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Amando de Ossorio was born in La Coruna, Spain, but spent most of his life in Madrid, where he finally died a few years ago. Of all the Spanish film personalities I have met over the years, including Paul Naschy, Jose Ulloa, Victor Israel, Salvador Sainz, Diana Conca and many more, he is the one I always liked the most. Oddly enough, I got hold of him through a directory for cinema personalities, wrote to him about doing a possible interview during my next trip to Europe and was surprised to hear back from him that very same month. He noted (via a secretary who spoke English, he himself did not understand the language) how he would be glad to receive me in Madrid, do the interview and show me his studio, where he kept props from the old Templar series of horror films. This would lead to our first encounter, with many more to follow during subsequent trips to Spain. These would continue to the point of his death and, frankly, I miss the man. I was not sure exactly who or what Ossorio would look like, for I had seen his films, but never a photo of him. Upon coming face to face with the man, I immediately thought how much he looked like, well...a vampire. Tall, white-haired, with penetrating eyes, he would have made a good Dracula as seen in the early scenes of Stoker's famous novel. At first I was not sure whether to be cordial to the man or pull out a stake and drive it through his heart, but ten minutes of conversation showed him to be one of the friendliest cinema personalities I had ever met. For those unfamiliar with his works, Ossorio gained recognition for his "Templar Series," four movies made on a shoestring budget but now regarded as cult classics. These tales evolve around devil-worshipping knights, left to hang during the inquisition for their sins against the church. After execution, crows pecked out the eyes of the dead men, leaving them blind, but operating on a type of satanic sonar to find their way around whenever some band of fools restored them to life. It was these films which made Ossorio a respected horror director in Spain, though he made several other films in various genres, including westerns and comedies. Ossorio always lamented he did not have the chance to make more Templar films, due to budget restraints and a feeling among producers that the blind knights had run their course. One unfilmed project was to possibly have Paul Naschy doing his werewolf role and facing the Templars, a project which would have been interesting to say the least. Another was to have the evil knights living under water, swimming upward to attack swimmers like Jaws, and infecting them with their bites, making them zombies. Again, the project did not happen. "I respect Paul Naschy," Ossorio said, when talking about the failed attempts to pit his knights against Spain's answer to Lon Chaney Jr. "Some people do not care for the man as a person and others are critical of his films, but he has made several very good movies on a very low budget. I like his work, especially the werewolf series. He called himself Waldemar instead of Larry, but in Spain he is as readily identified as the wolfman as Chaney is in America, with the film buffs. I think it would have been a great idea to have the werewolf fight and eventually defeat the Templars, but die in the process too. Alas it did not happen. The Spanish government no longer backs horror films. They want artistic films and ignore the westerns and the horror movies which made this country famous in the 1960s and 1970s." The Templar series was enhanced by a Morricone-type
soundtrack with moans, monk chants and screams. Ossorio admitted the
musical score helped make his films, saying the same had worked for Leone
and for Hitchcock, so he simply duplicated the concept. Ironically, the music never played much of a part in other films by Ossorio, some of the scores being just plain bad. To this he just shrugged and went on to other things, when I brought it up. "One of my favorite films would be DEMON WITCH CHILD," he said more than once. The film deals with a young girl possessed by a dead witch. At times her face grows old, like the witch, while her body remained that of a small child. "We used Fernando Sancho in that one," Ossorio commented. "It was funny because in this film he was a good guy and in most of his other movies he was bad. He played in a lot of westerns, where he pretended to be a Mexican bandit." Ossorio spoke fondly of Sancho, who was in poor health at the time of our first encounter and eventually died. "He would always take American actors to see the bullfights and try to educate them as to what was going on in the bullring. He was a big bullfight fan. He always frequented the Callejon, a big cantina in Madrid with bullfighting decor. They have his picture on the wall there. You'll see." (As indeed I did, for this would become our regular meeting place.) "The funniest thing is the movie with my biggest budget is one all the critics think to be my worst," he would often say. "This was called THE SEA SERPENT and it had some bigger names involved including Ray Milland. One problem was a lot of expenses were wasted shooting in Miami and other places, as well as paying for bigger names to act. The problem is there were budget shortfalls before we could design the monster, so it ended up looking like one of those things from the Japanese horror movies and not something big or spectacular, like I had hoped for. We did the best with what we had, but a lot of people say how funny it is that this, the movie with the biggest budget I had to work with, did not come out nearly as well as THE NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS or my other Templar films. It was not, some people said, even as good as MALENKA, which was a very low budget film about a lady vampire." Ossorio also lamented the downfall of the Spaghetti Westerns shot in Spain and Italy. He had done a handful of these movies and wanted to do more, but the genre just fizzled out. "One problem was the expense involved in renting horses," Ossorio explained. "Especially if you had to do an Indian attack or a Civil War scene. The horses cost more than many of the actors." "One of my favorite westerns was supposed to take place in Canada, with evil Mounties, as opposed to gunfighters in Texas and Arizona," he explained. "Of the westerns, REBELS IN CANADA (loose English translation) was my favorite, but it never got the distribution some of the works of other filmmakers did, like Corbucci or Leone. Still, it did well in the Spanish language." In subsequent visits, Ossorio would take me to various film studios, introduce me to people he had worked with and turn me on to interviews with others. He was always talking about redoing the Templar series, making more horror films, and even turning some of my past novels to film, but none of these plans ever transpired. It was a changing era and this man, sadly, could not bring himself to change with the times. He wanted to do westerns, to do horror and do what he was best known for, but "artistic movies," as he always complained about, and comedies by Pedro Almandovar, were the new rage. "Things go in a cycle," he once said. "Sooner or later, someone will make a good horror film again and when they do, everyone will be making horror films. Or someone will do a western, bring Ennio Morricone back for a musical score, have the long gunfights like Leone made famous and then, everyone will be doing it. I would like to be the one to start the trend again, but it's the budget issue. Also, you cannot make films as cheaply as you once did. Some of the early films I did could never have been made in this day and age. It is a changing time." Another of the projects this director was always proud of was THE LORELEI'S GRASP, in which an "animal" is killing people and a great white hunter type is brought in to track the maneater down. The animal, per se, ends up being a female monster, aptly played by Helga Line, who falls in love with her would-be killer and predictably, dies at the end. The only difference in this was the nature of the monster itself. Was she a vampire? A werewolf? A witch? "None," Armando explained. "This concept was based on ancient legend and subsequent medieval poetry. The monster in monster in question is a lamia, a she-demon who can take the shape of a beautiful seductress or that of a snakelike beast. What Helga Line's character was, was a lamia. In fact there is a very old poem out from medieval England, titled Lamia, and though there are passages missing from it, you can see where the idea for this villainess came from." I brought up the point that while Ossorio never used a great deal of nudity, as did Jesus Franco, Paul Naschy and others, he had a thing for scantily-clad women in most of his films. Did he have a thing for such fashions in the aforementioned project or other films? "That was up to the wardrobe department, not me," he smirked, but I wondered and still do, even now. Surprisingly, when it came to actresses, it was not Line of whom Ossorio seemed to speak the most highly. Instead, he was forever praising Esperanza Roy, a mainstay in Spanish horror and western films. He used her in the second of the Templar segments and as far as I can recall off the top of my head, that was it. Still, he was constantly saying how he liked working with Roy. "She's married to a director." he added, during one of our conversations. "She also has been getting away from cinema and doing more things on the live stage." Ossorio also spoke of Frank Brana, with whom he had worked before, but is better known for his role in cop pictures and as the detective in Pieces by Juan Piquer Simon. "He looks like Leslie Neilson," Ossorio commented. "A very good actor, who is forever put into the tough guy roles. I look for him one day to break out of the tough guy films and start to do comedy, just like Leslie Neilson did. Everyone knows Neilson for comedy movies now, but before, he was a tough guy on television shows. He was also the ship captain in THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, yet no one remembers Neilson for this, only for comedy. I think it would be funny if Brana, too, made this shift." I asked if Brana was difficult to work with. He shook his head in the negative. "Sharon Stone," he said. "She was here when they did a remake of BLOOD AND SAND. No one liked her. The Spanish actors didn't like her. I heard she had a portable whirlpool on the set and some of the supporting actors went to the bathroom in the water when she was gone then watched later when she was soaking. She was very difficult, I was told, in that picture, but maybe I shouldn't say. I do not think I would like to work with her. She caused some bad vibrations here with people I know, who told me enough to realize I think I would not want to work with her." Going back to Esperanza Roy, he mentioned that like Fernando Sancho, she was a big bullfighting fan. One of the magazines, APLAUSOS, had done a piece on her. (APLAUSOS is a bullfighting magazine.) As for Ossorio himself, he was a respecter of the bullfight, but not nearly as avid a fan as Roy and Sancho. "It was hard to get Sancho to work on a Sunday afternoon because he would always want to be off to the bullfight if we were shooting in an area where they had one that Sunday," Ossorio explained, imitating how Sancho would sit in the stands, blowing smoke rings from a big cigar and offering detailed explanations as to what was being done right and what was being done wrong on the sand. "Some of the Americans he took to the bullfights liked them and went back, but others became sick." Away from the film world, Ossorio had other hobbies. He was a novelist who wrote some books and also an accomplished painter. He made several paintings, studio-worthy in all, with a horror theme. He said he also played a big part in the design of posters and handbills for his films. Few people within the film world itself, however, knew these things about the man. It was odd, with all the American and British actors he encountered, however, that he never learned English. (The quotes are loosely translated in this piece from the Spanish.) He relied on his secretary, as noted beforehand, for business correspondence and translating fan mail. "The way we worked the movies, with cast members from different countries, was easy," he explained. "Much easier than you would think. You see, each actor was given a script in his or her native language and memorized the script in the tongue he was familiar with. Since the films were all redubbed anyway, when they were distributed outside Spain, it didn't really matter, but as you were shooting you would have one actor speaking English and another answering in Spanish. Sometimes it tested the abilities of the actors and actresses, but once you got used to doing things this way, it went far easier than you might think. That's how we all got along during the era of foreign film, when people were coming to Spain from everywhere to be in movies. That's how we broke the language barrier ... more or less ... we left it alone and made due." One of Ossorio's dreams, as mentioned before, was to have the Templars rise from the grave again, either to face Paul Naschy or some lesser known foes. Again, it never happened. "People were really scared in the theatres," he said, imitating how the Templars jerked when they heard sounds (something which provoked stares if there were onlookers about, unfamiliar with who he was or his projects). "The slightest sound and they would be on their victim, even able to hear breathing or a heartbeat. There are so many things I could still do with these characters, so many projects just waiting to happen. I have done a lot with the Templars but I wish I could do more." Sadly, this never happened. Ossorio died and with his death went all his high hopes for future horror films. One odd side note, Ossorio died "twice." In the late 1980s, a British publication mistranslated the word "infardo" for "fatal heart attack," gandered from a newspaper article and spread the word the man known for the Templar series had died, when it fact he was still alive. He'd suffered a heart attack, to be certain, but recovered, though this would contribute to a long series of health problems which eventually did kill him. "I have risen from the grave, just like the Templars," he had said when news of his "death" reached him. "I am still among the living." If only the same could be said now. I miss Armando de Ossorio, I really do. Of all the cinema people I have ever met, he was one of the most hospitable and the most intelligent. His passing was a great loss to the Spanish cinema.
AMANDO DE OSSORIO GALLERY
Many thanks to Dale Pierce for this
wonderful memoir Check out Dale's Lucha Libre and Bullfighting Photo Gallery |
