The Exquisite Cadaver () 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. 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. Along with one of these bloody parcels is a letter of blackmail from the dead woman's former lesbian lover, who seeks vengeance. Plot A girl is seen slowly and deliberately laying her head down on railroad tracks as an oncoming train approaches. 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. He buries it in a nearby park. The next yellow package he receives is left unopened on a bench in the city. However, when he arrives home the package is awaiting him. This one contains a torn-up dress and a photograph of a girl. His beautiful wife reads him a telegram asking if he would like a forearm. He feebly attempts to lie about the contents with a work-related explanation to his wife. Now suspicious, Carlos's wife follows her husband and spots a mysterious woman in black following him as well. Without a word, Carlos enters the mysterious woman's car. She drives him to her remote home, where she feeds him lysergic acid embedded in red blotting paper. Suddenly he is ambling down a long corridor drawn towards a woman's voice lamenting her lost love. He reaches the end of the hallway to discover the voice emanating from a tape recorder. He finds a woman's body in a refrigerator curled up, pale, but immaculate. When he awakens from the drugged stupor the editor is back at home, his body covered in a jaundiced yellow. His wife explains to him that she received a call from Parker, the mysterious woman, and she went to her house to fetch him. The wife believes neither the explanation given by her husband nor the one she receives from Parker about what has happened. Trying to come clean with his wife, the editor tells her how two years ago he met the young woman of the refrigerator. Her name was Esther. In a flashback Esther is seen in a coffee shop fiddling with some pills. She appears bored, yet eager