The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964)

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:

Yes:

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:

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.

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