Original title: Ladrón de cadáveres

This audacious riff on the Frankenstein story – soon to be revitalised by Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – was made to seem even more like a wanton cash-in thanks to its American release title which shamelessly recalled the 1945 Val Lewton-produced, Robert Wise-directed film of the same name. Unoriginal it may be then, but this The Body Snatcher, directed by Fernando Méndez, shortly before he made his hugely influential El vampiro/The Vampire (1957), is so well made and such rollicking, idiotic fun that it would be churlish to complain too much.

After a marvellously atmospheric opening sequence straight that’s out of a Universal Frankenstein film, it settles down into mystery thriller mode for a while. Mexican police captain Carlos Robles (Crox Alvarado) is on the trail of the killer of several of the county’s top athletes but that trail is growing colder by the day. The killer is a scientist, Don Panchito (Carlos Riquelme), who is using the murdered sportsmen as unwilling participants in his experiments to create the perfect being by transplanting animal brains into human bodies, believing that it will make them immortal. Robles persuades wrestler Guillermo Santana (former professional wrestler Wolf Ruvinskis), El vampiro (nothing to do with Mendez’s later film) to act as bait in order to lure the killer out into the open. But Santana is captured, and his brain removed, replaced by that of a gorilla. And the first thing that Panchito does with his new creation? Slap a mask on him and send him back into the wrestling ring of course with the new name El vampiro II of course. It’s all as mad as a box of frogs of course which just adds to the fun. The climax, in which the physically deteriorating Santana becoming increasingly animalistic in look and behaviour, goes on a murderous rampage in a wrestling arena is terrific.

The borrowings from the Universal films are obvious throughout though Méndez and his co-writer Alejandro Verbitzky ring just enough changes to ensure that the copyright lawyers were kept at bay. It’s a beautifully lit film, by the hugely prolific Víctor Herrera, with an almost noirish use of shadows and light and although it never quite recaptures the rich Gothic ambience of the opening graveyard scene, it’s a more atmospheric film than most of its ilk. The climactic chase across the rooftops quotes from King Kong (1933) and, after a fashion, anticipates the ending of Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961).

The Body Snatcher is a film of firsts. It’s the first of the wrestling horror films, a sub-genre that would explode in popularity over the coming decade, making stars of professional grapplers like Santo, Blue Demon, Lobo Negro, Neutron (a character created by Wolf Ruvinskis for the non-genre La bestia magnífica/The Magnificent Beast (1952)) and many others. It was also the first film to feature that future over-used staple of the Mexican genre film, the mad scientist engaging in obscene experiments with animals and humans.

Unusually, the wrestling scenes fit with the rest of the plot rather better than was the case in most lucha libre horror films – and they’re certainly quite brutal, the participants, all real-life professional wrestlers, not holding back one jot. The wrestling matches will entertain the fans but will likely leave everyone else with their thumb hovering over the fast forward button, though the milieu is well integrated into the story. It’s also notable that while later films largely pitted wrestlers against the monsters, here the wrestler is the monster, something that would become unthinkable in later films when the stars of the ring would be transformed into superheroes.

Too often, a historically important genre film doesn’t have much else going for it other than it was the first of its kind. Not so The Body Snatcher. It’s well made, nicely acted by all involved and yet still shot through with that weirdness that we’d become so familiar with from later Mexican films. La bestia magnífica may have been the first Mexican film to feature wrestlers but The Body Snatcher was the first to meld that most pervasive of Mexican sporting passions with the horror film and, with Hammer on the verge of transforming the genre, it couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. Little that followed would be as well made but, for better or for worse, it opened the door for a whole new strain of international horror film that would become extraordinarily prolific in the next few years.

Together with Méndez’s subsequent El vampiro, The Body Snatcher helped not only to create a new market for Mexican horror and science fiction films (there had been earlier examples, but none made quite the same impact as Méndez’s films) both at home and abroad and also went a long way to revitalising the entire moribund Mexican film industry as a whole. The Body Snatcher isn’t quite as striking as El vampiro but it’s still one of the best of the 50s and 60s Mexican horror/luchador films.