What I watched: The ninth episode of the second season of Suspense, an anthology drama series. “Black Passage” starred Stella Adler, William Prince, Mary Sinclair, Morton Stevens and Peter Fernandez. It was directed by series creator Robert Stevens, and written by Halstead Wells from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, November 1, 1949, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open on a door. A scary door! A bell rings, and a young man (Fernandez) dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans (also known as a Canadian tuxedo) enters. Inside is a woman (Adler) lying in repose. We then cut to an entirely different group of men: a clean-cut American young man (Prince), his Mexican guide screaming about “el diablo” (uncredited), and a priest (Stevens). The man, whose name IMDb assures me is Cunningham, is an architect who saw the building in a magazine and wanted to sketch it.
As per the priest, the house has three residents: “the quiet mother, the quiet daughter, the quiet son.” Sounds like ideal houseguests. We also learn that the mother is a “pagan animal”, while the priest is trying to convert the daughter to Christianity. The visitor tries to offer the scary son Miguel (the Canadian tuxedo guy) some wine, and he runs off. Instead, the man stops to linger over the mother, who is still reclining in her front yard.
Ten days pass over a fade to black. In one genuinely unsettling scene, Miguel offers his mother some food, and she bats it away. There’s no dialogue, but there is some Latin chanting laid over it. This chanting is apparently being done by the daughter “Lola.” Lacking both concern and ordinary decency, Cunningham asks the brother if she’s hot. He then read a letter telling him to avoid the mother, son, and especially “the black wind.” Just then, said wind begins to blow. The mother arises from her repose. SUSPENSE!
After the act break, we see Cunningham shirtless and sweaty. Lola is still chanting, and he believes he’s going mad. He goes out to find her,apparently overcome by his lust. Lola (Sinclair) really is kind of pretty, especially in those draped robes. Our hero (?) ultimately doesn’t do anything, then leaves. He doubles back, however, when he hears screaming coming from her room, but his door is locked.
Three weeks later, the priest has come to finally take Cunningham away. He refuses, saying he still wants to sketch the whole place, apparently the reason he came. He quickly drops the pretense, however, and says he wants to see Lola again. The priest then spills the secret: the women of the family, when full-grown, become vampires and drink blood. This apparently has something to do with sins that has been passed down through generations.
He does end up seeing Lola, who begs him in broken English to leave before he gets hurt. They kiss passionately, and she flees back to her room. Next up to the door is Miguel to take his suitcase, but Cunningham insists that he will stay as he knows Lola loves him. He cuts himself on a window, and then the vampiric mom shows up. We don’t actually see the moment of blood-sucking, but we do see the son dragging her off their guest. Cunningham stumbles into Lola’s room, and she attends to his wounds. But, when she sees the blood on his hands, she gets evidently hungry. Lola holds herself back just long enough for him to stumble out of that scary door we saw in the beginning.
What I thought: Boy howdy, this one is weird. There’s a plot, and a fairly comprehensible one, but “Black Passage” still unfolds with the languor and logic of a troubled dream. There are vampires, and an evil wind, and an old curse and a bunch of other things that are never quite explained properly. There are moments, as when the dialogue is overpowered by Lola’s Latin chanting, that it even approaches surrealism. In some ways, the episode is a mess, but it’s the kind of mess that horror geeks are usually fascinated by.
“Black Passage” is a surprisingly erotic thriller, given the general chasteness of network television and 1940s culture in general. The women are dressed in flowing white robes that always look like they’re about to fall off their shoulders. Our protagonist get shirtless and sweaty. His affection for Lola is best characterized as not love but lust, sudden and possessive. The story, then, is of an American tourists being overtaken by madness and desire south of the border
This is in itself something of a colonialist trope, the settler who is corrupted by their primitive surroundings. (You can just look at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for perhaps the most prominent example.) Our protagonist is the essential arrogant American tourist, thinking that the world is hi to posses and master — he say of the Gothic manor that “he had to have it”, and vocally hopes that everyone speaks English. As in “A Night at an Inn”, our colonizers are portrayed as naive and selfish, but what they “overlook” is exactly the sinister qualities ascribed to the global south by its colonial rulers.
Complicating this dynamic is the fact that Mexico is itself a settler state, founded on the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people. If that sounds familiar, it’s because a similar process occurred in the United States and across the Americas. The vampiric mother and her spooky son are associated with Indigenous spirituality, while Lola’s belief in Spanish Catholicism is what signals that she is not too far gone — all of this information dispensed to us, of course, by a helpful priest.
In another sense, the displaced Gothic manor and the mention of past in suggest that the curse visited upon this family is a form of justified revenge for Spain’s colonial exploits. America could not be so honest about its own colonialism in 1949, and perhaps not even today. Setting its narrative in Mexico allows for Suspense to displace the drama of American colonialism between “pagan” Indians and Christian settlers onto a foreign state that was in the midst of changing from a poorer rival to a kind of unofficial American colony.
It’s also worth noting that this is another story that Suspense adopted liberally from old gothic fiction, in this case Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “Olalla.” That story features a Scottish soldier staying at a Spanish home. Suspense transports the story to North America, renaming the titular daughter Lola and lightening (but not removing) the religious elements. As with “The Cask of Amontillado”, Stevens adds (intentionally or not) a new wrinkle to an old-world tale, in this case the haunting legacy of colonialism. It turns out that even the ghosts came over from Europe.
Coming up next: Look, just start playing the William Tell overture now.
The Eternal Couch Potato 