But even Paul Naschy couldn't be all joy, all the time, and as I dig deeper into the voluminous depths of his surviving filmography, more and more I discover the counterpoint to that joyfulness, the "Dark Naschy" that lay just below the surface, sometimes overlapping (as in his wonderfully villainous turns in El Caminante and Horror Rises from the Tomb), and sometimes taking over entirely. Particularly in the late-70s/early-80s segment of his career, Naschy seems to have had some demons to exorcise, springing perhaps from his sense of insufficient respect for his work, or perhaps from a deeper, more personal space. The "dark" movies sometimes lose that sense of fun that drew me to his spectacularly muscled bosom in the first place, but nonetheless show a fascinating complexity in the man I've come to know and love so well...
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