The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre, on Movies!

If you have a ghost, who you gonna call? In 1964, you could have called Nelson Orion, but only briefly. His pilot was not picked by the network for series order. Instead, they filmed more scenes and released it as a feature, mostly in international markets. That was a shame, because Joseph Stefano’s The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre is a nifty under-the-radar horror film of the 1960s, which airs Wednesday morning on Movies! (The exclamation point is in their name.)

Orion is not a medium or a parapsychologist. He works as an architect, with a specialty in restoring old houses. As a result, he spent enough time in creepy dark mansions to realize the potential validity of ghosts. Nevertheless, he usually ends up debunking supposed hauntings. That is what happened several years ago when he investigated the allegedly haunted church of Sierra de Cobre. Instead, he determined an American school teacher was more conventionally murdered, by an overdose of a hallucinogenic drug.

It’s a small world. Orion’s latest client, Henry Mandore, just retained Paulina, a Sierra de Cobre native, as his housekeeper—because nobody else will work in the Mandore manor. According to his wife, Vivia, Mandore believes his mother has been haunting him. The Mandore matriarch was so terrified she might be buried alive, she installed a direct phoneline to her son’s room from her tomb in the Mandore family vault. Now, the Mandore heir hears that phone ringing incessantly. Logically, Orion and Ms. Mandore visit her crypt to investigate. Yes, they see a ghost, but is it her ghost?

Even if Stefano’s proposed series, Haunted, had been picked up, “The Black Telephone,” as the pilot was originally titled, still might have been Orion’s first and last case, because it was conceived as an anthology. Logically, Stefano recruited many of his colleagues from The Outer Limits, including two-time guest-star Martin Landau. Fittingly, the Psycho screenwriter also recruited several alumni of Hitchcock productions, again including Landau.

Indeed, Landau is aptly cast as the cerebral Orion, who credibly combines both skepticism and a capacity for belief. Diane Baker and Dame Judith Anderson are both terrific as the freaked-out Vivia Mandore and the freaky Paulina, who could be the housekeeper in a Daphne du Maurier gothic. Plus, Nellie Burt has appropriate Thelma Ritter vibes playing Orion’s no-nonsense, disbelieving housekeeper, Mary Finch.

In addition to the gothic elements, there are sequences in Sierra de Cobre that are surprisingly surreal, even by contemporary standards. Supposedly, the network passed on the pilot because they deemed it too frightening. Of course, for horror fans, that constitutes a convincing recommendation. In this case, it is completely valid.

Visually, it is massively moody and eerily stylish. A lot of great design work went into the pilot/film, including the matte art of Orion’s cliffhanging ultra-modernist house (which seems out of character for an architect who specializes in historic restorations, but whatever). Highly recommended for fans of horror movies and vintage anthologies like The Outer Limits, The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre airs Wednesday morning (8/19) on Movies!