The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964)

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The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964) – J. Stefano

Writer-Director Joseph Stefano wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) but nothing else at that level of prominence.  This 80-minute TV-movie was apparently the pilot for a series that never got made, starring Martin Landau as an architect/psychic investigator. He lives in an incredibly stylish house jutting out over a cliff-face overlooking the ocean. Although this was the pilot, he’s already established and the plot revolves around events from a previous case (in which an American tourist is killed by the bleeding ghost of Sierra de Cobre) and in particular the presence of Judith Anderson (the housekeeper from Hitch’s Rebecca, 1940) as the new housekeeper to blind Tom Sincox (and new wife Diane Baker who hired Landau) who thinks his late mother is telephoning him from beyond the grave (she had a phone installed in her tomb).  If you were 10 or 11 years old, this might have scared the bejeezus out of you, if you caught it on TV.  Pretty creepy, even spooky, until the plot seems to wrap up abruptly in the final 10 minutes. That’s probably how the TV series would have been too.