The Exquisite Cadaver (Spanish: Las crueles) AKA: The Cruel Ones is a 1969 Spanish film noir psychological thriller film directed by Vicente Aranda, based on the short story Bailando Para Parker written by Gonzalo Suárez.

[1] The plot follows a well-to-do publisher and family man who begins to receive severed body parts in the mail two years after his mistress committed suicide.

Two years later, Carlos, a well-to-do family man and publisher of pulp horror novels receives an anonymous yellow package containing a severed human hand.

She drives him to her remote home, where she feeds him lysergic acid embedded in red blotting paper.

Sick and heartbroken after she was rebuffed by the editor, Esther fell under the spell of a scheming doctor claiming to cure leukemia.

The editor then called the police, but when they arrive to Parker's house to investigate she has left with her driver heading back to Paris.

The film was plagued by a series of problems: it was long in the making; Aranda suffered an accident during the shooting, which forced him to work lying down on a stretcher [3] and finally he had a legal battle with the producers.

[6] The Exquiste Cadaver was the original title of the film, but the producers rejected it, thinking that it had little commercial appeal.

[8] Aranda then proposed to call the film Las Crueles, a title that fitted the plot, and was chosen when it was released.

[8] Exquisite corpse is a surrealist game where a group creates a poem or drawing, but with each member unknowing what the others have contributed.

[9] The Exquisite Cadaver was one of four films made at the end of the 1960s based on stories written by Gonzalo Suárez.

Suárez himself wrote, produced and directed Ditirambo (1967) and Vicente Aranda made Fata Morgana and The Exquiste Cadaver.