Alucarda

• Director Juan López Moctezuma earned his surreal instincts the hard way before this: he was associate producer on Alejandro Jodorowsky's Fando y Lis (1968) and producer on El Topo (1970). The dreamlike staging in Alucarda is a deliberate nod to his mentor Jodorowsky, not an accident.
• Principal photography began in August 1975 at Estudios América in Mexico City, and the whole thing was shot in English even though it's a Mexican production. Stars Tina Romero, Claudio Brook, and Susana Kamini were all fluent in the language, which helped with international sales.
• Claudio Brook plays two roles in the same film: the rational Dr. Oszek and the hunchbacked gypsy who turns up to push the girls toward damnation. Same actor, opposite ends of the science-versus-superstition argument.
• The convent isn't built like a convent. The interiors were designed to look like rocky caves hewn from stone, with an altar set against a wall of writhing surrealist figures, and the nuns wear blood-stained bandages instead of traditional habits.
• Mexican censors partly cut it and it ran in theaters for only about two weeks, then got dumped into foreign markets under retitles including Sisters of Satan, Innocents from Hell, and even Mark of the Devil 3 to ride other films' notoriety.
• Mondo Macabro's 2002 DVD restored its reputation with a documentary on Moctezuma and an interview with Guillermo del Toro, who counts himself among the film's admirers.

The title spells it out: Alucarda is Dracula backwards, and Tina Romero's character is tied to Lucy Westenra straight out of Stoker. Read that way, the convent horror is really a vampire-bloodline story wearing nun's bandages, with Carmilla's lesbian-vampire DNA running underneath the possession plot.

The film refuses to pick a villain between God and the Devil. The priests draw as much blood with chains, fire, and the exorcism rite as any demon does, so the real horror isn't possession but institutional faith treating two girls' love and grief as something to be burned out of them.

Those cave-like walls and blood-soaked bandages aren't just set dressing. The convent is staged like the inside of a body, and the nuns' red-stained robes read as flagellation and menstrual blood, framing the whole place as repression made physical, the thing the girls' demonic awakening finally tears open.

Orphaned Justine arrives at a convent that looks carved out of raw rock, where nuns shuffle around in blood-soaked bandages instead of habits. She falls in with Alucarda, a wild-eyed girl who's already half-claimed by something older than the crucifixes on the walls. A graveyard pact, a wandering hunchbacked gypsy, and a coffin full of blood later, the two are screaming the Devil's name in the chapel. The clergy answer with chains, exorcism, and fire. Faith and possession trade places until you can't tell which side is doing the damning.