This Spanish convert’s macabre movies are hardly your typical LDS films

Long before “The Best Two Years,” “The Singles Ward” and “Mobsters and Mormons” graced movie screens, Jose Maria Oliveira was exposing audiences to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But rather than a lighthearted focus on quirky Latter-day Saint behavior, this largely forgotten Spanish filmmaker’s creations were laced with murder, adultery and heavy church doctrines, including the fate of unrepentant sinners in the afterlife.

Indeed, Oliveira’s art house “horror” flicks “Beware of Darkness” (1973) and “The Dead, the Devil and the Flesh” (1974) played in theaters across Spain, earning critical acclaim and respectable box office returns.

Moreover, as director of the William Morris Agency in Spain in the 1960s, Oliveira, a Latter-day Saint convert, hobnobbed with Hollywood stars. Later, he helped cast major American films.

Today, Oliveira’s movie work is remembered mainly by Latter-day Saint cinephiles, according to Brigham Young University film archivist Ben Harry, who digitally restored both of Oliveira’s movies and showcased them in special screenings at the church-owned school in 2022.

“There were rumors … that there were these Spanish horror movies from the 1970s,” Harry said. “So people had heard about them, but very few had seen them.”

Like a ‘rock star’

Oliveira, who helped the U.S.-born religion take root and blossom in Spain, is better known nowadays for his service to the faith than his career in film.

After his baptism in 1966, Oliveira helped the church win formal recognition in Spain and served, at varying times, as the country’s first Spanish branch president, district president, stake president and stake patriarch.

“He was like a rock star,” recalled Cedar Hills resident Paul Laemmlen, who served a church mission to Madrid in the late ‘70s. “He was a leader everyone looked up to and was kind of an emissary between the Salt Lake church and the Spanish people. Gringo missionaries serving in Spain adored him.”

For his part, Oliveira, who now lives in the same Salt Lake City apartment he and his wife, Patricia, moved to in 1989, would rather talk about his role building the church than revel in his personal or professional accomplishments.

Born in Huelva, where Christopher Columbus departed in 1492 to sail to the New World, Oliveira moved with his family to Madrid after the Spanish Civil War. Upon earning a law degree from the University of Madrid, he spent a year in London perfecting his English. After his return, he went to work as legal counsel for the William Morris Agency in Spain.

Part of his duties was to provide services to actors contracted with Hollywood studios to make movies in Spain. One of them was British star David Niven.

Now 91, Oliveira still vividly recalls the day he was instructed to pick up Niven at the airport and keep him entertained in Madrid all day until the actor could board a flight that night for Morocco.

Carousing with celebrities, converting to Mormonism

True to his task, Oliveira took Niven to a popular bar. There, the actor ran into two close friends: Luis Miguel Dominguín, a famous Spanish bullfighter who once had an affair with Ava Gardner while she was still married to Frank Sinatra, and Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú y Ortega, a heart surgeon and 10th Marquess of Villaverde.

“We spent the rest of the day with them at the heart surgeon’s home drinking and talking … and then they drove us to the airport late at night,” said Oliveira, who was not yet a Latter-day Saint. “David was worried about missing his flight. And [the Marquess] said, ‘Don’t worry about missing the plane because I will stop the flight. I’m Franco’s son-in-law’” — referring to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Oliveira’s interest in Mormonism was sparked in 1959 after he met and later began dating Patricia Wright, a Utahn who was living in Madrid with her brother, David, who worked at the U.S. Embassy.

At first, Oliveira was hardly impressed by the religion.

“When I read the pamphlet of [church founder] Joseph Smith, I told her that we have visions like that by the hundreds in the Catholic Church,” he recalled in an interview with President R. Raymond Barnes, who opened the first Latter-day Saint mission in Spain in 1970.

That changed several years later, Oliveira said, when he read “The First 2,000 Years” by W. Cleon Skousen and the “Articles of Faith” by apostle James E. Talmage. Fascinated by the church’s belief in a preexistence, he attended a Latter-day Saint branch, or congregation, for U.S. military members in Madrid and was taken by the humility of the worshippers.

After further study, Oliveira was baptized in March 1966 in Bordeaux, France, because there was no religious freedom in Spain for non-Catholic churches. Two months later, Jose and Patricia married. The only Spaniard in the American branch, Oliveira soon began teaching a Sunday school class in Spanish.

Oliveira then invited his mother and other relatives to attend the class, who in turn invited their friends. After going nearly a decade without Spanish converts, the branch suddenly had 25 of them. A few months later, in 1967, the Spanish Parliament enacted a law that granted religious freedom to non-Catholic faiths.

There was, however, a catch. For a church to be recognized, it had to already be established with a Spanish congregation. Fortuitously, the influx of Spanish converts had led to the formation of an independent branch for the new members, enabling the Utah-based church to apply for formal recognition, which the government granted in 1968.

“The Lord waited,” Oliveira stated in his earlier interview, “until a few months before the law of freedom [was passed] to form this group of Spanish Mormons … so we [would] have the right to apply.”

‘Thou shalt not lie’

Oliveira recounted another significant moment in the church’s evolution in Spain about the time he accompanied apostle Marion G. Romney to meet with the government official in charge of non-Catholic religions.

Oliveira, who was acting as translator, cautioned Romney not to tell the official about the faith’s plan to send missionaries, saying “we can do it, but we can’t talk about it.” When the apostle insisted on full disclosure, Oliveira countered with “we have to be wise as a serpent.”

Romney’s rejoinder: “Thou shalt not lie.”

So what went down? Here’s how Oliveira explained it at a Utah gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of opening Spain to Latter-day Saint missionary work:

“When the official asked, ‘What are the plans of your church for Spain?’ I said to President Romney, ‘He asked what are the church’s plans. ….’ [Romney] said, ‘Well, you know, tell him.’ So I said, ‘Our plan is to build a chapel.’ I did not mention the missionaries.”

“We converts do strange things,” Oliveira quipped at the gala.

Today, Spain has about 66,000 members, more than 130 congregations and one temple (with plans for a second).

Old movies get a new look

While the church has grown exponentially, Oliveira’s two horror films seemed destined for obscurity — despite the fact that critics named “The Dead, the Devil and the Flesh” the country’s top movie for spiritual and artistic values in 1974 and it was selected for the Chicago Film Festival.

Harry, the BYU film archivist, said Oliveira told him that he screened the movie at a Salt Lake City theater after moving to Utah and invited Latter-day Saints from his congregation to attend.

“He said church members who came left after 10 minutes because they were expecting to see a family movie,” Harry recalled. “They were expecting something like “Where the Red Fern Grows,” and they were seeing people [in the movie] with sex and heroin addictions … and they were murdering each other. So they walked out.”

Conversely, he added, foreign film aficionados were put off by the obvious nods to church doctrine and began shaking their heads before they, too, headed for the exits. Within 20 minutes, Harry said, Oliveira was sitting alone in the theater.

Impressed by the success of “The Exorcist,” Oliveira wrote, directed and produced both movies in the mid-1970s and cast his wife and Spanish actors. Besides seeking commercial success, the filmmaker wanted to subtly introduce audiences to Mormonism’s plan of salvation.

Without giving away too much of the plot, Harry said “Beware of Darkness” deals with a love triangle gone murderously wrong.

“All three of them are dead,” Harry said, “and they wake up in the spirit world trying to figure out what happened.”

Latter-day Saints believe the souls of people who die reside in a spirit world — the righteous in paradise, the wicked in a spirit prison — until the coming resurrection and judgment day.

“The Dead, the Devil and the Flesh” also involves murder and deals with tortured souls in the afterlife. It features Satan, two Latter-day Saint missionaries and a spirit guide named Alma, who tells one of the anguished spirits to talk to the proselytizers.

“It’s about a husband and a wife,” Oliveira told The Salt Lake Tribune. “She is an adulterous woman who gets killed and goes to the spirit world, and her husband goes there to rescue her. It is based on a Greek tragedy.”

Harry said the film also features an evil Korihor, a nod to an anti-Christ in the church’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, who urges the characters to fulfill their physical appetites they are unable to satisfy as spirits.

Unlike Oliveira’s fellow members and the film fans at the Utah debut years before, the enthusiastic cinephiles who gathered at BYU in 2022 to watch the movies ate them up, according to Harry, who hosted the screenings.

“Everyone found them fascinating because the Mormon angle in the movies really brings them alive,” Harry said. “We have never seen anything like them. Nobody from our [Latter-day Saint] community has ever made movies like this.”

Oliveira enjoys the recognition but said he prefers to bask in the glow of the restored gospel. He now lives alone (Patricia died five years ago). Of all of his life’s roles, he gives top billing to his church service. He doesn’t foresee that changing in his next life.

“My plan for the future is in the next world because I’m going there soon,” he joked at the 50th anniversary gala. “... I love to preach the gospel, and I’m thinking about what I am going to preach to the dead people there.”

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