RIDER OF THE SKULLS

RIDER OF THE SKULLS has 79 minutes and doesn't waste a single one 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 prepared to confront any supernatural menace in Mexico. 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. 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.

"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