Luchador

Mexican films in which a masked lucha libre wrestler fights monsters, mad scientists, gangsters and the occasional Aztec mummy, and also wrestles.

El Santo

Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, known as El Santo, the Saint, is one of the most famous people in Mexican history and almost nobody outside Mexico has seen his face. He wrestled from 1934, appeared in more than fifty films, and kept the silver mask on in all of them. He wore it in interviews. He was buried in it.

He unmasked once, briefly, on television in 1984, a week before he died.

The formula

A plot involving a criminal or supernatural threat, roughly forty minutes of investigation, two full wrestling matches inserted at intervals whether or not the story requires them, and a laboratory set that recurs across dozens of films because it belonged to the studio.

The matches are the point for the domestic audience and the reason the pacing looks so strange to everyone else.

The others

Blue Demon and Mil Máscaras had their own series, and the three regularly appeared together. The films crossed over freely with Mexican gothic horror, which was running in parallel and sharing the same crews and sets.

The K. Gordon Murray versions

Many of these reached American television in the 1960s through the distributor K. Gordon Murray, dubbed cheaply and retitled without much regard for accuracy. The dubs are how most English-speaking viewers encountered them, and they are considerably stranger than the originals.

Where to start

Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962), which is the best-shot film in the series and was later run on Mystery Science Theater 3000, to the annoyance of people who take Santo seriously.