Description
Wear the masterpiece of incompetence with this Manos: The Hands of Fate t-shirt, featuring a classic publicity image from the 1966 film that famously became one of the worst movies ever made.
The story begins in an El Paso coffee shop, where fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren bet screenwriter Stirling Silliphant that he could make a horror film himself. He scribbled the outline on a napkin, raised $19,000, and shot for days with a hand-wound 16mm camera that could only capture 32 seconds at a time. There was no live sound, so all dialogue was dubbed later by a handful of people, including Warren himself. The actresses who played the Master’s wives came from a modeling agency hire.
The plot follows a lost family who stumble upon a remote lodge tended by the bizarre, satyr-like Torgo, who takes care of the place while the Master is away. Torgo, played by John Reynolds in wire-and-foam leg braces that destroyed his kneecaps, moves with an unforgettable, painful gait. The Master, played by Tom Neyman, wears a black cape with red hands painted on the inside and presides over his nightgown-clad wives. The catfights are improvised. The dog dies. It might have all been a dream.
Reynolds died by suicide one month before the premiere. He was 25 years old. The film played briefly in El Paso and a few drive-ins, then vanished for nearly three decades.
In 1993, Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured Manos in an episode, and the movie became a cult phenomenon. Audiences discovered its endless driving footage, its dubbing where a grown woman voices the little girl, its inexplicable makeout couple who appear and disappear, and above all, Torgo, the trembling, twitching, unforgettable Torgo, whose theme music is genuinely catchy and whose every line feels like a haunting mantra: “There is no way out of here. It will be dark soon.”
• 100% combed and ring-spun cotton (Heather colors contain polyester)
• Fabric weight: 4.2 oz./yd.² (142 g/m²)
• Pre-shrunk fabric
• Side-seamed construction
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping
• Blank product sourced from Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, or the US
Disclaimer: The fabric is slightly sheer and may appear see-through, especially in lighter colors or under certain lighting conditions.
