Sorceress housekeeper Sarah (Isabela Corona) consults her magic mirror to show Elena (Dina de Marco) that her surgeon husband Eduardo (Armando Calvo) is planning to murder her. She also shows Elena her rival in love, the beautiful Deborah (Rosa Arenas, CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN). Sarah appeals to Satan to help her defend Elena but is told that she cannot reverse Elena's fate. Elena does not heed the warning and is poisoned by Eduardo who subsequently marries Deborah who soon finds herself haunted by Elena's presence (though Eduardo claims that there is a natural explanation even as they are staring at the piano playing Elena's favorite tune by itself). When Eduardo sees Elena's reflection in the magic mirror, he shatters it with an oil lamp; inadvertently scarring Deborah's face and hands. Eduardo starts to work on restoring her face and hands through plastic surgery, making use of dead women stolen from the morgue and from funeral homes (without Deborah's knowledge). When his assistant Gustavo (Carlos Nieto) informs him that a pretty pianist has recently died of a heart ailment, Eduardo attends the funeral and sees that she has hands like the dead Elena and decides to use them to replaced Deborah's scarred ones. Eduardo and Gustavo dig up the dead woman only to find out that she is alive and suffered a cataleptic fit. Nevertheless, Eduardo uses the dead woman's hands. Sarah, however, calls Elena back from the dead and switches Elena's hands for the transplant ones. Elena's hands are successfully grafted to Deborah's body and she and Eduardo discover that the hands have a life of their own!

THE WITCH'S MIRROR starts out as a gothic "husband doing the wife in and the new wife is haunted" story but switches gears at the half-way point to the surgical horror trend following EYES WITHOUT A FACE as well as the transplant possession themes of MAD LOVE and THE HANDS OR ORLAC (which draw from the same source novel). In the audio commentary, Frank Coleman points out that the film is listed as being a 1960 production but other sources cite a 1962 date and the film does indeed seem to have taken inspiration from certain other 1962 productions such as Jess Franco's THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF and Riccardo Freda's HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK. Strangely though, THE WITCH'S MIRROR does not go to the exploitation extremes of the former productions (as well as EYES WITHOUT A FACE) as it eschews the objectification and pursuit of live nubile victims in favor of already dead donors (although it lacks the necrophiliac twist of HICHCOCK). The sets and the mood have a gothic elegance about them which is undercut by script contrivances (such as Eduardo's continued insistence on logical explanations in the face of pianos playing by themselves, fires automatically extinguishing, and the like) and by the recycling of effects footage (Coleman in the commentary points out that it seems as if Elena's grave has never been filled in as the same shot of Elena's open grave from the funeral appears in the magic mirror every time Sarah makes contact with her spirit and Sarah transforms from owl to woman twice using the same shot and optical transition). Nevertheless, the atmosphere is superb and contemporary audiences might be surprised at just how lurid and graphically explicit this early sixties Mexican production really is.