Pulp Features

Born Jacinto Molina, Paul Naschy has been one of Spain’s most prolific directors, actors and producers of horror films. While some of his films have truly worked wonders, especially when you bear in mind the shoestring budgets with which they were shot, others have been absolute disasters worthy of Ed Wood.

Whether you like his films or not, however, you must give credit for dedication to the man who, in “The Hunchback of the Morgue”, actually allowed himself to be bitten multiple times by rats, in order to complete a scene without having the funds for the special effects.

Naschy’s most famous projects would be the werewolf series.

A big fan of Universal’s old horror films, he created a European answer to Larry Talbot, Waldemar Daninski who, like Talbot, was constantly killed, only to be repeatedly brought back to life in sequels. In further tribute to the old Universal series, Naschy also dressed in a black shirt and pants, something many viewers never pointed out in their evaluations or commentaries on his films. (Curious point, in the old Universal series, no one ever bothered to ask how, when Chaney turned into the wolfman, his clothing also managed to change, so he always had this same set of clothes, at least Naschy had sense enough to wear them before the big transformation scenes).

Not surprisingly, in many Spanish horror fans identify Naschy as “The Wolfman” more readily than they do Lon Chaney Jr. To be honest, film quality aside, Naschy played the werewolf in his European ventures far more times than Chaney in the USA.

Naschy of course played other characters as well, including a particularly moth-eaten mummy, an evil inquisitor in “Inquisition”, suckered into a fatal fall from grace and being burned at the stake himself in the end, an unusually stocky vampire in “Count Dracula’s Great Love” and a ghoul of undefined origin in “Terror Rises from the Tomb”.

In this writer’s own opinion, one of his best works remains seldom seen, “Panic Beats” or “Latitudos De Panico” in the original Spanish. In this plot, Naschy conspires to kill his wife, who has heart trouble, by scaring her to death. He and his adulterous lover work out a “haunted house plot” at the castle where centuries ago, a crazed knight killed his unfaithful wife with a mace. Naschy is able to scare his wife to death, causing her heart to go out, when he dresses as a knight and comes for her, but it doesn’t end there. His lover than does him in, by throwing an electric heater into a bathtub while he is washing up, humming and smoking a big cigar (Naschy was an avid cigar smoker prior to a near fatal heart attack in the late 1980s). The lover then gets hers, in the last ten minutes of the film. The castle ends up being haunted, the ghosts are real, and the evil knight does return from the grave, clubbing the living hell out of her at the end. Again, the film could have been better with a bigger budget and the plot sounds silly on the surface, but it works out rather well.

Another of his better projects, marred with controversy, is “Howl Of the Devil”, an interesting project in which the actor plays a marathon of characters including the lead heavy, his own “brother”, Frankenstein’s monster, the werewolf, Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, Bluebeard, the devil, Rasputin, The Phantom Of The Opera, and more. First came charges by scriptwriter Salvador Sainz - who had bit parts in both this film and the previously mentioned “Panic Beats” - that he, not Naschy, had scripted this project and had credit stolen from him like a scene from “Phantom.” The two were going at it, accusing the other of everything under the sun for years until time mellowed the controversy. To make matters worse, the movie was never released in the United States as intended, because Naschy utilized Karloff-type makeup for Frankenstein’s monster, and risked copyright action had the movie been shown in continental America.

The plot is too complex to go into in great depth here. Naschy plays a villain, raising his brother’s son (played by Naschy’s real-life son, Sergio). The boy hates his uncle and wants to kill him. As he creates a dream world, speaking to the various monsters, Naschy is “possibly” up to some kinky things of his own. Dressing up as famous sexual psychopaths such as Rasputin and Bluebeard, he makes loves to a series of prostitutes before casually discarding them. The prostitutes end up dead and mutilated.

The question is, is Naschy killing them, is someone else, or has the kid actually summoned up demons to get revenge on his hated uncle! The end has some odd twists, with the little kid revealed as the culprit, killing his reviled uncle while in the act of making love (not a bad way to die though). He then discovers he is not who he thinks he is, his “father” is not his father at all, but he is the son of Satan and the antichrist is in the world!

Sadly, for every good film he has come up with or been in, Naschy has had several bad ones, but these have helped, rather than hurt his career with some of these tacky horror projects elevating him to true cult hero status.

I met Naschy once and conducted an interview with him, years ago, while in Spain.

Although some of the people he has worked with didn’t like him and made no bones about it, I found that he was hospitable, to say the least. I was surprised however, to learn his characteristic black hair is a wig. He’s bald in real life.

Though no spring chicken, he still keeps going. I had heard he planned an internet movie titled “Bullfighters from Outer Space”, a couple years back, but a quick search turned up only a passing reference to it.

No-one can keep going forever and, whether he retires or drops dead from overwork, one thing can be certain, Naschy will have left behind a host of horror films others will find hard to match, in sheer productivity. Not all of these have been good projects mind you, but that’s all part of the Naschy legacy.

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