The Exquisite Cadaver

The Exquisite Cadaver (1969)

Las crueles

Horror, suspense and naked terror... will make your blood freeze!

Carlos, a rich publisher of novels begins receiving severed body parts in the mail two years after his mistress committed suicide. Along with these bloody parcels comes a letter of blackmail from the dead woman's former lesbian lover, launching a dark campaign for vengeance that forces him to confront secrets from his past.

Date of release
1969-08-25
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (17)
Runtime
1h 48m
Genres
Crime, Thriller
Director
Vicente Aranda

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Barcelona

The Exquisite Cadaver AKA: The Cruel Ones is a 1969 Spanish film noir psychological thriller film directed by Vicente Aranda, based on the short story Bailando Para Parker written by Gonzalo Suárez. The plot follows a well-to-do publisher and family man who begins to receive severed body parts in the mail two years after his mistress committed suicide. Along with one of these bloody parcels is a letter of blackmail from the dead woman's former lesbian lover, who seeks vengeance.

Production

After his previous films were met with indifference by critics and audiences, for his third project Spanish film director Vicente Aranda took a commercial approach mixing fantastic and erotic overtones in The Exquisite Cadaver.

Aranda had bought the film rights of Gonzalo Suárez's book Trece veces Trece (Thirteen Times Thirteen) that included the short story Bailando Para Parker (Dancing for Parker). Aranda and Suárez fell out over Fata Morgana, a previous project directed by Aranda and written by Suárez, because of Suárez's dislike of the resulting film.

Long in the making there were at least five different scripts and the film's ending varies from its original source: Bailando Para Parker ends in a trial that is not in The Exquisite Cadaver. Aranda found inspiration for the script in the letters of Mariana Alcoforado, including the theme of her famous letters : To die for love which is used in the sequence when the editor discovers the cadaver of his former lover.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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