Wolfgang Gotho (Paul Naschy) is a slightly retarded hunchback who works at the local morgue. Gotho is a mild-mannered man that is often harassed and ridiculed by some of the locals, especially Udo (Fernando Sotuela) and Hans (Kino Pueyo). His only real ally is a childhood friend, Ilse (Maria Elena Arpon). Ilse is dying of a lung disease. Gotho is in love with Ilse, so he brings her flowers that he handpicked each day to cheer her up. Gotho sometimes works for Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbes). Eventually, Ilse dies. Gotho believes that Ilse is actually sleeping.
When Ilse dies some orderlies desecrate her body sending Gotho into a homicidal rage. He kills the three orderlies and takes Ilse’s body for safekeeping. He takes her down into a hidden basement below an abandoned abbey that had once been used as a torture chamber during the Spanish inquisition. The police begin looking for Gotho for the murders. While Ilse is laid out, the body attracts rats that begin eating at Ilse’s face and hands. Outraged Gotho sets the rats on fire.
He then tells Dr. Orla about the hidden chamber and asks him to help his friend. Dr. Orla has been experimenting on creating life and needs a secretive and quite place to do his experiments. He believes that the torture chamber is the perfect place. Dr. Orla enlists Dr. Frederick Tauchner (Victor Barrera) and Dr. Maria Meyer (Maria Perschy) to help him with the experiments. To get Gotho to help him, Dr. Orla promises to re-animate Ilse. What the doctor needs is fresh bodies to first create the monster, and then more bodies to feed to the creature he has created. Gotho does his best to oblige.
“The Hunchback of the Morgue” AKA “El jorobado de la Morgue” was released in 1973 and was directed by Javier Aguirre. It is a Spanish horror film.
The movie is a sort of Spanish take on the Frankenstein mythos. Naschy, as the much-maligned Gotho, may have murdered a bunch of people, but since they all were horrible, your sympathy lies with the hunchback and not any of his victims. Naschy is Igor to Orla’s Dr. Frankenstein.
In one scene Naschy is in a battle with rats that are feasting on Ilse. The rats were real, so Naschy had to receive shots to make sure he didn’t get rabies. His co-star, Maria Elena Arpon, who played Ilse, was really lying on the stone slab during the scene and had actual rats swarming on her body. In addition, some of the rats were really set on fire during the scene. There seems to be more horror behind-the-scenes than there was on screen.
Supposedly, a real corpse was used during the scene where Gotho cuts off a corps’s head. Naschy was said to have taken a couple swigs of whiskey to perform the cut but couldn’t finish the scene so a dummy head was used for the rest of the film.
Since the movie was made during the reign of Francisco Franco there is basically no nudity and the gore scenes, although graphic, were few and far between. The camp, however, is in full swing. The creature that is created isn’t seen until the end of the film. It looks a little bit like the Oily Man from Maylay folklore. There are a few slow spots that are used to emphasize Gotho’s undying love for Ilse that are a bit sappy. Other than that, it’s not a bad little horror story.