WE ALL have them: little fragments of a once seen film or television show burnt into your memory that niggle away at you like some half-remembered dream.
Maybe it was a shock sequence delivered by a late night film that you shouldn’t really have been watching, or an unnerving moment in an otherwise harmless family drama that did the trick.
Fleeting as these experiences may have been, those moments of terror given to us by our TV sets are almost impossible to forget.
For me, it was screening of a short Spanish film called La Cabina that hotwired itself forever into my brain, leaving me with a lifelong fear of public phone boxes in the process.
La Cabina hotwired itself forever into my brain, leaving me with a lifelong fear of public phone boxes
Memory can be a tricky thing, but I’m going to say I first saw director Antonio Mercero’s 1972 film as a fresh faced youth late at night and probably on BBC2. It may have been Channel 4, but either way it scared the bejebus out of me then, and even now gets the hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention at the very mention of it.
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An Emmy award-winning made-for-TV effort, La Cabina - or The Telephone Box, to give it its English title - tells the macabre tale of an unnamed man (Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez) who enters a shiny new bright red telephone booth that’s just been installed by an unnamed company in the local town square.
The door of the box lies invitingly open, so the man decides to pop in to make a quick call. Upon doing so, the door closes slowly behind him, leaving him trapped.
At this point, I should mention I’m about to unveil some serious plot spoilers, so stop reading now if you want to experience the claustrophobic thrills of La Cabina for yourself.
What follows is an ever-escalating anxiety ride into horror, as the phone doesn’t work, the door can’t be shifted, and the man inside gets increasingly flustered as a variety of people try to help him while the afternoon sun beats down on the box.
What begins as an almost comic caper, with kids teasing him and old women relaxing on deckchairs as they watch the drama unfold, swiftly turns nasty, with nobody able to free the man who grows increasingly frantic with every passing minute.
Eventually, with a crowd now gathered in the square, the phone company men reappear. The box is unscrewed from its base and dropped unceremoniously onto the back of a truck, which takes our man, now screaming silently for help behind the glass, across town, eventually dumping him at a vast underground warehouse full to bursting with other phone booths containing the remains of victims in various states of decomposition.
The film then ends with the phone company men returning to the town square with a shiny new phone box ready to be installed.
A Kafka-esque nightmare of true horror in the most mundane of surroundings, La Cabina has never left me.
Watch it yourself and your dreams will never be the same again.