'Hasta el viento tiene miedo' (1968) - Carlos Enrique Taboada.

'Hasta el viento tiene miedo' is a supremely atmospheric Gothic horror gem from the gifted Mexican maestro of understated, eerily ethereal chills, Carlos Enrique Taboada. He takes a prosaic Gothic plot, the haunting of a all-girls school, and effectively turns it into sublimely unsettling cinematic art, and it becomes apparent fairly swiftly that Taboada is a master of malign mood. Sadly, for reasons I simply don't understand, there are a great number of fright fans entirely unaware of Taboada's magnificent genre cinema. The deliciously unsettling opening gambit of 'Hasta el viento tiene miedo' is inordinately creepy, sinisterly subtle, and deftly reveals a great mastery of camera that brings to mind the visionary macabre genius of Mario Bava's 'Kill Baby Kill', or maestro Jack Clayton's eternally nightmarish 'The Innocents'.

'Hasta el viento tiene miedo' is a genuinely unnerving ghost story that resolutely clasps you in its grievously glacial grip right from its bravura first act to the heart-rendingly diabolic, ectoplasmically thrilling dénouement! This is quite demonstratively one of the more important examples of genre cinema, whose chilling Gothic motifs easily rivals that of 'Black Sunday', 'Night of the Living Dead', and 'Carnival of Souls', and it remains a profound injustice to enthusiastic genre cineastes everywhere that Taboada's moodily majestic, tantalizingly penetrating visions of fear aren't more recognized for the landmark films that they so clearly are.