House of Terror

House of Terror (1960)

La Casa Del Terror

Casimiro, night watchman at a wax museum of horrors, is even more sleepy than his usual laziness makes him - because his boss, the Professor, is secretly draining blood from him while he dozes to use in experiments in raising the dead. These haven't worked so far, and the bodies have been waxened and placed on display in the museum to cover his crimes. His big chance seems to come, however, when he learns that the mummified body of a modern man has been found in an Egyptian sarcophagus. The professor and his two henchmen steal the body and take it back to his lab - where the experiment flops again.

Date of release
1960-06-05
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 22m
Genres
Science Fiction, Horror, Comedy
Director
Gilberto Martínez Solares

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $475.2K

La Casa del Terror is a 1960 Mexican horror comedy film written and directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares, and starring Germán Valdés "Tin-Tan", Yolanda Varela and Lon Chaney Jr..

Production

The film was shot in Mexico in 1959. It was directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares (who also plotted the story). Juan García and Fernando de Fuentes co-wrote the finished screenplay with Solares.

Lon Chaney Jr. traveled to Mexico in 1959 to star in this Tin-Tan horror comedy. Jerry Warren commented (in an interview with Tom Weaver) "He (Chaney) didn't like doing this kind of film. He didn't like being classified as a werewolf at all. ....He wanted to be Lon Chaney, not the sort of character whose face changed.....but in Hollywood, people do the things they have to do."

The werewolf transformation effects in the film were very similar to those in the Universal Wolf Man movies, with Chaney having to hold his face still while the slow dissolves turn him into a monster. The special effects were handled by Jorge Benavides.

Producer Jerry Warren bought the film and combined footage from La Casa del Terror with footage from another 1950s Mexican film, La Momia Azteca, in order to create a hybrid film which he released in 1965 as Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

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

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