Episode 398: EL FANTASMA DEL CONVENTO (1934)

Alfonso covets Cristina, the wife of his friend Eduardo, and she enjoys the attention. The trio’s sudden stranding at a monastery full of silent monks only hones their illicit affection… And hastens the return of a lustful monk whose sin cursed him to haunt the monastery forever!

Unknown numbers of movies were lost in the early years of Mexico’s film industry, especially before the country’s cinematic Golden Age in the 1940s and 1950s. But a growing number of them have been rediscovered, restored, and rereleased by Permanencia Voluntaria — and they include Fernando de Fuentes’s EL FANTASMA DEL CONVENTO (THE PHANTOM OF THE MONASTERY), a subversive Gothic horror from that weird post-revolution, pre-war gap.

It’s kind of a thin movie on the face of it, but in this discussion, we pull a lot from it. There’s Mexico’s growing prominence on the world stage, economic favor from the US during World War II, Catholic guilt, and a movie industry reflecting how a nation charted an unknown future. Check it out!

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References:

• Watch EL FANTASMA DEL CONVENTO on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/el-fantasma-del-convento-1934-spanish
• Permanencia Voluntaria: https://mxfilmarchive.com/
• Archives On Screen: https://archivesonscreen.org/
• “Lust Souls: The Phantom of the Monastery” by Salvador Carrasco for Senses of Cinema (August 2025): https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2025/cteq/lust-souls-the-phantom-of-the-monastery/
• “Hollywood's Rogue Neighbor: The Argentine Film Industry during the Good Neighbor Policy, 1939-1945” by Tamara L. Falicov https://www.jstor.org/stable/4491220
• Check the calendar, preview upcoming series, and buy tickets at https://www.trylon.org/
• Contribute to Perisphere, the Trylon blog, at https://www.perisphere.org/perisphere-blog-post-guidelines/

#FantasmasyLuchadoras #DCP

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Show art by Emily Csuy. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Outro music: “Tierra Mestiza” by Los Folkloristas from the EL NORTE soundtrack.

Timestamps

0:00 - Episode 398: EL FANTASMA DEL CONVENTO (1934)

1:43 - Whadja Watch This Week?

17:05 - The Patented Aaron Grossman Summary

20:22 - Some important context on early 20th century Mexican film

24:39 - Gothic fiction and the fantastical elements of Mexican art

41:20 - The pacing and structure (it’s too long)

48:08 - How the monastery starts changing our protagonists

1:06:24 - How it brings you into the story and character dynamics

1:15:57 - The Junk Drawer

1:19:56 - To All the Loves We’ve Tried Before: 1934

1:21:42 - Cody’s Noteys: The Phantom of the Indicator (trivia about Trylove films released through Powerhouse Films’s Indicator label)