Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Telephone Box

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the award-winning 1972 Spanish short film “La cabina,” directed by Antonio Mercero, written by José Luis Garci and starring José Luis López Vázquez. (originally published 3/21/2025)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb.
Today we have an episode for you that originally published
three twenty one, twenty twenty five. It is an episode
covering the nineteen seventy two Spanish short film La Caabina
The Telephone Box. Let's jump right in.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
last week on Weird House Cinema we talked about the
nineteen eighty four fantasy short film Quest, directed by Saul
and Elaine Bass, and that was a real good time.
If you haven't heard that episode yet, I recommend you
go back and check that out. But this this week
I kind of wanted to stick to the theme of

(01:03):
short films, especially weird short films. In the thirty minute
run time zone, that's about how long Quest was. So
today we're going to be talking about a picture that
I've had on my list for a while, the surreal,
genre defying nineteen seventy two made for TV Spanish short
film La Cabina or The Telephone Box, directed by Antonio Mrcero. Now,

(01:27):
much like Quest the Telephone Box, you can really do
in a one sentence plot description. It is very light
on plot machinations, not a lot of dialogue, not a
lot of information to process except for weird little images
and things to kind of wonder how you should read
as the situation develops. But instead of a plot per se,

(01:51):
this movie really does have more of a situation, and
that situation is a man gets stuck inside a telephone
booth and he can't get out out And warning before
we say anything else, this movie does have some major
twists and surprises, and we're going to be talking about
all of that. So if you want to watch it unspoiled,
you should pause here and go do that. The film

(02:12):
is available to stream for free online, including in what
looks to me like an official upload on YouTube by
the television station that owns the rights to it, which
I think is RTVE out of Spain.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, yeah, RTV Archivo. That's how I watched it. And
outside of that, I'm not aware of an actual physical
release for this film, though of course sometimes short films
like these do get included as extras on the release
of full features, but this seems to be the best,
if not only, way to watch it right now, at

(02:46):
least internationally.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
So again, the situation that takes place in this film
is a man gets stuck in a telephone box and
he can't get out. Now, what's really interesting about this
story is the way the situation develops, both in terms
of tone and I would say, ultimately in terms of genre.
I said at the top this was a genre defying film,

(03:10):
and I think you could quite reasonably ask how one
would classify it if you were going to have to
shelve it at the video store. Where does this go?
I've seen write ups that do classify it as a
comedy and write ups that classify it as horror. I
think it's a lot easier to say it is horror
if you had to pick one, But a lot of
writing about this notes that it is both. And while

(03:33):
I think it certainly is both, I think it would
be quite misleading to call Lacabina a horror comedy. That
would give the wrong impression, because horror comedy is a
well established hybrid genre. But in thinking about this question
of what to call Lacabina, I realized that almost all
so called horror comedy movies are built the same way,

(03:57):
and that is the bones are horle horror and the
flesh is comedy. So in a horror comedy movie, the plot,
the setting, the characters, and situations will almost entirely be
those of the horror genre. And then what makes it
a comedy is that we get ironic reversals on the

(04:17):
expected imagery or tone. Maybe through dialogue or the behavior
of the characters. You will get changes that twist the
basic horror situation and make it funny. So when I
make a mental list of horror comedy movies, I think
this basic format applies to all of them, all the
ones I can think of Evil Dead, to Grimlins, Grimlins

(04:39):
to Sean of the Dead, Cabin in the Woods, etc.
It's really hard to think of a movie that people
think of as horror comedy that doesn't basically work like that,
built like a horror film, but then furnished and decorated
with comedy.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
I think Tremors is a great example of this. Tremors
is a film that doesn't do anything in its structure
plot that really screams comedy, but the characters are fun
and funny yes at times, and therefore you get plenty
of chuckles in there, and you can, I think, accurately
call it a horror comedy to some degree.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I think that's a great example, and I think there's
a reason that horror comedies are usually built like this.
Comedy by nature works by subverting expectations. So I think
the laugh moment in a comedy routine comes from your
brain recognizing some kind of incongruity. You think, that's not
how that works, or that's not what's supposed to happen,

(05:33):
or that's not the right way to respond, and so forth.
So when you merge comedy with another genre of storytelling,
the script to follow is pretty clear. You change or
subvert the expectations of that other genre in amusing ways.
So maybe you play with the tone like it's a
horror situation, but the moment, the moment where things would

(05:55):
normally be very serious, something silly happens. Or maybe you
satirize the geen itself, like you invert horror tropes in
a way that reveals something about the reason that writers
invoke them, which undercuts their power. So in you know,
this is what you get more of in movies that
are satires on horror itself, like Cabin in the Woods.

(06:17):
So I think that's the way it almost always works.
The other element in the genre hybrid, be it horror
or fantasy or whatever, is the setup, and then the
comedy is by its very nature. The twist on that
setup the short film we're going to be talking about
today is, I would argue the extremely rare inverse of

(06:37):
this blueprint, in lack of beina, the bones are comedy
and the flesh is horror.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, I think that is a that is a very
valid point. Yeah, because everything about the premise even just
screams comedy. You hear it and you're like, all right,
I'm ready to hear this joke. You don't know that
the jokes punchline is going to be so and horror centric.
But it initially seems to have the structure of comedy,

(07:03):
the structure.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
Of a joke exactly right. So it's a comedy situation.
In fact, we could explore more about this as we
go on, but it feels to me like a very old, classic,
almost silent film era style of comedy situation. It makes
me think of Charlie Chaplin.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Oh absolutely, yeah. It's very mime too, of course, like
the mime act is Oh, I'm stuck in a box,
and that's the basic plot here. In fact, I believe
the filmmakers when they were casting it initially one of
them was pushing for the for them hiring a mime, like,
let's get somebody who can who can do that level

(07:40):
of wordless, pure body acting.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
And the main actor that is cast in the film
is the guy who gets stuck in the box does
have a lot of mime like skills. So the setup
of the plot is an absurd, humiliating physical situation where
there's like a mechanical problem to solve. Again, this is
like a Charlie Chaplin scene. So you're stuck in a
box and we watch various stereotyped characters come along and

(08:06):
try and fail to solve the problem in amusing ways. However,
if this movie had just been a comedy that delivered
on that premise, I don't think it would be all
that well remembered. Not like the comedy elements are not good,
but it just wouldn't stand out in the way that
it actually does. This movie made a big impression on
a lot of people. We can talk more about its

(08:27):
cultural impact and a bit, but I think it is
the horror twist that really makes this movie memorable to
people and is what makes it kind of masterful. So
as the comedy scenario drags on, there is a very gradual,
almost imperceptibly increasing tone of menace and despair, and moment

(08:48):
by moment the situation just becomes less funny and a
little weirder and more ominous, until by the final moments
we are in full throttle nightmare territory. And I honestly
cannot think of another film that pulls off this kind
of revolution in genre and tone across its run time.
It's a really interesting project, has a very unique effect

(09:11):
on the viewer, and I can't think of anything else
quite like it.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
The only picture that's coming to my mind that does
something even kind of like this is Terry Gilliams Brazil
with of course it's actual ending, not the fairy tale ending,
but the right bleak ending that we get in that picture,
which is one of the things that makes it so memorable.
Like there's so much in Brazil that is, you know,

(09:37):
stupid and absurd and outright comedic, but we land in
a very dark place, in a very contemplative place, and
I think it's one of the reasons that Brazil resonates
so strongly with everyone.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
I think that's a really good point of comparison, though
I would say it's different because I think the bleak
and ominous stuff is there from the beginning in Brazil,
but throughout the runtime it's also like earlier on, especially
it's a lot funnier, and then it just ends in
like its bleakest point, whereas this is a movie that
starts doesn't It's not scary or bleak at all at

(10:11):
the beginning. It starts off completely lighthearted and then ends
where it does.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Now we've mentioned absurdity a couple of times, and I
think absurdity is also key to understanding The Telephone Box.
I think it makes wonderful use of absurdity in multiple ways,
and I think we are generally primed to interpret absurdity
in terms of comedy, at least at first. Maybe there's
some sort of scenario though, where if absurdity, if you're

(10:37):
continually bombarded with absurdity, it eventually becomes horror. I'm not sure,
but I think one of the film's great merits is
that on the whole, even though we have an absurd
premise from the get go. It's pretty much played straight.
We have some goofy moments, some physical comedy, but even
those goofier moments I think are played with a realistic

(10:58):
air and deliberately avoid going full cartoon on anything. And
we'll touch on some examples of this when we get
into the plot later. And then of course, at the
center of it all, our unfortunate man, our gray man
trapped in the phone booth played by Jose Lewis Lopez Vesquez,
who we'll get to here in a minute, is portrayed
just very believable, very relatable. It has this quiet dignity

(11:21):
and frustration and embarrassment that just steadily gives way to
these darker emotional states.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right, and I think I'm
not the first to point this out. You know, people
have written before about the kind of surprising overlap between
comedy and horror and the way I think they can
both stem from absurd situations that you know, the genres
do have a lot in common, Like they both deal
with the with the building and then the release of tension.

(11:48):
That's the structure of a joke, and that's the structure
of a scare in a horror movie. And as you
were just pointing out, with like the situational absurdity in
the film, a lot of times the difference but like
the same events could be shown as comedy or as horror,
and really all that it takes to make a difference
between the two is your perspective.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Another thing I wanted to bring up about Lacabino or
the telephone Box is that this is not an obscurer movie,
actually certainly not obscure within Spain. You know, we on
Weird House we cover stuff most people have never heard of,
and we cover stuff that's pretty well known. This is
actually sort of both because I think many English speaking

(12:31):
listeners will probably never heard of it. But in Spain,
I think lots of people saw this on TV, certainly
back when it came out. Lots of people who are
adults now saw it on TV when they were kids,
having no idea what it was, and it left a
powerful impression on them. This is one of those movies
where there's like a lot of Internet search traffic of

(12:52):
people asking what was the horror movie where the guy
gets stuck in a phone box, and then they come
across this and find these web pages about it.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
Yeah. I think, as we've discussed before, that's one of
the brilliant things about broadcast horror television is that so
many of us watched something or part of something and
it just stuck in our heads and we had no
idea what it was. And it's only much later via
the Internet that were able to find out, Oh, yeah,
I was, that's what it was. It was in my case,
like NASA, it was NAUSICAA or various horror movies that

(13:22):
I saw parts of.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
We may have mentioned this on the show before, but
I remember having a conversation with my dad about this,
where he was remembering from when he was a kid
seeing something on TV that really scared him, and just
talking through it, we were able to figure out what
it was, and it was an episode of Boris Karloff's
thriller that was an adaptation of the story Pigeons from Hell.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Oh yes, yes, the short story by Robert E. Howard.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
But anyway, coming back to the telephone Box, something quite
interesting about this was that it was something of a
cultural sensation. It was kind of the talk of the
town in Spain when it first aired in December nineteen
seventy two, and I was reading an article about this
movie called Lacabina creating Horror from the Absurd. This was

(14:08):
published in an online magazine called The Artifice, written by
a contributor just called Amius. I guess that's like a
pseudonym or something. But in this article, which is definitely
worth a read for a lot of the background on
the film, the author talks about how the movie gave
rise to so it was not only talked about a lot,
it gave rise to a kind of urban legend in Madrid. Basically,

(14:30):
I think the idea was that people in Madrid were
becoming trapped in phone boxes and later being kidnapped by
sort of agents in shadowy uniforms, and nobody knew where
they were taken, and so this actually would cause people
to be afraid. And maybe whether or not they'd actually
seen this short on TV, maybe they just heard about
the kind of rumor of this thing happening secondhand, and

(14:53):
so they go into a phone box to make a
call and leave their legs sticking out to keep the
door from shutting.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
I love that they made phone box is scary, which
we should. This would probably is probably a good point
in the podcast to mention for our younger listeners high zoomers.
A phone box or a telephone booth is a is
a compartment, sometimes open on one or more sides, but

(15:19):
sometimes it can be sealed with a door, and there
is a pay telephone in there, a telephone that you
would put money into in order to place calls and
could receive calls if you've watched enough like older films,
especially like noir films, you know, payphones off and feature
into the plot. So I'm half joking and having to
remind everyone what it is. But but I also found

(15:41):
it an interesting experience to watch this film that is
so centered around a phone booth and really asking myself,
have I ever actually used one in my life? And
I'm not sure that I have ever used a fully
enclosed phone booth before.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
Yeah, I'm not sure. I've used payphones when I was younger,
but I don't know if they were I've heard the
kind that were enclosed in a glass box.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah, there is something just unique about the idea that
I must seal myself into this space in order to
then have this disembodied conversation with another place. There's almost
kind of a magic act going on there, which I
think they're tapping into a little bit here.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Well, you want privacy for your call, but I mean,
does it feel private when everybody can see you from
all sides?

Speaker 1 (16:25):
I don't know. I mean nowadays with everyone. I mean,
it seems like this was a rational expectation for folks.
People are going to have phone calls out in public.
They want privacy, But now we know they don't really
want privacy. People have all sorts of hyper sensitive phone
calls out in front of tons of people. So it
turns out it really didn't matter.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
Okay, I got another bizarre cultural legacy of this movie,
also mentioned in that same article on the Artifice, in
what seems to me like a quite bizarre marketing choice,
there's a Spanish telecom company called Telefonica, which actually released
TV ads after this special that were a parody of it,

(17:09):
using the star of the movie in the ads. That
will seem even more bizarre to you after we discuss
the whole plot.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeahs, as that artifice article kind of gets into, it's
really kind of brilliant. It's like, uh, oh, they've made
telephone booth scary. What do we do? We embrace it,
We turn it into a commercial. Even though from some
angles that seems a little tone deaf. It actually reminds
me of some of the Severance branded ads out there
right now for stuff like zip Recruiter, where they're just like, Yep, Severance,

(17:40):
that's great, let's attach our brand to that, when Severance
is in many ways like a really cutting look at
workplace culture and and you know what it does to
us and what we do to ourselves there.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
Oh, I'm a surfboard company. Let's make a Jaws themed commercial.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know. But then again, I guess
any publicity is good but elic, so they go for it. Now.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
Actually, the story of the ad for this telephone company
gets even stranger because that article talks about how the
movie itself, the short film, may have been in part
inspired by a telephone company ad that aired in the
nineteen sixties and also had the star of this film
in it. So there was a phone ad, and then

(18:24):
the guy from the phone ad was in a movie
that turned a telephone box into horror, and then the
telephone company made another ad that was a spin off
of the horror movie.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Right, And I think there's also some possible connection to
a nineteen sixty spy movie that had somebody in a
phone booth in the phone booth gets put on the
back of a truck, that kind of thing. But the
ultimate finished product here goes in original and terrifying directions.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Yeah. Also this in the not obscurer category. This movie
won awards. It won an International Emmy in nineteen seventy
three for Best Fiction. This was apparently the first Emmy
ever for a Spanish director.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Yeah, and as we'll get into, many of the people
involved in this picture were top notch professionals who were
recognized certainly within Spain but also internationally.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, so major cultural legacy. There's some kind of there was,
at least at some point a kind of campaign to
get a monument put in place that's like a phone box,
you know, in Madrid to recognize this movie. There's like
telephone booth graffiti that people have found where somebody like
illustrates the man from the movie being trapped on the

(19:32):
inside of a phone booth.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah, and it's rather telling. The article points out that
Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame was inspired by this
short film, which should tell you everything you need to
know about the ultimate trajectory of this piece.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
This is very nineteen seventy two Black Mirror. Okay, Now
we would normally play some trailer audio here, but I
don't think this thing ever had a trailer, at least
as far as I can tell.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Not that I could tell. So in lieu of a trailer,
go watch it. Just go watching it and come back,
Or if you know you're not gonna watch it, or
you don't like to go into films without full spoilers,
then carry on and watch it later. Joe, what's your
elevator pitch here?

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Well, if the tagline for Jaws was You'll never go
in the water again, this is gotta be You'll never
go in a phone booth again.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
Right. I think that works. I think that works.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
All right, we talked about the connections.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yes, so let's start at the top with the director,
who also has a writing credit on this. As we
mentioned earlier, it is Antonio Marcero or Marciro. I'm not
sure which pronunciation is most accurate here, but he lived
nineteen thirty six through twenty eighteen Spanish film and TV

(20:56):
director whose work was well regarded domestically and internationally. His
directorial work spanned from nineteen sixty through two thousand and seven,
and included such acclaimed films as nineteen eighty eight's Wait
for Me in Heaven, about a man selected against his
will to serve as Franco's double, nineteen eighty eight It's
a Time for Defiance, a romance set during the Spanish

(21:17):
Civil War, and two thousand and three's The Fourth Floor,
about seriously ill youths at a Spanish cancer ward. As
for his other genre films, there's nineteen seventy five Bloodstains
in a New Car, a kind of follow up to
this film, I think in some ways has the same
lead actor. Oh, and then there is a nineteen eighty
three kids monster mash film, a monster mash in that

(21:39):
it has a Franknstinse monster, has a Dracula, a were wolf,
and so forth. It's titled good Night, Mister Monster. And
I'm glad to report that it does feature Paul Nashy
as the were wolf. I'm also to understand that it
is a disco musical with some rocky horror aspirations.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Oh wow, I gotta see that.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Well.

Speaker 3 (21:58):
I should have of it when I picked this movie.
But there have to be multiple Paul nashi connections, right,
We're gonna get several, aren't we?

Speaker 1 (22:06):
There are yes? And also that's I mean, for better
or worse. That's how I end up grounding any Spanish cinema.
I'm like, okay, how many decrease the separation? Are we? From?
Paul Nashi?

Speaker 3 (22:16):
So I found a quote of Antonio Mercero's where he's
trying to describe the themes of his own work, and
he basically says in all of his movies there are
three elements. He says, in all my works, I have
used three concepts, pain, love and humor. It's a strange cocktail,
I know, and often I've asked myself how I could
mix elements potentially so different from one another. But in

(22:39):
practice they have been landmarks in developing my creations. And
you know what, yep, that's they're all three are here
in the telephone box less love than anything else, but
there is a bit of love, and the bit of
love makes the horror much more painful. And of course
there's humor too, So check on all three, all right.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
The other writer credited here is Jose Lewis Garci born
nineteen forty four, claimed Spanish writer and director who directed
four films nominated for Best Foreign language film at the
Oscars begin the Beginning in nineteen eighty two, and that
one actually won double feature in eighty four, Course Completed
in nineteen eighty seven, and The Grandfather in nineteen ninety eight.

(23:22):
He's also credited with a handful of horror films from
the nineteen nineties, but I couldn't find out much about these.
But he's certainly best known for his dramas, his comedies,
and his social commentary. Now our star really the when
I say star in the short thirty minute film, he's
pretty much like the I mean, he's the focal point

(23:44):
the whole time. He is our gray man. He is
the man trapped in the telephone booth. It's his performance
within the telephone booth. And again we barely hear from him.
He is mostly sealed in there. There is no sound.
It's just a pure visual, mime like performance.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
He has a few lines at the beginning, Yeah, but
almost no dialogue for this protagonist.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
Yeah. This is again Jose Lewis Lopez Vasquez, who with
nineteen twenty two through two thousand and nine a claim
Spanish actor whose largely comedic work eventually shifted towards the serious.
During the nineteen seventies. He worked in theater initially before
working his way into cinema with various odd jobs in cinema,
and then his career really began to take off in

(24:28):
the nineteen fifties. So today's film certainly emerges during a
prominent part of his career when he's switching into more
for the most part, into more serious roles and finding
a great deal of success there. Some of his most
critically well received films are from this time period. In fact,
he won two Chicago International Film Festival Awards for his

(24:50):
performances in the early seventies, particularly two films of note,
the First I've Seen It attributed to nineteen seventy and
other places to nineteen seventy. A film titled The Anchises
would a well regarded folk horror film about historical Spanish
serial killer and self professed werewolf Manuel Blanco. Roma Santo

(25:14):
Vasquez plays a fictional character based on accounts of this
individual from the novel by Carlos Martinez Barbito. It's a
serious role and only his I think, second big non
comedic role, following the acclaimed psychological thriller Peppermint Frape in
nineteen sixty eight, The Anchises Woods earned him numerous nominations,

(25:36):
and then in nineteen seventy two he was in a
film titled My Dearest Senorita. This was a groundbreaking Spanish
film dealing with sex change and intersexualism, in which Fasquez
plays Adella, who becomes Juan. I haven't seen this film,
and so I can't speak for how well at sincabela
sensibilities concerning sex and gender matchup with where we are today,

(25:56):
but it apparently broke new ground at the time, especially
in Spain, as such subjects had largely been banned under
the oppressive Franco regime. And during this time there's like
a sort of and this is also discussed in that
article we referenced earlier, during this time period, there's kind
of a breaking down of some of those strict rules

(26:17):
concerning media as Spain is beginning to sort of reach
out and try and sort of fit in with the
larger European world around them. And so, you know, a
few years earlier, film like this would not have been released,
but Vesquez's performance here earned widespread acclaim, and the film
itself was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the

(26:39):
forty fifth Academy Awards. So these two films were instrumental
in his shift to more dramatic work, including nineteen seventy
one's The Garden of Delights, seventy fives of Zorita Martinez
seventy six's Este Signor di Negro. But of course, as
far as connections go, you might be wondering, Okay, did
he work with any of the Spanish cinema mainstay from

(27:00):
the time period that we've discussed on the show before,
And the answer is yes, So Frank Bronna multiple times,
Lewis Barbou multiple times, Helga Linet, yes, I think at
least one or two pictures there. And indeed there is
a Paul Nashi connection as well. So Nashi, I think,
had an uncredited part in the nineteen sixty six film

(27:22):
that Vasquez also appears in. But Vasquez definitely appears in
a pair of Nashi written and directed films, though sadly
they're from Paul Nashi's late period. So there's a family
drama titled My Friend the Vagabond, and then that's from
nineteen eighty four, and then there's a nineteen eighty five
film titled Operation Mantis that is like a slapstick spy

(27:45):
movie that I think was just negatively received across the board.
He did all the genres, didn't the Yeah, at one
point or another. I've got his horror box sets, but
I don't see his slapstick spy movies. Yeah, I mean
the horror I think is by most accounts, the best.
I think that's also where Paul Nashey's heart ultimately was.
And some of these other genres are often things he

(28:07):
was getting into later in his career when gothic horror
had lost its popularity in Spanish cinema. So yeah, these
are generally not as well received and or are not
as widely known outside of Spain.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
I think that he's done at least a couple of
movies about characters who are either actors or filmmakers and
just want to keep doing universal style monster movies and
there's pressure for them to do like action and stuff.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah. Yeah. Now, I can't speak for how Vesquez performs
in those two pictures, but in fact, in any other picture.
This is the only thing I've seen Vesquez in, But
now I want to see more of him because he's
so good in the Telephone Box again, The Quiet Dignity
in the face of all this inconvenience and embarrassment, the
gradual erosion of his resolve as the situation steadily descends

(28:59):
into panic and tear. You know, it's all there, all
wordless and soundless within this soundproof sarcophagus, and we know
next to nothing about his character, and yet we feel
we know him so well by the end of it,
you know, just based on the nuances of the performance,
and also some of these nice key supporting details, like
you know, obviously there's as we'll discuss, like there's this

(29:20):
love for his son, and it's this photograph of his family.
But also I like, I really love the detail of
his colorful tie. Yeah, it really felt like otherwise he's
wearing this kind of you know, just boring business suit,
but he has this really nice tie that made makes
him feel like a guy who has found this one
small way to allow his individualism to burst free and shine,

(29:45):
you know, and it's it's very much filtered and held back,
but but you can get a sense of his inner light. Oh.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
I think the tie is a great detail. Not to
contradict to you, but you described it as colorful. It
is visually interesting, but it's actually rather earth toned. It's
basically brown and black.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
I interpreted it as kind of an orange, but.

Speaker 3 (30:06):
Oh well, maybe it is kind of orange. I mean,
but it's not like, you know, rain the whole rainbow.
It's like a kind of brown or orange and black.
But it does have these very striking expressive designs on it.
It's like these kind of watery swirls in a way.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, yeah, kind of ya waves.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah, sorry, folks, we just had to scroll down to
our screenshots to make sure we're describing the tie correct.
I don't know that could be so it is like black,
but it is the other color, like, could be brown
or maybe orange or maybe gold. It's a little hard
to tell in the light quality because it's like under
a really bright sun, which is another thing about this character.
He's stuck in a glass box in the middle of

(30:44):
like right under this noonday sun. Yeah, so he's like
baking in there, but he's got this tie on and yeah,
it's I don't know what you call this pattern, but
it's like these kind of spirals or swirls that look
kind of like, I don't know, dabs of pain, almost
maybe made with the fingers or something.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
It's interesting all right, more on the necktie in a bit. Okay.
There are other actors in the picture, but mostly it's
a one man show, though I do want to mention
the burly man, the sort of like heavy set strong
man that comes to try and bust him out of
the phone booth. This character is played by Tito Garcia,

(31:25):
who lived nineteen thirty one through two thousand and three,
a rotn Spanish character actor whose credits include various westerns,
also the Jess Franco film The Awful Doctor Orloff and
a pair of Nashy films nineteen eighties Human Beasts, Oh
and nineteen eighty one's Night of the Werewolf, which we
previously covered on Weird House Cinema. He's one of the
two grave robbers that accidentally reawakens Voldemar Gninski.

Speaker 3 (31:48):
Okay, I've seen both of those. Night of the Werewolf's
a lot better. Human Beasts didn't love that one.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, kind of a nasty one and also but in
very action oriented in its early goings. Yeah, but I
have to say Garcia is good here. This could have
easily been a real over the top, blueto stop performance,
and I guess it is. But there are these nuances,
you know, like this guy's trying to do the right
thing despite of the onlookers, but also kind of because

(32:15):
of the onlookers. Yeah, and it all comes off quite
believable in my estimation.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
I want to talk later on when we get into
some of the themes about the way the film portrays
the people who stop to help the guy in the box.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
I think there's interesting stuff about the choices there.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
Now getting into the music here. Early on in the picture,
the subtitles generously refer to the music as jazz, and
I'm guessing it's probably stock music, but it also kind
of works perfectly because it feels energetic but lifeless, you know,
it's just sort of humdrum modernity, like this is what
we have done to jazz. And later on in the picture,

(32:56):
we have a rather kind of startling shift in tone.
I mean, we've been building up to it, but there
is this shift in tone, and we get a shift
in the music as well, and suddenly we're utilizing the
music of German composer and educator Karl Orf who lived
eighteen ninety five through nineteen eighty two, best known probably
for Carmina Burana, which has been used a great effect

(33:17):
in many a film, including John Borman's ex Caliber. His
music has also been used in such pictures as nineteen
seventy Three's bad Lands by Terrence Malick. This film makes
use of a cantata from his operetta Trianfo Diafreddi.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
Now, initially the use of this composition did lead to
a legal dispute. Orf tried to sue Marco because he
said that one of his compositions was used without permission.
Marcero pleaded that it was an accident. He said he
used it, he had meant to ask for permission and
then forgot to, and he set settled out of court
with Orf. Apparently they met up and they watched the

(33:56):
film together, and they came to some kind of agreement
and then or prove the use of his music. But
initially that was a bit of a sticky point about this.
Unclear to me if Marcero actually did just forget and
it was an accident an honest mistake, or if he
was trying to get away with something. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
Either way, I do feel like the orph music is
used really well here. He kept us the sense of
the transcendent, the tragic, and much more.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
Oh yeah, unimpeachable choice to use four effect in the film,
and just wish he had wish he had gone to
Orfit first.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
All right, well, let's get right into the plot, all right.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
So you can kind of divide this movie into three parts.
There's the opening that takes place in the phone booth
within a plaza in Madrid, and then there's the middle
part that's sort of a journey, and then there is
the climax, which is when we descend and descend into
the underworld. So the first third, as I said, takes
place in a plaza in Madrid. It's a real place apparently,

(34:53):
called the Plaza del Conde del vaer de Sushil. And
the credits play in this blood red typewriter font all
lowercase over views of the city framed by tall, blocky
apartment towers.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Yeah, apparently this is a rather nice part of Madrid,
a traditional district with an aristocratic architectural flare, according to
Tourismo Madrid, So I take their word for it.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
Yeah, it seems like an elegant part of the city.
So as we first come in, we're looking up at
the sky at the tops of the buildings. But then
the camera pans down to the plaza, which is in
one sense, yes, it is quite pleasant. It is surrounded
by trees as this big yard where kids can play soccer.
But in another sense, at least in the way it
is framed, it's kind of claustrophobic because we see it

(35:43):
boxed in on all sides by these nondescript high rises.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah. I feel like there's a weird sense of balance here,
an uneasy balance, but balanced nonetheless, So like the apartment
complexes are modern and nice, thus pacifying. Apparently government pressure
to include a sense of modern Madrid to showcase to
the world. Yes, but on the other it's kind of like, well, okay,

(36:08):
whatever you may have lost to these sort of stacked
confines of apartment living, at least you have these nice
green spaces and pluses.

Speaker 3 (36:15):
Yeah, we should have mentioned this earlier. But yeah, as
you said, showing off the beautiful modernizing Madrid was apparently
a requirement to satisfy the government censors, you know, the
kind of ministry that they didn't know if this script
was going to get approved to be made into a
made for TV movie, and it did. But one of
the conditions was, okay, you got to make Madrid look nice.

(36:36):
You know, we got good stuff going on here.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah, as we'll discuss, as is often the case, government
mandates for the arts can often be twisted around and
weaponized in very inventive ways. And then that may be
what's going on here.

Speaker 3 (36:54):
Yeah, there may be a kind of malicious compliance with
the sensors. So at first, when we come in, the
soundscape here is chirping birds and the grinding of motors
and machinery. It's early in the morning, and the first
thing we see in terms of action is a dark
green flatbed truck rolling into the plaza with a bright

(37:16):
red new telephone box as its cargo. The truck slows down,
backs up to the edge of the yard, and then
four men in telephone company uniforms get out. They unload
the box, carry it to the middle of the plaza,
and efficiently install it. And I want to note that
nothing really feels ominous at this point. There's no indication

(37:36):
that this is a horror movie. The birds are chirping,
the music is bright, almost whimsical. It feels much more
like the opening of a lighthearted family comedy than a
horror film.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, like we said, the sun is bright you get
the sense that there's no danger here because everybody's at
work or at school, like nobody's creeping about. It's just
people here on official business. And especially given the nineteen
seventies feel to everything, I was reminded of a lot
of live action sesame street shorts. Yeah. I feel like
I just needed a child's narration about telephones or the
letter P.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
This is how they make saxophones.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
The only thing that potentially registers as threatening to me,
and it didn't when I first watched. This was only
upon rewatching. The only thing that is potentially threatening is
the camera angle, because instead of watching this scene from
the ground, we begin with the camera way up above,
surveying everything from a distance in the sky, as if

(38:34):
we were watching like security camera footage or something. And
this could allow to set in a kind of subconscious
awareness of the scene in the plaza as being monitored
by distant and unfeeling observers, which is a powerful kind
of horror feeling to create within fiction when you take
like a mundane scene or activity, something that is not

(38:58):
unsettling by itself, but then suddenly give the impression that
it is being watched unsympathetically. It reminds me of the
excellent opening sentence of HG. Well's War of the Worlds,
where he says, quote, no one would have believed in
the last years of the nineteenth century that this world
was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than

(39:21):
man's and yet as mortal as his own. That as
men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized
and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with
a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply and a drop of water.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
Hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. This may be ultimately
because I had some sense of where things were going,
but I also found it a tiny bit foreboding that
the box is carried around via inserted staves, like it's
the Arc of the Covenant or something, you know. I
don't know, I just I don't see workmen carrying things
around like this. Maybe this is accurate, or maybe it

(40:00):
is kind of a nod to something strange. I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah, with the poles and sert it's like the Arc
of the Covenant or like a palanquin, which is especially
funny slash disturbing when there is actually a person inside
the box. So they're being carried like a king, accepted
as they're not being treated.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
Well yeah, yeah, And there are a number of visual
comparisons that end up being made between the box and
other things in the world. Will discuss as we proceed.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
So anyway, the phone company guys install the box. They
bolt it down to the earth and they get in
their truck and drive away, and we see the box
just left in the middle of the square. It is
the brightest object in the frame. The door is hanging
open invitingly. It looks absolutely jolly. And after this we
get a kind of slice of life of the residents
of the local buildings.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
In the morning.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
We see a gardener out watering the plants in the
plaza with a hose. Children running around, playing and chasing
after each other before they have to go to the
school bus, some nuns out on a walk. We see
this cool guy, Rob. I've got a screenshop for you
to look at. Here's a guy with a button up
shirt with a big seventies collar and big sunglasses.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
I like his look. He's got some books there he
has to return those to the library or something.

Speaker 3 (41:16):
Yeah, I bet their books on the occult, they've got
to be interlibrary loan for the Necronomicon. So eventually we
meet our protagonist again. He is an unnamed middle aged
man in a business suit with this with this seventies
tie with the cool design on it. He is bald
on the top of his head, with a horseshoe of

(41:38):
dark hair and a mustache. And from what I've read,
I think this guy is supposed to look like a
sort of stereotyped character, a stereotypical urban businessman in nineteen
seventy Spain. This is our gray man, and the gray
Man is not alone. He is leaving home in the
morning with his son, who's a boy of maybe a

(41:59):
ten or two, twelve or so, and his son is
out bouncing a blue soccer ball. So the son is
like kicking the soccer ball around and at one point
he kicks it and it flies into the new phone
booth because the door is just hanging right open, and
upon rewatch, I was horrified because I forgot about this moment,
but I remember at this part the boy he goes

(42:21):
into the phone booth to retrieve the ball, and he
stops for a second like he's messing around. I think
he's dawdling before school. And he goes to pick up
the phone receiver and his dad comes over is like,
come on, no, get out of there, and the boy does,
and he never closes the door again. There is still
if you don't know what's coming. There's nothing overtly frightening
at this point. It's only on rewatch that this moment

(42:43):
becomes tense. But the boy points out that the phone
booth is new, and the father acts almost as if
he would not have noticed that fact otherwise, So they
walk off to catch the school bus. The father gives
his son a kiss and says goodbye for the day,
and then while walking back the way he can the
gray man stops beside the phone booth and he seems

(43:03):
to remember that he needs to make a call, so
he steps inside. And I noticed this also on rewatch.
We never learn who he was planning to call or
what he was calling about. Never find out.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
I mean it was probably something mundane and boring, like
he's like, oh, I forgot I'm supposed to call about
those tickets for the weekend, or I forgot to call
about the laundry. You know, nowadays we would stop halfway
between point A and point B, pull out her cell
phone and send that quick email or text message. And
I assume that's just what's going on here.

Speaker 3 (43:37):
But when the man lifts the receiver in the phone booth,
he does not hear a dial tone, so he starts
fiddling around with the phone, trying to make it work. Meanwhile,
behind his back, the door to the box quietly folds shut.
It's just like a venus fly trap closing on its prey.
And still there is nothing yet to let you know

(43:57):
this is horror. The man just keeps messing around with
the phone to try to figure out what's wrong. Eventually
he gives up and he tries to leave, but now
the door is closed and it will not open, and
he pushes and pulls and it is not going anywhere.
And then he just stands back and folds his arms, like,
oh brother, this is all I need very much. In

(44:18):
the mime school of posture.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah yeah, so at this point again, yeah, there's no
musical sting to drive home what's happening. The ceiling of
the phone booth is as low key and natural as
can be. And initially it's just like, oh goodness, yeah,
I've got one more thing now I have to do
in my day, and it's get out of this phone booth.
But you know, it seems like I've just got to
figure this out, right, It's like there's a latch or
there's something. This will just take a minute.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
Yeah, And so his initial struggles give rise to I
think some of the most famous images from the movie
images you see clipped out around the internet, ones that
are reproduced, and stills and graffiti and on the poster,
it's just the man struggling in the situation. He looks
around on the inside of the box. He's probably trying
to find some kind of release mechanism or something that

(45:05):
he's pressing on the corners and searching up and down,
but nothing. The door is locked and there is no
apparent way to get out. So next a couple of
men come along. There is a guy in a polo
shirt and then an older man and a jacket, and

(45:27):
they come along walking past the box, and the man
in the box pantomimes to them that he needs help
getting out, and so the two men stop to try.
I think it's worth noting that in their performance, they
never seem to care all that much. They do not
act like they are concerned for the man. They do

(45:48):
stop to help, but for example, the first thing they
do is they go to the man and they suggest
that he try pushing on the door. Then when that
clearly doesn't work, they start trying to pull on the
door from the outside, but it's not moving. And then
they declare, well, we're late for work, and they move on,
leaving the man behind.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah. The guys are basically like, look, we've done exactly
as much as the Social contract Demand's office, and then
they move on. And this is a vibe that's going
to continue throughout the film where different people attempt to help,
their actions always very much within the neuro confines of
what society and or their job requires of them.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
And the thing I want to emphasize is true of
them and basically everybody else who comes along. They do
briefly stop to try to help, but it never feels
like they see him or like they're concerned for him.
It's just kind of like, oh, here's a little problem,
eh okay, can't fix it, see yah.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Yeah, And they never seem to appreciate any real danger,
and of course we don't truly begin and our main
character doesn't truly begin to understand the danger till later.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
So in the meantime, while these guys are pulling on
the door, several spectators sort of gather up around the scene.
There are some adult women coming back from the store.
They stop to look at him from a distance. There's
a group of evil children who begin pointing and laughing
at him, and they gather outside the door to the box.
They're mocking him. They're saying, like, what's wrong with you man?

(47:15):
And one of them says, should we throw you peanuts?
And the children run in circles around the box, hooting
at him, and they're just having the time of their lives.
This is hilarious.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah. How many Spanish films have we seen at this
point where mobs of children mock an adults predicament. I
think this is at least the third one.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
That's the mainstay of Paul Nashy movies. Also, yeah, it's
just mobs of evil children.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Yeah. I believe it also showed up in the Tomb
of the Blind Dead film that we watch. It's like
Spanish children in these movies are just out to shame
and harass.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
So I think it's kind of interesting to note all
of the different characters who become part of the crowd
around the man in the box. So there's a guy
carrying an ornate cushioned chair on his head. I think
he might he's supposed to be a mover. Maybe maybe
somebody is moving into one of these apartment buildings. And
he stops and he puts the chair down in the
yard just to watch the scene. And then there's a

(48:09):
man who's or it's a young man I guess, going
around selling pastries from a tray. He gets robbed. Later,
a couple of movers are unloading a large polished mirror
that has like baroque framing on the outside, and they
stop and they put the mirror down to watch what's happening.
A few women nearby they sit down on a bench

(48:30):
and begin knitting, and they're knitting. That's when you really
know you're in trouble. And so next we get to
the large man Tito Garcia. Here he's this big guy
carrying an athletic bag. I think it's a Puma brand bag.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Yeah, Like I guess he's going to the gym or
just came back from the gym.

Speaker 3 (48:49):
Yeah, he's a weightlifter guy. And he comes to the
rescue and he's like, Okay, everybody, get out of the way.
I'm the strongest. I'll get this thing open. And he
tugs and he tugs and and it's played a bit
for comedy. All he succeeds in is breaking the handle
off the door, and then he tries repeatedly ramming the
glass with his shoulder like he's a charging bull, but

(49:12):
to no avail. And this is all played for physical comedy.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, but you know, you do get the vibe that
he is trying to do what's right, both in the
eyes of the gray man inside, but also the crowd
of onlookers, like there's a performative aspect of what's going on,
even though as he begins to fail at this task,
they begin to sort of mock him as well. But

(49:36):
in the end, once more, there's only so much he
can do and has to do in everyone's eyes, and
it's kind of like, well, it is what it is.
I gave it a good go, but I've got places
to be buddy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
Once again, I feel like he never seems to really
see or be concerned about the man inside. He's just like, oh,
here's a problem. I'm strong, I can get this thing open.
And he tries and tries, and then he's humiliated and
then last to leave.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Yeah yeah, but yeah, there's never a sense that he
cares about the individual in the box. He wants to
obey the social contract. He wants to sort of appease
the crowd and perhaps himself in his own ego. But
does he really see the gray man at all in
a sense?

Speaker 2 (50:19):
No.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Somewhere in here, there's an interesting moment where the man
in the box sees his reflection in the fancy mirror
that the movers have set down across from him and
on rewatch. I thought this was kind of interesting because
a few things happen here. For one thing, and the
man sees himself in the mirror. He's clearly embarrassed and
he kind of tries to adjust his appearance in a way.

(50:42):
But this is also the first moment where it felt
to me like Vasquez's performance where the man's demeanor shifts
a little bit from frustration and embarrassment to worry.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
Yeah. Yeah, And of course I love just the idea
of bringing the mirror into this. It feels very very
borges esque, you know. And also the mirror is of
course a person in a box sort, and so the
man in the box is now reflected and is another
man in the box. And I think maybe now he's

(51:15):
seeing himself from the outside, right, he's seeing what other
people are seeing. That he is this person trapped within
and maybe less of a person, you know, he is,
just he is within something else. He has no he's
no longer like this free part of the world.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
I think that's right. Yeah, But then so we we're
gonna get another attempt to intervene. So the guy who
was carrying the mirror next tries to show that he's
the one who can get the box open. He's like,
it takes not strength but skill, and so he pulls
out his tools. He's got like a screwdriver. He has
the tools and he has the know how. So we
see him searching all over the box looking for the
place where he can unscrew the door and get it open,

(51:55):
but he finds nothing. It's like it was made not
to be disassembled. And then he tries to pry the
door open with his tools, but he can't get that
done either. And then while the screwdriver man is working
and the crowd is watching. Uh. The man in the
telephone box, he like witnesses things happening outside. I thought
this was so interesting. So everybody's watching him, and then

(52:18):
he's looking out through the windows seeing things happening in
the crowd that other people are not seeing. He's like
seeing what is not otherwise observed. So he like watches
a man steal pastries from the pastry vendor's tray and
cram them in his mouth, and he walks. He sees
a man walk by behind the crowd with multicolored balloons. Uh.

(52:40):
He sees the mover who set down the cushioned chair,
offering the chair to an elderly woman who is also
there watching the scene, which is funny because it's like
it's like a gesture of kindness, but not toward the
man in the box, only toward another member of his
unwonted audience. And then finally, uh oh, here comes fuz So.

(53:01):
Two uniformed police come marching up to the scene. And
I've read other reviewers mentioning feeling at this moment when
they watched it, like, Okay, the authorities are here, the
situation is under control now. But nope.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Well, you know, given the sort of rule of three, right,
if this were some sort of a parable, and it
definitely feel it has more of the trappings of parable.
I think when we tell listeners what's happening here, it
feels like okay now. And then the third people that
came and tried to solve the riddle, they were able
to solve it because they had legal authority to do so.
But like you say, this is also not going to work.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Right, So the cops here have an awesome way of
dealing with the situation. They arrive and they tell the
man with the screwdriver to get away from the box,
and they tell the man stuck in the box to
get out immediately, and then when he shows that he can't,
they start barking threats at him and saying, didn't you
hear me? I said, get out of there now.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Yeah. So, once more they follow procedure, they enforce their authority,
but they're unable to help and gladly step aside to
let some other authorized party jump in. And during this
section of the short film here I thought quite a
bit about the bystander effect in all of this. This
is that psychological theory that I believe we've talked about

(54:17):
in the show before that states that the presence of
others tends to discourage an individual from intervening. So in
the more people there are, arguably the less likely any
individual is to help. And this is not necessarily grounded
in any kind of like state of innate cruelty or anything.
If there is a conscious energy to it all, it

(54:38):
is often something along the lines of, oh, well, someone
more qualified, someone more official, or someone more just someone
closer to the situation, They're going to jump in and
do what needs to be done. I'm not that person.
And this is why if you've ever taken any CPR
classes before, they always stress that you don't say, hey,
someone call nine to one one, because there's too much

(54:59):
room for people to say, yes, that's a great idea.
Someone should do that, maybe someone closer to the situation
or someone unless it or know. What you do is
you point at someone and you tell them to call
nine to one one, Because if you leave it open,
then there's this there's a high likelihood that nothing is
going to be done, or it's going to take far
longer for some decision to be made.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Yeah, everybody assumes somebody else is doing it, or it
takes them too long to figure out who's doing it.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when the when the police kind
of run out of options, that you know someone else
is about to arrive on the scene. It's the fire department,
and they're like, oh, well, good, fire department will take care.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Of it, okay, see yah. So the fire department, it
really seems like these are the ones who are going
to solve the problem, right, So they've they've got ladders
and axes and everything they need to get inside this box.
So they get like one of the fire firefighters gets
up on top of the box and it seems like
he is going to smash the glass.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
In and I was really thinking this was going to
do it. Surely like they have fine, like someone has
the tools. It seems it's a little violent, but it
looks like this is gonna work.

Speaker 3 (56:05):
But just then an even higher authority arrives, the phone company.
So finally the right people for the job, the phone
company truck parks and four men get out, I think
the same fore men who installed the box earlier, and
they One thing I thought was worth noting, we never

(56:26):
get a very close look at any of the phone
company workers whatever they actually are, the people dressed up
in the green uniforms who put the box there. But
from a distance they all look vaguely like the man
stuck inside the box. They're all like middle aged men
who are balding on top with a horseshoe of dark hair.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
That's a good point. Yeah, they're just very much bland,
everyday men, they are, and we get far, we get
far less character from these. We don't get a sense
of the same sort of interpersonal connection that we do
with these other phases of helpers or would be helpers.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
That's right. So the four men come and they unbolt
the phone booth from the earth, they lift it up,
they insert the poles to carry it, and then they
carry it back to their flatbed truck, put it on
the truck bed and drive away, all with the man
still stuck inside, and everybody at the assembled crowd they're
all cheering and celebrating like this is what's supposed to happen.

Speaker 1 (57:26):
Yeah, it's like somebody who knows what they're doing came
and did something, so things are okay now.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
But the guy in the box is like, wait, what
what's going on? But from everybody outside's perspective, it's like
it's absurd, but it almost is plausible that that is
how a crowd would react, because it's now like by
removing the man in a in a kind of weird
psychological way, the people who were standing around can be
like the situation has been resolved.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:54):
Yeah, So this gives rise to the middle section of
the movie, where the man is still stuck in the
booth and now he's riding around on the back of
the truck. I did notice this earlier, actually, but I
thought we got to mention at some point, So I

(58:15):
do want to mention here how hot it seems like
it would be inside that booth. Was just like the
sun blasting down through the glass and the doors are stuck.
And apparently this was actually an issue during filmmaking that,
like for the actor in the box, it was quite
hot in there, and they at some points had to
like angle shots in certain ways so that you couldn't

(58:37):
see that Pines had to be removed from parts of
the box just to allow some air to circulate, or
it would get unbearably hot inside. But during this section
of the short, the truck is driving around Madrid and
the man is becoming increasingly distressed. He tries to get
the attention of the workers in the truck, but they
won't even look at him like that. It's not like

(58:57):
they're menacing. They just eyes forward, driving, no acknowledgment of
him at all. Other people on the road, much like
the crowd earlier, just do not seem to take him seriously.
Like they stare at him, they're kind of amused, or
they mock him and laugh at him. We see some
young attractive people in a convertible pull up next to

(59:18):
the truck and traffic, and they're all pointing at him.
One of them jokingly, I think, asks if they can
make a phone call.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
Yeah. And this whole time too, we're driving past more
high rise apartment buildings in various high rise buildings in Madrid.
And this is another I think there's some great visual
poetry going on here between the vertical phone booth and
the vertical buildings, the idea of these towers of modernity

(59:47):
in here, this sort of little tower of modernity in
which our main character is trapped. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:52):
And so obviously this section of the movie is where
they were fulfilling part of their obligation to the Ministry
Office that was like show us, show us Madrid modernizing,
and so we get some of these views of the city,
but I think a lot of them are sort of
situated and edited together actually to make us feel some
amount of dread.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
Yeah, because we see like buildings being constructed, and so
in a way all like construction, that's growth, that's modernizing,
that's good, but we see kind of the bones of
a building in a way that's a little unsettling, especially
because we see them back to back with a moment
where the truck stops outside of a church where there's
a funeral going on and it's a funeral with a

(01:00:35):
glass coffin.

Speaker 1 (01:00:36):
Yeah, and yeah, the comparison there is obvious and rather foreboding.
But then also gave what you mentioned about the we
see these buildings that are being built, and it is
there's this kind of feeling like something modern and out
of control is happening, you know, And that's what's happening

(01:00:57):
on the micro level here with the phone booth as well,
or at least that's the since I'm beginning to get
like there's some sort of a process going on here.
People you know, delivered one of these things. It trapped
somebody and now they're taking it away, and there's this
feeling that nobody is at the wheel, or that's the
the overbearing feeling that I got from it, Like there

(01:01:17):
are just machinations in process. They are completely unfeeling, nobody
approved them, nobody's fighting them. It's just what's happening, and
you and you were just in the wrong place at
the wrong time.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
Well, it connects to a kind of to a kind
of real world horror that I think a lot of
people will have some experience with the feeling of like
when you are in some way to your detriment being
the object of an institutional process something by like a
you know, a big corporation or a government or some
big institution, and there's no way for you to feel

(01:01:53):
like you are getting a foothold with that organization, like
they're paying attention to your needs. And that kind of
can of course run the whole gamut from just like
a very frustrating inconvenience to like severe oppression of a
person's rights, and in any sense it feels bad, but
it can go from much like this story does, from
the inconvenient to the horrifying. Now right around here in

(01:02:18):
the story, is the first moment where I would say
the energy really seems to tip over when it crosses
the threshold into horror. And that moment is when the
truck pulls up next to a playground and there are
children singing a kind of song where it's some kind
of I don't know, old nursery rhyme song that talks

(01:02:39):
about like Easter and the Trinity, and the truck stops,
and it stops next to another phone company truck on
which there is also a red telephone box with a
man stuck inside.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
Yeah, and that's where we begin to realize this is
not a singular incident, This is not maybe not that
much of an anomaly, this is maybe happening all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
Yeah. And so the men are unable to talk, like
because they're both stuck in the boxes, but they look
at each other and you see them both like a
kind of horror dawning on them when they see one another.
Also because they're kind of dressed the same and look similar,
like they just like look like similar guys. And they
see each other and they they're aware something frightening is happening,

(01:03:25):
and they're both powerless to do anything about it. So
you can see a it's weird almost to kind of
like pity for each other, but also a kind of
resentment for each other in the like seeing what the
other one means for them.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
Another interesting moment I wonder what you made of this
was the part where the truck crosses paths on the
outskirts of the city. Like they are these ruins, a
kind of collapsing old wall. Uh, and they cross pass
with a group of circus performers. They're these guys juggling
and in clown makeup sitting on this collapse sing wall.
One guy's holding a ship in a bottle. Oh, It's

(01:04:04):
it's an unsettling moment. And I would say the men
sitting there, like the circus performers, do, seem to kind
of look at the guy in the phone booth with
more recognition and pity than most of the other observers
in the story do. But I'm not sure what was
really meant by this.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
Yeah, And I think, like everything in the picture, they
keep it vague so that you can have various interpretations.
But I guess what I took away from this is maybe,
like the circus performers here have a certain amount of
freedom like they are. They live on the outside, and
in fact they are situated in this shot on the
other side of a wall that separates them from the

(01:04:43):
truck in the phone booth. So you know, in a
way they like pity his condition in his circumstance, but
they understand it insofar as they have escaped it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
Yeah. Yeah, And then right after this comes I was
maybe the sad to part in the whole thing, which
is when the truck crosses paths with a young boy.
There's like a young boy out playing with a ball,
and the boy waves to the man. This is another
point I guess where the man does. It does feel
like somebody actually sees the man and kind of like
recognizes his humanity and all that. But he when he

(01:05:19):
sees this boy, obviously he thinks about his son, and
he thinks about his son earlier, and he remembers the
soccer ball bouncing into the phone booth that morning. And
I think it's a strong image because it implies simultaneously
a kind of horror. This man's worrying about his own
situation and worrying how he's going to get out of
this and whether he's going to see his son again.

(01:05:41):
But Also there's a kind of relief in the memory,
I think, because he realizes that his son could have
been the one trapped in the in the box and
he wasn't. Then after this he just keeps getting weirder.
Suddenly there's a helicopter following the truck. Why the helicopter,
I never knew what to make.

Speaker 1 (01:05:58):
Of That helicopter just means like someone is watching. It's
almost like the eye of God. But then it becomes
it offers no comfort because in this situation, God is
doing nothing. Whoever is in the helicopter, who's observing from
the helicopter, they're not interfering with this, they're just I guess,

(01:06:20):
documenting it. And again there's just this overbearing coldness to
the whole scenario.

Speaker 3 (01:06:25):
So the truck leads through some strange and amazing locations.
At one point it goes down this mountain side road,
zigzagging down, down and down into a valley near a
huge dam. And then finally at the end of this
road we pass out of the sunlight which has been
beating down. So you might imagine you almost kind of
feel a physical relief because this man's been under the

(01:06:48):
glass under the hot sun and it has just been
roasting him in there, and they finally pass into darkness.
But things are not getting better, So the truck goes
into an underground facility and dry down a long dark
road and a tunnel. They are little sort of utility
lights all along the walls, and as it goes deeper,

(01:07:09):
it passes more and more unsettling things. The man sees
lots of empty red telephone boxes being cleaned and prepared
by phone company workers. Again, if that's actually what they are,
they're just men in green uniforms. We see trucks leaving
the facility loaded with telephone boxes, and the tone markedly
shifts here. There is no longer any ambiguity or any

(01:07:32):
hint of comedy or whimsy. The music lets you know
that things have gotten very dark.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
That's right, Yeah, the carl Orf is in full swing here,
and things that are beginning to feel tragic.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
So the truck parks and uniformed men get out and
the man in the box again. He tries to signal
them for help, but they don't even look at him.
They unhitch the box from the truck and then it
is lifted away by a crane and transported to some
deeper part of the facility, and the man becomes increasingly
terrified and desperate. He's banging on the glass from the inside,

(01:08:08):
but there seems to be no relief, and eventually the
box is transported into some kind of dark back room,
this big, vast warehouse room where he has wheeled past
other telephone boxes, and here just the nightmare reaches its apex,
where he looks into the other telephone boxes and there

(01:08:30):
are just dead men inside, dead men dressed like him,
in various states of decomposition, looking like they've been in
there for years or even decades. And finally he's parked
next to one where a guy appears to have strangled
himself with the cord of his own telephone receiver. The
last image we see of the man is of his

(01:08:50):
hand pressed up against the glass. Is he's just, I guess,
sinking down to the floor in despair. Ending doesn't get
much darker than that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
Yeah, there is no escape. That is the final statement
here that we do get a little bit of a
stinger that reminds us, don't worry, there's more doom to come.

Speaker 3 (01:09:15):
That's right. So we see a clean, tidy, new telephone
box being deployed in the plaza once again, just waiting
for the next person to step inside.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:09:26):
So that's the end of Lacabina. But several things I
think I want to talk about because it raises all
these interesting ideas. One is, within the movie, did you
ever detect any hint about what the point of the
human harvesting operation was?

Speaker 1 (01:09:43):
Like?

Speaker 3 (01:09:44):
Why are people getting trapped in phone booths and stashed underground?
I'm almost certain this is intentionally left unanswered by the film.
But did you pick up on any clues that I missed?

Speaker 1 (01:09:55):
No, I mean, I think it's left ambiguous. I think
if I were to supply my own sort of headcannon
for what's happening here, is that just like some sort
of uncorrected accident of design, and the overall view of
the corporation and or the government and anyone involved is like, well,
these things happen. It's unavoidable. There are tragedies and horrors

(01:10:17):
baked into modern civilization, and I'm sorry, we can't really
address these design flaws. It is what it is. I'm
sorry it happened to you, or at least I feel
obligated to tell you so. And yeah, that's what I
got from it. I mean, I guess you could lean
into the idea that the boxes are being put out
there intentionally to catch and kill middle aged men in Madrid.

(01:10:39):
But I like the idea that this is all just
an accident of design and it's just not going to
be corrected, not out of maliciousness or not individual maliciousness,
but just sort of like the uncaring nature of the world.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Well, bridging off of that, I guess to go beyond
the sort of in universe question of what these people
are supposed to be doing in the narrative, there's something
a lot of people have asked, which is, like, what
is the meaning of the whole story? Is Lackabine supposed
to be a metaphor for living under the Francoist dictatorship
in Spain? This is something lots of viewers have inferred.

(01:11:17):
I mean, I think it's quite reasonable to suspect that
about it. According to the director, the meaning was not
intended to be limited to that, so it's not any
kind of direct allegory, but instead it was generally about
a kind of confinement and unfreedom and the desire for
freedom of all sorts. However, I think it's very worth

(01:11:40):
noting that at the time of this film's production and release,
Marcero may have believed he had to say that that
he could not admit, even if it were a veiled
critique of Francoist Spain, that that's what it was. However,
I think this issue is a little further illuminated by
a couple of quotes that Marcero gave that are collected

(01:12:03):
in that article in the Artifice magazine that we've been
talking about. So, for one thing, Marcero, speaking after the
film's release, said, quote, Jose Luis Garci and I recognize
that when we wrote the script we were closer to
the world of science fiction and terror than any political theme.
We also realized that our story had many readings, and

(01:12:24):
that that was its richness and complexity. I would say
then that Lakabina is a parable open to all kinds
of interpretations, and according to the sensitivity, culture, and formation
of each one, it will be interpreted in a different way,
and those multiple interpretations will always be valid. And then, apparently,
in an interview to our tve in two thousand and nine,

(01:12:47):
looking back on the film, so this was when he
was much older, he said, quote, all human beings have
boxes that we have to get rid of. There are
boxes of the moral type, there are boxes of the
educational type. There are boxes of the mental type, economic
boxes that imprison us. And I believe that life is
a continuous quest for freedom from each one of these boxes.

(01:13:08):
In order to be free, spontaneous, and happy, each person
has to see which box imprisons him and try to
free himself. That is our destiny. So, according to Mrcero himself,
a political interpretation is not the only intended meaning, and
I certainly don't think it's the only valid interpretation of
the film. But I also looking at it and knowing

(01:13:30):
a bit about the history, I would have to say
it's certainly a reading that makes sense, especially in the
way that it locks with other themes that are clearly
there in the story. So there's this theme of unfreedom,
but it also the theme of unfreedom connects to the
theme of dehumanization, which is a core element of first

(01:13:50):
the comedy and then later the horror. This thing we
see over and over is that the man stuck in
the phone booth is not being treated as a human
being by those outside the booth. He gets mocked, he
gets gawkeed at like just some amusing object. He gets
absurd nonsensical orders barked at him by the police, like
things that would be impossible for him to comply with.

(01:14:13):
People that do try to help him, most of them
don't actually seem all that sympathetic to him. They're just
like it's like a way to show off their strength
or skills to the gathering crowd by getting the door open.
And then eventually the man gets shelved inside an underground
bunker to apparently die, with no one at any point

(01:14:33):
other than maybe like the kid on the road, and
maybe the circus performers seeming too much notice his humanity,
like his pain, his dignity, his desire for freedom, his
requests for help. It's really like, once he is stuck
in the box, he is not a person anymore. And
so despite the film's extremely bleak and horrifying ending, I

(01:14:57):
think it actually functions as a rather human the main
and emotionally powerful warning against participating in that kind of dehumanization,
either as a spectator or as a functionary of an
institution stacking telephone boxes full of people underground, like the
person stuck on the other side of the glass is
a human being, and tomorrow or the next day, maybe

(01:15:19):
it is you, according to this story, and so we've
got to treat that person as a human being. The
fact that they're stuck in the box isn't funny, and
it isn't meaningless. It matters.

Speaker 1 (01:15:30):
I think it would be easy to watch this film
and just be left with a feeling of like, well,
people will do what they can and what they have
to do in order to help you, but beyond that,
they won't. And you know that it's not to say
that the safety net of society and government is a
complete illusion, but it will only get you so far.
I guess where it challenges us, and where you can

(01:15:51):
get into that idea of the film ultimately being about
freeing yourself from your boxes and all is by realizing
that we don't have to like the people in this movie,
like this is a cautionary tale, Like we don't have
to live in a society, in a culture that views

(01:16:11):
the suffering of other in the predicaments of other people
like this.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
That's right, And so I think that that's one reading
on which this weird, absurd, little horror short film actually
becomes quite powerful, Like it this is it's not just
there to kind of chill you and entertain you. It's
rather meaningful and it kind of puts a lesson in
there that I think it's hard to forget, but I

(01:16:35):
do want to acknowledge also that that again, that's not
the only reading of it. People have interpreted this to
mean all kinds of things, and so you know, there's
what the director said about it himself, is this general
like free your mind sort of thing. There are also
all these weird other readings that came up in some
of the articles we looked at. The one in the
Artifice mentioned something some people at the time apparently thought

(01:16:56):
it had something to do with alien abductions. I don't
get that much at all, but people take it all
over the place.

Speaker 1 (01:17:03):
Yeah, they leave it open, and so you know, all
interpretations are valid. All right, Well, there you have it.
Nineteen seventy two's La Cabina the Telephone Box, I say,
still more of a downbeat film compared to last week's Quest,
but they do have some things in common, Like they
are both films, both short films about liberation or the

(01:17:29):
quest for liberation, the desire for liberation, whether that liberation
is actually achieved within the runtime or not.

Speaker 3 (01:17:35):
I guess it is up to us to imagine the
sequel to La Caabina where the where the telephone box
regime is overthrown.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
But can you imagine if someone did a feat I
think I've seen that kind of thing done before, where
there'll be like some sort of a short, like perfect
treatment of an idea. But if you expand it out
into a feature, you've got to you've got to add
all these elements that kind of take away the bite
of the original piece. You know, you didn't have have
to have that escape and perhaps some explanation of what's

(01:18:04):
going on, and I think a lot of that would
fall flat.

Speaker 3 (01:18:07):
Yeah, best to leave that victory to the imagination.

Speaker 1 (01:18:10):
All right, We're going to go and close up the
episode here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there.
Had you seen the telephone box before? What did you
think of it? What kind of an impact did it
have over you? Or are you, like us, new initiants
into the mysteries of the telephone box. If that is
the case, we want to hear about that too, And
if you have any recommendations for other thirty minute films

(01:18:32):
that feel like a perfect fit for Weird House. We
would love to entertain those suggestions. Also, I want to
note once more that we are really close to hitting
our two hundred film selection here on Weird House Cinema.
We've been receiving a number of suggestions for what we
might cover, and we might not listen to any of
those suggestions, but we might. I'm very interested to read

(01:18:54):
more of them, so keep them coming. A reminder that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie
here on Weird House Cinema. And if you want to
follow us on letterbox dot com, our profile name is
weird House, and there is in fact a list of

(01:19:16):
all the movies we've covered thus far, and sometimes a
glimpse ahead at what's coming out next.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
Your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:19:42):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.