Recently, I stumbled upon a library of K. Gordon Murray releases on the Internet Archive. (Which would have been worth it for this thing alone.)

Given my predilections, I knew what I had found immediately, but for those who have spent their lives in more worthwhile pursuits than I, who is K. Gordon Murray? As Mark David Welsh puts it (in his own review of Spiritism), “Rather than make his own films, Murray made his reputation importing foreign films, many from Mexico, giving them a quick wash and brush up before unleashing them on the American market.”

Which is to say that Murray is probably best known primarily for his role in releasing a passel of Mexican movies stateside, including children’s fairy tale flicks as well as luchador and horror pictures, all dubbed into English by Sound Lab Inc. in Florida. After that, Murray ran afoul of the IRS and died of a heart attack at age 57 while watching an NFL playoff game.

Fellow Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans will no doubt recognize Murray’s name, as it appeared in front of no less than three of their films: The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, Santa Claus, and Samson vs. the Vampire Women.

Murray’s releases were not always the most respectful of their source material, but they were also often the only way to see these films, at least until recently. Such is the case with Spiritism, a 1962 shocker from Mexico that was the first thing I watched upon stumbling on this unexpected treasure trove.

Director Benito Alazraki had a prolific 1962. Along with Spiritism, he also released Santo vs. the Zombies and the horror comedy Frankenstein, the Vampire, and Company. His other credits include 1961’s Curse of the Doll People, another K. Gordon Murray joint.

I hadn’t seen any of Alazraki’s other films, and I hadn’t ever heard of Spiritism, but, as I wrote on social media, “There are certain immutable laws of the universe. One of these is that if I find a Mexican horror movie from 1962 called Spiritism, I’m going to watch it, no matter how yellow the print is.” (And, unfortunately, in this case the print is very yellow.)

In many ways, Spiritism is made up of two stories. In one, the wife of a middle-class couple gets into spiritualism and drags her husband along. It starts off with a seance on a dark and stormy night, and we get a few more seances before all is said and done, including some spirit manifestations that are genuinely eerie, even all these years later and on a less-than-ideal print. In particular, the manifestation of a “high being,” a character’s “guardian angel,” is especially haunting – nevermind that it is apparently supposed to be a comforting presence.

The other story comes in as the wife receives various warnings from the spirit world, even while her son (played by Rene Cardona Jr., the son of a legendary Mexican director with more than 100 films to his credit, who would go on to become a director himself, helming such flicks as The Night of 1000 Cats and Bermuda Triangle) gets into some financial difficulties. Into this comes the Devil (maybe), who offers her “Pandora’s box,” which is capable of granting her wishes. Inside this box is a crawling hand and the film’s other main plot, an uncredited retelling of W. W. Jacobs’ classic 1902 short story “The Monkey’s Paw.”

By any normal metric, there’s not a lot to recommend Spiritism. The spirit manifestations are memorable, but there’s little enough else of atmosphere in this talky picture, and, as Mark David Welsh puts it in his review, “the pace is almost unbearably slow.” Fortunately for me, I love Mexican horror from this era, and I love seance bullshit, so I loved Spiritism, in spite of its many flaws, and in spite of that glacial pace. I’d love to see it get the kind of boutique treatment afforded to some other top-shelf K. Gordon Murray imports in the Mexico Macabre boxed set from Indicator.

Maybe someday we can get a Mexico Macabre 2 with this, Doll People, World of the Vampires, etc.

(I also want a copy of that poster. It would look amazing in my media room.)