La Noche de Walpurgis and the horny scourge of Spanish werewolves
Surprisingly gory and haunting as hell
Italy casts a long shadow over the horror offerings coming from Europe with England riding in real loud behind them, hogging the spotlight and it’s not without merit. Both nations, with France as a sort of sidekick, dominate the world stage for horror with a parade of solid gold hits. The United States, with the backing of Hollywood and a vast network of independent franchises is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, taking up the remaining western real estate. So it’s always struck me as a little disappointing that Spain, a significant landmass on the European continent, lives in the shadow of its neighbors. It certainly experienced the same social conditions as the others, as rightward and leftward political forces clashed openly in the twentieth century that led directly to an easing of social mores and the same libertine spirit that seized the continent in the 60’s. The resulting violent shift of society produced the very same wave of trashy horror movies but in many ways, Spain’s offerings are qualitatively superior to the exploitation factories which surround it. Where Italy’s masters eventually gave way to schlocky dickweeds like Bruno Mattei, and the baseline quality of their horror films slipped into dire mediocrity as the sands of the 70’s hourglass slipped away, Spain’s output was significantly less prolific, but remained at a consistent goodness that it’s positively weird to me that a dude like Paul Naschy remains niche and cult even among a crowd as niche and cult as ravenous horror movie fans tend to be.
A few Spanish horror movies managed to slip through the cracks and you see them on American shelves occasionally bearing titles like Tomb of the Blind Dead and Vampyros Lesbos, and most of them owe their international success to the tone and precedents set by Paul Naschy. His perennial werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky, appeared in a shitload of films that set the pace and established filmmaking themes that would make the later breakout successes so memorable. In short, they put Spain on the map in the first place and with good reason. They’re great and Naschy has a natural presence on screen. A professional body builder in the mode of doughy 60’s strongmen, he was a handsome dude with easy macho appeal and a smolder that was destined for cinema and to top it off, the guy could act.
Naschy was a one-man show in a lot of ways that interesting wave-makers tend to be. He experienced the early Hollywood pictures, zeroing in on the obvious winners of the bunch, the Universal Monsters, and like most of us who caught those pictures at a young and impressionable age, he came to identify with one of them more than the others. Even though their relevance slips further and further away the older they get, they still leave an impression and whether you realize it or not, you likely identify with one of the core four more than the others, leaving aside those unhinged weirdos who fall for The Creature From The Black Lagoon. For instance, I realized one day that in spite of my love of Bela Lugosi and Dracula, I was really more closely related to Boris Karloff and Frankenstein’s Monster. You could probably build an entire psychological study around the Universals. The tragic creation, horrifying through no fault of his own really says a lot about me and the way that I feel about me. The same goes for Naschy and his obsession with Lon Chaney Junior’s Larry Talbot, doomed through bad luck to give his body over to the suppressed animal instincts of man’s meaty evolutionary past once per month. Loving film but lacking substantial studio output, Naschy set out to create his own legacy of horror movies with equal parts inspiration from the Universals and the salacious Hammer lookalikes coming into Madrid from a few hundred miles north of the Bay of Biscay. Spain, reeling from the Franco era and the fairly recent unpopularity of fascism in Europe, found release in these new sexy and violent wolfman movies and thus a legacy was born. Naschy even set the table for Spanish filmmakers like Jess Franco who would later make and remake their own movies when he went back to the well on several of his previous wolfman movies, among them this one, La Noche de Walpurgis.
Also known as The Werewolf Versus The Vampire Woman, because Americans need wobbly, keyword-rich titles to spell everything out for them, La Noche del Walpurgis picks up where the previous film ended, with Naschy’s hombre lobo, Waldemar Daninsky lying dead on the slab at a mortuary. His corpse is revived when the presiding doctor removes two silver bullets from his chest and because we need to hit the ground running, he transforms into a wolf, kills the doctor and flees to the countryside where he ambushes a woman alone in the forest, leading to an unintentionally hilarious shot that sets the tone for the rest of the movie. The camera first zooms in on the face of the dead woman, pans down to the gory wound on her neck, and then pans down again to her exposed breast where we linger for way longer than is necessary before the title card is revealed over wolfman Daninsky’s drooling wolfy face. What’s a European horror movie without some gratuitous boobs, though?
Once the title card hits, however, the film shifts gears and gets to the point (but not before another long steady shot over some bloody breasts). A pair of friends, Elvira — named after Naschy’s wife for a subplot that’s actually very sweet in this context — and Genevieve set off to the countryside in search of the grave of a notorious Eizabeth Bathory type, the Countess Wandessa Darvula de Nadasdy. They chance upon Daninsky, who is also in search of the Countesses body in order to retrieve a silver dagger which can be used to kill him once and for all if the stabbing is done by his true love. Inevitably, the grave is found and the dagger is retrieved but, oops! Genevieve is cut on the blade and drops of her blood end up on the Countess’s skull which spells doom for hapless adventurers in any movie. Mayhem ensues.
The film’s director, Leon Klimovsky, makes use of a technique in La Noche del Walpurgis that you later find in Armando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies where it is far better known. He uses slow motion whenever the Countess is around and as simple as that sounds, it’s actually quite haunting in its execution. It suggests that being in the presence of vampires is dream-like and strange, a theme that neighboring French director, Jean Rollin, would use as an expressive technique in his own sexy vampire movies. There’s an unnatural quality about them that is hypnotic and weird and the fluid technique of slow-motion film expresses this idea breezily. In any other exploitation movie, the script would spend valuable pages explaining this effect out loud but to its credit, the original audio track of the Spanish release lets it ride and the movie wins points for it. Also on board is the stunning Patty Shepard, as the Countess, who hardly speaks a word yet manages to clinch the entire movie’s lasting appeal with viewers thanks to her natural beauty and captivating presence and costuming. The dramatic tension falls to our heroes being constantly under siege from the vampires and the looming threat of a full moon. It’s simple stuff but I’d wager good money that I could make a solid argument for Naschy’s films picking up the ball where Hammer let it drop in the 70’s as Christopher Lee could no longer mask the fact that he was sick and tired of playing Count Dracula.
With the exception of the soft and disappointing finale, La Noche de Walpurgis moves along at a steady clip, featuring Naschy’s excellent low-budget wolfman getup and a stunning amount of drippy gore for the time that it was made. And no horrifying scene spares the opportunity to tear blouses when a woman’s involved, putting on display a near-pathological drive to stuff the loose ends with nudity. You’ll find no greater metaphor for the werewolf than yet another shirt literally torn open as the wolfman runs wild. La Noche de Walpurgis is the opening volley in what would result in a horror movie boom for Spain that, with few exceptions, never seem to reach beyond its own shores. Being the first, it also left a high-water mark for the rest to reach for, none of them ever really achieving these heights again. Not even Naschy, whose output up to the time of his death was quite prolific, would chase this achievement, even going back to the well in 1980 with Return of the Wolfman, a sort of remake and revision of this movie and the movie which turned out to be Naschy’s favorite among his own body of work. Personally speaking, of course, I feel like this is the superior movie of the two and I consider it to be the best of his wolfman flicks.
If you’ve never experienced a Naschy wolfman movie you really owe it to yourself to try it out. They’re at once very familiar, thanks to their use of common American and British monster movie tropes while also being being uniquely Spanish in their gleeful employment of slimy gore and nudity. It’s no accident that I post this essay on the night of a full moon.