It is well known that The Phantom of the Monastery (Fernando de Fuentes, 1934) belongs to the canon of Mexican horror films. However, more should be said about how it’s one of the greatest Mexican erotic films. Enrique, Cristina, and Alfonso get lost in a forest. Out of nowhere, a monk accompanied by a dog named Sombra (“Shadow”) guides them to a monastery where they can spend the night. Some of the film’s horrific elements are the loneliness of the long corridors, the shadows of the night, the somber group of monks, and the pall of a tragedy that haunts the place. But they are just a façade, “a covering veil behind which the real meaning is concealed”, as Gordon Teskey defines allegory. The real meaning, in this case, is found in an exploration of sexual desire that turns out to be really provocative. Enrique and Cristina are married. Enrique and Alfonso are best friends. Cristina and Alfonso are fascinated with each other. De Fuentes’ mise-en-scène elicits a wide range of erotic themes that cover infidelity, sin, guilt, fantasy, and even kinks.

The film opens with Enrique screaming and asking for help: he has fallen into a ravine. Why open a film with a man who has fallen? The action is full of connotations. To lay on the ground after this accident exposes some kind of vulnerability because it is a reminder that there’s a lack of control which may lead to pain. Enrique needs a hand to get up. Thus, the man is portrayed as frail, a characteristic that will be reinforced in the following shots when his wife and his friend suggest he is a coward for being afraid of going to the monastery. The act has a deeper metaphorical meaning. When related to offenses against religion, we speak about falling into sin, which, ultimately, will be one of The Phantom of the Monastery’s main subjects. Alfonso and Cristina will try to consummate their desire in a sacred place. Plus, on Alfonso’s part, this is a violation of the commandment that ordains “thou shalt not commit adultery”. Double profanation.

The tension between the three characters is established in the staging of the first sequence. From the trees, Cristina and Alfonso enter the frame to help Enrique get up, leaving him right in the middle of them. Visually, he is an obstacle between them. In the characters’ position in the frame and in their gestures, it is very clear that the woman desires her husband’s best friend: she moves to be close to him and she repeatedly holds his arm. In addition, Enrique usually walks behind the two. However, this positioning of the characters in the frame not only evokes the impossibility of Cristina and Alfonso of being together. When Alfonso appears between them, it also reflects the impossibility of Enrique being with his wife. When Cristina appears between both males, it accentuates the rupture of the friendship (and, why not, a potential expression of the men’s mutual affection beyond brotherhood).

The monastery, then, will be the film’s single location until the end. The fact that this place hosts a story of desire is in itself very seductive because of the profanation it implies, but De Fuentes takes things a step further by making the building some sort of visual allegory too. When it is first shown, its towers are grandiloquently shot from a low angle. Immediately after, the camera pans to the arches that frame the doors. An elongated figure meets a curvilinear one. Or shall we say, phallic and yonic? The reading may be too far-fetched, but it is no less far-fetched to think of penetration when a train enters a tunnel in that famous final shot of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Doors opening and closing, by the way, recur throughout the film.

The rising tension between the characters is, precisely, built by means of space. Each of them will be placed in separate dormitories, preventing the married couple from sleeping together while also distancing the two lovers, complicating a consummation of desire. However, there will be four sequences where two characters share a room. Two of them, to further support the idea of the latent homoerotic desire between Enrique and Alfonso, show the friends together. After stridently opening the door, Alfonso enters the room to sit next to his buddy, who is lying in bed as if he were Goya’s shy and scared Naked Maja (this is the only scene where two characters are shown in bed). While discussing whether it was a good idea or not to stay in the monastery, Alfonso softly touches his friend’s leg before being interrupted by a monk that says it’s forbidden to share rooms. A few sequences later, it’s Cristina who visits her husband. Contrastingly, she sits on a chair next to the bed, emphasizing the lack of a sensual connection between. Seated thusly, she compares her husband with Alfonso, provoking a jealous reaction from Enrique, who protests that the intimacy between both must be stopped, but eventually regrets it, since he loves his friend. Suddenly, Cristina, too, touches her husband’s leg as she searches for reassurance when a bat flies into the room. Enrique is an obstacle between Cristina and Alfonso, yes, but he’s also a pivot that somehow joins them (hence the repetitions of visits, of touching his leg). Cristina and Alfonso will try to share a room twice. The first time a monk interrupts. The second encounter ends with a kiss that announces a tragic ending.

Next to its space, the film’s sound also operates as a suggestive tool to evoke erotic imagery. When the characters arrive at the monastery, there’s a shot that shows a doorframe inside of which we see the shadow of a man beating someone with a whip. The victim of these lashes is not shown; however, we can hear him moaning. Is this a penance? Probably. But the staging is so elusive (the shadow, the moaning, the unseen character) that it is possible to think of it as a spanking akin to BDSM practices. Furthermore, after this shot, the camera pans to show Cristina, Enrique, and Alfonso entering the frame, so they haven’t seen the shadow yet and only heard the noises. Couldn’t this be a projection of their deep, obscure desires?

Continuing with another sonic element, the film’s dialogues are full of sexual allusions and double-entendres. From the beginning, Enrique describes their walk around the forest which ends with them getting lost as “delicious”, a weird adjective for an excursion. This, too, is described as an “adventure”, which it certainly is, but this word in Spanish is used to refer to an affair. When Cristina invites Alfonso to spend the night with her (in a very straightforward yet subtle way), she says she’s “capable of everything”, given the context the spectator is free to imagine what “everything” could be. Then, seductively, she tells him to “come in” … to her cell, of course, but the imperative “entra” (enter) can also be an invitation to go inside other parts. Or when the monk asks the excursionists to have supper with him, he says: “Thank you, Lord, for the bread that our flesh of dust doesn’t need, but which is good for those who penetrate our house at night”. The film is full of dialogues like this in which the subtlety with which some very straightforward references are pronounced excites the imagination.

During a second supper, the monk tells a story about a phantom that haunts the place. Years ago, Brother Rodrigo arrived at the monastery to redeem himself for a sin. What was it? He desired his best friend’s wife. The intensity of his passion was such that he read in a book how to obtain what you desire the most in exchange for your soul. Thus, his best friend was found dead. The story, which is meant as a moral fable for the characters, incites Cristina’s desire even more. However, Alfonso’s love for his best friend is stronger. After visiting the cell where Rodrigo’s corpse is buried, in the film’s climatic sequence, Alfonso will go through the same as the former monk. In a very De Fuentes twist, who often ends his films with his main character waking up to find out that everything we watched was a dream, the morning’s sunlight will stir Alfonso from his sleep, for him to discover that his friend is safe. Nevertheless, in The Phantom of the Monastery this will turn out not be the only hallucination.

As the morning advances, Cristina, Eduardo, and Alfonso will notice that the monks are all gone. They meet a janitor who laughs at them, because the monks have been dead for years. As a part of his mockery, he leads them to a cell full of coffins containing the monks’ skeletons. Nothing was real. If this hallucination was shared by the three of them, this implies that the three of them had the same fantasies, the same desires. The camera’s point of view supports this since it is never subjective, nor assumes one of the characters’ perspectives. Therefore, Enrique fantasizes about his best friend having his wife as much as Alfonso and Cristina desire each other. Ultimately, The Phantom of the Monastery‘s bold approach of desire raises deeper questions: Why use horror as a way of speaking about sexual desire? Why keep pleasure in the realms of fear, disobedience, and guilt? What does this say about the society in which this film was created? Certainly, there’s some sort of darkness—like the one that clouds the monastery—in the vulnerability of desire’s exposure. Yet, the film ends with the characters walking in the sunlight, Cristina holding her husband’s arm, no profanation committed. The realm of shadows is always more pleasurable and fun.