mystery of the Ghastly Face (1935), but also for a festival uncommonly haunted by death.

Perhaps that’s to be expected: last fall, as in years past, the festival took place in the week leading up to the Day of the Dead. Across from the Teatro Matamoros and its red carpet, Morelia’s central square was blanketed in decorations: bright orange marigolds, calavera mannequins, altars piled with offerings. The city is the capital of the Mexican state of Michoacán, home to some of the holiday’s most exuberant celebrations. About an hour away by bus, the town of Pátzcuaro draws tourists from near and far, who flock to the neighboring island of Janitzio on the night of November 1 to climb to its candlelit cemetery. Back in Morelia, local tradition mingles with the decorative esperanto of Halloween: stylish catarinas pose for cell-phone-camera snapshots next to kids trick-or-treating as superheroes.

This was my first time at the festival, which was in its nineteenth edition. Since its founding in 2003, Morelia has stood out among the country’s annual film events by spanning the local and the international. The yearly Michoacán selection provides a platform for the state’s filmmakers, while a partnership with Cannes’s Critics Week brings in cutting-edge art-house work from around the world. Above all, it’s an ideal place to catch up with the latest in Mexican filmmaking, the exclusive focus of the official selection. Apart from the Netflix-backed A Cop Movie, few films in this section had much overseas-distribution muscle behind them, making it an important showcase for voices still unknown abroad.

Though the festival created a pocket of calm in Morelia’s historic center, the films I saw there reflected the turbulent conflicts raging outside it—real-life tragedies that contributed to the event’s haunted atmosphere. In the fifteen years since President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking, violent, gruesome, and inexplicable death has become a constant threat to communities across the country. Nearly 100,000 people are now missing, according to the National Search Commission, their loved ones left to mourn without closure, let alone justice. Michoacán is disputed territory; the U.S. State Department advises against visiting. The cab driver who took me to my bus from Mexico City hesitated when I asked him about the region. He didn’t consider it safe—one of his cousins had been killed there several months ago. In Michoacán, crime networks and protection rackets that long shaped the drug trade have taken over chunks of the formal economy too. Less than two hours west of Morelia, the city of Uruapan sits at the center of Mexico’s avocado-growing heartland; its murder rate is among the highest in the world.

These stark realities—along with the massive loss of life produced by Covid-19—stand in tension with the Day of the Dead and its grinning-skull symbolism. Traditionally, the holiday has been cited as evidence of a distinctly ironic and intimate national attitude toward death. “The Mexican chases after death, mocks it, courts it, hugs it, and sleeps with it,” wrote Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude. “He thinks of it as his favorite plaything and his most lasting love.” But that characterization is harder to sustain now that search parties of the bereaved and campaigners against impunity are the country’s most visible avatars of mourning.

A sorrowful social realism therefore prevailed among new Mexican films at the festival. Many of them took loss and tragedy as a starting point, with Ángeles Cruz’s superb portmanteau Nudo mixteco, Teodora Mihai’s bleak thriller La civil, Alejandro Guzmán Álvarez’s existential mood piece Estanislao, and Tatiana Huezo’s coming-of-age tale Prayers for the Stolen all beginning with a character’s death or disappearance. Most subtle and surprising was The Box, directed by the Venezuelan-born Lorenzo Vigas, in which an adolescent boy named Hatzín (Hatzín Navarrete) travels north to Chihuahua to recover the remains of his long-missing father, only to discover that he is still alive, now working as a shady entrepreneur in northern Mexico’s hyperexploitative border economy. In one of the film’s most resonant scenes, Hatzín takes off a shoe to compare his skin tone to that of his paler father, who lies asleep in the back of a truck. His search for paternal identity here stands in for Mexico’s fraught sense of history as a postcolonial nation.

For me, though, the festival’s principal attraction was a repertory sidebar dedicated to Bustillo Oro, one of the most prolific filmmakers of the cine de oro—a golden age that lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s. Opportunities like this are all too rare, as even some of the best-loved classics of Mexican cinema have been poorly preserved and scantly distributed. A chameleonic figure whose career encompassed expressionist experiments (Dos monjes) as well as popular hits (You’re Missing the Point), Bustillo Oro has long occupied a neglected middle tier in critical opinion, considered less of an auteur and more of an impersonal craftsman than peers like Fernando de Fuentes and Emilio Fernández. Yet the festival’s selection—consisting of six films screened in downtown Morelia’s Cinepolis Centro, as well as six more shown online—made a strong case for him as a daring and unpredictable stylist.

Before the festival, I knew Bustillo Oro only through a trio of films released in 1934: his brooding thriller Dos monjes and the screenplays he cowrote for de Fuentes’s The Phantom of the Monastery and El compadre Mendoza. The first two draw heavily from German expressionism, transposing its lugubrious mise-en-scène to a cloistered, Catholic setting where it thrives like a fungus in the dark. El compadre Mendoza, on the other hand, is one of the great cinematic tales of the Mexican Revolution, tracing the deceptions of a fickle landowner whose loyalties sway with the prevailing winds of battle. Its cool judgment surely owes much to de Fuentes, who directed two other classics of the revolution-film genre. But Bustillo Oro was then best known as a radical playwright, one of the founders of a social-realist movement called Teatro de Ahora. And, like the contemporary filmmakers bringing work to Morelia, he too came to the cinema in a time of widespread violence and social upheaval.

At first glance, The Mystery of the Ghastly Face reflects little of that background. Taking place largely within an art deco mansion and starring a cast of mostly lily-white actors whose pallor suggests a certain gothic sickliness, Bustillo Oro’s thriller conjures a hermetically sealed world. He and production designer Carlos Toussiant “wanted to avoid the gloomy old run-down house, a cliché in horror films,” as the director wrote in his memoir, Vida cinematográfica. “We preferred a modern style of architecture, full of large windows and light, suitable for scientific experiments.” Gloom still holds sway here, though, sucking at even the most well-lit interiors: one character’s bedroom is transfigured by a high window opening out onto blackness.

The plot hinges on a journey away from this main location. After losing the last of the tormented patients involved in his mysterious experiments, Dr. Forti (Carlos Villarías) takes his son, Pablo (Joaquín Busquets), on an expedition that brings them to an Indigenous village. Here they seek a guide to a place that the locals call “the land of the pale faces” (the “ghastly face” of the film’s title could be more literally translated from rostro pálido as “pale face”). The villagers refuse, but at night the doctor and his son observe them practicing a ritual of protection against the dead: masked figures dance around a firepit, surrounded by musicians drumming on skulls. The sequence is luridly exoticized, but its logic is provocative—the movie shares with these characters an association between whiteness and death.

Eight years later, Dr. Forti returns home without Pablo, but with a menacing, darker-skinned servant named Crescencio (Abraham Galán) in tow. Pablo’s fiancée, Angelica (Beatriz Ramos), reluctantly agrees to live with the doctor, but is terrorized by a masked figure who lurks outside her windows—including the one that opens onto nothing. Is this Pablo’s ghost, or a figment of her imagination? Dr. Forti seems far too pleased with her torment. In the end, the plot is unraveled with a neat scientific explanation: Dr. Forti has been seeking a cure for leprosy, and the ghost is a still-living but disfigured Pablo, who caught the disease when the pair visited the leper colony known by its neighbors as the land of the pale faces. But the film’s self-contained chamber horror has been subtly transformed by its encounter with Indigenous culture. Its sense of terror now seems to emerge from the mutual incomprehension of two sets of people, symbolized by the opacity of Pablo’s mask. In its own roundabout way, The Mystery of the Ghastly Face is just as preoccupied with questions of identity as The Box.

That said, it would be wrong to think of Bustillo Oro as a social critic whose early commitments remained constant throughout his oeuvre. A prolific and successful filmmaker whose career stretched from early talkies to the late sixties, he was very much a creature of that era’s commercial cinema. Though capable of bold visual experiments, the vast majority of his projects were driven by the whims of the box office. He readily admits as much in his memoir:

Cinema was born midway through the last decade of the nineteenth century. Then I followed midway through the first of the twentieth, less than ten years later. Since my father was the manager of the Teatro Colón, nearly the only pastime my family had was going there, and I found it marvelous. My father, as manager, received a small percentage of the ticket revenue. From the very beginning we saw ourselves in my house as at the mercy of the whims of Our Lady the Box Office. If she showed us favor, we’d even get pastries from El Globo. But with her disfavor came threats to cut off the light and throw us out of our home. How many things in my films can be explained, for better or for worse, by this complete submission that was imposed on me from childhood!

This easy humor helped Bustillo Oro score one of his biggest popular successes: the 1940 comedy You’re Missing the Point, which made a movie star out of Mario Moreno, a.k.a. Cantinflas. Though a hit performer on the carpa theater circuit (a cousin to the U.S.’s vaudeville scene), he didn’t get much traction on-screen until Bustillo Oro decided to direct a starring vehicle for him. Thinking back to his days in law school and a stint working as a public defender, the filmmaker devised a courtroom climax as the film’s raison d’être. A wonderful comic set piece that pits Cantinflas’s signature loopy—and effectively unsubtitleable—nonsense talk against the pompous logic of law and order, the scene became one of the star’s signature screen moments.

You’re Missing the Point was an outlier in this retrospective, though. The other five films the programmers chose to present at the Cinepolis all made the case for Bustillo Oro as a specialist in the macabre. From Dos monjes through a series of urban thrillers made in the 1950s, he returned repeatedly to shadows and fog, evocations of tortured mental states, and anguished sexual repression. He dabbled in writing crime fiction, and his early enthusiasm for expressionism made him an ideal practitioner of cine negro, just as German exiles like Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak helped plant the seeds of film noir in Hollywood. This is no doubt a selective reading of Bustillo Oro’s career. He made plenty of melodramas, musicals, and comedies, including a string of popular nostalgia pieces set during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship. But it’s clear from the films selected that his imagination came alive in the shadows.

Take The Man Without a Face (1950) and its eerie dream prologue. A funeral procession crosses a fog-filled landscape while a tortured-looking man watches helplessly. An older woman exhorts him to catch the killer who’s filled the coffins passing by. The murderer appears, and our dreamer shoots him, only to find that the man he’s been looking for has no face, just a blank, white smoothness under his hat. If the whodunnit that follows weighs a little leaden, it’s perhaps because Bustillo Oro has already expressed the movie’s concept so forcefully. The detective hero is himself the killer he’s looking for, and there’s no suspect more capable of hiding the truth from him than he is. The action, consequently, is all psychological, and develops somewhat ponderously. It helps, though, that the director has more nightmare imagery in store, and that the policeman is played by Arturo de Córdova, Mexican cinema’s great specialist in men fighting protracted, losing battles against their own psyches; his perennial costume is a suit drenched in cold sweat.

A punchier late effort called El medallón del crimen (1956) hews closer, almost virtuosically so, to the rules of the genre. As the film opens, an eye-in-the-sky voice-over (think The Naked City) introduces us to the ruthless gangster Ramón (Belmondo-faced former wrestler Wolf Ruvinskis) and the milquetoast family man Raúl (Manolo Fábregas, whose limp charisma makes him an ideal fall guy), telling us their paths will improbably cross. Sure enough, Raúl walks into a trap when he drunkenly stands up his wife on New Year’s Eve for another woman, who turns out to be Ramón’s mistress. After the gangster kills his lover out of jealousy, Raúl becomes the one who must get rid of the body, with both the killer and the police looking for him and a pesky brooch engraved with the number 13 signaling his guilty association.

This last film, a gothic cousin to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, was my favorite of the Bustillo Oro movies presented at Morelia. Marina Tamayo plays the nominal heroine Elisa, who marries brooding aristocrat Jorge (Emilio Tuero) despite the lurid rumors that trail him. But it’s Isabela Corona who towers over the film as Cristina, the jealous housekeeper who steps between Elisa and Jorge at every opportunity. She is eventually revealed to be Jorge’s half sister, long enthralled by incestuous love for him. Corona’s vampy hauteur—honed on the stage, where she spent much of the thirties in groups that produced the latest in international modernism for Mexican audiences—practically bursts into flames when she confesses her desire to Jorge at the film’s climax. Moments like these represent one of the key pleasures of the cine de oro: seeing filmmakers take familiar Hollywood idioms (here, the gothic melodrama) beyond the constraints of the Production Code.

The flipside of this forceful taboo-breaking, though, is the strength of tradition. Popular Mexican cinema was prone to assert familial piety as often as shatter it, and Bustillo Oro’s films are no exception. The trope of the foundling raised as a sister to the young man of the house who becomes his beloved, so venomously inverted in The Black Angel, is reused to less ironic ends in several of his plots. Then there’s the cliché of last-minute filial recognition, which puts a cap on The Black Angel’s sinister vapors when Jorge and Elisa’s son, played by Manolo Fábregas, finally acknowledges and embraces his true mother. The same actor earns a hard-won recognition from his long-lost father in Padre contra hijo (1955) and plays the trope inside-out in “X” Killer (1955) as a death-row convict who won’t let his mother find out he’s a murderer. For all the malady and destruction unleashed in these films, much dutiful effort is made to reestablish health and order.

But even when the pace slackens, the plot sputters, and these movies start to feel mechanical, a haunting image is always poised to leap off the screen: the shadow of an unseen violinist in The Mystery of the Ghastly Face, the devil’s face carved into a piece of furniture in The Black Angel, blood spreading over a pair of hands in The Man Without a Face. Bustillo Oro could not always exercise the control of a true auteur; it’s not clear he ever had that in mind. But his morbid grace notes sounded loud and clear at Morelia. Outside, death was a cause for celebration in the streets. In the dark theaters, sorrowful faces filled the screens, trying to tally their losses with a clear gaze. Bustillo Oro added a third note to the air, indeterminate but powerful. These films were designed to entertain, but they drew their energy from moments of anxiety and destruction. They’re the work of a director who knew to leave room in his films for a certain alchemy, like the window that opens onto darkness in The Mystery of the Ghastly Face. Gazing upon that frame, Dr. Forti compares it to “the window that dreams open onto mystery.”

Macabre in Morelia: Exploring the Dark Side of Juan Bustillo Oro

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