Luis Fernandez (Jose Luis Jimenez) and his wife Mary (Nora Veryan) along with their friends Amy (Carmelita Gonzalez) and her husband, Harry (Jorge Mondragon), are invited to a séance performed by family friend Elvira (Beatriz Aguirre) and her daughter Aurora (Maria Eugenia San Martin). Aurora is also the fiancé of the Fernandez’s son Rudolph (Rene Cardona Jr.). Elvira uses a Ouija board to talk to her dead husband. His message says that Mary will have trouble ahead and if she makes the wrong decision, she will be the cause of horrifying events. No one takes the message seriously.
A few months later the Fernandezes celebrate their anniversary. After their anniversary party Rudolph tells his parents that he needs four thousand dollars to start up his own crop-dusting business. He convinces his parents to mortgage their house and give him the money. Rudolph’s business begins to have problems and Luis and Mary are afraid that they will lose their house.
Mary begins experimenting with the Ouija board to try to have the spirits solve her problems. When they are unable to help her, she begins to call on the evil spirits. The good spirits and her husband try to warn her about the dangers of invoking the evil spirits, but Mary is desperate. In the next séance she calls upon the devil himself to help her save her son’s business. Satan appears and gives Mary a key. The monitor of the séance, Don Carlos (Antonio Bravo) calls upon the benevolent spirits to save them. The good spirits appear and chase the devil away. Since the group came close to being invaded by Satan, Mary is kicked out of the group.
At midnight the next night a sudden storm comes up. A man comes to the door of the Fernandez home. In his hands he has a box. He places the box on a table. He calls it Pandora’s Box and tells Mary that she can open it with the key she received if she chooses. Eventually things go from bad to worse. Mary opens the box. Inside is a disembodied hand.
“Spiritism” AKA “Espiritismo” was released in 1962 and was directed by Benito Alazraki. It is a Mexican horror movie. This is one of the films that K. Gordon Murray purchased and dubbed into English. As usual with Murray films, some of the character names have been Americanized.
The movie doesn’t have any real action until sometime in the last fifteen minutes of the film. There is, however, a sort of epilogue to the movie that was unnecessary and rather lame. The film starts out as your basic spiritualist type movie and adds a bunch of pseudo information about séances, spiritualism and contacting people in the afterlife. Towards the end it suddenly morphs into a Mexican version of “The Monkey’s Paw”. The main difference here is that instead of a monkey’s paw, the box contains a disembodied hand.