Darker Than Night (1975)

Day 53 of Sobriety. 

Another day, another horror film revolving around a creepy cat. I don’t know why but I have been coming across a lot of creepy cats recently. Since I started this blog less than two months ago, I have watched The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), The Legacy (1978), and now another one: Darker Than Night, which is my third and final film from the three-film set of Carlos Enrique Taboada films put out by Vinegar Syndrome under the title Mexican Gothic. Of the other two, I enjoyed one: Poison for the Fairies (1984), and did not really care much for the other: Rapiña (1973), so I went in hoping it would score two out of three.

The plot of Darker Than Night concerns four attractive young women that move to a creepy old mansion that one of them has inherited from a deceased aunt. This surprises the woman, because the aunt was estranged from her while she was alive. However, she seems to have been a slightly eccentric character, and her one stipulation was that her niece take car of her beloved cat called Bequer. Needless to say, things do not go particularly smoothly.

On the surface Darker Than Night should have been right up my street. It plays much like an Italian or Spanish “Eurohorror” film of the same period, albeit with far more restrained sex and violence. Although it has a contemporary setting, it could definitely be called a gothic horror film. The film is well made all round: well photographed, the sets and locations look great, and the four young women are suitably attractive and attired in cool 70s fashions.

For some reason, though, it didn’t quite click with me as much as those credentials suggest it should have. Maybe it was because it lacked the exploitation excesses of similar European efforts, maybe it was because the straight-forward ghost story plot was very leisurely paced and offered few surprises—I just don’t know, but those aren’t usually things that I mind. Maybe it was just my mood when I watched it, or maybe it was just one spooky cat too many. But I have to say, this particular cat was a better actor than most—certainly much better that the cat in The Tomb of Ligeia, which seemed to spend most of its screen time getting thrown at people from off-camera.

So, while I liked Darker Than Night, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped. I am looking forward to watching it again sometime, and who knows, maybe I will enjoy it more, but for now, I would rank it second place in the  Mexican Gothic box set, after Poison for the Fairies, which did have a certain unnerving quality.