RIDER OF THE SKULLS

RIDER OF THE SKULLS has 79 minutes and refuses to waste any of them. A werewolf! A vampire! A witch! Walking skeletons! The Headless Horseman! A corpse resurrected from its coffin to identify its own murderer! Alfredo Salazar’s glorious 1965 horror-western plays like an entire Saturday matinee serial crammed into a single feature, tearing through three supernatural adventures with barely enough time between monsters to reload.

Holding this magnificent pile-up together is a masked charro dressed in black, decorated with skulls and apparently prepared to confront any supernatural menace in Mexico with the same basic equipment he’d use against cattle rustlers. The werewolf transforms from man to skeleton to wolf. The vampire turns into a wonderfully handmade flying bat. A cemetery witch summons the dead. The Headless Horseman brings skeleton henchmen. When bullets don’t work, our hero’s next strategy is generally to keep shooting, start punching or find something with a blade. Nobody questions any of this. Why would they?

Part western, part monster movie, part masked-avenger serial, RIDER OF THE SKULLS has the handmade creatures, foggy graveyards and irresistible comic-book logic of a movie dreamed up without anyone around to say no. It has very little money, three monsters to fight and absolutely no time for restraint.

"A truly sublime artifact. A precious treasure that approaches embodying my platonic ideal of a certain special kind of movie. More than almost any other movie in recent memory, it felt like something that had crawled out of my monstercozy dreams into actual, factual reality. I was transfixed in a kind of awe." - Claire Diane