A cult Spanish zombie film shot mostly in England’s Peak District in 1974 – those filters must surely narrow things down to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which also goes by the name of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, the slightly more anaemic Don’t Open the Window and the original Spanish title, No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos.
The Living Dead bit nods us towards George Romero. But Jorge Grau’s film is full of his own little touches, and has fantastic mood and chilling music to offset some of the madder moments of bad acting (though a lot of those can be laid at the door of bad dubbing).
Plotwise, a man and a woman are thrown together on a journey towards the Lake District (which somehow becomes the Peak District – different place – within minutes) and find themselves tangling with dead people returned to undead life, thanks most probably to experiments in insect control carried out by white-uniformed government scientists.
Before long an innocent man is dead, the cops have arrived and suspicion has fallen on the couple, who protest that it’s zombies doing the killing. George and Edna are not believed by the dour police inspector, a cop deeply suspicious of young men with “long hair and faggot clothes,” who get up to “drugs, sex, every kind of filth.” The classic generation gap antagonism of the era.
But then this movie is all about songs in the key of strife. Antagonism is its guiding mood. George (Ray Lovelock) and Edna (Cristina Galbó) nark away at each other the entire time, starting the moment they meet, when her car reverses into his motorbike at a petrol station. At the cottage where Edna was headed, her sister (Jeannine Mestre) and husband (José Lifante) carry on a hostile relationship. At one point George stops to ask a farmer for directions and it isn’t long before the local is making disparaging remarks. At a small hotel where George and Edna try to book a room for the night, they are again met with dismissiveness bordering on animosity.
There are so many hostile and downright weird characters in this film that it’s almost light relief when the zombies start to assemble. They’re clearly cut from the Romero cloth – slow moving, shuffling, groans not speech – but Grau’s zombies have an animal intelligence that makes them more dangerous than Romero’s. They also will not die and every time they go down they get up again. Unusually, Grau asks his zombie actors do some actual acting. They turn out to be very good. In fact hands down the best performance in this film is by Fernando Hilbeck, as zombie number one, with his two companions (couldn’t work out their names, apologies) coming in close behind. Though undoubtedly Arthur Kennedy, who had appeared in films like High Sierra, Rancho Notorious and Lawrence of Arabia, does work beyond his pay packet as the gruff dismissive cop.
The sound design and score are the making of the film. The zombies make an unsettling noise like a deflating lung and the soundtrack is full of subliminal groans and burbles, breaths and sighs (made by Grau himself). The discordantly jerky score by Giuliani Sorgini full of oscilloscope warbles adds more unease.
In this movie men are dismissive of women, people in authority treat civilians shabbily and scientists always know best. The counter-cultural angle of attack lets long-haired misogynist George off lightly but the cops and scientists don’t get away so easily. In many ways it sits quite well in a 21st century full of resentment and suspicion of elites, and thanks to the 4K scan of the original negative done in 2020, you can now feast on this movie in much the same way as its zombies feast on plump internal organs and bright ribbons of convincing viscera. Enjoy!
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
