The Ghost Of Sierra de Cobre (aka The Haunted)

"It was a wonderful, wonderful pilot. I was a psychic consultant, whose actual profession was the restoration of old Victorian homes. His sub-vocation, or hobby, was psychic research. Whether or not he actually believed in ghosts was never addressed," Landau explains. "Robert Stevens started to direct it, got sick, and Joe Stefano ultimately directed it. It never aired in the United States, but when I was in England doing Space: 1999, it showed up on TV on a British anthology show. People were knocked out by it."


Haunted still has never been shown on these shores-outside of Landau's living room. "I have a 16 mm print, " he says. "It's a terrific show, it scares the hell out of people. "

One of the most frightening made for TV works of horror ever produced: In '64 or '65 my father ,who was working at CBS brought home a 16mm print of this film which had been screened at the network as a potential pilot,but was rejected because the network (CBS) felt it was too scary for television audiences. I was 7 years old at the time and my Brother was 9 when we first watched this film, and it was the most frightening thing we had ever seen."The Bleeding Ghost" as we referred to it gave us both nightmares for many years to follow,but we still watched it over  and over again.When I was 18 my families house burned completely to the ground & the 16mm print was lost in the fire with everything else. I am now 47 and images and  sounds from this film still linger in my mind. 


I, like the other Sydneysiders who have contributed to this film's comments, saw The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre as a child in the mid-1960s on television in Sydney (quite possibly the same screening as the other contributors), and it is still one of the most suspenseful and frightening movies that I've ever seen. Its small cast led by Martin Landau gave some really marvellous performances, arguably too good, and the ending of the film left me in a rather contradictory state: somewhat emotionally drained yet beset by a strange sort of consternation.


This is really a very intelligently made and effective film, relying on good writing, direction, and acting, and using only the quite limited and standard special photographic effects of the time. It is a genuinely frightening film without gimmicks. What more could anyone want? It is an excellent film and deserves full marks. Compelling viewing, to be sure.


I caught this on late-night Sydney television in the '60s as a young boy who had been allowed to stay up late. Really bad move. I was unable to sleep for days I was so terrified. The memory still occasionally haunts me: the idea of things happening in sealed crypts is something of a staple of the horror genre (it always reminds me of the infamous Chase family vault in Barbados, something someone should make a movie about!) but The Ghost of Sierra Cobre was also incredibly moody and suspenseful and the denouement shocking. I'm not surprised the TV execs "soiled their garments" when Stefano and Martin Landau screened it for them. I've been chasing this one for 40 years without success. I hope these comments put the heat on some Hollywood archivist to track it down and get it out there.


I remember seeing this film as a child, in Sydney in the sixties, on the Deadly Earnest Show.. scared the crap out of me.. and I don't believe in ghosts.  I saw it again years later and it was still great...the scene in the crypt has stayed with me as one of the biggest scares I ever got out of a movie.  I would love to get a copy of this film, if anyone knows of it being on DVD anywhere.  If you get a chance to see it don't miss it, especially if you like creepy dark tales.  Minimum special effects and really great suspense, I can't understand why it didn't do really well, especially with Stefano's credits. Somebody must be able to do something...please!


I too saw this in 1964 in Manila, Philippines and my sister and I would love to see it again.... it was so scary and we thought no one else remembered this movie... so I was surprised to see a lot of people have seen it as well... please let us know if anyone knows how to get a copy of it. I remember the howling cry of the bleeding ghost as it went down a hallway and the scary fish pond !!! and also the phone by the coffin and the bony hand reaching out for it when it rang !!! 

I was a 6 year old kid in 1971 when one night my dad pick up this movie on TV (B&W). It was hideously captivating from the very beginning: my dad was so scared that he forgot to sent me out of the TV room and so I saw it. There are sounds and images from this movie that still echos in my nightmares: the camera following the phone line; the sobbing when someone pick ups the phone; I remember something falling without explanation to the ground,like some flower basket or such; one shot in the Mandour Mansion hall where the sunlight drops over a sofa on which a beautiful woman sits... and the "bleeding ghost". Yeah, terrified I was. Until 1975 the TV put it a couple of times and then I never see it again. Never an horror film has shocked me as this one, a real classic! But as far I can remember Martin Landau wasn't the dead lady's husband but a paranormal detective or something alike. The dead lady was Mr. Mandour's mother as far as I remember. The whole movie had this "atmosphere", something incredible arcane.



I have seen this film a number of times, since it was not uncommonly screened on Australian late night television in the 1960s. Martin Landau's wife is dead, and interred in a crypt in the grounds of the family mansion. There is a phone line leading from the crypt to inside the house itself, and when it rings anguished sobbing is heard on the line. Martin Landau believes it is his wife's ghost sobbing, but in fact it is connected with the ghost of an old Spanish mission, a painting of which is on the wall of the main room of the house. The film is strong on atmosphere. There are slow, lingering shots which follow the phone line out of the house, and down to the granite crypt, which are quite creepy. However, the ghost, when it appears, is a disappointment.


...But the holy grail has always been The Haunted, the pilot for an occult drama that Stefano almost sold to CBS immediately after he left The Outer Limits.  (The Haunted may be better known under the title “The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre,” a title applied to a longer version shown as a feature in markets outside the United States.)

For years, The Haunted lurked in the shadows, a ghost indeed, taunting Outer Limits fans with its consummate obscurity.  Supposedly Stefano himself made the rounds of the archives in his last years (he died in 2006), looking in vain for a print of it.  David J. Schow, the author of the exhaustive Outer Limits Companion, who had not seen The Haunted when either the first (1986) or second (1998) editions of the book were published, put the word out among collectors every few years.  Nothing emerged.  Then a copy screened at a fantasy film festival in Japan, but reports in English were few.  A print surfaced on Ebay, sold for a pittance, and disappeared again. 


Finally, early this year, the UCLA Film and Television Archive came to the rescue.  A sixteen-millimeter print of The Haunted had resided at the Archive since at least the late 1990s, but few people (especially Stefano fans) were aware of its existence.  As with many cultural artifacts that have been overzealously declared “lost,” this was a case where no one had thought to ask the right person.  Although UCLA’s print had been transferred to video and was available to visiting researchers, the Archive’s Mark Quigley, one of the Outer Limits faithful, thought that wasn’t good enough.  Quigley campaigned for a public screening of The Haunted as part of UCLA’s Archive Treasures series.  Last week, paired with a thirty-five millimeter print of The Unknown, The Haunted was given a proper (if belated) premiere at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, with Stefano’s widow Marilyn and other family members in attendance.


The Haunted stars Martin Landau as Nelson Orion, a modern architect and “the country’s foremost restoration expert,” who’s more preoccupied by his second and presumably less lucrative career as a “psychic consultant.”  In other words, Orion investigates incidents of the paranormal.  Are they real, or phony?  Orion has detective skills rooted in this world, but also a kind of shining for the otherworldly that’s not fully explained in the pilot.  “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,” is the epigram that Orion quotes to sum up his philosophy.


In the pilot, Orion’s client is one Vivia Mandore (Diane Baker), a wealthy young woman whose new husband is doubly luckless: Henry Mandore (Tom Simcox) is blind, and he’s being haunted by the ghost of his domineering mother.  Vivia hopes to save her marriage by plucking Henry from the grasp of this wraith, who communicates by telephone from her crypt and finally manifests itself in the form of a glowing, skull-faced ghost.


Orion suspects that someone is orchestrating the supernatural goings-on in order to lay claim to the Mandore millions, and fixes his attention on the foreboding family housekeeper, Paulina.  But then Stefano’s script pulls a switch: Paulina is not the agent of the haunting, but the target.  The ghost is real, and it has a complicated reason for descending upon both Paulina and Vivia, one rooted in their shared secret past.

It’s a shame to puncture the excitement of discovery by pointing out that The Haunted, while fascinating, is a lesser work in Stefano’s portfolio.   Although Stefano’s work was always allusive – the demented genius of “The Forms of Things Unknown” is not at all reduced by the fact that the script is a blatant reworking of Clouzot’s Diabolique – The Haunted is built out of a grab-bag of references that fail to cohere.  There’s a strain of The Premature Burial (the phone in the dead woman’s crypt) and a very obvious debt to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, in the casting of Dame Judith Anderson as  a character initially identical to Mrs. Danvers.  And the ghost’s non-corporeal manifestations were probably inspired by Robert Wise’s then-recent The Haunting: a noisy, aggressive poltergeist, physically assaulting a young woman with an unseen energy. 


All of these ideas feel recycled, and less interesting than the element of autobiography visible in the character of Nelson Orion.  Distracted from his established profession by the folly of ghost-chasing, nagged by a business manager (Outer Limits vet Leonard Stone) who thinks that he’s “squandering” his talent, Orion is a thinly-disguised portrait of Joseph Stefano, circa 1965, a man who had walked away from safer opportunities as a writer and producer in order to launch his own pilots and to direct.  Just as Nelson Orion’s career was stunted by CBS’s rejection of the pilot, Stefano’s ambitions beyond screenwriting went unfulfilled.


Part of the problem with The Haunted may be Stefano’s direction, which is stiff and uncertain.  Although Stefano had hoped to direct The Unknown (ABC said no), he had not assumed that position initially on The Haunted.  Instead, he hired Robert Stevens, a live TV veteran who had directed more segments of Alfred Hitchcock Presents than anyone else (and won an Emmy for the classic “The Glass Eye”).  Stevens was famously eccentric (apparently he bowed out of The Haunted because his psychiatrist died), but also a bold visual stylist with a taste for chiaroscuro lighting and smooth,  muscular camera movement.  Stevens might have fit in with the Outer Limits gang. 


In his place, Stefano plays it safe, sticking with more static compositions and flatter lighting than one is used to seeing on The Outer Limits.  One reason that interest in The Haunted has persisted is that it reunited much of the key Outer Limits creative team, especially cinematographer Conrad Hall, camera operator William Fraker, and composer Dominic Frontiere.  But the dreamy Hall-Fraker imagery is only sporadically evident in The Haunted; it’s a far cry from the wall-to-wall bizarrely-angled, vaseline-lensed, hand-held camera tour-de-forces of their key Outer Limits segments, the ones they photographed for more experienced directors like Gerd Oswald, John Brahm, or Leonard Horn.


Stefano appears to have been hobbled by a low budget, production problems (Henry’s scenes were reshot, with Tom Simcox replacing the troubled John Barrymore, Jr.), inexperience (an attempt at a ghost point-of-view shot comes off crude and distracting), and indecision (apparently Stefano disliked Frontiere’s original score and replaced most of it with cues written for The Unknown).  But the biggest problem, I think, is Stefano’s decision to convey the elaborate backstory of Sierra de Cobre – the origins of his ghost – through dialogue, without resorting to any flashbacks.  A tale of paranormal mayhem more intriguing than the one we’re actually seeing on-screen is reduced to an indigestible chunk of exposition.  This trick had paid off for Stefano before: some of his best Outer Limits episodes (“Don’t Open Till Doomsday,” “The Invisibles,” “The Forms of Things Unknown”) consisted entirely of a few people in an old mansion, talking for an hour.  Stefano’s off-kilter writing, coupled with the brilliant imagery laid a heavy air of dread over those episodes.  They weren’t talky, they were eery and claustrophobic.


In The Haunted, though, the slack pacing exposes the faults in Stefano’s writing, which in is sometimes verbose and stilted.  Was he rushed for time?  When nothing else is going on in the frame, it’s hard to not to wince at lugubrious dialogue like this: “Well, you ended the haunting, Mr. Orion.  I suppose the only thing that will haunt me now is other people’s anguish.”


Even if The Haunted doesn’t rank among Stefano’s masterpieces, it’s still full of inspired ideas, many of which will resonate especially for the Outer Limits cognoscenti.  If your show is about an architect, he pretty much has to live in a cool house, and The Haunted delivers on that promise: Orion’s pad is a talon-shaped promontory jutting out of the side of a deserted beachside cliff.  The one iconic composition in The Haunted is a tableau, repeated for emphasis, of the black-clad Paulina, seen from behind, staring up from the rocky beach at Orion’s bizarre hillside domicile.  The show’s title sequence is also enormously imaginative, a collage of several images that revealed to be tricks of perpective, most memorably a tidal wave washing over Los Angeles that morphs into a trickle of froth receding on a sandy beach.  (Or vice versa – I’ve already forgotten how, exactly, the trick shot works.)


The ghost itself is a spooky image, one created with the same reversal effect as the title character in “The Galaxy Being”; one pilot connects back to the other.  Stefano’s ghostly visuals are upstaged by an aural effect, which may be the aspect of The Haunted that fans will remember after all else fades away.  The ghostly sobbing emitted by the phone in the crypt is a horrible, nails-on-a-chalkboard sound – not a sound that makes you shiver but a sound that you just want to end, right now, which I imagine is exactly the effect that a real encounter with the paranormal would inspire.

It’s hard to judge a character by just one adventure, but unlike a lot of projected television heroes, Nelson Orion may have been a fellow worth revisiting week after week.  Stefano goes out of his way to style Orion as a sort of bohemian; in his own words, “a different kind of cat altogether.”  In the pilot this amounts to wearing white tennis shoes and a lot of sweaters; but it’s likely that Stefano had it in mind to position Orion as an outsider with an open mind toward the counterculture.  Had The Haunted continued into the late sixties, Stefano might have had some fun with that: a psychic detective in the era of LSD and in the world of beads, nehru jackets, and psychedelic colors.  I also dug the presence of Nellie Burt as Orion’s housekeeper and caretaker.  Burt was a major discovery in two Outer Limits episodes, a motherly presence who nevertheless carried about her an aura of mystery and forboding.  She would have been an ideal mascot for a weekly excursion into Stefanoland.


Stefano works themes into The Haunted that we associate with his work on The Outer Limits – a fixation on suicide; heavy symbolism (Henry’s blindness serves no other function); and in particular an elaborate reaffirmation of the marital bond that is noteworthy for its transparent lack of conviction.  Without giving too much away, the conclusion of the pilot sent me back to reread Schow’s excellent coverage in the Companion of “ZZZZZ,” which Stefano revised to reflect his own ideas on marital relations.  The Haunted, it should be noted, was expanded for exhibition as a feature overseas, with a different ending that, on paper, sounds more satisfying.  The longer cut remains elusive, but Quigley tells me that he is on the hunt.