Tales to Keep You Awake: The Nightmare – review

Director: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador

First aired: 1967

Contains spoilers

Tales to Keep You Awake (Historias para no dormir) was a thriller/horror anthology (with a touch of sci-fi) series in Spain that has rightly been called the Spanish Twilight Zone. It made episodes both from original ideas and based on classic tales (largely Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe) and cast a wide net on its ideas. Some episodes were geared towards the macabre – there is an excellent first season version of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar – but others had a touching sentimentality – The Rocket (El cohete) being a prime and fantastically executed example.

bite marks

This episode was from season 2 and pulls on its full gothic sensibilities. It begins with three older women discussing the dresses and stockings that Rosa should wear. As they start it seems almost frivolous and the viewer thinks that, perhaps, Rosa is to go to a dance – until we realise that they are dressing her corpse. The main woman curses the village doctor, calling him stupid for saying she had succumbed to a peculiar weakness. She brushes Rosa’s hair and the movement reveals the punctures on her neck.

Fernando Guillén as Yolakin

We are in the village Kisilova in the Carpathians in 1880 and the innkeeper strings garlic outside his window. Inside he sends Maria to get more bottles of Sloe Gin – it is to be a busy night. Once retrieved he sends her to bed but the girl hides and watches. The men of the village are there and they know that the vampire is the strange and reclusive stranger Yolakin (Fernando Guillén). His nocturnal habits betray him but, they muse, the doctor doesn’t believe it and if they deal with the vampire they’ll hang, despite 6 girls having died. They’ve invited the doctor to talk. He arrives but is not swayed by their arguments so they say if one more girl is harmed Yolakin will die whatever the subsequent outcome. During all this the word wurdulak is used.

meeting

Catalina (Gemma Cuervo) is being fussed by the housekeeper, who is making her wear a garland of crushed garlic and silver cross. Maria has come to visit and, once the housekeeper is called away, confides in Catalina what she eavesdropped the night before. She suggests that Catalina should warn Yolakin and it is clear that Catalina has feelings for the stranger – and she does agree to visit him. She gets to his house and is intercepted by Luis, Yolakin’s servant who is going to send her away when Yolakin appears and takes her to the library.

Gemma Cuervo as Catalina

It transpires that the doctor and Catalina would, on occasion, dine with Yolakin and she has perceived the looks he bestowed upon her as an indication of his feelings. This is despite her frequently, over 6-months, writing to him and he not replying. She tells him that he should leave the area and take her with him – indeed she demands he go to her that very night. If he fails to do so then… she has taken a keepsake from each of the dead girls and she’ll say she found them buried near his home…

victim

Has she convinced him or simply irritated a vampire? Is he a vampire at all, or the scapegoat for superstitious villagers, as the doctor believes? Will the villagers kill him regardless? The episode does a nice line in playing with the outcome and it is a nicely gothic and competent story (there is, perhaps, some shorthand in the telling due to the episode length but it doesn’t suffer for it). Perhaps it was the vampire-centric story that made this one of my preferred episodes but I think its worth catching. 6.5 out of 10.

The episode's imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK