The Witches Mountain (1973) (Spain)

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A bad breakup sends mustachioed photojournalist Mario to the Pyrenees Mountains, taking the assignment to get away for a bit. It’s pretty much Mario’s fault because he’s an asshole and when his lady (who just set a child on fire… it’s ok, the kid seemed evil and on top of her cryptic threats she had just murdered a cat) begs him to take a vacation to Brazil with her, he calls his job in front of her pretty face and demands an assignment. While there he sleazily takes photos of a sunbathing babe and asks the gorgeous freelance writer Delia to join him on his gig through the isolated Spanish countryside. They stop at a decrepit inn as night falls and they’re told by the strange innkeeper (Victor Israel… trust me, you’ve seen him before) that the surrounding area is dangerous and Delia should probably go home. After a spooky encounter with a cloaked figure hanging around outside her window, Delia sleepwalks into the surrounding woods and Mario goes looking for her. Undeterred by the experience and the innkeeper’s warning, they travel on. As Mario gets some lovely shots of the landscape, their jeep gets stolen and they follow the road because their options are fairly minimal. They find the car a few miles away, near what looks like an abandoned village built into the side of the mountain. The place ends up being occupied by a black-gowned woman who claims she’s on her lonesome and she invites the two to spend the night in her spare bedroom. Mario heads out to capture some images of the admittedly eerie village and when he develops them they disturbingly capture ghostly figures who weren’t present at the time. It’s a genuinely effective bit of macabre. Before any of this is revealed, Mario gets lost in the fog and stumbles across a strange procession of chanting, cloaked figures and their elderly host warns them that the mountainside is haunted by a coven of witches. Mario and Delia should get the hell out but curiosity and a dismissal of the supernatural has them sticking around. It’s a bad move and, as you probably guessed, their host has some sinister intentions. Our scuzzy hero looks like someone sculpted Tom Selleck from memory and their memory wasn’t exactly reliable. Then upon finishing the sculpture it was given life and granted three wishes. All three of those wishes were for venereal disease. It’s an atmospheric and slightly odd time benefitting from a great sense of isolation and man’s incapability in facing the unknown. Beautiful women and an intriguing score help things along.