The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964), written, produced and directed by Joseph Stefano.
A woman entombed in the family mausoleum has a telephone installed next to her coffin just in case -- that old Victorian fear of being buried alive. Now her blind son up at the mansion is getting phone calls from the crypt, a sobbing woman. His skeptical wife calls in an architect who is a part-time ghost hunter. He says he is not so much interested in ghosts as in haunted people: "We are all haunted in some way".
Is this a lost horror classic recently rediscovered and finally made available on home video? Yes and no.
No:
It was made for CBS TV and that meant 1960s limits on what could be shown. No way they could go full Psycho (1960) (Joseph Stefano again!) or even Masque of the Red Death (1964).
The original cut was less than an hour and an extra 20 minutes was added for a theatrical release. It is good to have additional material but it does relax what was the original tight pacing.
Yes:
This is essential viewing for fans of The Outer Limits (1963). It was made by the season one crew and is a good companion to Incubus (1965), the William Shatner esperanto demonology thriller, made by the same people.
Like the best episodes of the series it is a lovely presentation from Conrad Hall, cinematographer.
It is always good to see Martin Landau and I enjoy Diane Baker in featured roles -- last seen in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and Marnie (1964).
Judith Anderson, the spooky housekeeper, channels her Mrs Danvers from Rebecca (1940).
Ghost-hunting is a perennially favorite topic. Real or debunked, we enjoy it both ways. A combination? Perfect!
This was meant to be the pilot for a series -- The Haunted -- that was not picked up. CBS honchos were happy with the program but after a change in management all the programs on deck were flushed, as often happens.
It is not clear that American audiences ever got to see the pilot or feature film versions, but folks in other parts of the world have vivid memories of TV broadcasts. Tracking down and restoring both versions was a big project, detailed in the Blu-ray commentary tracks.
Notes:
Martin Landau returns from two great The Outer Limits episodes -- The Man Who Was Never Born and The Bellero Shield. If the series had been picked up he would have had his own mid-1960s show. He was also offered Mr Spock in the original Star Trek; history would have been quite different.
His comment on the lavish mausoleum: "The dead of the rich have better accommodations than the living poor".
He also says: "I won't take a fee if this is a hoax. And I will call the police".
Score by Dominic Frontiere, although Stefano did not care for his new music and they instead recycled his work for The Outer Limits The Forms of Things Unknown.
Stefano fled ABC at the end of season one of The Outer Limits, hoping for a better experience at CBS, but it was just the same.
Available on Blu-ray from Kino, very much a companion to their set of The Outer Limits (1963) disks.
The feature film has a commentary by David J Schow, Outer Limits expert and frequent contributor to the series commentaries. He gives synopses of further Nelson Orion adventures, planned but never made.
The disc also includes the pilot episode version The Haunted with commentary by Eric Grayson who did much of the work on hunting down and recovering these titles.