The Blancheville Monster (Horror)

D: Alberto De Martino; S and SC: Jean Grimaud [Gianni Grimaldi], Gordon Wilson, Jr. [Bruno Corbucci]; DOP: Alexander [Alejandro] Ulloa [b&w, VistaVision]; M: Francis Clark [Carlo Franci] [and Giuseppe Piccillo, uncredited]; E: Otello Colangeli; PD, SD: Leonard Bublerg [Antonio Simoni]; CO: Henry Steckler [Mario Giorsi]; AD: Bruce Stevenson [Michelangelo Panaro]; C: Ted Shaw [Silvano Mancini]; MU: Arthur Grunher [Romolo De Martino]; Hair: Shirley Dryant [Adalgisa Favella]; SE: Emilio G. Ruiz. Cast: Gérard Tichy (Roderick Blackford/U.S. version: Rodrigue De Blancheville), Leo Anchóriz (Dr. Atwell/Dr. Lerouge), Joan Hills [Ombretta Colli] (Emily De Blancheville/Emily Blackford), Helga Liné (Miss Eleonor/Eleonore), Irán Eory [Elvira Teresa Eory Sidi] (Alice Taylor), Richard Davis [Vanni Materassi] (John Taylor), Frank Moran [Paco Morán] (Alistair), Emily [Emilia] Wolkowicz (Cook), Harry Winter (Gamekeeper). PROD: Italo Zingarelli for Film Columbus (Rome), Alberto Aguilera for Llama Film (Madrid); PM: Robert Palace [Roberto Palaggi]. Country: Italy/Spain. Filmed at the Monastery of Santa María La Real de Valdeiglesias (Spain) and at Cinecittà (Rome). Running time: 90 min. (m. 2423); Visa n: 40372 (05.14.1963); Rating: V.M.14; Release date: 06.06.1963 (Italy). Distribution: Titanus (Italy); Compton-Casino Films (U.S.A.), AIP-TV (U.S.A., TV); Domestic gross: 87,000,000 lire. Also known as: Le Manoir de la terreur (France, 05.20.1966). Home video: Alpha Video, Bayview/Retromedia (DVD, U.S.A.).

Scotland, 1884. One week before her 21st birthday, young Emily Blackford returns to her family castle with her friend Alice and her boyfriend, John, after years spent at college. A feeling of doom permeates the manor and its inhabitants. Roderick, Emily’s older brother, who is now the lord of the castle after the death of his father, behaves in a mysterious way, and so do Miss Eleanor, the enigmatic housekeeper, and the elusive Dr. Atwell. One night, after hearing inexplicable noises in the tower, Alice wakes up to find Eleonor administering an injection to a creature hidden in the castle’s tower. It turns out that the elderly Lord Blackford is still alive, even though horribly disfigured, and that Roderick kept him locked in the manor’s keep. The monster has escaped, though, and Emily is in peril: according to a prophecy, as soon as she will turn 21 an atrocious curse will strike the Blackfords, and Roderick believes that the deranged Lord Blackford will attempt to murder his own daughter before she turns that age, in order to save the family. The plot thickens when the disfigured man reappears and hypnotizes Emily: soon she starts having horrible nightmares. As it turns out, the girl is actually the victim of a diabolical plot against her life…

Of all the 1960s Italian Gothic thread, The Blancheville Monster—an odd Italian-Spanish co-production—is perhaps the closest to the canons of seventeenth/eighteenth century Gothic literature, which the script by Bruno Corbucci and Gianni Grimaldi¹ follows closely. No wonder it came out in Italy with the self-explanatory title Horror—chosen by the producer, Italo Zingarelli.

As usual, Italian publicity ads of the time pretended that the film was based on a Poe story, and even if that is not actually the case, Corbucci and Grimaldi indeed reworked elements from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: the story features a lord of the castle named Roderick who in one scene faces his sister who had been buried alive and escaped from her tomb. On the other hand, the references to mesmerism are lifted from other Poe stories, namely “A Tale from the Ragged Mountains” and “Some Words with a Mummy,” with a typical touch of Italian mastery at forgery. In a scene, in fact, Emily discovers a book by Francis [sic, instead of Franz] Anton Mesmer entitled Hypnotism and Magnetism, yet Mesmer never wrote a book with such a title: Ipnotismo e magnetismo was the title of a manual written in 1903 by Giulio Belfiore, which had popularized Mesmer’s theories in Italy.

Italian poster for Alberto De Martino’s The Blancheville Monster. Note the reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s work (Libreria Eleste).

“At that time, Gothic films were en vogue, such as The Pit and the Pendulum and the like,” De Martino explained. “Even though, to tell the truth, I was inspired by Hitchcock’s films, and I didn’t think I was doing the same kind of stuff as Bava or Margheriti. I remember Antonio and I were shooting at the same time: I was making The Blancheville Monster and he was directing one of his films, side by side, in the same studio.”² The Hitchcock reference is not as weird as it sounds, as the film is actually a period mystery where the supernatural element is only a red herring: overall, The Blancheville Monster is closer to the Richard Matheson-scripted AIP Poe films of the period than to its Italian contemporaries, as underlined by the emphasis on a sinister male authority figure that was typical of Corman’s work, where it was embodied by Vincent Price.

However, The Blancheville Monster does not have much to offer other than De Martino’s competent direction, atmospheric set-pieces (including the ruined monastery that would often be featured in 1970s Spanish horror films³) and Alejandro Ulloa’s atmospheric lighting. The opening shot, with the camera panning from an ominous-looking forest beaten by the pouring rain through a castle in the distance (via a very visible maquette) synthesizes the film’s over-reliance on stereotypes: the Scottish setting (which in the U.S. version turns into Northern France!), the old manor and its ancestral curse, the ambiguous servants, the crypt, the disfigured monster, the young lady walking in her nightgown through dark corridors at night, and the lord of the castle playing the organ.

Such a parade of clichés only heightens the story’s predictability, stilted dialogue and mediocre acting: in a largely Iberian cast, the 20-year-old and unknown Ombretta Colli (who would later become a popular singer in her home country, and later a right-wing politician) hides behind the pseudonym Joan Hills—that is, her surname’s literal translation. The horrific moments, so to speak, are also quite awkward, with a grotesque-looking monster and naive shock cuts underlined by Carlo Franci’s melodramatic score, while the script’s idea of a mystery is making every character act ambiguously even when there would be no need. “It became a cult movie and I didn’t know about that […]. But it is just a little film of no importance,” De Martino recalled. “The only thing that moves me, when I think about that film, are the masks that you see in the film, which were sculpted by my father.”⁴

The technically proficient De Martino, who had debuted with several sword-and-sandal films in the early 1960s, was one of Italy’s most eclectic genre filmmakers of the ’60s and ’70s. He would try his hand at different genres, with admirable ease: spy films (The Spy with Ten Faces/Upperseven l’uomo da uccidere, 1966, and the campy cult O.K. Connery, 1967, starring Sean Connery’s brother Neil); Spaghetti Westerns (He Who Shoots First/Django spara per primo, 1966), war flicks (Dirty Heroes/Dalle Ardenne all’inferno, 1967), Eurocrime (Bandits in Rome/Roma come Chicago, 1968; Crime Boss/I familiari delle vittime non saranno avvertiti, 1972; Counselor at Crime/Il Consigliori, 1973) and thrillers (Carnal Circuit/Femmine insaziabili, 1969; The Man with Icy Eyes/L’uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio, 1971). In the 1970s De Martino would return to the horror genre with The Antichrist (L’anticristo, 1974) and Rain of Fire (Holocaust 2000, 1977) starring Kirk Douglas, inspired respectively by The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). His last films in the 1980s belonged to the thriller and fantasy genre as well: Extrasensorial, a.k.a. Blood Link (1982) starring Michael Moriarty in a dual role as surgically separated Siamese twins, one of whom is a serial killer; the weird Florida-based sci-fi Miami Golem (1985); and Formula for a Murder (7 Hyden Park: la casa maledetta, 1985), the latter two starring David Warbeck.

The Blancheville Monster ended up in the public domain list in the United States, and can be easily found—albeit in poor-quality copies—in the home video market.

Notes

1. The Spanish sources add a scriptwriter (Natividad Zaro) whose contribution to the script, as it often happened in the days of European co-productions, was merely nominal for legal (i.e., tax) reasons.

2. Manlio Gomarasca, “Il cinema è quello che ci fa,” in “Fatti di cinema. Controcorrente 3,” Nocturno Dossier 51, October 2006, p. 15 (Interview with Alberto De Martino). De Martino could well have added the name Dreyer, as the film features the umpteenth “homage” to Vampyr, in the scene in which Emily is buried alive—naturally, in a coffin with a glass window.

3. The interiors, on the other hand, were filmed in Rome. The hall of Blackford Castle is the same set-piece as seen that same year in The Whip and the Body.

4. Gomarasca, “Il cinema è quello che ci fa,” p. 14.

The Ghost (Lo spettro)

D: Robert Hampton [Riccardo Freda]. S: Robert Davidson [Oreste Biancoli]; SC: Robert Davidson, Robert Hampton; DOP: Donald Green [Raffaele Masciocchi] (Technicolor); M: Franck Wallace [Franco Mannino] (and Francesco De Masi, uncredited); E: Donna Christie [Ornella Micheli]; ArtD: Sammy Fields [Mario Chiari]; CO: Mary McCharty [sic] [Marilù Carteny]; AD: Silvy Black [Silvana Merli]; C: Anthony Taylor [Antonio Schiavo Lena]; AC: Piero Servo; SO: Cristopher [sic] Curtis; [Ernesto Livoli] MU: Max Justins [Massimo Giustini]; Hair: Charles Seaman [Giancarlo Marin]. Cast: Barbara Steele (Margaret Hichcock), Peter Baldwin (Dr. Charles Livingstone), Harriet White [Harriet White Medin] (Kathryn), Leonard G. Elliot [Elio Jotta] (Dr. John Hichcock), Carol Bennet (Woman), Charles [Carlo] Kechler (Chief of Police), Raoul H. Newman [Umberto Raho] (Priest), Reginald Price Anderson (Albert Fisher). PROD: Louis Mann [Ermanno Donati, Luigi Carpentieri] for Panda Cinematografica; PM: Lou D. Kelly [Livio Maffei]; PA: Rommy Deutch [Romolo Germano], Lucky Reed. Country: Italy. Filmed in Rome. Running time: 100 min. (m. 2790); Visa n: 39641 (02.22.1963); Rating: V.M.18; Release dates: 03.30.1963 (Italy); 02.18.1965 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Dino De Laurentiis (Italy); Magna Pictures Distribution Corporation (U.S.A.); Domestic gross: 175,000,000 lire. Also known as: Le Spectre du Professeur Hichcock (France, 12.09.1964). Home video: Alpha Video (DVD, U.S.A.), Artus Film (DVD, France).

Scotland, 1910. Bound to a wheelchair because of a grave disease, the middle-aged Dr. John Hichcock is a regretful sad man. His obsession with the afterlife has Hichcock conduct séances in his mansion to get in touch with the spirits of the dead. He is lovingly taken care of by his wife, Margaret, who is much younger than him, as well as Dr. Livingstone, who administers Hichcock small doses of poison as an experimental treatment to cure his paralysis. However, Margaret and Livingstone are actually lovers, and have concocted a plan to murder Hichcock by poisoning him. They apparently succeed, but soon Margaret is haunted by what appears to be her husband’s ghost, and shortly she and Livingstone are at each other’s throats. However, it turns out that Hichcock just faked his own death, in order to perform a cruel revenge on his wife and her lover…

One of the recurrent features in Italian horror films of the 1960s was that the stories would take place in secluded, almost claustrophobic settings. Whereas this often happened because of mere budgetary reasons, in the case of Riccardo Freda’s The Ghost seclusion is a necessary, even fundamental element to the story, in a film characterized by an almost theatrical staging: a reviewer evoked, and rightly so, Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis clos.¹

Freda’s sequel of sorts to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock features a main character with the same name (but not the same habits) and Harriet White in her customary role as the menacing housekeeper, but it moves on to equally frightening depths as its predecessor in what is essentially a Gothic reimagining of the typical “scheming lovers” plot of H. G. Clouzot’s Diabolique (Les Diaboliques, 1955).² This allows the director to twist the knife even deeper into the institution of marriage, seen as a role play, a pantomime of sorts in which both spouses play roles and wear masks which they cannot wait to get rid of. An exemplary moment is the scene in which Margaret (Barbara Steele) holds up her elderly husband (Elio Jotta), escorts him to bed and undresses him like any loving wife would do … a moment immediately followed by Margaret’s feverish, liberating race to the greenhouse, the meeting place where her lover (Peter Baldwin) awaits her.

The French poster for Riccardo Freda’s The Ghost underlined it being a sequel of sorts to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (courtesy S. I. Bianchi).

Even more so than in the director’s previous horror films, the supernatural element is evoked only to be eventually denied: the ending gives the right perspective to what has happened before, as in a eighteenth century anamorphosis. To Freda, horror is a Cartesian matter, a theorem to be proved through images: the thesis is the immanence of evil, while the supernatural is only a bogus trick in order to reach the deepest, atavistic fears. “True horror is deep-rooted in each one of us from birth,” as Freda wrote in an oft-quoted passage of his autobiography Divoratori di celluloide, contemptuously rejecting the presence of “carnival-like” monsters in the movies.³ A statement somehow confirmed by a line of dialogue in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock which sounded like a declaration of intents: “So much time wasted trying to analyze the secrets of the soul, while the material part of our beings remains an unknown world.”

The opening credits for The Ghost are superimposed over a slow tracking shot towards a table where a séance has just ended, while the participants leave and the room is left empty. The shot ends with the close-up of a skull—that is, Freda’s vision (or rather, negation) of the afterlife. It is no use to look for the spirit, the director seems to imply: what is left are just bones. If the opening scene is a reminder of Freda’s vision, the final shot is a grim punchline that culminates with the sight of a secret door behind which Dr. Hichcock is dying, unbeknownst to all, like a rat. What will be left of him is not even worth seeing: he is damned to disappear from view and from the world, doomed to become what the opening shot implied—no spirit, just bones.

It is one of the grimmest, most nihilistic endings ever committed to film, which rivals some of Freda’s most celebrated ones, like that of his Dante-inspired The Iron Swordsman. In The Horrible Dr. Hichcock the secret passage was a “forbidden door” which Cynthia should not trespass, as in the most classic fairytales: it was the key to move from one world to the other, from the reassuring order and luxury of the haute bourgeoisie to the hidden dimension of Hichcock’s dark side, and the threshold between the two realities was a mirror. In The Ghost, Freda turns the essence of the secret passage upside down: no more a privileged instrument to reach inaccessible places and reveal secrets, but a blind alley, a street of no return where to end up and die like a wounded animal.

“In Freda’s film, fear is so everyday and tangible that it becomes flesh,” as Italian film critic Carlo Bocci wrote. “Not even once does The Ghost slip into the epouvante cocasse of so many horror movies, neither can one be relieved with the apparition of the monster, as every single character in the film is a monster.”⁴

This leads to an important absence to deal with: that of religion. As observed earlier on, Italian Gothic horror films deprived the vampire myth of its anti–Christian core, which was well in evidence in Hammer productions. On the other hand, the metaphysical element was not even considered in a negative way, as Roger Corman’s films did. AIP’s Poe cycle was centered on a universe abandoned by the divine mercy, where death—deprived of any promise of transcendence—became a terrible and horrific event, evil acquired a tangible quality in the form of genetic tare, and such dialogue was uttered: “Each man creates his own God for himself—His own Heaven, his own Hell” (The Masque of the Red Death, 1964). Whereas in Italian Horror films of the same period the dramatic juxtapositions and the boundaries between good and evil were often blurred and tricky, as exemplified by the recurring theme of the doppelgänger.

The Ghost moves one step further. To Freda, there can be no fight between good and evil, because good does not exist in the end. All the characters are evil, abject, diabolical. The film’s concept of inner evil is closer to the themes of the subconscious, and therefore it focuses on the torments of the individual instead of the universal fight between good and evil. That is why it does not need any monster. This makes The Ghost a much more personal film than The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, to the point that Freda can even make his own personal stab at organized religion through the character of Umberto Raho, as a petty and almost caricatural priest who in the end takes leave with a punchline which sounds most sarcastic in the context of its delivery: “I told you, Dr. Hichcock, the Devil is a very real person.”

As with The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, Freda’s use of color has a distinct dramatic flair. That is also the case with framing composition and camera movements: to Freda, the camera becomes an instrument of moral judgment. An example of this is the camera approaching objects and moving away from them at the beginning and end of many sequences in The Ghost. Such movements express the fascination and repulsion towards evil and the physical tools with which it is perpetrated: a syringe, a razor, a vial of poison, a glass of gin. “The real protagonists,” as Bocci noted, “are the objects that we have seen before the horrible doctor’s apparent death: the objects that become the tools of fear and death when the plot thickens. Not one of the privileged objects as seen in the first part of the film escapes its fate of transfiguration. Freda’s cold camera keeps framing them from a low angle throughout the film, without a single impulse of sympathy towards any of them: the director’s cruelty towards his own creatures adds to the theatrical cruelty—we would be tempted to say, Elizabethan—of the mise en scène.”⁵

Another noteworthy element is the presence of a carillon which has a diegetic function similar to the one in Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965), as well as the harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, 1968) and Dario Argento’s Deep Red. The score is credited to “Franck Wallace,” which—according to the list of a.k.a.s registered with the performing rights society SIAE as well as other sources such as the Italian magazine Bianco e Nero and the Monthly Film Bulletin—was the pseudonym of Franco Mannino. Other references suggested that “Franck Wallace” was actually a joint pseudonym for Mannino and Roman Vlad. However, when Beat Records released the soundtrack in 2008, it was discovered that the surviving tapes were attributed to Francesco De Masi, even though he is not credited on the picture. It has been suggested that Freda replaced Mannino’s score, as a whole or in part, as he was not happy with it. As a matter of fact, the musical accompaniment is one of the film’s many highlights, and the exquisite title theme popped up again and again in other Italian horror films of the period, due to the typical recycling habits of Italian low-budget productions.

The Ghost received a predictable V.M.18 rating by the Italian censors, but no cuts were demanded. When interviewed in 1964 by the French periodical Midi-Minuit Fantastique, Freda claimed he was satisfied with the way the Ministerial commission had treated his film. “I didn’t have any problems with the censors. Contrary to what one might expect, they proved to be intelligent.”⁶ Funnily enough, a few years later Freda became a member of the censorship commission: among the films he rejected there were Christian Marquand’s Candy (1968) and Mario Bava’s Four Times That Night (Quante volte…quella notte, 1969).

Nevertheless, The Ghost features one of Italian Gothic’s most utterly violent moments: the extraordinary scene where Margaret massacres her lover with a razor, shown through a subjective shot of the man while Barbara Steele savagely wields the weapon towards the camera—a scene later redone by Aristide Massaccesi in Death Smiles on a Murderer (La Morte ha sorriso all’assassino, 1973). It is a chilling, savage moment which rivals the infamous opening of Bava’s Black Sunday, and synthesizes Italian Horror’s emphasis on gruesomeness. What is more, it underlines the utter weakness of Baldwin’s character: like so many male figures of the filone, the helpless Dr. Livingstone is destined to be dominated, humiliated, and eventually destroyed by the weaker sex.

Notes

1. Anonymous, “Lo spettro,” Il Nuovo Spettatore Cinematografico 4, August 1963, p. 80.

2. Despite what some writers have claimed—see Sergio Bissoli, Gli scrittori dell’orrore (Collegno: Ferrara Editore, 2007), p. 15—the similarities between The Ghost and the pulp novel La vecchia poltrona (I racconti di Dracula 20, June 1961, by Max Dave, a.k.a. Pino Belli) are minimal.

3. Freda, Divoratori di celluloide, p. 86.

4. Carlo Bocci, “Lo spettro,” Il Falcone Maltese 1, June 1974, p. 40.

5. Ibid.

6. Caen and Romer, “Entretien avec Riccardo Freda,” p. 3.

Katarsis, a.k.a. Sfida al diavolo

D: Giuseppe Veggezzi. S and SC: Giuseppe Veggezzi; DOP: Mario Parapetti (additional scenes: Angelo Baistrocchi) (B&W); M: Berto Pisano (Ti ho visto sung by Sonia); E: Enzo Alfonsi (1965 version: Piera Bruni); AE: Laura Caccianti; PD: Andrea Crisanti, Giuseppe Ranieri; AD: Paolo Bianchini; C: Francesco Attenti; MU: Giovanni Amadei; SO: Salvatore Gaetano; W: Maria Maresca; SP: Alfonso Avincola; SS: Luciano Lo Schiavo; Grip: Giulio Diamanti, Tarcisio Diamanti, Alfonso Grilli; ChEl: Alberto Silvestri, Eolo Tramontani, Otello Polletin. Cast: Christopher Lee (Lord of the Castle), George [Giorgio] Ardisson (Gugo), Lilly Parker [Vittoria Centroni] (Maga), Anita Dreyer [Anita Cacciolati] (Jenny), Bella Cortez [Alice Paneque] (Frie), Mario Zacarti [Mario Polletin] (Gian), Adriana Ambesi (Castle lady), Piero Vida [Pietro Vidali] (Peo), Eva Gioia, Ulderico Sciarretta (Guardian monk—1965 version), Ettore Ribotta, Sergio Gibello, Pasquale Basile, Sonia [Sonia Scotti], Alma Del Rio (Alma the dancer—1965 version). PROD: Fernando Cerqua for I Films della Mangusta (1965 version: Ulderico Sciarretta for Eco Film); PM: Spartaco Antonucci; PS: Oscar Santaniello. Country: Italy. Filmed at Odescalchi Castle (Bracciano), Montelibretti and Olimpia Studios (Rome). Running time: 87 min. (1963 version)—79 min. (1965 version) (m. 2390/m. 2149); Visa n: 40989 (08.10.1963); Rating: V.M.18; Release date: 09.09.1963 (Italy). Distribution: Mangusta (Regional); Domestic gross: unknown.

After a reckless car ride, six wild and immoral youngsters reach an apparently abandoned castle. There, they meet an old man who tells them that he had sold his soul to the devil to preserve forever the beauty of the woman he loved. However, the old man can only hear his beloved’s voice, and in order to break his pact with the devil he has to find the woman’s body and bury it. The young punks do not believe the old man but decide to help him for kicks. After a long struggle against mysterious forces that hinder their search, eventually they find the beautiful woman’s body. At the crowing of the cock, the old man dies, finally in peace, while the castle is devoured by the flames. The young people return to their own world marked by this new experience.

The first and only film directed by the Piacenza-born filmmaker Giuseppe Veggezzi—or Vegezzi, as (mis-?)spelled in several official papers: with Italian bureaucrats, you are never sure—Katarsis was one of the most obscure fruits in the season of Italian Gothic. Shot in the spring of 1963 at one of the filone’s most recurrent locations—Bracciano’s Odescalchi Castle—with a budget of just 46 million lire (the shooting schedule also mentions the subtitle L’orgia, The Orgy), Veggezzi’s film benefitted from the special participation of none other than Christopher Lee, as the only “name” actor in a cast of unknowns (although young lead actor Giorgio Ardisson would later attain a modest fame as one of James Bond’s Italian lookalikes), in the midst of his busy 1963 Italian schedule.

The Brit thesp was on the set for only one week, just before moving on to play in Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body. Lee never saw the dailies nor the finished product, which might explain the confusing way in which he speaks of Veggezzi’s film in his autobiography. “Katarsis was very hard for those involved to follow. It seemed to be about drop-outs who find an old man in a castle, who turns into the Devil and seizes them, but no one was ever sure. In its efforts to find itself, the film forked into two films, the sequel being Faust ’63. I was Faust in the first and Mephistopheles in the other, which must have confused people with the strength to see both.”¹

Actually, what Lee recounts never happened in the first place. There was no sequel to Katarsis, and there was no Faust ’63 either. What happened instead was typical of the production dynamics that animated genre cinema, which was becoming more and more hectic, chaotic, fraudulent. Quite simply, Katarsis obtained the Ministry’s visa in August 1963, but soon afterwards the production company I Films della Mangusta went bankrupt. Katarsis was then bought by another society, Eco Film, which proceeded to reedit the film, adding new footage, and distributed it again in 1965 with the title Sfida al diavolo. The new version was nine minutes shorter than the previous one (78 minutes compared to 87 minutes), and according to the Ministry of Spectacle, which examined the request to obtain Italian nationality (and the subsequent sum of money granted to all films officially labeled “Italian,” according to the 1965 Corona law), “given the irrelevance of the alterations, the film itself cannot be considered other than as authorized by the projection to the public in 1963 under the title Katarsis.” Unfortunately, the original cut of the film is apparently lost.

The additional footage included a slapdash framing story which can be roughly described as “apostolical film noir.”² Whereas the original Katarsis centered on a group of young upper-class punks who spent a night in a haunted castle, in Sfida al diavolo a monk named Peo (Piero Vida) goes to a shady nightclub to retrieve incriminating documents and save a friend who had taken refuge in his convent to hide from a gangster from Beirut. There, Peo meets an adipose dancer (Alma Del Rio), and in order to persuade her into giving him the papers, he tells the Faust-like parable which was the film’s original core: it turns out that Peo was one of the punks, who had been so affected by the experience that he became a monk (!).

Said additions include Del Rio’s cellulitic dance routine—which would not have been out of place in one of the period’s erotic “documentaries”—and one of the most awkward product placement cases in Italian film history: the guardian monk who greets the wounded and hunted gangster in the convent hands him a drink from a bottle which has no visible label, saying “Don’t pay attention to the bottle: this is real ‘Stock ’84’ brandy. I’ve been told to buy a cheaper one, but since I drink it myself I don’t care about the price.” This line was also the object of complaints on the part of the Ministry of Spectacle when Sfida al diavolo was resubmitted to the censors, as it emerges from a letter dated October 1965, where the producer claims that the “Brendy”[sic]’s label had been expunged from the dialogue—which clearly was not. Last but not least, it is worth pointing out that the guardian monk in said scene is played by Ulderico Sciarretta, the production manager of “ECO Film” which took over from the bankrupted “I Film della Mangusta.”

Similarly to the earlier examples of Italian Gothic horror, Katarsis was set in contemporary Italy, with weird results. The obnoxious young punks, who have fun chasing passing cars and drink whisky straight from the bottle, are a bourgeois variation on Pasolini’s street kids (“We were like animals: we liked the taste of blood and uncontrolled violence” as Peo’s voice-over recalls), and their savage car ride near the film’s beginning recalls the opening sequences of the controversial Pasolini adaptation Violent Life. The night orgy in the haunted castle, on the other hand, suspiciously looks like a poor man’s version of the bacchanales in the villa at sea as described by La Dolce Vita.

However, the tone—even more so in Sfida al diavolo—is decidedly moral, or rather moralistic. The orgy turns into a path of purification, accompanied by Peo’s pedantic voice-over, while the character of the punk-turned-friar becomes an involuntarily comic reversal of the eponymous devilish monk in Matthew Lewis’ celebrated Gothic novel. On the other hand, the film pays reference—quite confusingly indeed, as noted by the perplexed commissioner of the Ministry of Spectacle who gave the project the green light—to German romanticism, with a Faustian pact set in the present.

The Italian poster for the 1965 rerelease of Katarsis (as Sfida al diavolo) emphasized the film’s Gothic elements (author’s collection).

Lee’s presence on screen is minimal, even though he plays a dual role (the old man in the castle and the guy in the car the punks push out of the road), and his acting is understandably on autopilot. What is more, to put it bluntly, Veggezzi’s direction veers between the naive and the terrible, save for a few wild surreal moments such as the scene in which the punks discover the lady of the castle (Adriana Ambesi) inside a grandfather clock—a moment worthy of Jean Rollin. The protagonists spend a seemingly endless amount of time—at least twenty minutes in Sfida al diavolo, possibily even more in the original version—wandering through dark rooms that lead nowhere, endless spiral staircases and even a maze of transparent glasses that recall amusement park labyrinths. It is just a way to pad a thin story to an acceptable running time, yet it does reveal a way of conceiving the Fantastic not as a source of shock but as a limbo where time and space blur, and in which one can float indefinitely: anxiety and fear come from the loss of spacial coordinates and the discovery (always inconclusive) of new ones replacing the previous.

For all its clumsiness, Veggezzi’s film was not devoid of ambitions: the basic story was the pretext for an awkward web of symbols to underline the basic storyline. According to the director’s own words, the six punks represent the present, the castle is the subconscious where “the conscience crisis that brings the six to their catharsis” takes place, while Lee’s character embodies “interior life, exasperated and turned into an ascetic fanaticism.” The less said…

Notes

1. Lee, Tall, Dark and Gruesome, p. 187; Lee, Lord of Misrule, p. 207.

2. Sfida al diavolo’s ridiculous framing story is not the only example of the hybridization between Gothic and film noir, as proven by little-seen films such as I’ll See You in Hell (Ti aspetterò all’inferno, 1960, Piero Regnoli) and Passport for a Corpse (Lasciapassare per il morto, 1962, Mario Gariazzo). In Regnoli’s film the Gothic path is only a red herring, as a seemingly vengeful ghost apparently persecutes a trio of thugs led by John Drew Barrymore, who have taken refuge in a cabin in the woods after a hit, near a mephitic swamp. The atmosphere evoked by Luciano Trasatti’s b&w cinematography recalls Val Lewton’s RKO pictures, and suggests a supernatural explanation that is eventually replaced by a rational one. Passport for a Corpse follows the escape of a criminal (Alberto Lupo) after a heist gone wrong, and is more pertinent to the Fantastic. The plot has the man escape while hiding in a coffin, in a variation on Poe’s theme of premature burial (the long sequence where Lupo finds himself locked in a cold room is genuinely unnerving), and the story borders on the metaphysical, due to the presence of Death in the form of a mysterious woman (Linda Christian) that appears to the protagonist throughout the story and eventually welcomes him in the end.

Tomb of Torture (Metempsyco)

D: Anthony Kristye [Antonio Boccacci]. S: Anthony Kristye; SC: Anthony Kristye, Johnny Seemonell [Giovanni Simonelli]; DOP: William Grace [Francesco Campitelli]; M: Armando Sciascia (Ed. Vedette); E: Jean-Pierre Grasset [Luciano Anconetani]; AE: Gaby Vital [Gabriella Vitale]; SO: Johnny Harold [Bruno Francisci]; SE: Patt Collins (trick photography) [Gaetano Capogrosso]; C: William Backman [Giovanni Savelli]; AC: Basil Klay [Roberto Gengarelli]; CO: House of Werther. Cast: Annie Albert [Annie Alberti] (Anna Darnell/Countess Irene), Thony Maky [Adriano Micantoni] (Dr. Darnell), Mark Marian [Marco Mariani] (George Dickson), Elizabeth Queen [Flora Carosello] (Countess Elizabeth), William Gray [Antonio Boccacci] (Raman), Bernard Blay [Bernardo D’Angeli], Emy Eko [Emilia Eco] (Esther), Terry Thompson [Maria Teresa Sonni], Fred Pizzot [Andrea Scotti]. PROD: Frank Campitelli [Francesco Campitelli] for Virginia Cinematografica; PA: Silvano De Amicis. Country: Italy. Filmed at Castle Orsini, Nerola (Rome), Palazzo Borghese, Artena. Running time: 88 min. (m. 2404); Visa n: 39769 (03.20.1963); Rating: V.M.14; Release date: 03.27.1963 (Italy); 07.1966 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Filmar (Italy); Trans-Lux Distributing Corporation (U.S.A.); Domestic gross: unknown. Also known as: Le Manoir maudit (France, 11.12.1963), Die Bestie von Schloß Monte Christo (West Germany). Home video: Image (DVD, U.S.A.).

Early 1900s. Young Anna is suffering from horrific nightmares in which she is murdered night after night in a torture chamber. It is discovered that she is the reincarnation of Countess Irene, who disappeared twenty years earlier—just before her wedding to a rich Hindu named Raman, who is still searching for her to this day. Anna’s father, psychiatrist Dr. Darnell, takes her to the Countess’ castle in an attempt to help her. The manor hides a secret, though: a demented monster who is responsible for the abduction, torture and murders of two young girls. Newspaper reporter George Dickson arrives at the place to investigate and falls for Anna. After the girl is abducted by the monster and chained in the castle’s chamber of torture, Dickson and Raman must find their way into the crypt, where the mystery of Countess Irene’s disappearance will be finally solved…

In the great season of Italian pulp fiction, it was not uncommon that a writer would also try his hand at scriptwriting, or vice versa. Before becoming one of Cinecittà’s most prolific screenwriters, Ernesto Gastaldi published a number of crime and sci-fi novels such as Sangue in tasca (1957, as James Duffy), Brivido sulla schiena (1957, as Freddy Foster) and Tempo zero (1960, as Julian Berry). Another similar case was that of Giovanni Simonelli, the son of director Giorgio Simonelli, who wrote cheap pulp novels under the pseudonym Art Mitchell—such as 10 bare e un sepolcro (“10 Coffins and a Grave”), a supernatural reworking of Ten Little Indians published in I Racconti di Dracula n. 3, February 1960—as well as film scripts under the more transparent a.k.a. Johnny Seemonell.

The results, however, were not just undistinguished but mostly undistinguishable, as with Metempsyco, the first and last film directed by the elusive Antonio Boccacci (or Boccaci, according to some sources). Under the imperscrutable pseudonym Anthony Kristye, the same he is credited with in the film, Boccacci had churned out a number of cheap paperback mystery novels in the late 1950s, such as Vendetta e sangue (“Vengeance and Blood”) and La ragnatela (“The Cobweb”).

Metempsyco is in many ways the celluloid equivalent of those pulp fiction novels concocted by Simonelli, Boccacci and others, as well as the adults-only fotoromanzi (photonovels) of the period: it is a supernaturally spiced murder mystery of sorts, replete with Italian Gothic horror’s favorite themes, namely reincarnation (hence the Italian title, no doubt chosen because it sounded a bit like Psycho), a vengeful ghost and a doppelgänger. Not content, Simonelli and Boccacci throw into the story every kind of cheap horror cliché: a castle with a torture chamber, swarms of rats (actually guinea pigs), secret passages, hooded skeletons and a deformed creature lurking in the surroundings.

Although the attempts at shock effects are ill-advised at the very least, the content was rather outrageous for the period, with cheap sadistic thrills—the aforementioned torture chamber scenes feature plenty of naked legs and a few screaming young girls, a nymphomaniac heroine (a condition that is merely hinted at in the film, however) who goes skinny dipping in the lake, dashes of gore and a grotesque sex-obsessed Quasimodo-like monster, appropriately named “Hugo,” who appears too early (and too much, given the atrocious make-up) in the film. No wonder the Italian tagline featured the vital question: “Sesso o terrore?” (“Sex or Terror?”).

Boccacci is no Bava, though, a fact that is patent to the audience as from the opening credits, with a montage of crudely animated cut-out stills—a sleeping woman, a hand carrying a lamp, an armor, a skull—that suggests a proximity with the period’s horror photonovels rather than contemporaneous Gothics. Besides the director’ habit for crude zooms, the production’s haphazard quality is best summed up by the sight of the Countess’ “painting” of whom the young heroine is found out to be the reincarnation: allegedly unable to find any cheap and good painter, Boccacci had to make do with … an enlarged photograph of actress Annie Alberti.

As usual, the locations are more interesting that what actually happens—very little indeed, it must be added—in them. The dilapidated manor where the story takes place is Castle Orsini in Nerola, near Rome, while the interiors were shot in another oft-used location, the labyrinthine Palazzo Borghese in Artena. To stress the fotoromanzi connection, the obscure cast was led by Annie Alberti, a minor photonovel star of the early 1960s. Alberti often appeared in the infamous Killing, and later on she became the protagonist of the adults-only French photo-roman Baby Colt, published in 1968 and directed by her husband Gérard Landry. As for the other cast members, Emy Eco (one of the two nosy girls at the beginning, and very active in Italy as a dubbing artist) is the sister of novelist Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of the Rose. Boccacci himself, billed as “William Gray,” plays an unlikely turban-wearing hindu who looks like he has just stepped out of an Emilio Salgari novel.

The result is as unlikely as the director’s Anglo-Saxon pseudonym, which patently hints at Agatha Christie, but is bogged down by misspellings and vowels at random. Even more astonishing, however, is the alias used by actress Flora Carosello, a chuckle-inducing “Elizabeth Queen.” Armando Sciascia’s cool score pushes such clichés to the point of self-parody—not that it was necessary, as shown by the opening sequence in which two girls sneak into the castle and are brutally murdered, or Anna’s nightmare featuring a moving armor brandishing a huge sword and an ugly monster peeping out of a sarcophagus. Said armor conceals the murderer’s identity in what has to be one of Italian Gothic’s most laughably outlandish ideas.

The United States poster for Tomb of Torture featured a rather different monster than the one appearing in the film (author’s collection).

Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, the film—which passed absolutely unnoticed in Italy and whose box-office takings were so scarce that there is no actual record of them—was picked up for distribution in the United States in 1965 by Richard Gordon, who was hoping to score again as he had done with The Playgirls and the Vampire, and released by Trans-Lux Distributing on a double bill—“Twice the thrills! Twice the chills!!”—with the German vampire film Cave of the Living Dead (Der Fluch der grünen Augen, 1964, Ákos Ráthonyi). The tagline (“Creatures who kill AGAIN, AGAIN and AGAIN!!”) promised more than the film could possibly deliver, but the poster featured a memorably sleazy portrait of the monster, albeit with an unlikely set of feline fangs, plus a semi-naked woman chained to a St. Andrew’s cross in a crypt.

Boccacci’s film was later picked up by Four Star for television broadcasting.

The Virgin of Nuremberg, a.k.a. Horror Castle (La vergine di Norimberga)

D: Anthony Dawson [Antonio Margheriti]. S: based on the novel La vergine di Norimberga by Frank Bogart [Maddalena Gui]; SC: Anthony Dawson, Edmund Greville [Edmond T. Gréville], Gastad Green [Renato Vicario]; DOP: Richard Palton [Riccardo Pallottini] (Ultrapanoramic, Eastmancolor); M: Riz Ortolani, conducted by the author (Ed. North-South); E: Angel Coly [Otello Colangeli]; PD, ArtD: Henry Daring [Riccardo Dominici]; CO: James Lyon [Riccardo Dominici]; AD: Bertrand Blier [and Ruggero Deodato, uncredited]; C: George Henry [Filippo Carta]; AC: John Baxter [Gianni Modica]; SE: Anthony Matthews [Antonio Margheriti]; SO: Albert Griffiths [Alberto Bartolomei]; MU: Joseph Hunter [Franco Di Girolamo]; AMU: Walter Roy [Walter Cossu]; Hair: Lilian Moore [Anna Cristofani]; W: Peggy Bronson [Antonietta Piredda], Sandra Weber [Irma Tonnini]; SS: Eve Marie Koltay [U.S. version: Richard MacNamara] Cast: Rossana Podestà (Mary Hunter), Georges Rivière (Max Hunter), Christopher Lee (Erich), Jim Dolen (John Selby), Lucile St. Simon (Victim), Luigi Severini (The Doctor), Anny Degli Uberti (Frau Marta), Luciana Milone (Trude), Consalvo Dell’Arti, Mirko Valentin (Max’s father). PROD: Marco Vicario for Atlantica Cinematografica; PM: Fred Holliday [Natalino Vicario], Jim Murray [Sante Chimirri]; PS: Steve Melville [Gianni Di Stolfo]. Country: Italy. Filmed at Incir-De Paolis Studios (Rome), Villa Sciarra (Rome). Running time: 83 min. (m. 2287); Visa n: 40904 (08.03.1963); Rating: V.M.14; Release dates: 08.15.1963 (Italy); 01.10.1965 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Atlantica Cinematografica (Italy); Zodiac Films (U.S.A.); Domestic gross: 125,000,000 lire. Also known as: Terror Castle, La Vierge de Nuremberg (France, 02.03.1965), The Castle of Terror (U.K.), Die Gruft der Lebenden Leichen, Das Schloss des Grauens (West Germany, 05.15.1964), El justiciero rojo (Spain). Home video: Shriek Show (DVD, U.S.A.).

Mary Hunter and her husband Max are staying at Max’s family castle in Germany. One night the young woman awakens to the sound of a woman’s scream, and much to her horror she finds a dead body inside a torture device in the manor’s crypt. Max convinces Mary that it was just a bad dream, but she remains suspicious: Max behaves strangely, and the disfigured servant, Erich, is an ominous presence as well. It turns out there really is a malevolent presence hiding in the castle, who abducts and tortures young women: Max’s father, an ex–SS officer gone mad after he was submitted to horrific experiments by the Nazis after an unsuccessful attempt at killing Hitler…

Lurid Italian sleeve of the KKK paperback novel La vergine di Norimberga, upon which Antonio Margheriti’s film was based (author’s collection).

Antonio Margheriti’s first horror film released in Italy, The Virgin of Nuremberg was actually filmed after the director’s own Castle of Blood, as Margheriti himself explained, giving an idea of the hectic days of Italian genre cinema back then. “We made that film in order to exploit Castle of Blood’s production values—we used to go on that way, recycling over and over.”¹ However, despite being submitted to the censorship commission a couple of months earlier, The Virgin of Nuremberg was released almost immediately, in mid–August 1963, whereas Castle of Blood had to wait until February 1964.

The film can also be seen as a fil rouge between Italian Gothic horror and the country’s contemporaneous popular literature. In the early 1900s, the Gothic and the Fantastic developed through either feuilletons or magazines such as La Domenica del Corriere.² A similar role, sixty years later, would be played by the rise of horror paperbacks, comics and photonovels: the aforementioned Edizioni KKK and I Racconti di Dracula as well as similar series with such explicit titles as Terrore (“Terror”). Released in the newsstands circuit in 20,000 to 25,000 copies each, with attractive and alluring illustrated covers, these dime-store paperbacks contained badly written novelettes which mixed horror clichés, Gothic stereotypes, cheap eroticism and even cheaper thrills. Passed off as Italian translations of obscure British, French or Teutonic authors, these books were, more prosaically, a genuine, 100 percent made in Italy product. “Original” English titles as indicated in the title page were completely made up, and behind a legion of pseudonyms hid a small bunch of prolific Italian writers, often merely credited as “translators.”³

Based on the novel La vergine di Norimberga by “Frank Bogart” (that is, Maddalena Gui), issue #23 of the KKK series, The Virgin of Nuremberg was produced by Marco Vicario—the co-founder of G.E.I., the company which published the KKK paperbacks, in association with his brother Alfonso. No wonder the leading role went to Vicario’s own wife, the glamorous Rossana Podestà.⁴ On the other hand, the presence of Christopher Lee, in one of his many visits to Italian sets of the period, added a sense of prestigiousness to the whole product. However, Lee does not play the villain, but is relegated to a secondary role (a stretched-out cameo, that is) as a scarred and menacing—yet totally harmless—servant.

The film’s straight pulp descendence makes for a few peculiar traits, starting with its present day setting—something that Italian Gothic had already abandoned after the early awkward attempts—which displays a more immediate affinity with contemporaneity, starting with its setting in the present day. “The difficult thing was to start like a classic horror story, and then to move on to the present with a more contemporary approach,” as Margheriti recalled when interviewed by Peter Blumenstock.⁵ The bouncy, lively jazzy score by Riz Ortolani is perfectly in tone: the feverish contrabass which underlines the opening credits theme would have made Jess Franco smile, and is a noticeable departure from the classical-oriented Gothic scores of the period.

Unlike what he did with the impressive black-and-white of Castle of Blood, this time Margheriti employed gaudy colors, courtesy of his customary d.o.p. Riccardo Pallottini: there are lots of garish reds which pop out from the screen, almost as if the film was in 3-D, and the effect in many scenes is that of a lurid pulp novel’s cover turned to life. One moment, though—Podestà running in the villa’s park, the tree branches appearing before her like claws in a blaze of colored lights—is practically a carbon copy of a similar sequence in Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock.

The overall effect is more playful than horrific: an exhibition of sorts, which also serves as a dissimulation—the brighter the colors, the more convincing the illusion of luxury and sumptuousness. Despite the film’s pretentions at Gothic grandeur, The Virgin of Nuremberg was a rushed production, shot in just three weeks (including special effects photography). Therefore, Margheriti’s style is decidedly pragmatic and economical, and his habit of shooting a scene with several cameras is well in evidence. As the director explained, “of course, it limits your possibilities concerning camera movements and composition, because you have to see that no camera is interfering with the others, but it is a good way to cope with very complicated scenes in just a few takes. After that’s done, you just need some intercutting or some filler and all the rest can be done in the editing room.”⁶

Such an approach makes for dynamic results at times, as in the sinuous opening sequence, in which Rossana Podestà wakes up, looks out the bedroom window, descends the stairs and finally enters the torture chamber where she discovers a dead woman’s body inside the titular device. However, sometimes the expedient results in a certain artificiality: for instance, all the dialogue scenes between two characters are inevitably shot with the usual shot/reverse shot routine, and often come off as boring and predictable.

The Italian poster for The Virgin of Nuremberg featured prominently the film’s star Rossana Podestà (author’s collection).

Yet the Roman filmmaker does not give up his beloved miniatures, with remarkably spectacular results in the scene—absent in the book—where Georges Rivière is trapped in the castle’s crypts which the hooded villain floods with the pool water, or the castle corridor catching fire.⁷ Elsewhere, Margheriti’s miniatures carry a more practical purpose: the shots of the pinnacles and towers of the castle on the Rhine where the story is set belong to a miniature, and are strategically inserted between shots of the Roman villa where the film was shot.

The director was rather pleased with the results: “I changed a few things, tried to insert a war subplot, the surgery, in order to give the story some more sense… […] Georges Rivière was rather good and the film, for all its modesty, was quite decent, not completely thrown away.… I always tried to save the set-pieces, the special effects, the mise-en-scène.”⁸

The bulk of the story is a typical Gothic yarn centered on a woman in peril which disposes of the supernatural for a decidedly more earthly menace. Interestingly, though, the mad monster (Mirko Valentin) who inhabits the family castle, kidnapping and torturing all the unfortunate women he can lay his hands on is revealed to be an ex–SS general who took part in a failed plot to kill Der Führer, and as a punishment was tortured and transformed by Hitler’s surgeons into a living skull (echoes of Captain America’s Red Skull here). The idea of a Nazi-related plot can also be found in such horror flicks of the period as The Flesh Eaters (1964, Jack Curtis) and The Frozen Dead (1966, Herbert J. Leder), and later on in Jean Brismée’s fascinating moral parable The Devil’s Nightmare (La Plus longue nuit du diable, 1971). However, Margheriti predates by a whole decade the atrocities of the Nazi-erotic cycle with the flashback scene of the surgery (in black-and-white in order to diminish its gory impact), and the results are decidedly gruesome for the time.

The unbridled sadism of several scenes still packs a punch, starting with the prologue where Rossana Podestà discovers a dead woman inside the “Virgin of Nuremberg,” her eyeballs gouged out; later on the torturer applies a cage containing a rat to a victim’s face, and the rodent starts eating the hapless woman’s flesh—a scene taken verbatim from the book. However, the script skips the novel’s most extreme parts, which are not unworthy of today’s torture porns: one grotesque highlight in the book has the madman sever a woman’s “nerve, at the height of the first dorsal vertebra,” before pulling out almost all the bones from her body, leaving only the rib cage and part of the backbone, reducing the poor victim to a shapeless flesh bag—an over-the-top moment that would not have been out of place in Martyrs (2008, Pascal Laugier) or The Human Centipede (2010, Tom Six).

As for the screenplay, Ernesto Gastaldi denied he was the “Gastad Green” credited as scriptwriter together with Margheriti and Edmund Greville, despite many reference books and websites (including the IMDb) claiming the contrary. ““Gastad Green” was not me, as far as I know. As producers often did with the Spanish co-productions, where they had to put Spanish names into the film even though they actually were not involved, it might be the case that they needed an Italian name, and that either my friend Antonio Margheriti or the producer said “Well, let’s use Gastaldi’s!”” as the writer himself explained. “However, revisiting the film I had a vague memory of the ending, so my impression was that either I had a chat with Margheriti about the film or I did some sort of supervising. However, the dialogue and the rest are not mine.”⁹ According to the film’s official papers, the man behind the pseudonym “Gastad Green” was actually Renato Vicario, the producer’s brother.

For all its violence, The Virgin of Nuremberg is not devoid of a much welcomed tongue-in-cheek irony. On paper, the final scene sounds poignant: the servant played by Christopher Lee rushes into the flames to rescue his old master and ends up buried with him under the castle’s ruins. At the moment of the final agnition, though, when the ex–Nazi whose face reduced to a horrid skull recognizes his faithful attendant Erich, the scarred servant is apostrophized by the dying monster with the priceless line: “What happened to your face?”

The film was released in the States as Horror Castle, to less than raving reviews.¹⁰ The subsequent U.S. home video releases restored a more faithful translation of the original title. The German print, on the other hand, omitted the war flashbacks and even changed typical German names such as Erich and Trude, to disguise the German setting.

Notes

1. Marcello Garofalo, “Le interviste celibi: Antonio Margheriti. L’ingegnere in Cinemascope,” Segnocinema 84, March/April 1997, p. 7.

2. Created in 1899 by Luigi Albertini as a supplement to Italy’s best-selling newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, the weekly magazine—which became immensely popular due to its extraordinarily elaborate colored illustrations on the front and back cover (the unmistakable work of the great illustrator and painter Achille Beltrame)—did not just collect the events of the past week, but also short stories and serialized novels, which often dealt with the Fantastic. On La Domenica del Corriere, Italian readers got to know the works of Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles) and H. G. Wells (The Flowering of the Strange Orchid): but the magazine also served as a showcase for Italian authors such as Italo Toscani, Egisto Roggero (Il vecchio orologio, The Old Clock, 1900), Virginio Appiani (Il segreto della morta, The Dead Woman’s Secret, 1901), Giuseppe Tonsi (Il vampiro, The Vampire, 1902).

3. Besides novelizations of contemporary horror films—including The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958, Terence Fisher), The Return of Dracula (1958, Paul Landres) and The Vampire (El vampiro, 1957, Fernando Mendez)—the series included original, specifically written material. Three years later, with the release of L’amante gelida (The Icy Lover) by Lyonel Clayle, the series would become I Capolavori della Serie KKK. Classici dell’Orrore (“The Masterpieces of KKK. Horror Classics”): published by G.E.I. (Grandi Edizioni Internazionali, later to become EPI—Edizioni Periodici Italiani), it would run for over 170 issues until 1972. Besides the aforementioned Clayle and O’Neal, the KKK paperbacks featured a plethora of exotic names—René Du Car, Roland Graves, Lucien Le Bossu, James Darren, Elizabeth Cronin, Maud Guy, Geremias Gotthelf, Marion Walles, Jean Le Rousse, Mary Sant Paul, Barbara Lee, Jack Cabot, Terence O’Neil, Patty North, Hassan Louvre, Jannet Mills, Stephen Tourjansky, Edgar Mittelholzer, and so on—which were actually ascribable to a quartet of Italian pens: Leonia Celli, Renato Carocci, Maddalena Gui, Laura Toscano. Similarly, I Racconti di Dracula were the product of Pino Belli, Libero Samale, Franco Prattico, Gualberto Titta, Giuseppe Paci, Svenio Tozzi, Aldo Crudo, plus future film directors Mario Pinzauti (2 Magnum 38 per una città di carogne, 1975) and Marco Masi (C’era una volta un gangster, 1969). I racconti di Dracula offered such lurid titles as I morti uccidono? (Do Dead Men Kill?), Femmine dell’al di là (Females From the Beyond), L’alito freddo del vampiro (The Vampire’s Cold Breath), L’organo dei morti (The Dead Men’s Organ)—respectively, issues 1, 7, 52, 73, credited to Max Dave [Pino Belli], Doug Stejner [Sveno Tozzi], George Wallis [Giuseppe Paci], Frank Graegorius [Libero Samale].

4. Margheriti himself recalled Vicario’s involvement with horror paperbacks in a 1970 interview with Luigi Cozzi: “(The Virgin of Nuremberg) is based on a fairly good book published by Vicario. Yes, Marco Vicario, the director of Seven Golden Men […].” Luigi Cozzi, “Il vampiro in orbita,” Horror 6, May 1970, p. 27.

5. Peter Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Interview,” Video Watchdog 28, May/June 1995, p. 51.

6. Ibid., p. 49.

7. As for the special effects, Margheriti recalled, “We did them at night. When the rest of the crew went home, I picked some poor guys who were not exactly looking forward to a sleepless night, and we filmed those miniatures […].” Ibid., p. 51.

8. Garofalo, “Le interviste celibi,” p. 7.

9. Ernesto Gastaldi, interviewed in Il castello del terrore, a featurette included as an extra on the Italian DVD of the film.

10. The New York Times reviewer summarized the film with these words: “Inept horror pic. Rossana Podestà’s looks and Christopher Lee’s chillpix reputation don’t save it. Grind house fate.” Murf, “Horror Castle,” New York Times April 15, 1965.

The Whip and the Body, a.k.a. What, a.k.a. Night Is the Phantom (La frusta e il corpo)

D: John M. Old [Mario Bava]. S and SC: Julian Berry [Ernesto Gastaldi], Robert Hugo [Ugo Guerra], Martin Hardy [Luciano Martino]; DOP: David Hamilton [Ubaldo Terzano] (Technicolor); M: Jim Murphy [Carlo Rustichelli], conducted by Pier Luigi Urbini; E: Bob King [Renato Cinquini]; AE: Kathy Line [Lina Caterini]; PD: Dick Grey [Ottavio Scotti]; CO: Peg Fax [Anna Maria Palleri]; SD: Gus Marrow [Riccardo Dominici]; AD: Julian Berry; 2ndAD: Sergio Martino (uncredited); C: Art Balsam [Ubaldo Terzano]; AC: Mark Baer; SO: Peter Jackson; B: Rex McCrea; MU: Frank Field [Franco Freda]; AMU: Raf Christie [Raffaele Cristini]; SP: Robert Schafer; SS: Priscilla Hudson [Priscilla Contardi]. Cast: Daliah Lavi (Nevenka Menliff), Christopher Lee (Kurt Menliff), Tony Kendall [Luciano Stella] (Christian Menliff), Isli Oberon [Ida Galli] (Katia), Harriet White [Medin] (Giorgia), Dean Ardow [Gustavo De Nardo] (Count Menliff), Alan Collins [Luciano Pigozzi] (Losat), Jacques Herlin (Priest). PROD: Vox Film, Leone Film (Rome), Francinor, P.I.P. (France); PM: Tom Rhodes [Federico Magnaghi]; GM: John Oscar [Elio Scardamaglia]; UM: Free Baldwin [Ferdinando Baldi]; PSe: Joe M. Seery. Country: Italy/France. Filmed at Anzio and at Castel Sant’Angelo (Rome). Running time: 91 min. (m. 2374); Visa n: 41063 (08.24.1963); Rating: V.M.18; Release dates: 08.29.1963 (Italy); 12.10.1965 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Titanus (Italy); Futuramic Releasing (U.S.A.); Domestic gross: 72,000,000 lire. Also known as: Le Corps et le fouet (France, 01.26.1966), Der Dämon und die Jungfrau, Der Mörder von Schloß Menliff (West Germany, 06.09.1967), Night Is the Phantom (U.K.). Homevideo: Kino (Blu-Ray, U.S.A.), VCI (DVD, U.S.A.), e-m-s (DVD, Germany).

Kurt Menliff arrives at his seaside castle after many years. The black sheep of the Menliff family, he is met with distrust (if not open hatred) by the castle’s inhabitants: his invalid father, his younger brother Cristiano, who married Kurt’s former lover Nevenka, and the maid Giorgia, whose daughter killed herself because of him. Kurt’s arrival soon spreads disorder in the place, and he and Nevenka reprise their sadomasochistic affair. However, one night Kurt is murdered by an unknown hand. After the funeral, though, Nevenka keeps having nightmarish visions of her dead lover, while the Count is assassinated as well. Has Kurt returned as a ghost to exact revenge on his family?

Mario Bava’s second Gothic horror film of the year, The Whip and the Body was an Italian/French production financed by Luciano Martino and Elio Scardamaglia’s Vox Film and based on a script which the opening titles credit to “Julian Berry, Robert Hugo and Martin Hardy”—respectively, Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra and Luciano Martino. However, Gastaldi pointed out to this writer: “I surely wrote the script all by myself, but I don’t remember whether there was a plotline by Ugo Guerra: that’s possible, as Ugo was really a goldmine of ideas. Instead, Luciano Martino had nothing to do with it.”¹

Bava came on board through Guerra, who thought he would be a convenient choice: “I remember Ugo saying, ‘Mario can be both photographer and director; that is convenient for us,’” as Gastaldi recalled.² Even though Bava took care of the photography, the credited d.o.p. on the film was, as usual, Bava’s frequent cameraman Ubaldo Terzano, acting as a front. The director employed for the second time in his career an English pseudonym (the rather self-deprecating John M. Old) after the laughable “John Foam” (the literal English translation of his surname) he had chosen as the d.o.p on Caltiki, the Immortal Monster. Bava would re-use the John M. Old alias on his Western The Road to Fort Alamo (La strada per Fort Alamo, 1964). As for Gastaldi, even though his name (or rather, his pseudonym) can be found in the credits as the assistant director, he never even set foot on the set.³

Besides the presence of Christopher Lee, billed as co-star, the female lead was Daliah Lavi, a ravishing Israeli actress who, among other things, had played alongside Kirk Douglas, George Hamilton and Edward G. Robinson in Vincente Minnelli’s bitter take on the Italian film industry, Two Weeks in Another Town. That same year, Lavi would offer an extraordinary performance in Brunello Rondi’s Il demonio, as a girl who is believed to be possessed by the devil in rural Southern Italy.

Compared to Bava’s previous Gothic efforts, The Whip and the Body had no claims on being original, and was probably thought of as a project for the home market consumption, as Gastaldi recalled. With a six-week shooting schedule (plus one for special effects) and a budget of less than 150 million lire, it was nonetheless a flop in Italy, with a domestic gross of just 72 million lire—no doubt due to its censorship troubles (more on this later). The film was more successful abroad, although poorly represented by an English language version (prepared by Mel Welles) which did not even feature the actors dubbing themselves. In the United States, where it came out in 1965 as What, the film soon circulated in a truncated, cheaply processed 77-minute mess of a print (almost identical to the butchered British version, Night Is the Phantom) which was best described by Lee as “a picture of opening and closing doors and shadows and funny footfalls and people spinning around and nobody being there.”⁴

The storyline featured the now established characters associated with Italian Gothic horror films: a nineteenth century setting (although the producers chose to be unspecific in order to avoid problems on costumes and sets), a morbidly suggestive atmosphere with nods to the feuilleton, convenient doses of eroticism and an emphasis on the female character. All this, however, with an eye to foreign models. As the opening image clearly shows—Christopher Lee galloping towards Castle Menliff is an almost exact replica of the beginning of The Pit and the Pendulum, American International Pictures’ Corman/Poe cycle was the main model Gastaldi was asked to stick to. “The producers […] showed me an Italian print of The Pit and the Pendulum before I started writing it: ‘Give us something like this,’ they said.”⁵

And yet, the relationship between AIP’s Poe films and Italian Gothic horror is a curious one: a game of rebounds and reciprocal influences—of communicating vessels, so to speak. First, both had in common a more disenchanted attitude towards the genre, free from the classical monsters’ routine—whose survival was granted by Hammer films—and linked to the inner self. Both displayed an attitude clever enough to grab a Gothic icon such as Poe (with respect to Italy, see The Blancheville Horror and especially Castle of Blood) in order to shape it and distort it at will—yet they were characterized by a similar taste for the baroque, the mannerism, the delirious as Poe’s own stories.

Italian films were similar as well to Corman’s works because of the limited budgets, hasty shoots and tight crews. Obviously, there were also precise iconographic and stylistic points of contact, such as the emphasis on the décor and set-pieces as an element of anxiety (“The house is the monster” was Corman’s answer to Samuel Arkoff’s perplexities on the commercial potential of House of Usher, which lacked a proper monster) and the repetition of identical situations and images. The sight of ladies in their nightgown moving through dark corridors often evoked by Martin Scorsese about Italian horror films can actually refer to either House of Usher or The Virgin of Nuremberg, while the multicolored hooded figures of The Masque of the Red Death owe a lot to the monochromatic torturers in the opening scene of Bava’s debut as well as the pallbearers wearing scarlet hoods in the funeral scene of The Whip and the Body.

It was also a matter of commercial strategies. Corman borrowed Barbara Steele as a horror icon after Black Sunday for The Pit and the Pendulum, whose American trailer openly referred to Bava’s film—AIP’s biggest hit as a distributor so far. In Italy it was to be the opposite, with The Pit and the Pendulum used as a blueprint, as Gastaldi recalled, while Bava cast Mark Damon, the lead in House of Usher, for the most Corman-like episode of Black Sabbath.

Yet, such a pragmatic film-maker as Corman would have never played with the incongruencies and the limits of the scripts like Bava was used to do. Bava’s inventions were often the product of individual craftsmanship and improvisation, whereas the American director relied on a tight organization production-wise, to the point that Richard Matheson, his scriptwriter on many films of the Poe cycle, labeled him—perhaps ungenerously—as a mere “traffic cop.”⁶ Gastaldi noted how the Sanremese director did not make any changes in regard to the dialogue, plot or characters, but just altered some special effects as described in the script. Yet the way he dealt with the fantastic element of the story in The Whip and the Body is particularly interesting, and deserves an in-depth analysis.

According to Tzvetan Todorov’s oft-quoted definition, the Fantastic occupies the time span of uncertainty, of the “hesitation” before an event which “cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world,”⁷ before a choice that will lead the reader either to the “uncanny” (that is, the supernatural explained) or the “marvelous” (that is, the supernatural accepted as just that).

Italian Gothic horror films often took sides in either of these two extremes. Besides those movies where the supernatural element had a central role, there were others where it turned out to be a red herring, such as Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock and The Ghost, De Martino’s The Blancheville Monster and Mastrocinque’s An Angel for Satan. All these films dealt with curses, monsters and possessions which had their roots in earthly intrigues; similarly, the murderous entities of The Virgin of Nuremberg and Bloody Pit of Horror were decidedly human.

At times, though, a more thought-provoking approach emerged, which in turn revealed the cracks in Todorov’s theory and underlined its schematic construction. Such a case is The Whip and the Body. The film’s peculiar narrative, which continually veers between a ghost story and a murder mystery with a rational explanation, piles up unexplained or obscure passages: examples are the mention of a secret path through which Kurt’s father visited his son before being killed, or the muddy footprints that appear on the castle’s floor and stairs.

This time it was not, as with The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, a matter of pages being torn off the script at the very last minute. The plot had its share of holes. Yet Bava did not worry about tying up the loose ends: on the contrary, he closed the film with an extraordinary directorial coup de théatre which further shuffled cards. Unlike the previous apparitions of Kurt’s ghost—whom Bava showed with a standard shot/reverse shot routine and always from the point of view of his lover Nevenka (thus emphasizing her subjectivity), in the final scene the director shows the two lovers’ deadly embrace, both in the same shot, as Nevenka is about to stab Kurt.

As Italian Bava scholar Alberto Pezzotta noted, “This would seem the denial of the theorem, and the evidence of Kurt’s ‘existence.’ Yet immediately afterwards Bava shows us the same scene as seen through the eyes of Cristiano: this time, Nevenka is embracing the void. So then, who was watching the previous scene, when the ghost was visible (which was not a POV shot, mind you)? Bava is not interested in dissolving the ambiguity, or in teaching some lesson about cinema as an illusion. The Whip and the Body is a truly Fantastic film precisely because it does not add up and its logic falters: not only and not so much in the plot, but especially in the filming. Contradictions, red herrings […], misconceptions that the script cannot handle […]: everything contributes to building a world the laws (or non-laws) of which are quite peculiar.”⁸

This way, Todorov’s “choice” is denied—or rather, we the audience find ourselves in a position similar to that of the character who is observing Nevenka, yet without any element that might enable us to choose one solution over another. Did Kurt really exist? Or was he just a projection of Nevenka’s unsatisfied lust and madness? This is no longer a mere hesitation, but a stalemate, an impasse. Well after the words “The End” have appeared on screen, we are still in a position best-described as follows: “Hesitation, doubt, uncertainty, bewilderment are all terms that could equally express such a state, provided it is clear that this is not the state of someone who is undecided between two alternatives, but led to doubt the validity and adequacy of the paradigm of reality itself […]; this is not the hesitation of someone who stands at a crossroads, but the loss of someone who found himself at a dead end and cannot retrace his own steps.”⁹

The Whip and the Body is in many ways the quintessential Gothic film—or rather, it looks like it. What immediately strikes the viewer is Bava’s use of the landscape and the way it interacts with the characters.

In his treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)—one of the key works in the foundation of the aesthetics and poetry of literary Gothic—Edmund Burke pointed out how the Sublime is connected to natural phenomena, whose suggestion is likely to push us “by an irresistible force” towards the world of the imagination and the sensational, where wonder becomes terror. It is commonplace in the Gothic that characters’ emotions are highlighted and replicated by natural events.

As he did in Black Sunday, with The Whip and the Body Mario Bava transposed on film an idea of the landscape that draws on the Romantic and Gothic conception of the Sublime, by blending real exterior locations and studio sets. In both films the landscape conveys a feeling—an emotion connected to terror and pain. In Black Sunday’s opening scenes, the crooked branches and brambles, standing between the camera and the carriage on which the two doctors were traveling in the woods, evoked the idea of a hostile and overpowering environment. Similarly, The Whip and the Body’s image of the mysterious rider, galloping towards a gloomy castle as darkness falls, perfectly sums up one of the central images of the Romantic iconography.

Nature occasionally assumes anthropomorphic or symbolic shapes: that is the case with the branches which look like skeletal fingers and frighten the coachman in Black Sunday, or the tree branch that opens a bedroom window and hisses inside the room like (appropriately) a whip in The Whip and the Body. In a similar way, the furious storms that sweep Castle Menliff echo Nevenka’s tormented soul and psyche: in the encounter between her and Kurt on the beach, where the two lovers hook up their ancient sadomasochistic bond, Bava elliptically suggests their arising passion by cutting from the lovers to the waves crashing on the shore.

Italian poster for Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (author’s collection).

Overall, the landscape in The Whip and the Body is a totally imaginary creation, as is typical with Bava. Whereas in I Vampiri Bava had sticked a view of the Eiffel Tower by the river Aniene, and reinvented the Saint-Jacques tower as a part of the Du Grand castle, here the director incongruously transported the sight of an Alpine manor (Castle Fenis in Aosta) on a shore—the Tor Caldara beach that Bava also used in Knives of the Avenger (I coltelli del vendicatore, 1966). In so doing, Bava reproduced, by means of optical tricks, one of those fantastic landscapes dear to such painters as the Mannerist Agostino Tassi (1580–1644), who used to insert realistic details within oneiric contexts. This way, Bava put on film Edmund Burke’s celebrated axiom: “No work of art can be great, but as it deceives.”¹⁰

Another element that sets The Whip and the Body aside from its American counterparts—as well as much of its Italian contemporaries—is the way Bava used the color palette, which goes far beyond Corman’s pop attitude. The arbitrary use of color, as opposed to Freda’s dramatic and functional one, is a sign of the modernity of Bava’s approach to the Gothic.

First, and most patently, the lighting is not justified by diegetic motives—see also the intermitting light outside the window of the nurse’s apartment in “The Drop of Water,” or the silhouettes that walk along the village alleys in Kill, Baby…Kill!—but responds to unpredictable laws. In Hercules in the Haunted World Bava framed the Sibyl behind a curtain of moving beads, bombarded with multi-colored lights (green, blue and yellow), to symbolize her essence, suspended between two worlds. In a pioneering essay on the director, Alain Silver and James Ursini pointed out how the use of primary colors was an expedient to externalize and emphasized the characters’ dilemma about the indistinguishability of reality and illusion.¹¹ However, this is not always true: on the contrary, more often than not the alternance of primary colors is released from the original meaning as pointed out by Silver and Ursini, and does not obey any rule, if not the director’s own whim.

That is the case with The Whip and the Body. In the scene in which Nevenka hears the cracking of Kurt’s whip for the first time and follows its sound throughout the castle, Bava seemingly resorts to colors as a palette of the character’s feelings. Daliah Lavi’s face is lighted with a violent red that suggests a feverish desire, and which alternates with a deep blue that stands for fear. Yet, as the story moves along, other characters who wander inside Castle Menliff are subjected to the very same treatment, regardless of their emotional state.

Aesthetic and dramatic function become increasingly blurred. As one critic noted, “Colors serve both to give a scene a greater depth as well as creating a dreamlike dimension and a constant tension.”¹² This leads to an unreal and schizophrenic world where every sequence and shot becomes an attraction in itself, regardless of who appears or what is happening (or not happening) in it. This way, Bava achieves striking, almost abstract effects: in the scene where Nevenka is in bed, the director cuts from the image of the moon surrounded by clouds to Nevenka’s (out-of-focus) hair on the pillow. Then the camera moves towards her eyes, which are the only lighted part of her body, “like in a painting by Alberto Martini.”¹³

Much has been said and written about The Whip and the Body’s sadomasochistic theme, which caused the film plenty of trouble in its native country. The board of censors—to which the film was submitted only 12 days after Bava’s other horror film of the year, Black Sabbath—gave it a V.M.18 rating (“forbidden to minors”) but demanded no cuts. The production company appealed, after making a few cuts, and obtained a more commercially viable V.M.14. However, this did not prevent The Whip and the Body to be seized on October 12, 1963, with charges of obscenity, because of “several sequences that refer to degenerations and anomalies of sexual life.” It was eventually released in January 1964. However, the law court of Rome ordered the confiscation of several scenes that were considered “contrary to morality,” disposed that the film poster be destroyed and condemned the chief press officer at Titanus to three months on probation.¹⁴

Besides the required amount of spicing to the recipe—aided enormously by Lavi’s extraordinary screen presence—The Whip and the Body is one of the most patent examples of the general intolerance towards the institution of marriage, on a par with the more blatant The Long Hair of Death. The return of the prodigal son Kurt, who has come back to claim his family property, including his beautiful sister-in-law Nevenka, has turbulent effects on the woman, reviving her dormant desires and anxieties; furthermore, it undermines a family that is stable only in appearance, leaning on a marriage of convenience and devoid of love—that of Nevenka and Cristiano.

Yet, even though she is an adulteress and a murderess, Nevenka is never seen as an utterly negative character, but rather as the victim of a patriarchal family that has forced her to marry someone whom she does not love. Although at Kurt’s funeral the priest claims that the deceased has been struck by divine justice, there is hardly a superior force at work in the film—rather, it is a subterranean vein of self-destruction that corrodes the family as a whole.

Compared to the male characters in other Italian Gothic horror films, the Lucifer-like Kurt Menliff is one of the rare examples of a strong male figure who recalls the “cruel fatal man” as embodied in Gothic novels by the titular character in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer or Father Schedoni in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian. “There was something terrible in [Schedoni’s] air; something almost superhuman. […] and his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts,” as Radcliffe wrote, a description which fits Lee’s imposing screen presence. All this, however, melts like snow under the sun in Gastaldi’s script.

Kurt the rebel shows up at Castle Menliff with all the boldness and the contemptuous arrogance of a fallen angel who returns to reclaim his place in heaven, sowing discord and paying back his relatives with the same hatred that had been reserved for him. But his game costs him his life. Kurt’s murder, after scarcely half an hour, comes as a shock to the audience, who—given the presence of Christopher Lee—were expecting an all-round villain for the entire duration of the film. It is not simply a nod to Marion Crane’s murder in Psycho (as in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, Gastaldi was smart in absorbing and reworking Hitchcockian influences), but a real sabotage of the romantic hero character.

The Whip and the Body moves along in a seemingly contradictory manner, with an apparent subservience towards the romantic trappings of the story and its actual disruption of them. Since the opening credits, in Gothic golden letters on a scarlet silk curtain, accompanied by Carlo Rustichelli’s sumptuous main theme, Bava’s film seems to stick with a turgid rétro Romanticism. Such was also Gastaldi’s impression: “The movie disappointed me a lot,” he confessed to Luigi Cozzi in a 1970 interview. “I was thinking about a story in terms of a psychological nightmare, in the style of Clouzot’s films, but Bava saw in it a baroque and decadent drama, and emphasized such tones beyond belief.”¹⁵

Bava collects the basic elements of the Gothic novel—the galloping rider, the forces of nature as a mirror of the characters’ emotions, etc.—and employs languid tracking shots so as to isolate single elements of the scene: a case in point is the dagger that Giorgia’s (Harriet White) daughter had used to kill herself under Kurt’s influence, which is kept under a glass case and will become the weapon of Kurt’s murder. Yet sometimes these symbolic objects—the dagger as an instrument of revenge, the vase of red roses connected to Kurt’s apparitions—get the upper hand over the characters and the plot, and dominate the scenes and the story with an effect of abstraction from the narration.¹⁶

However, Bava’s was not quite a post-modern reflection as Sergio Leone’s would be with the founding elements of the Western. Bava was never a cinephile, and his was mostly an aesthetic challenge: as a film-maker, he enjoyed cultivating the taste for experimentation, chisel, visual mockery. Add to that a detachment which grew from the awareness that what he was doing meant absolutely nothing: he did not have the presumption of believing otherwise. That is why Bava’s less successful films are those where the centrality of the story is unavoidable, such as his Westerns. Similarly, the least interesting parts in his horror films are usually the expository sequences (such as the conversation between Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Piero Lulli in Kill, Baby…Kill!), where the director was restrained by the need to give room to dialogue.

True, the script for The Whip and the Body is pegged at outdated clichés, such as a hand that suddenly pops up onscreen and leans on a character’s shoulder from behind, and it draws a lot from the overall atmosphere of Corman’s films. Nevertheless, Bava was not deluding himself that he could frighten the viewer by showing muddy footprints or playing hide-and-seek with Kurt’s ghost. Understandably, he focused his attention on something else, by amplifying the subjective and inner dimension of fear: a case in point is Kurt’s ghastly hand which, distorted by a wide angle lens, literally fills the screen from Nevenka’s point of view.

This makes The Whip and the Body the first Italian Gothic horror film centered on the ghosts of the subconscious, an anticipation of the so-called “paranoid texts” that would characterize so much Gothic cinema to come, including Bava’s final masterpiece Shock.

Notes

1. Ernesto Gastaldi, email interview, March 2011.

2. Lucas, “What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood,” p. 38.

3. Ernesto Gastaldi, email interview, July 2014.

4. Michael Parry, “CoF interviews Christopher Lee, Part 3,” Castle of Frankenstein 12, 1968, pp. 30–31.

5. Lucas, “What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood,” p. 38.

6. Tom Weaver and Michael Brunas, “Quoth Matheson, “Nevermore!,”” Fangoria 90, February 1990, p. 16.

7. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 25.

8. Pezzotta, Mario Bava, p. 66.

9. Lucio Lugnani, “Per una delimitazione del “genere,” in Remo Ceserani, Lucio Lugnani, Gianluigi Goggi, Carla Benedetti and Elisabetta Scarano, eds., La narrazione fantastica (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983), pp. 72–73.

10. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (New York: Digireads.com, 2009), p. 42. As with other Italian Gothic Horror outings, the film’s castle is actually a mosaic of different locations. A few exteriors (the drawbridge and the inner court) surprisingly come from a famous yet almost unrecognizable location: Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. Similarly, the studio interiors of Castle Menliff—mostly the same as seen in Margheriti’s Castle of Blood—are inexorably broken by scenic and color elements that divide them into incongruous portions, thus creating perspectives and niches which seem to belong to contiguous yet impervious dimensions.

11. Silver and Ursini, “Mario Bava: the Illusion of Reality,” p. 95 ss.

12. Di Chiara, I tre volti della paura, p. 159.

13. Pezzotta, Mario Bava, p. 66.

14. Alessio Di Rocco, “Visto in censura: La frusta e il corpo,” Nocturno Cinema 94, June 2010, p. 81.

15. Luigi Cozzi, “Così dolce … così perverso… Intervista con Ernesto Gastaldi,” Horror 5, April 1970, p. 56.

16. One extraordinarily bewildering sequence in The Whip and the Body is a case in point: while Cristiano and Katia are debating whether Kurt is dead or not, as Pezzotta notes, “from a pedantic shot/reverse shot of the two characters talking, the director cuts to a vase of red roses (while the dialogue continues off-screen), and moves around it for about 180 degrees, before returning to the actors, now in the background, who are still exchanging fundamental bits of dialogue: but in the meantime the viewer’s—and the director’s—attention has long gone.” Pezzotta, Mario Bava, p. 64.

1964

Castle of Blood (Danza macabra)

D: Anthony M. Dawson [Antonio Margheriti] (and Sergio Corbucci, uncredited). S: “based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe”; SC: Jean Grimaud [Gianni Grimaldi], Gordon Wilson, Jr. [Bruno Corbucci]; DOP: Richard Kramer [Riccardo Pallottini] (B&W); M: Riz Ortolani; E: Otel Langhel [Otello Colangeli]; PD: Warner Scott [Ottavio Scotti]; AD: Roger Drake [Ruggero Deodato], SE: Anthony Matthews [Antonio Margheriti]; SS: Eva Koltay. Cast: Barbara Steele (Elisabeth Blackwood), Georges Rivière (Alan Foster), Margaret Robsham [Margrete Robsahm] (Julia), Henry Kruger [Arturo Dominici] (Dr. Carmus), Montgomery Glenn [Silvano Tranquilli] (Edgar Allan Poe), Sylvia Sorent [Sylvia Sorrente] (Elsi), Phil Karson, John Peters, Ben Steffen [Benito Stefanelli] (William), Johnny Walters [Giovanni Cianfriglia] (Killer), Merry Powers [Miranda Poggi], Raul H. Newman, [Umberto Raho] (Lord Thomas Blackwood). PROD: Franco Belotti, Walter Zarghetta for Era Cinematografica (Rome), Leo Lax Films (Paris) (U.S. version: Frank Belty [Leo Lax], Walter Sarah [Marco Vicario]); GM: Giovanni Addessi; PM: Al Givens [Alfonso Donati]; PS: Charles Smith [Giancarlo Sambucini]. Country: Italy/France. Filmed at Castle Bolsena (Viterbo); Running time: 90 min. (m. 2431); Visa n: 40624 (06.25.1963); Rating: V.M.18; Release dates: 02.27.1964 (Italy); 07.29.1964 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Globe International Film (Italy); Woolner Brothers Pictures, Inc. (U.S.A.); Domestic gross: 100,680,000 lire. Also known as: The Castle of Terror, Coffin of Terror, Dimensions in Death, Danse Macabre (France, 04.14.1965). Home video: Image (DVD, U.S.A.), Sinister Film (DVD, Italy).

Journalist Alan Foster challenges Edgar Allan Poe on the authenticity of his stories, which leads to him accepting a bet from Lord Blackwood to spend the night in a haunted castle on All Souls’ Eve. Ghosts of the murdered inhabitants appear to him throughout the night, re-enacting the events that lead to their deaths. It transpires that they feed on the blood of the living visitors in order to maintain their existence. Blackwood’s sister Elisabeth is also one of the ghosts, as she had been murdered by her husband. Elisabeth and Alan fall in love, and the woman tries to save his life from the bloodthirsty undead…

The idea of making a low-budget horror movie came to Sergio Corbucci when producer Giovanni Addessi commissioned him a film which would re-use the Medieval sets of Corbucci’s period comedy Il monaco di Monza, also produced by Addessi and starring Totò. Corbucci, who was supposed to direct the film himself, asked his brother Bruno and Gianni Grimaldi (that is, “Gordon Wilson, Jr.,” and “Jean Grimaud”) to write the script. Then, when it came to start the movie, Corbucci found himself in a conflicting schedule, having to direct another film. He then called on his good friend Antonio Margheriti.

The presence of Barbara Steele was one of the film’s assets. According to Ruggero Deodato, who was Margheriti’s a.d. on the set, “since she had just done Fellini’s 8½, Barbara wanted to keep her distance from the horror genre. It was I who persuaded her, because we were friends. I had first met her at Demofilo Fidani’s place […]. She was so nice, she made me crazy. When I paid her a visit or brought her cats back, whenever Fellini stopped by—he used to visit his actresses every morning—Barbara had me hide under the bed.”¹

When interviewed about Castle of Blood, Margheriti used to minimize the film’s merits, with a self-criticizing attitude that recalled Bava’s, claiming that it was “even more boring” after all those years. “I remembered it well, just like that, and unfortunately it’s got all the limits of a film done in too much of a hurry, perhaps even scripted in a hurry: we had to shoot everything in a few days, because then the workers would come and dismantle the sets […]. When today we rediscover and screen these things of the past, I don’t think they’re good in themselves—they may be good to those of us who experienced them back in our own time.”²

Having to work on a tight schedule, Margheriti perfected his technique of using several cameras at once: “In order to manage in keeping the shooting schedule within fifteen days, I shot with the same method as in television, by using up to four cameras at once. One was placed on tracks, another one on a dolly, and so on. I had a camera with three lenses, and after a line of dialogue my a.d. used to pat on the cameraman’s shoulder, so that he would change the lens and do a close-up […]. This way I was able to get many fragments which nevertheless were easier to edit together.”³

However, to finish the film on time Margheriti had to call Sergio Corbucci for help. “Sergio came on the set only once, and gave me a hand shooting one scene, or else we’d have gone half-a-day behind schedule. […] While I was shooting the bit of the serpent’s head being cut, he was above, doing the scene where the couple is in the room, and then the “macho” enters,” Margheriti explained, referring to the scene in which Giovanni Cianfriglia kills Barbara Steele and her lover.

Castle of Blood features the most typical traits of the Italian Gothic film—starting with its overt (but fake) literary lineage. According to the credits, Castle of Blood is based on a—non-existing—short story by none other than Edgar Allan Poe. The Poe connection goes further: the two scriptwriters conjectured Poe’s journey to England (which never happened) and turned him into a character in the film itself, as played by Silvano Tranquilli: an expedient that had already been used by such writers as Manly Wade Wellman (“When It Was Moonlight”) and John Dickson Carr (“The Gentleman from Paris,” which was made into a film in 1951’s The Man with a Cloak) and that later became a staple in mystery literature—think of Philip José Farmer, Nicholas Meyer and Harold Schechter’s novels starring Poe—and film (Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt, 2011, and James McTeigue’s The Raven, 2012). However, Corbucci and Grimaldi manage to slip in another Poe reference: the name Lord Blackwood (the character played by Umberto Raho) recalls Poe’s satirical short story “How to Write a Blackwood Article.”

No doubt Corbucci and Grimaldi were trying to cash in on the then very popular AIP Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman. According to film scholar Chris Fujiwara, “It is, above all, the use of décor in Margheriti’s film that recalls Corman: the emphasis on the prolonged and repeated examination of the sets; the ritual predictability of the settings—dining room, ballroom, bedroom, staircase, study, crypt. Furthermore, the casting of Barbara Steele in the role of Blackwood’s sister, Elisabeth, links Castle of Blood as much to Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, in which her character is also called Elizabeth (though with a “z” and not an “s”), as to the films she had made with Bava and Freda.”⁴

Moody Mexican poster for Antonio Margheriti’s Castle of Blood (1964) (author’s collection).

Poe as a character brings to the screen the mythical halo of the maudit writer and his obsessions: on the other hand, he clashes with the Italian Gothic’s typical pragmatism. In the opening sequence we find Poe in a tavern, reciting the final paragraphs of one of his most celebrated tales, “Berenice”—another short story anthologized in Feltrinelli’s volume I vampiri tra noi—before pointing out to journalist Alan Foster (Georges Rivière), who complimented him for the wisdom of his writings, that he is just like Alan—a reporter. That is, a mere observer of reality, powerless and defenseless against the horrors which he witnesses, as Foster will be as well. Such interpretation is not as far-fetched as it might sound: according to Poe scholar Carlo Bordoni, “when Poe writes about a supernatural theme, he always does it with special attention, by presenting the cause to the reader in a discursive, almost diary-like form, thus underlining the aspect of documentary evidence, of unusual experience, mysterious but no less justifiable on a rational level.”⁵

Edgar Allan Poe would return several times in Italian Gothic films, mostly as a commercial gimmick and sometimes just as a vague reference: it is a sign of a sensibility that is closer to the psychological (or “everyday,” as Italo Calvino labeled it) Fantastic, characteristic of the late nineteenth century, than to its previous, “visionary” incarnations.⁶ In Castle of Blood, Poe sheds light on a contradictory vision of the fantastic: he is at the same time the (apocryphal) source of the story and a character. Thus, according to Corbucci and Grimaldi’s game, he depicts himself and his oeuvre within one of his own stories, as is the case with the aforementioned reference to “Berenice.” But Poe, as we have seen, claims himself to be just a reporter, and in the final scene he sadly observes: “When I’ll tell this story, no one will believe me.”

It is a punchline that causes the film to fold in on itself: the story Poe will tell is the one we have just seen. And since said story features the supernatural, it follows that all other Poe tales are not fiction, but mere transpositions of the existing. Without even being aware of it, Corbucci, Grimaldi and Margheriti end the film on a thought-provoking enigma.

Besides being a ghost story, Castle of Blood is also a vampire tale, although the film’s bloodthirsty undead, who need blood to maintain their suspended non-life, are a far cry from the typical Victorian specters, and are much more genuinely menacing and terrifying because of that.

Despite Margheriti’s cost-saving methods, Castle of Blood retains several scenes of undoubted horrific power, such as the skeleton which starts breathing in the crypt (a special effect done by the director himself, who labelled it “terrible”), and Rivière’s desperate escape from the undead, which are still rather effective today. Others, such as the “breathing” painting, betray the haste in which the movie was made.

“The portrait of the woman, who in our intentions had to look as if it was practically breathing, became a ridiculous thing, tremendous, almost like a flag in the wind,” Margheriti recalled, bemusedly. “Here, these are just the things where we take a fall, failing to reach the desired result by a little.… I was given an old optical printer, one of those that operated in the water … my a.d. told me: “Well, you know, it’s the light.…” “What light? (laughs) Looks like she’s swimming!” I remember I got angry even then because of that special effect.”⁷

And yet, the film’s core is not horror but eroticism. A typical situation of the Gothic filone requires that a living person fall in love with a dead one, or vice versa: in this sense, Castle of Blood follows a similar path as The Long Hair of Death, Terror in the Crypt and La vendetta di Lady Morgan (1965, Massimo Pupillo). However, unlike the pale specters that obsessed Poe’s characters, such love is often not platonic at all, with all the paradoxes and anxieties that follow. According to Alberto Pezzotta, “eros […] has to do with, and even seems consubstantial, to the passing of a threshold: the one between the living and the dead, between the real and the supernatural.”⁸ That is why in Castle of Blood Elisabeth proclaims: “I live only when I love.” Elisabeth is a “queen bee,” more ethereal but no less voracious than Marina Vlady in Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed. She is a man-eater that only through her due punishment—death—can become a romantic heroine, without losing her characteristics nor giving up on her sexuality.

Margheriti’s emphasis on eroticism is also evident in one of the film’s most famous scenes, where Julia (Margrete Robsahm) makes a pass at Elisabeth, who responds in horror “I love men, do you understand? Men!” Although the topic of lesbianism is a recurrent one in Italian Gothic, Castle of Blood is the first to explicitly portray it on screen with the aforementioned scene, possibly one of the reasons that earned the film a V.M.18 rating (“for the sadism that permeates the whole picture and for the sensuality [sic] of several scenes”) and, according to Margheriti, caused quite a scandal when the film opened in Rome.⁹ Yet, even though the emphasis on eroticism is a required element (so much so that the more daring French cut featured actress Sylvia Sorrente in a nude scene), Margheriti’s film is remarkable for its portrayal of the heroine: Elisabeth Blackwood is a more faceted character than usual, as her psychological and behavioral splitting is not a consequence of hypnosis or coercion.

The way Elisabeth greets Foster, teasing him about his manhood and dropping not-so-veiled allusions to the possibility of spending the night together, makes her immediately appear as a seductress—therefore dangerous, and surely a liar, according to the typical notion of woman in an inhibited society. Soon, though, we find out that Elisabeth is sincerely in love with Foster, thus becoming a positive character. Later on, however, we will discover that, just like the undead who inhabit the castle, she feeds on human blood. Yet, for love—and here is a further reversal—she is willing to sacrifice herself and make her beloved escape. In Elisabeth many contradictory traits live together without apparent friction: she is at the same time a woman-monster and a romantic heroine, thus emerging as one of the most complex and enigmatic female characters in Italian Gothic horror.

On the other hand, the male hero is eroded as the film moves along. Initially an active character, purposeful and bold, Foster—who accepts without hesitation the bet as proposed by Lord Blackwood, as he is convinced of the non-existence of the supernatural—becomes a passive spectator, fearful and trembling, whose manly bravado cracks with a trifle: “Must I have to give you courage—a woman?” Elisabeth teases him. Powerless against past events that unroll before his eyes, in the end Foster—in a curious reversal of narrative roles—assumes the position normally reserved to the damsel-in-distress: it is up to Elisabeth to save him from the other bloodthirsty undead, in a plot twist later recycled verbatim in Massimo Pupillo’s La vendetta di Lady Morgan. Foster’s failure is ideological (as was that of his predecessor Carmus), economic, diegetic. Soon the reporter’s rational conventions are demolished by the evidence of a supernatural dimension, and in the end he loses the bet (and his life with it), thus failing across the board in his “institutional” task, so to speak.

On the other hand, Dr. Carmus—who decapitates a snake in the presence of Foster and shows him the severed head’s twitchings in order to prove his theory about the permanence of the vital instinct beyond death—is just a deluded soul, a victim like the reptile he just killed. What is more, he is further proof that Italian Gothic was simply not interested in the theme of progress and science as a Promethean challenge to God, which was central to American Horror.

Despite its plethora of menacing ghosts, Castle of Blood’s most ruthless character is a living person: Lord Blackwood (Umberto Raho, rigged with a thin mustache à la Vincent Price), the absent lord of the castle who pulls the strings of the story by playing with the lives of the unfortunates who accept his bets. Blackwood (whose true family name, as Foster discovers, is the more ominous Blackblood¹⁰) is a further development—although not as blatant—of the Gothic’s Sadean villains such as Dr. Hichcock, and a figure worthy of an Ambrose Bierce story. “He’s as sadistic as his grandfather,” as Carmus defines him, recalling the ancestor’s custom of hanging his enemies to the trees in the park: an anticipation of the vicious habits of the bloodthirsty titular character in Bava’s Baron Blood (Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga, 1972)—and near the end Foster actually sees the old victims hanging from the branches, just like in Bava’s film the castle bastions fill up with corpses. Blackwood survives because his attitude towards the supernatural is pragmatic: he accepts its existence and turns it in his favor, instead of being dazzled by it like the aforementioned “reporters.” Blackwood takes advantage of his castle’s curse to bet sums he will never lose, and in the last sequence he cynically takes—like he presumably did with Foster’s predecessors—the payment from the dead man’s pockets.

One of Castle of Blood’s most fascinating aspects is the concept of time that is at its core. An apparently linear situation (a night spent in a haunted castle) unveils a metaphysical dimension which circularly, and obsessively, repeats itself like a loop. In Margheriti’s film, the past and the present coexist within the same space: this way, Foster can be the witness of events that took place ten years earlier. The Blackwood manor is a sort of crossroads of space and time, within which characters are pushed by a force that condemns them to an eternal repetition of their own acts. Previous lives (and deaths) are staged again and again in the same places, like contrails of a past whose effects remain and affect the present: rather than the retaliations in Dante’s Inferno, the result is a meditation on time and the eternal return which recalls either Julio Cortázar’s stories (such as The Other Sky, where the protagonist finds himself from Buenos Aires’ art-deco Güemes gallery in 1928 to nineteenth century Paris), Adolfo Bioy Casares’ celebrated The Invention of Morel or, for a more cinematic comparison, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961).

According to Fujiwara, “Foster is a journalist, that is, he deals in the commodification of time. The time of Foster’s journalism is no less a cycle of eternal recurrence than the time inside the castle—or, for that matter, the time of Italian genre cinema. Asked by Elisabeth to inform her about life outside, Foster replies, “Well, there’s nothing new. People are born and others die every day, business seems as usual. In fact the world goes on and remains the same. You haven’t missed anything while staying here in your own world.” A few moments later, he adds, “To be honest, I’ve been very lonely.” His solitude is the counterpart and the meaning of the unchanging, abyssal time-space of London, a chronotope bound to the commodity form of the reproducibility of experience, in which there is no possibility of a direct experience, but only one more repetition of the same.”¹¹

Castle of Blood’s central theme focuses on the typical dichotomy between the rational and the irrational. At first, reason is represented by Foster—the reporter, the hero; then, once Foster has come in contact with the afterlife, it is the turn of his predecessor, Dr. Carmus (Arturo Dominici). Carmus’ loss in the bet, even before Foster’s, also marks the defeat of reason: the inability to explain and reduce the supernatural to physical terms, measurable and demonstrable empirically. The only solution is to become reporters—that is, accepting its existence and report its record, like Poe does. It is up to Carmus himself to assume such a task, leading Foster from one room (and one time) to the next, like a Virgil with his own Dante, with surreal effects: the duo’s peregrinations in the haunted castle bring to mind the visions of the Hôtel des Folies Dramatiques in The Blood of a Poet.

Faced with visions of the past, Foster gets stuck, unable to intervene: if one of the recurring clichés in films and literature focusing on time paradoxes is the prohibition of meddling in the past, otherwise disastrous effects will follow, here the impossibility is even physical. Castle of Blood’s central part, in which Carmus shows Foster the past events that took place in the Blackwood manor, also works as a mise en abyme of the relationship between the viewer and the film. Just like an audience watching a movie, Foster can look but not act: his participation is only emotional, and marks the hero’s gradual embrace of the sensorial dimension—the only thing that will make him live beyond physical life, as Carmus revealed. In the end, after his death, Foster will remain in balance on the threshold of both worlds: his lifeless body is impaled on the outside of the castle, unreachable by the undead vampires but also separated from the living, while his spirit and senses are still active: from now on he too, just like Elisabeth, will live only when he loves.

The film’s disappointing box-office results were one of the factors that led Margheriti to remake it in color, in 1970, as Web of the Spider, starring Anthony Franciosa, Michèle Mercier and Klaus Kinski. The director would comment: “It was stupid to remake it, because the color cinematography destroyed everything: the atmosphere, the tension. I always tried to do my horror films in B&W. Even today, I’m still convinced that the only way of making a really scary horror film, with that kind of disturbing atmosphere and suspense, is to shoot it in B&W.”¹²

Notes

1. Manlio Gomarasca, “Monsieur Cannibal. Il cinema di Ruggero Deodato,” Nocturno Dossier 73, August 2008, p. 11. Incidentally, several sources (including IMDb) list the renowned stage and film actor Salvo Randone in the cast, as Lester the coachman. This is obviously not true: given that said coachman (who is on screen for a handful of seconds) does not look like Randone at all, the thought that a famous actor like Randone—who had just played major part in such prestigious films as Francesco Rosi’s Hands Over the City (Le mani sulla città, 1962) would accept a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in a low-budget film, with no close-ups nor dialogue lines, is simply ridiculous.

2. Garofalo, “Le interviste celibi,” p. 2.

3. Paolo Fazzini, Gli artigiani dell’orrore. Mezzo secolo di brividi dagli anni ’50 ad oggi (Rome: Un mondo a parte, 2004), p. 51.

4. Chris Fujiwara, “Margheriti, ‘Danse macabre’ et l’intensité,” in Frank Lafond, ed., Cauchemars Italiens. Volume 1: Le cinéma fantastique (Pris: L’Harmattan, 2011), p. 53.

5. Carlo Bordoni, Del soprannaturale nel romanzo fantastico (Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2004), p. 82.

6. Italo Calvino, ed., Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday (New York: Penguin, 2001, 2009).

7. Garofalo, “Le interviste celibi,” p. 2.

8. Pezzotta, “Doppi di noi stessi,” p. 30.

9. Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Interview,” p. 47.

10. As Fujiwara notes, “In any case, “Lord Blackwood” is another fake; as Foster learns, the family name was formerly Blackblood, before it was changed to obscure the source of the family’s fortune (the first Lord Blackblood was a hangman). Thus the question of origin, of the original name, is folded into the text of the film.” Fujiwara, “Margheriti, ‘Danse macabre’ et l’intensité,” p. 56.

11. Ibid.

12. Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Interview,” p. 45.

Castle of the Living Dead (Il castello dei morti vivi)

D: Warren Kiefer. S and SC: Warren Kiefer; C: Aldo Tonti (B&W); M: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, conducted by Carlo Savina (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Mario Serandrei; PD: Carlo Gentili; MU: Guglielmo Bonotti; AD: Fritz [Frederick] Muller; 2nd AD: Michael Reeves; C: Luigi Kuveiller; SO: Fiorenzo Magli. Cast: Christopher Lee (Count Drago), Gaia Germani (Laura), Philippe Leroy (Eric), Mirko Valentin (Sandro), Donald Sutherland (Sgt. Paul/The witch/The old man), Renato Terra Caizzi (Policeman), Antonio De Martino [Anthony Martin] (Nick), Luciano Pigozzi (Dart), Ennio Antonelli (Gianni), Jacques Stany (Bruno), Luigi Bonos (Marc). PROD: Paul Maslansky for Serena Film (Rome), Filmsonor (Paris); PM: Renato Dandi; PS: Antonio Girasante. Country: Italy/France. Filmed at Orsini-Odescalchi Castle, Bracciano and at Bomarzo. Running time: 90 min. (m. 2700); Visa n: 43311 (06.27.1964); Rating: not rated; Release dates: 08.05.1964 (Italy); 1965 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Cineriz (Italy); Woolner Brothers Pictures, Inc. (U.S.A., theatrical), AIP-TV (U.S.A., TV); Domestic gross: 103,500,000 lire. Also known as: Crypt of Horror, Le château des morts vivants (France), The Castle of the Living Dead (U.S.A.—TV print). Home video: Sinister Cinema (DVD-R, U.S.A.), Passworld (DVD, Italy).

France, early nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars, a small traveling theatrical company, specialized in staging a macabre comedy featuring Harlequin in public squares, is invited at the castle of Count Drago to run through their act. The company is joined by a Napoleonic officer on the run, Eric, who falls for the prima donna, Laura. On the way to the castle the group meets an old witch who warns them about the “castle of the living dead,” and prophesies death for someone among them. The eerie Count warmly welcomes the company, but the troupe leader, Bruno, falls dead during his stage act, apparently by accident: it turns out, however, that Drago has perfected a drug that can instantly embalm any form of animal life, and needs new victims to add to his macabre collection of “living dead” statues. However, one member of the company, the diminutive Nick, discovers the truth, and tries to stop Drago from killing his fellow troupe members…

When he arrived in Rome, Warren Kiefer had left everything he had—a job, a wife, a child—behind. What he had, was a dream. As one friend said of him, “he had a romantic concept of the writer’s life and a naive fancy that just over the horizon was the Promised Land.” As opposed to those pilgrims that moved to America looking for a promised land, Kiefer—born in New Jersey in 1929—followed the opposite trail. His Promised Land turned out to be Italy—better still, Cinecittà. Kiefer wanted to be in the movies, and found a niche in the U.S.–based community that inhabited the so-called “Hollywood on the Tiber,” savoring the delights of La Dolce Vita and trying to make some money in the process.

Dreamers are lucky. They need to be. And luck, to the 34 year-old Warren, came in the guise of a fellow American, the 30-year-old, New York–born Paul Maslansky. He and Kiefer met at the Cinecittà tank, where the latter was shooting additional footage for a documentary about oil in Libya, while Maslansky was the production manager on the hokey Irving Allen epic The Long Ships (1964, Jack Cardiff), which was being shot in the Cinecittà studios.¹ They liked each other, got along well, and talked about making a movie together, in Italy. According to Maslansky, Kiefer had married again at that time, with a beautiful American woman named Ann-Marie. His former self—Kiefer the businessman, trying to make ends meet and struggling to be a writer—had been left behind, and so his first wife and son. The new Kiefer, the writer and filmmaker, was born.

That is how Castle of the Living Dead germinated. Kiefer provided a script about a bunch of street comedians who, in the early nineteenth century, are summoned to the castle of a nobleman who has perfected a rather unnerving embalming method and is looking for human beings to add to his collection; Maslansky acted as producer. “We both wanted to make a feature, and Rome was a good place then to try. We each put up $10,000, plus my script” Kiefer recalled. “With those elements we contacted Chris Lee for 10 working days, and shot the film in five weeks at a splendid old castle overlooking Lake Bracciano,”² that is Castle Odescalchi. A few scenes—which would provide for the film’s most memorable images—were shot at the Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, about a hour’s drive from Rome.

Italian fotobusta for Warren Kiefer’s Castle of the Living Dead (1964). Note that the direction is credited to “Herbert Wise” and Kiefer’s name does not appear (author’s collection).

All in all, it was just another little B-movie, a hit-and-run job that would provide both director and producer with quick cash. And yet, Castle of the Living Dead has gained a one-of-a-kind controversial status, partly because of its own merits, and partly for reasons that are either coincidental, paradoxical, unfathomable, or just plain absurd.

Example? As of today, many sources wrongly state that Castle of the Living Dead was directed by an elusive Italian filmmaker named Lorenzo Sabatini, and that Warren Kiefer was just a pseudonym, while it is quite the opposite. The name Lorenzo Sabatini was made up by Kiefer himself, paying homage to an Italian mannerist painter of the sixteenth century. The reason? It was economically convenient for Warren to pass off as an Italian citizen, and for the film to receive subsidies according to Italian cinema laws.

But it was not the only compromise the director had to go through in order to have the film financed and distributed. “Angelo Rizzoli’s Cineriz came up with the main financing, and qualified the film as an official Italo-French co-production. This complicated my credit because to receive state subsidies, an Italian director was required,” as Kiefer would later explain. “Thus, the Italian version of the film carried me only as scriptwriter and story originator, listing “Herbert Wise” as the director. “Wise” was an American-sounding pseudonym registered in Italy by my first A.D., Luciano Ricci. In my Cineriz contract, however, my name had to appear full card, last credit, as sole director on ALL other versions.”³

A comparison between different prints of the film confirms Kiefer’s words. On the Italian language DVD, immediately after the title, a card says “un film di Warren Kiefer” (“a film by…”), but in the end another card says “regia di Herbert Wise” (“directed by…”). Whereas on the English language print, the screenplay and direction are credited to Warren Kiefer, while Maslansky is listed as the co-scriptwriter. The name “Herbert Wise” does not appear, nor does Luciano Ricci. It must be noted, however, that Castle’s assistant director Frederick Muller is adamant that Ricci never showed up on the set.

However, as discussed earlier, it was a common practice for Italian filmmakers to use foreign pseudonyms. That is why many started thinking that the name “Warren Kiefer” might actually refer to an Italian filmmaker. Where the devil cannot put his head, he puts his tail: according to a publicity article on a movie magazine at the time of Castle’s release, the directors were “two young Italian filmmakers, Luciano Ricci and 32-year-old Lorenzo Sabatini, born in Florence.” Perhaps the unknown writer simply took this bit from the film’s press kit, or just made it up. However, hence came the notion that Sabatini was an Italian director born in 1932, whose pseudonym was Warren Kiefer, which can be found on Italian film dictionaries and reference books.⁴ Such an error would spread incontrollably throughout the years.

At the time of the film’s release, however, Italian reviewers usually did not seem to care who the director really was. One ill-advised, unnamed film critic even identified Herbert Wise with Riccardo Freda: “Bomarzo is one of Central Italy’s architectural wonders […] Freda degraded it to the setting of a bad vampire movie […]. Clumsily directed by the filmmaker, who this time is hiding under the fraudulent pseudonym Herbert Wise (previously it had been Robert Hampton), Philippe Leroy and Gaia Germani try their best to look terrorized […].”⁵ The one exception was the reviewer on La Stampa, who wrote: “Signed by Herbert Wise, the pseudonym of Italian Luciano Ricci (such mysteries are typical of French-Italian co-productions) the film was actually directed by an American, Warren Kiefer, who also wrote the story and screenplay.”⁶

Castle of the Living Dead was shot in 24 days on a cost which Kiefer recalled as approximately $135,000 dollars ($116,000 according to an article on the Daily American,⁷ while Maslansky’s approximation was $125,000). Maslansky and Kiefer managed to average four minutes of film on the screen each day: an impressive achievement, even though not uncommon in the realm of the Italian B-movie industry, considering that Freda shot I Vampiri in 12 days. Each night after shooting they hurried to Rome to watch the rushes of the day’s filming, select what they wanted and be on the set the following day at 7 a.m.

The dynamic duo devised all sort of speed-up techniques, no doubt benefiting from shooting most of the film on one location. They devised a floor plan of the Odescalchi castle so as to shoot in one room and then in the next; a second set was ready to go at all times so that as soon as one scene was completed the next would be ready (the same in case something would not work on the first set); filming most scenes in one take and getting three different shots (close-up, medium, long) at the same time. To save time, Maslansky and Kiefer gave up their idea of recording an original sound track. “Changes in the cast which brought in several non–English speaking actors made this impossible, and even if it hadn’t the acoustics of the castle would have, said Kiefer. And getting original sound wouldn’t have been as time-saving as the moviemakers at first thought.”⁸

Another mystery surrounding Castle of the Living Dead centers on the entity of the contribution to the finished film on the part of a then unknown, nineteen-year-old Brit by the name of Michael Reeves, who had become friends with Maslansky on the Yugoslavian set of The Long Ships, where the former worked as production assistant. Struck by the young man’s enthusiasm, Maslansky hired him on Castle of the Living Dead. Reeves would make his own debut as a director the following year, on another Maslansky-produced little horror movie shot in Italy and starring (well, not quite so) Barbara Steele, The She Beast (Il lago di Satana, 1966).

During the years, Reeves’ work on Castle of the Living Dead has been wildly overpraised. Italian prints of the film do not even credit Reeves’ name, who is listed as a.d. with Fritz [Frederick] Muller on the American International Television English language print. Nevertheless, rumors that Reeves had been the true director all along would soon spread. In his celebrated piece In Memoriam Michael Reeves,⁹ written soon after the young filmmaker’s premature death, Robin Wood claimed that Reeves had shot all the sequences at the Parco dei Mostri; according to others, Kiefer fell ill after nine days and Reeves took over the whole production. On the revised edition of his classic book on English Gothic cinema A New Heritage of Horror, David Pirie writes: “Maslansky corrected this for me while I was writing the first edition of Heritage, explaining it was quite untrue. Reeves remained on the second unit for the entire picture, but the work he was doing with a scratch crew turned out so much better than Kiefer’s that his contribution was enlarged and he was allowed to make some additions to the script, including the introduction of a rather Bergmanesque dwarf.”¹⁰

However, this contradicts what Maslansky stated in a 1999 interview, that the dwarf character was planned since the beginning: hoping to find an English-language speaking little person for their film, Kiefer and Maslansky flew to England to visit Billy Barty’s circus, but to no avail. One night they went to see a Lindsay Anderson Royal Court production of Spoon River Anthology, where they spotted an incredibly talented young man, tall, lanky and with a prominent Adam’s apple, who played five or six roles in the play. They paid him a visit backstage and asked him if he wanted to make a horror movie in Italy for 50 bucks a week. The young thesp accepted. That’s how Warren met one of his closest friends, Donald Sutherland, who would pay homage to him by naming Kiefer one of the twins his girlfriend Shirley Douglas gave birth to a couple of years later. Sutherland would later picture the director as “a lovely cigar-smoking whiskey-drinking mystery-writing rogue of a man.”

According to film historian Benjamin Halligan, “Back in Rome, Maslansky had advertised for an actor of restricted growth for the role of the dwarf and fifteen arrived outside his flat on the morning of the audition. The first was called up (from the flat window) and, after four storeys of stairs and a disconcerting amount of time later, Anthony Martin arrived in a state of some physical exhaustion. Maslansky was mortified and to save further embarrassment awarded Martin the part. Martin, a tobacconist and part-time actor, would go on to appear in Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, Horror Hospital, Vampire Circus (as Skip Martin) and Fellini’s Casanova among many other uncredited roles.”¹¹ Like Kiefer, he was eventually credited with an Italian pseudonym, Antonio De Martino.

While it is true that Jim Duncan’s piece in the Daily American mentions “a second unit under the two assistant directors filming less important action while the main crew was at work on another scene,” conceived in order to create a speed-up technique, Kiefer’s assistant director Frederick Muller was adamant with this writer that all the film was shot by Kiefer without Reeves ever being present. Kiefer himself, in a 1990 letter to U.S. film critic Steven Johnson, stated that “Michael Reeves hung around as an unpaid gofer during the production and had nothing whatever to do with the direction or anything else. He was English, rich and bright, and later went on to make one or two films with his own money before dying of a drug overdose.”

It is likely Maslansky asked Reeves to film a few missing shots without the cast being present (for instance, a carriage riding in the woods). As Halligan puts it in his book on Michael Reeves, “Mike oversaw some pick-ups, cutaways and, once principal photography was complete, missing shots. In some circumstances this would have been considered “Second Unit” material—but nothing that would ultimately make for any discernable authorial imprint on the finished film.”¹² Later on, Reeves would initially talk up his involvement in Castle of the Living Dead but, as Halligan recalls, “only occasionally referred to this period as one of “some rewriting” on a script that was being made by a director friend.”¹³

In his book on Mario Bava, All the Colors of the Dark, Tim Lucas reports Luciano Pigozzi’s assertion that Bava actually worked on Castle of the Living Dead:

“‘Another time, he [Bava] was up on the mountain, and asked for three or four white sheets—I don’t know what for—and he painted. The scenery was very bad, but after he made the special effects … my God! You could see a ship, all the time making with this special glass, and you see the ship on this postcard—and he put it very close to the water, and you could see this ship going up and down, up and down, and afterward, it disappeared.’

“Which film was this?

“‘It was, it was … Il castello dei morti vivi. The Castle of the Living Dead.’

“Bava worked on that film, too?

“‘Yeah. He came to make that scene, that special effect.’”¹⁴

However, there are no scenes featuring ships at all in the film, as the story does not even take place by the sea—nor is there any such scene in the original script. Lucas’ assumptions that “Bava’s effect appeared on the periphery of a scene and would only be visible when the film was shown in its correct 1:85 ratio,” or that perhaps it did not make the final cut, do not hold. Occam’s razor suggests that Pigozzi simply got confused with another film on which Bava took care of the special effects, especially since the actor’s vague memories are contradicted by other participants in the film. When asked about Bava’s contribution to Castle of the Living Dead, Frederick Muller has no hesitation whatsoever. “Certainly I don’t remember Mario Bava coming to the set ever. And I should know because a few years later I produced a film directed by Mario Bava. No, this is pure invention.… I wonder why people make such things up.”¹⁵

Lucas also states that Kiefer was a pseudonym for Lorenzo Sabatini, and further develops Pirie’s and Wood’s theory that Michael Reeves shot a portion of the film, with ill-advised conclusions. “Reeves’ specific contributions to the film would appear to include the scenes involving Dart, such as the gallows skit, the tavern fight, the scaling of the castle wall to Laura’s bedroom window, and his death-by-scythe. […] Another patently obvious Reeves contribution is the film’s opening narration […] which shows an attention to historical timing extremely uncharacteristic of Italian horror, and strongly parallels the opening narration of his final, and finest, film (Witchfinder General).”¹⁶

The film’s Italian-language script, conserved at Rome’s CSC, titled Il castello dei morti vivi—House of Blood (almost 200 pages long and with a stamp dated April 13, 1964) could be misleading. First of all, it includes a voice-over (absent from the final film) of the dwarf Dart (who will become Pic in Italian language prints) which gives the proceedings an almost picaresque tone. It also further dismisses Maslansky’s confidences to Pirie, as the dwarf was obviously a central character since the very beginning.

The script—which is very precise in specifying camera movements and angles in almost every scene—displays a number of differences from the final film. All the scenes set in Bomarzo are missing, and the action takes place almost entirely in the castle. What is more, the old hag who lives in the “Mouth of Hell,” played in the film by Donald Sutherland, is absent. According to Frederick Muller, this was an embryonic version of the script, whereas the ones given on the set already included the scenes at the Parco dei Mostri as well as Sutherland’s second character. It must be excluded, then, that Kiefer improvised new scenes during shooting: it is likely that he and Maslansky visited Bomarzo while scouting locations, and that the director added a few more scenes in a last-minute rewriting before shooting started in order to take advantage of such a fascinating set. Muller also confirms that all the scenes in Bomarzo were shot by Kiefer alone.¹⁷

The script also contradicts Mel Welles’ assertions, as reported by Halligan: “During post-synch in Fono Roma, a furious Lee discovered that there was no soundtrack at all, and that all the continuity sheets had been mislaid. Fireworks ensued, but Paul [Maslansky] won him over and the film was dubbed in its entirety as well as possible. […] Mel Welles, who oversaw the post-synching, claims the lost continuity sheets was partly a ruse to improve the dialogue.”¹⁸ Yet what can be read in the script is virtually identical to what can be heard in the finished film.

Other differences are the names of a number of characters (Count Drago is named Baron Ippo, his servant Hans is called Fausto) and, most remarkably, the ending, which is much more humorous—and better—than the definitive one. After Baron Ippo has accidentally impaled himself on the sword held by one of his human statues, the dumb Sergent Pogue and his colleague show up and arrest Laura and Eric, the two surviving actors, for the baron’s murder; then (while outside Dart helps the prisoners escape) Pogue and his companion drink a toast with the Baron’s cognac, unaware that it is actually the embalming fluid, thus getting immediately petrified.

Beautifully photographed by Aldo Tonti and starring Christopher Lee (looking less bored than in his other Italian forays of the period), Philippe Leroy and Gaia Germani, plus a few Italian character actors (including Luciano Pigozzi and Ennio Antonelli), Castle of the Living Dead was a modest success in Italy and a rather profitable entry in the U.S. horror market. However, as Kiefer stated, “the dividend for me on Castle became my enduring friendship with Don Sutherland.” The debuting Canadian actor slept at Kiefer’s home during shooting and played two roles in the movie: the dumb, self-important sergeant Pogue and an ugly old witch, in keeping with the mood of the film. Some sources claim Sutherland played a third role, that of an old man: however, this writer has not been able to spot it in the film. Good luck!

As Steven Johnson brilliantly synthesized in an in-depth essay on the film,¹⁹ Castle of the Living Dead shares several stock characters (or “masks”) with seventeenth and eighteenth century “Commedia dell’Arte”: the protagonists are specialized in a variation of a classic seventeenth century performance starring Harlequin, who tricks his own executioner into hanging himself in Harlequin’s place, and the plot itself unrolls as a variation of a classical Commedia play. Philippe Leroy and Gaia Germani embody the figures of Harlequin and Columbine beyond their theatrical roles, the fool Sergeant Pogue is reminiscent of the fearful and pompous Captain and the awkward Hans (Mirko Valentin) is the zanni, the antagonist’s servant whom Kiefer brings back to the original demonic figure it used to be, while Count Drago is a more malevolent and less luxurious Pantalone, the hero’s elderly antagonist.

At the center of the story there are two opposing male figures (the evil Count Drago and the clever hero Eric) fighting over a woman, and in the end Drago suffers the inevitable comeuppance, as he accidentally ends up petrified as his own human statues: a bizarre accident which recalls Harlequin’s play at the film’s beginning, where the hangman falls victim of his own instrument. It is no wonder that Kiefer revealed that he had originally written Castle of the Living Dead as a comedy of terrors, but Italian financers asked him to play it straight, making it into a “fairy tale for grown-ups.”²⁰

The differences with contemporaneous Italian horror films are evident in the description of the main female character. Gaia Germani’s Laura is a shallow presence, who passively suffers the hero’s advances as well as the villain’s attentions, and in the end, while the two are contending for her, stays aphasic into a corner, leaving the stage to the men, just like in a commedia. She is definitely not on a par with Italian Gothic’s evil queens.

The morbid elements are also reduced to a minimum: necrophilia is barely hinted at and soon forgotten. “You should never grow old, you should stay … you should stay like this forever” Drago tells Laura, to which she replies: “Every young woman wishes that, sir. To be old and ugly is what we all fear.” When we later discover the Count’s bride, embalmed in the nuptial bed in the act of observing her own beauty at the mirror for eternity, it almost looks like Kiefer is going to predate the necrophiliac amour fou at the center of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil. However, Drago’s purpose is merely aesthetic, instead of erotic: to recreate a personal theater whose players are all embalmed, a wax museum of sorts in the vein of House of Wax, and where he is the only director and audience.

What is more, despite being set in a typical Gothic mansion, Castle of the Living Dead is sunny and airy, unlike its contemporaries. The fact that the film’s unlikely savant is a dwarf gives it a fairylike quality that is especially evident in the scenes set in Bomarzo, easily the most memorable ones: the game of hide-and-seek between Pic and the gigantic Hans underlines Kiefer’s taste for the grotesque and his playful approach to the genre.

On the other hand, one thing in common with Italian Gothic horror films is the conception of space. Not simply because of its Italian locations, but because of the inventive way Kiefer combines them, elaborating the concept of “vastness” in his own way. When Luciano Pigozzi and Anthony Martin are seen wandering through the castle’s crypts only to emerge from the Ogre’s mouth in Bomarzo, it is as if they were entering another dimension, unexplained and impossible to reconcile with the film’s own topography and logic. This opens the way for a peculiar conception of the Fantastic, which is one of the most remarkable things about Kiefer’s film.

Although the Daily American announced the director’s next film as a Western called The Outrider, to be shot in Libya in November ’64 and co-produced by Kiefer himself, the project never materialized. Without a doubt, the American film-maker was a victim of the industry crisis that since 1963 displayed the economical fragility of many small production companies which specialized in low-budget flicks. As film historian Simone Venturini wrote, “the extreme fragmentation of production companies, the increased production costs, cinema’s progressive loss of centrality compared to other entertainment activities and the companies’ recurring economical speculations”²¹ were all factors that made many small fish sink in the troubled sea that was the Italian movie industry of the period.

Kiefer’s subsequent works were mostly screenplays for other directors, which were basically comprised into the Western genre, which he had always loved. In 1950 Kiefer had written a short story on Billy the Kid, and eventually tried his hand at it as a novelist, with Outlaw (1989). While he is credited as the co-scriptwriter for Beyond the Law (Al di là della legge, 1967), starring Lee Van Cleef and Lionel Stander and directed by Giorgio Stegani,²² there is no trace of him in the credits of the little-known Sunscorched (Jessy non perdona.… Uccide a.k.a. Tierra de fuego, 1965), directed by and starring Mark Stevens and Mario Adorf, which he nevertheless claimed as being based on his own script.²³ Another Kiefer-penned western was the dreadful The Last Rebel (1971, Denys McCoy), starring former football star Joe Namath and Jack Elam and graced by an unbelievable rock score by Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, featuring keyboardist Jon Lord of Deep Purple fame.

In his correspondence with Steven Johnson, Kiefer claimed having directed “half a dozen films after Castle” and having scripted “perhaps twenty more,” adding that “all this work was done in Italy and various Italian directors got the credit (because under Italian subsidy laws the producer could only collect if the film was signed by an Italian) while I got the paychecks.” This makes things even more cloudy, as Kiefer’s official output as a director includes only two more titles: the idiosyncratic film noir Defeat of the Mafia (Scacco alla mafia, shot in late 1968 but released in late 1970) and the erotic Juliette De Sade (Mademoiselle De Sade e i suoi vizi, shot in 1969 but released in Italy in late 1971²⁴), a spurious adaptation of De Sade’s work. It may well be that the number of films he scripted and directed was a creative addition on Kiefer’s part. After all, reading his own bio on his novel The Lingala Code makes one suspect that the author had the same creative knack for mixing fact and fiction regarding his own life as he had for his novels.²⁵

Warren Kiefer’s subsequent efforts behind the camera were nowhere near as successful as Castle. Conversely, they remain barely seen as of today. He eventually moved to Argentina in the early 1970s, where he started a successful career as a novelist. He died of a massive heart attack in Buenos Aires, in 1995.

Notes

1. Warren Kiefer, letter to Steven Johnson, July 24, 1989. Kiefer shot a documentary for Esso in Libya, but it is likely that his experience in Africa also comprised a trip to the Congo, as his 1972 novel The Lingala Code—set in the period after the killing of Patrice Lumumba—opens with Kiefer’s statement that “The Congo background is represented substantially as it was during the author’s time there.”

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. See Roberto Poppi and Mario Pecorari, Dizionario del cinema italiano. I film (1960–1969) (Rome: Gremese, 1993); Roberto Poppi, Dizionario del cinema italiano. I registi (Rome: Gremese, 2002).

5. Anonymous, “Il vampiro di Bomarzo,” La Notte, August 8, 1964.

6. Anonymous, “Dracula si rinnova: da vampiro a imbalsamatore,” La Stampa, August 6, 1964.

7. Jim Duncan, “Horror-For-Fun Pays Off,” Daily American August 30–31, 1964.

8. Ibid.

9. Robin Wood, “In Memoriam Michael Reeves,” Movie 17, Winter 1969/1970.

10. Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror, p. 168.

11. Email to the author, November 2011.

12. Benjamin Halligan, Michael Reeves (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 41.

13. Ibid.

14. Lucas, Mario Bava, p. 575.

15. Email to the author, July 2010. Muller was production manager on the additional scenes Bava shot for Alfredo Leone on what would become The House of Exorcism.

16. Lucas, Mario Bava, p. 575.

17. Email to the author, January 2012.

18. Halligan, Michael Reeves, pp. 40–41.

19. Steven Johnson, “Italian American Reconciliation: Waking ‘Castle of the Living Dead,’” Delirious—The Fantasy Film Magazine 5, 1991.

20. Duncan, “Horror-For-Fun Pays Off.”

21. Venturini, Galatea Spa (1952–1965), p. 30.

22. The film’s opening titles credit the story to Warren D. Kiefer and the screenplay to “Mino Roli, Giorgio Stegani, Fernando di Leo and Warren D. Kiefer.”

23. In a letter to Steven Johnson dated March 1, 1990, Kiefer mentions “two westerns with Lee Van Cleef and Lionel Stander, another with Mark Stevens and Mario Adorf.”

24. The film was released in the United Kingdom as Heterosexual, in 1970.

25. In his bio for The Lingala Code, Kiefer claimed that he had served active duty with the Marines during the Korean War, whereas in fact he was only in the Marine Corps for a few weeks before being discharged for medical reasons. Another misinformation in the bio has Kiefer claiming that he studied at Andover, a private prep school for boys, whereas he was educated at the University of New Mexico, and the University of Maryland.

The Hyena of London (La jena di Londra)

D: Henry Wilson [Luigi Mangini]. S and SC: Henry Wilson; DOP: Hugh Griffith [Guglielmo Mancori]; M: Frank Mason [Francesco De Masi]; E: John Alen; ArtD: Gabriel Kriss [Gabriele Crisanti]; SD: Al Merik [Franco Colli]; AD: Frank Bhandy [Franco Baldanello]; C: Craig Mark [Mario Sbrenna]: MU: Landry Manuel [Leandro Marini]; SO: Mario Sisti; SS: Robert Grand [Roberto Giandalia]. Cast: Bernard Price [Giotto Tempestini] (Dr. Edward Dalton), Diana Martin [Patrizia Del Frae] (Muriel), Tony Kendall [Luciano Stella] (Henry), Denise Clar [Ilona Drasch] (Margie, the housekeeper), Claude Dantes (Elisabeth), Alan Collins [Luciano Pigozzi] (Peter, the caretaker), John Mathews [Giovanni Tomaino] (Chris, the butler), Thomas Walton [Luigi Rossi] (Inspector O’Connor), James Harrison [Angelo Dessy] (Dr. Anthony Finney), Anthony Wright [Gino Rumor] (Quayle), William Burke [Attilio Dottesio] (Police Official Brown), Robert Burton [Mario Milita] (John Reed), Felix De Artal, Annie Benson [Anita Todesco] (Margaret), Tony Wise. PROD: Giuliano Simonetti for Geosfilm (Rome); AP: Thomas Walton [Gino Rossi]; PS: Henry Boley [Enrico Bologna]; PA: John Bread [Agostino Pane]. Country: Italy. Filmed at Villa Perucchetti, Rome. Running time: 79 min. (m. 2680); Visa n: 42977 (05.20.1964); Rating: V.M.14; Release dates: 06.23.1964 (Italy); 1966 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Geosfilm (Italy, Regional); Walter Manley Enterprises (U.S.A.); Domestic gross: 44,000,000 lire. Home video: Sinister Cinema (DVD-r, U.S.A.).

London, December 1883. A savage murderer named Martin Bauer, also known as the “Hyena of London,” is executed on the gallows. However, a few days later his coffin is found empty. Just when peace seems to have finally returned, a new series of brutal murders start again in the nearby village of Bradford. The victims are all young women, and Scotland Yard has no doubt in recognizing the hand of the “Hyena”—but how could that be, if the monster is dead? Meanwhile, strange things are going on at the house of the renowned Dr. Edward Dawson, whose daughter Muriel is secretly in love with the young and penniless Henry. The suspects include Dawson’s colleague Dr. Finney, an alcoholic who is staying at the doctor’s house for some mysterious experiments and seems to be hiding a secret, a scheming butler and his lover, the caretaker’s wife. The key to the mystery, however, lies in Dr. Edward’s secret experiments, which involve injecting fluid from the dead man’s brain into another individual…

An obscure item in its home country, where it performed with modest results on the regional distribution circuits, The Hyena of London was picked up for U.S. distribution in 1966 by Walter Manley Enterprises and eventually resurfaced on home video via a public domain label. A weird destiny for one of Italian Gothic horror’s most schizophrenic oddities: Luigi Mangini’s film assembles together a number of Gothic stereotypes, yet it is mainly noticeable for actually being a whodunnit in disguise, in which the supernatural element works as a red herring within a murder mystery plot.

Italian poster for the obscure Hyena of London (author’s collection).

Much of the running time is wasted around a chain of killings that are apparently being committed by a serial killer who seemingly returned from the grave, yet it is all too evident that the solution must be quite different. However, for its final twist Mangini’s script draws—with curious results—from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by linking the mystery’s solution to a split personality case. Nevertheless, all this is squeezed into a last-minute para-scientific explanation which blatantly rips off both Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain (adapted to film no fewer than three times) and Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle, albeit in a totally unconvincing way. The solution to the mystery also sweeps away the morbid incestuous implications in the relationship between two of the main characters (namely, Dr. Edward and his daughter), a common theme in contemporaneous Italian Gothics. The erotic content, however, is rather lame.

The same can be said of the stereotyped Victorian setting: working on a shoestring budget, Mangini has to make do as he can: a handful of old London postcards in the prologue make up for the real thing—and luckily for him, Italians do not know enough about British geography to notice that the West Yorkshire town of Bradford is not nearly a “small village,” nor is it so close to London as the film pretends it to be. Attentive viewers will notice that the villa where most of the action takes place is Villa Perucchetti in Rome’s Monti Parioli district, the same one featured in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Also, the tunnel at the film’s beginning, through which Bauer is accompanied by the guards before the execution, is the same that Barbara Steele explored in Freda’s film.

Compared to other Italian horror films of the period, the atmosphere is more clichéd, with foggy cemeteries and unlikely period details (the costumes are especially slapdash), while the murders are elliptically filmed, with a heavy emphasis on menacing shadows and several surprising POV shots, giallo-style, of the murderer in action. Yet, for all the film’s shortcomings, Mangini manages to come up with a few atmospheric shots and keeps the camera moving resulting in plenty of tracking shots.

As customary, the whole cast hides behind Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms, starting with the stage actor Giotto Tempestini as “Bernard Price.”¹ Besides working for the big and the small screen, Tempestini (1917–2009) was also an appreciated voice actor who took part in many radio dramas in the immediate post–World War II years. A trio of Mario Bava regulars—a young Luciano Stella, fresh from his role in The Whip and the Body, Blood and Black Lace’s Claude Dantes and the unmistakable Luciano Pigozzi—share the spotlights, while a beardless Attilio Dottesio pops up briefly. Francesco De Masi’s score is recycled from The Ghost.

Director Luigi Mangini (Rome, 1921–1991), here sporting the pseudonym “Henry Wilson” and often credited in reference books with the diminutive “Gino” Mangini, was a former screenwriter who claimed to have written over 100 scripts, a number that must be drastically toned down. Among his credits, which cover many genres, are Totò all’inferno (1955, Camillo Mastrocinque), David e Golia (1960, Ferdinando Baldi) and Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops (Maciste nella terra dei ciclopi, 1962, Antonio Leonviola). Mangini debuted behind the camera in 1963, co-directing with Piero Ghione the political documentary on Russia Dagli zar alla bandiera rossa. His directorial output consists of six films overall: besides The Hyena of London, he made a pair of nondescript film noir efforts (Fango sulla metropoli, 1967, starring Giancarlo Giannini, and I diamanti che nessuno voleva rubare, 1968); the western Bastardo, vamos a matar (1971) and the juvenile comedy Abbasso tutti, viva noi (1974). His last screen credit is Gabriele Crisanti’s shockumentary Mondo cane 2000: l’incredibile (1988), for which he wrote the story and screenplay.

Note

1. Not to be confused (as IMDb does) with the English-born stage actor Bernard Ashley Price (1925–2000) who played minor roles in English television series such as The Canal Children and Doctor Who.

The Long Hair of Death (I lunghi capelli della morte)

D: Anthony Dawson [Antonio Margheriti]. S: Julian Berry [Ernesto Gastaldi]; SC: Robert Bohr [Tonino Valerii], Anthony Dawson; DOP: Richard Thierry [Riccardo Pallottini] (B&W); M: Evirust [Carlo Rustichelli]; E: Mark Sirandrews [Mario Serandrei]; ArtD: George Greenwood [Giorgio Giovannini]; SD: Henry Fraser [Enrico Fiorentini]; CO: Humphrey Patterson [Ugo Pericoli]; AD: Bob Parks [Roberto Pariante], Guy Farrell [Gaetano Fruscella]; C: Humbert Tennberg [Ubaldo Terzano]; MU: Edmund Stroll [Euclide Santoli]; Hair: Florence Clark [Itala Cambi]; SO: John Tamblyn [Giulio Tagliacozzo]; SS: Eva Koltay. Cast: Barbara Steele (Helen Karnstein/Mary Karnstein), George [Giorgio] Ardisson (Kurt Humboldt), Halina Zalewska (Elizabeth Karnstein), Robert Rains [Umberto Raho] (Von Klage), Laureen Nuyen [Laura Nucci] (Grumalda), Jean Rafferty [Giuliano Raffaelli) (Count Humboldt), John Carey [Nello Pazzafini] (Monk), Jeffrey Darcey (Messenger). PROD: Felice Testa Gay for Cinegai (Rome); PM: Fred Dexter [Ferruccio De Martino]; UM: Paul Meredith [Paolo Mercuri], Dean Morris [Arduino Mercuri]. Country: Italy. Filmed at Cinecittà (Rome) and at Castle Massimo, Arsoli (Rome). Running time: 100 min. (m. 2775); Visa n: 44461 (12.29.1964); Rating: V.M.14; Release date: 12.30.1964 (Italy). Distribution: Unidis (Italy); Domestic gross: 321,000,000 lire. Also known as: La Sorcière sanglante (France, 08.08.1970) Hævnens flammer (Denmark). Home video: East West Entertainment (DVD, U.S.A.—double feature w/Terror-Creatures from the Grave), Midnight Choir (DVD, U.S.A.—double feature w/An Angel for Satan), Raro (DVD, Italy), Artus (DVD, France).

Towards the end of the 16th century, Adele Karnstein is accused of having murdered Count Franz Humboldt and is burned at the stake. Her little daughter Elizabeth is brought up to the castle and, upon reaching adulthood, is forced to marry Kurt Humboldt, who is actually the real murderer. The curse uttered by the unfortunate Adele becomes true: an epidemic of plague is raging in the land and Count Humboldt, Kurt’s father, dies after the sudden appearance of a woman whom he recognizes as Mary, Adele’s eldest daughter whom he seduced and killed years before. Kurt falls for the unknown woman and, along with her, plans to kill Elizabeth. His wife disappears, however, while everyone in the castle keeps referring to her as if she were still alive. Kurt, who feels haunted by Elizabeth’s ghost, is driven to terror and madness. Eventually he discovers that Elizabeth is alive while Mary is actually a ghost, who came back to exact revenge in her mother’s name. Kurt is locked and gagged inside a wicker figure, to be burned in the garden of the castle during a party…

The past as a crushing weight as well as a dynamic force that occurs again in the present, opening coffins and unmasking the guilty and their sins, shaking up consciences and claiming a price to be paid by the living, is a common element to many Italian Gothic horror flicks. Antonio Margheriti’s third foray in the genre, The Long Hair of Death, is particularly significant in this sense. Set in a remote past, in a gloomy realm where lust and corruption rule, the film focuses on a punishment that is both individual (striking the unfaithful husband and murderer Kurt Humboldt) and collective, with a plague outbreak that hits the village.

As in Terror in the Crypt, the script was the result of teamwork by Ernesto Gastaldi and Tonino Valerii (who reprised the title from their earlier effort) and had an equally hasty genesis. In an interview with Tim Lucas in Video Watchdog, Gastaldi recalled: “Valerii tried to direct that film, but the producer didn’t want him because, at that time, he hadn’t directed any movies. Antonio was called when the script was finished, and we met only once, so that I could explain some details to him. He didn’t change the script and I never went on the set.”¹

The story focuses on the idea of the female body as a simulacrum of a terrible and vengeful presence (the reincarnated Adele Karnstein, who was burned at the stake for a crime she did not commit), but moves further by totally destroying the dichotomy between the damsel-in-distress and the belle dame sans merci.

Here, Barbara Steele plays a bewitching conspirator who is also an avenging angel, and the script ingeniously plays on the scheme conceived by Mary and her lover Kurt in order to get rid of the latter’s wife, Elizabeth. The main influence, of course, is Diabolique, as the story focuses on the ambiguity of Elizabeth’s effective or presumed death. The apparently deceased woman is continually evoked by other characters or objects that bear traces of her presence, just like Paul Meurisse in H. G. Clouzot’s masterpiece. However, even though the audience is immediately aware that Mary is actually a reincarnated revenante, The Long Hair of Death maintains the point of view of the scheming husband, as a horror reworking of sorts of Pietro Germi’s Divorce, Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana, 1961).

On the other hand, the final twist borrows the shock ending from The Pit and the Pendulum, when Barbara Steele is trapped in the iron maiden. “Yes, of course!” Gastaldi confirmed. “The Pit and the Pendulum was a big influence on Italian horror films. Everybody borrowed from it.”² Nevertheless the final scene surprisingly predates the mocking epilogue of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) as well. Still, another memory of the commedia all’italiana comes to mind: the scheming Kurt, for all his cruelty, meets a fate that is as grimly hilarious as the one reserved to Alberto Sordi as the husband who is planning to kill his wife with disastrous results in Dino Risi’s The Widower (Il vedovo, 1959). All in all, it is a testament to the disenchanted, mordant vision of marriage that characterized the Gothic, Italian style, and which is emphasized by the dialogue.

“You are my wife, Elizabeth!” “You have not yet possessed me. What if I refuse?” “You can’t refuse, for I am your master!” can be heard in an explicit exchange between Kurt and Elizabeth. Under its horrific glaze, The Long Hair of Death is the story of female rebellion against patriarchy and male prevarications which turn women into designated victims—again, a nod to melodrama’s unfortunate heroines. The opening scene has Mary give herself to the elderly Count Humboldt only to save her mother, yet her sacrifice will be vain; what is more, her sister is forced to marry the Count’s son, who had her mother executed. Mary’s supernatural revenge thus acquires further significance when compared to other Gothic films of the period, and takes on an apocalyptic feel which is a one-of-a-kind moment in the filone: Steele’s resurrection from the grave takes place on the last night of the century, while an excerpt from John’s Revelations is recited.

Even though the result is not quite as strong as Castle of Blood, the film still has its moments—namely the memorably horrific sight of an apparently reanimated corpse whose chest is actually infested by rats, that cause it to wriggle and “breathe.” Customarily, Margheriti shoots many scenes with several cameras at once: this technique becomes an added factor of unpredictability, as it allows the director to capture a gesture or a momentary grimace, while the frequent use of hand-held shots heighten the irrational element of the story, as in the scene where Kurt comes across hints of the presence of his supposedly deceased wife.

Technically, The Long Hair of Death is constantly competent and stylish, thanks to Riccardo Pallottini’s accomplished b&w cinematography, which benefits from the presence of Ubaldo Terzano (Bava’s frequent collaborator) as the camera operator, under the a.k.a. Humbert Tennberg. Most of the shooting took place at Castle Massimo in Arsoli, with its unmistakable labyrinthine park, in just three weeks, and one cannot help thinking that the film’s most patent stylistic bit—the two-minute long take in the scene where the nurse brings young Elizabeth to visit her mother’s grave—had less an aesthetic function than a time-saving one.

Margheriti, however, was not too keen on the film. “I don’t like that one too much. I don’t like the story. The screenplay we had was very badly written and a lot of things were not really fixed in it. On the set, a lot of things turned out to be stupid or impossible, so we had to invent a lot and improvise every day. […] There was hardly any time to think, to invent, or write something down properly, because we had to shoot, shoot and shoot.”³

Notes

1. Lucas, “What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood,” p. 41.

2. Ibid.

3. Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Interview,” p. 49.

“Il passo” (from the film Amori pericolosi)

D: Giulio Questi. S and SC: Giulio Questi; DOP: Leonida Barboni (B&W); M: Ivan Vandor (Ed. RCA); E: Franco Arcalli; AD: Rinaldo Ricci; C: Elio Polacchi; PD: Luigi Scaccianoce; SD: Ermanno Manco; CO: Marilù Carteny. Cast: Juliette Mayniel (Isabelle); Frank Wolff (Captain Gerard Garnier), Graziella Granata (Jeanine); Piero Morgia (Jacques). PROD: Moris Ergas for Fulco Film/Zebra; PM: Carlo Murzilli. Country: Italy/France. Filmed at: Cinecittà (Rome); Running time: 34 min.; Visa n. 43279 (6.26.1964); Rating: V.M.18; Release date: 08.14.1964 (Italy). Distribution: Cineriz (Italy); Domestic gross: 48,300,000 lire.

France, 1912. A military officer, Captain Gerard Garnier, is obsessed by the sound produced by his wife Isabelle’s orthopedic shoe, which the woman has to wear since she became lame after a horse-riding accident. Garnier, who does not love his wife and married her just because of her social status and wealth, has an affair with the maid, Jeanine, and the two are planning to get rid of Isabelle by poisoning her. The plan succeeds, but before dying Isabelle repeatedly shoots Jeanine in the leg. Jeanine takes Isabelle’s place as the lady of the house, but Garnier will have to live with another lame woman…

“If your wife’s step is too heavy don’t kill her—another woman will come who will have the same step—if this step is inside you” ominously announces the opening line of Giulio Questi’s “Il passo.” As part of Amori pericolosi, an anthology feature film about “dangerous loves” (as the Italian title translates) produced by Moris Ergas—the other episodes being Carlo Lizzani’s La ronda and Alfredo Giannetti’s Il generale—Questi’s short film is perhaps the most surprising and idiosyncratic example of the way Italian Gothic overflew and contaminated auteur cinema, predating the works of Damiano Damiani, Elio Petri and Federico Fellini—or rather, how filmmakers outside of genres used themes and suggestions from the Gothic to explore more personal territories. As Questi himself recalled, “‘Il Passo’ made a great impression on the people of the movie industry because it was original, outside of any current canon: a cross between Buñuel’s cinema and refined, decadent atmospheres à la Cocteau. It was a morbid, sick little film.”¹

The short story, scripted by Questi himself, draws on elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s psychopathological Gothic to convey a macabre, darkly humored moral fable reminiscent of Grand Guignol, and riddled with symbols, by exploring a man’s obsession over the sound of his wife’s lame steps—an obvious nod to “The Tell-Tale Heart”—which leads to murder and a very bitter retaliation in the end.

But there is more than that. The setting, in a luxurious, mysterious villa; the opposite female characters (the faithful wife/victim and the scheming lover); the themes of sin and guilt; and most of all the weak male figure(s), all are typical Italian Gothic staples. Here, they are conjured up for a meditation on the nature of male desire as well as the relationship of mutual dominion between the sexes: in a reversal of roles, the lord of the house (Frank Wolff) is destined to become a mere puppet, at the mercy of his lover’s wishes. In another interesting variation on the theme of the “designed victim,” the meek, unhappy wife (Juliette Mayniel) eventually turns into her husband’s tormentor, with a vengeance that will have its effects after her own death on both her scheming murderers: the surviving woman (Graziella Granata) is subject to a transformation—physical, social and psychological—that turns her into the mirror image of her victim.

The female body becomes once again an object of attraction and repulsion (see the emphasis on Jeanine’s bare feet as opposed to Isabelle’s orthopedic shoe, which the former ritualistically slips on the latter’s foot), as the two opposites merge into one; however, the new lady of the house finds herself another, younger lover (Garnier’s young orderly, Jacques [Piero Morgia]), to satisfy her sexual needs that her husband cannot fulfill any longer: Garnier’s obsession with the woman’s lame step and orthopedic shoe—a typical Buñuelian detail if ever there was one: the obvious reference is The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ensayo de un crimen, 1955)—is also a metaphor of his impotence, while Questi manages to add a biting social commentary in the depiction of the relationship between the protagonists.

All this is rendered in a rarefied manner: just four characters, a quick dramatic progression and a meticulous attention to detail. But it is the style that marks “Il passo”’s approach to the material, which goes through a radical stylistic reinvention of the subject matter. Questi opens the film as if it were a straight Gothic tale, with the aforementioned line and an atmospheric, otherworldly sideways tracking shot of the villa’s exteriors at night as seen through the surrounding woods, to the sound of Ivan Vandor’s creepy score. However, though, he and ace editor Franco “Kim” Arcalli (possibly Italy’s most brilliant editor of the 1960s and 1970s, and a sort of auteur himself) immediately conjure up a symbol-ridden oneiric scene. Garnier dreams he is making love to his mistress Jeanine, when he is interrupted by an ominous sound which grows louder and louder: he wanders through the house in search of its source until he is so frightened by it that he eventually hides in a laundry room amidst blinding white clothings; he finally locks himself up in another room where he first glimpses an orthopedic shoe in the middle of a room, and then his wife Isabelle giving him an accusatory stare. The man kneels down behind the woman and starts tying her corset, while elsewhere the other woman laughs…

It is an extraordinary opening, lit and edited in a decidedly experimental style—quick, disorienting cuts between close-ups and long shots, suggestive camera movements, expressionistic sound and overexposed lighting—that owes much to the French Nouvelle Vague, and puts Il passo apart from its Gothic contemporaries, while in the meantime exploring the genre’s stylistic potential for a more mature and self-conscious narration.

Questi and Arcalli maintain this stylistic tension throughout the film, thanks to the frequent use of hand-held camera, and are immensely aided by Leonida Barboni’s truly extraordinary lighting and cinematography. Especially outstanding is the sequence where Wolff recalls his past encounter with his future wife in a dilapidated church, rendered through a subjective shot of the man wandering through the ruins and the echoes of past voices that eventually materialize in a flashback, when Gerard is seen proposing marriage to Isabelle. The actors are also top notch, and Granata exudes a proud sensuality (already exploited in Slaughter of the Vampires, where she played an unsatisfied wife) that makes her one of the most impressive female characters in Italian cinema of the period—a time when Italian films, and especially anthologies, were literally obsessed with the theme of the eternal feminine.

However, Amori pericolosi passed unnoticed at the box-office and soon disappeared from sight. Critics were not that kind either, although they partially salvaged Questi’s segment. The renowned Alberto Abruzzese wrote: “The episode conveys an old and decrepit theme with a formal refinement that is between a mannered decadence and a misunderstood naturalism.”² Stylistical experimentation, in the way Questi conceived it, was not particularly appreciated by Italian critics of the period, which were also not too keen on the film’s self-defined “Grand Guignol” quality.

After decades of obscurity, Il passo was rediscovered at the 66th edition of the Venice Festival in 2009 through the retrospective section “Italian Cinema Rediscovered.” Questi, one of the most peculiar and interesting personalities of 1960s and 1970s Italian cinema, would go on to make his feature film debut in 1967 with the Sadean spaghetti Western If You Live Shoot, a.k.a. Django Kill! (Se sei vivo spara). His sparse career as a director included such genre-defying works as Death Laid an Egg (La morte ha fatto l’uovo, 1968) and Arcana (1972)—all with Arcalli as co-writer and editor—as well as a few TV movies, made in the early 1980s, that contained strong Gothic elements such as L’uomo della sabbia (“The Sandman”) and Vampirismus, inspired respectively by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories. He passed away in 2014.

Arcalli, perhaps Italian cinema’s most brilliant editor, died at age 49 in 1978, while working on the script of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984): among his editing credits are Bernardo Bertolucci’s best films, including The Conformist (Il conformista, 1970), Last Tango In Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972) and 1900 (Novecento, 1976).

Notes

1. Giulio Questi with Domenico Monetti and Luca Pallanch, Se non ricordo male (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2014), p. 114.

2. Alberto Abruzzese, “Amori pericolosi,” Cinema 60 45, September 1964, pp. 61–62.

Terror in the Crypt, a.k.a. Crypt of the Vampire (La cripta e l’incubo)

D: Thomas Miller [Camillo Mastrocinque]. S: based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla; SC: Robert Bohr [Tonino Valerii], Julian Berry [Ernesto Gastaldi]; DOP: Julio Ortas (B&W, panoramic, Vistavision), Giuseppe Aquari (uncredited); M: Herbert Buckman [Carlo Savina], conducted by James Munshin [Carlo Savina]; E: Herbert Markle [Roberto Cinquini]; C: Noel Lardner [Emilio Giannini]; AC: Charles Sundberg [Angelo Lannutti]; AE: Judy Marlow [Mirella Marino]; AD: Robert Bohr; PD/SD: Demos Filos [Demofilo Fidani]; APD: Remy Villar [Renato Minnesi]; CO: Milose [Mila Vitelli Valenza]; MU: Joe Carlin [Emilio Trani]; Hair: Stephan Carlin [Stefano Trani]; SO: Ferdinand Larkin [Fernando Pescetelli]; SS: Piper Samson [Paola Salvadori]; DubD: Mario Colli. Cast: Christopher Lee (Count Ludwig Karnstein), Audry Amber [Adriana Ambesi] (Laura Karnstein), Ursula Davis [Pier Anna Quaglia] (Ljuba/Sheena), José Campos (Friedrich Klauss), Véra Valmont (Annette), Cicely Clayton [Carla Calò] (Ljuba’s mother), Vera Conjiù [Nela Conju] (Rowena), José Villasante (Cedric the butler), Angel Midlin [Angelo Midlino] (The hunchback), Bill Curtis [José Cortés], James Brightman; uncredited: John Karlsen (Franz Karnstein), Ignazio Balsamo, Lee Campos, Benito Carif, Angela Minervini (Tilde), Rafael Vaquero. PROD: William Mulligan [Marco Mariani] for MEC Cinematografica (Rome), Hispamer Films (Madrid); PM: Hector Corey [Otello Cocchi]; PS: Marcel Harrods [Marcello Lucchetti]; PSe: Heinz Bishop [Ezio Ranzini]. Country: Italy/Spain. Filmed at Castle Piccolomini, Balsorano (Aquila). Running time: 82 min. (m. 2329); Visa n: 42808 (04/22/1964); Rating: V.M.14; Release date: 05.27.1964 (Italy); 1965 (U.S.A., TV). Distribution: MEC (Italy, Regional); AIP-TV (U.S.A., TV). Domestic gross: 69,541,000. Also known as: La maldición de los Karnstein (Spain: 08/01/1966); La crypte du vampire (France: 09/22/1965—80 min.); Ein Toter hing am Glockenseil (West Germany: 03/03/1967—85 min.); Crypt of Horror (U.K.: 1965—84 min.). Home video: Image (DVD, U.S.A.—as Crypt of the Vampire).

Baron Von Karnstein, who lives with his daughter Laura in a solitary castle in the mountains, has become obsessed with the idea that Laura is the reincarnation of a vampire, Sheena, who placed a curse on the family several centuries earlier. After a noblewoman and her daughter are involved in a minor accident with their coach near the castle, the elderly lady suggests that the girl, Ljuba, stays at castle Karnstein for a while to recover after the accident. Ljuba and Laura become friends, and perhaps more than just that. Meanwhile, horrible murders start taking place in the neighboring countryside, and all the victims are drained of blood. Baron Karnstein’s suspicions seem to be confirmed…

The Italian poster for Terror in the Crypt crudely enhanced the film’s erotic element (author’s collection).

Among Italian Gothic films about female vampires, Terror in the Crypt deserves a place of its own. Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla, published in 1872, had already been the inspiration for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr and had been adapted just a few years earlier, in a contemporary setting, by Roger Vadim as Blood and Roses (Et mourir de plaisir, 1960). The idea to draw on Le Fanu’s original probably came to Tonino Valerii and Ernesto Gastaldi after reading the horror anthology I vampiri tra noi, which featured a preface by Vadim and was very popular at that time.

The original script was written in just three days, according to Valerii; Gastaldi says it was nailed in a mere 24 hours. “While chatting with a producer, Tonino Valerii and I told him the story of the film—we had just a tiny little sheet. We caught his interest, and he told us he would produce the film, but he needed the script at once, because he wanted to start shooting in a few days, for economical reasons. Lying shamelessly, I told him that the script was ready, and he happily told us that he would wait for us the next morning in his office with the screenplay, so that we would read it together. So, Tonino and I spent the night writing the script on my terrace, with Mara Maryl providing coffee.”¹ The working title was La maledizione dei Karnstein (The Curse of the Karnsteins)—the same as the official screenplay deposited at the CSC library in Rome, as well as the one mentioned by Christopher Lee in his autobiography.²

Initially, the film was supposed to be directed by Antonio Margheriti, who would later film The Long Hair of Death. “The producer liked the result and gave it to Antonio, who invited us at his home on the Appia Antica. Antonio, Valerii and I worked on the script for several afternoons, filling some scenes, correcting others and meeting the director’s needs,” as Gastaldi recalls.³ Eventually, due to Margheriti’s commitments, the directorial chair was eventually taken by Camillo Mastrocinque (1901–1969), an elderly veteran of comedies who had often worked with Totò on such titles as Siamo uomini o caporali (1955), Totò, lascia o raddoppia? (1956) and La banda degli onesti (1956), and who hid as was customary behind a foreign pseudonym, Thomas Miller. Mastrocinque’s name was suggested by the agent Liliana Biancini (the ex-wife of producer Dario Sabatello) who was trying to help the 63-year old director find new assignments. As with most Italian Gothics of the period, Terror in the Crypt was not shot in the studio but on an existing natural set, in and around the Castle Piccolomini in Balsorano, in the central region of Abruzzo: cast and crew also accommodated in the 15th century manor in order to cut costs.

Terror in the Crypt is a case in point when it comes to analyze the easiness and lack of diffidence on the part of Italian scriptwriters and filmmakers when adapting (or, more properly, reworking) the Anglo-Saxon Gothic canon. Valerii and Gastaldi retained many elements from Carmilla: the opening situation, with young Laura being secluded in a lost castle in the mountains with her father; the warm yet ambiguous friendship that develops between the two young women; the character of the old tramp who sells amulets; and the final desecration of the vampire’s grave.

Other parts of Le Fanu’s story were either expunged or radically changed. For instance, the long tale of old general Spielsdorf, which occupies the last third of the book, is completely missing: the evocation of a masquerade ball in which an unknown countess had entrusted the General with the care of her daughter Millarca—that is, Carmilla—would later be faithfully reprised in Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (1970, Roy Ward Baker). On the other hand, Laura’s father, Count Ludwig von Karnstein, first described by Le Fanu as “the kindest man on earth, but growing old” is brought to the screen in a decidedly different, and more ambiguous, incarnation: he is much younger, visibly nervous (notice the cigarettes he chain-smokes with his mouthpiece), wears brocade robes and has not bid farewell to the pleasures of the flesh, as shown by his affair with the housekeeper-lover Annette (Véra Valmont) he regularly visits in her room after midnight. A transformation heightened by the choice of hiring for the role the then 42-year-old Christopher Lee. The British actor’s imposing and alluring screen presence gives new meaning to such dialogue exchanges as “Why don’t you marry me?” “You could be my daughter” “Then adopt me” which make explicit the incestuous undercurrent that can only be guessed in Le Fanu’s novel.

However, several crucial plot points are entirely the product of the two scriptwriters. First of all, there is the choice of structuring the film along a red herring that deceives the viewer on the real identity of the vampire: the opening sequence, shown through a point-of-view shot, in which the young Tilde (Angela Minervini) is attacked and killed in the woods, as well as the murders of Rowena (Nela Conju) and Annette, are all elements which display a patent stylistic proximity with the nascent Italian thriller.

Furthermore, the script introduces a subplot involving the young restorer Friedrich Klauss (José Campos) who has been summoned to the castle to reconstruct an old portrait of Sheena Karnstein: besides the predictable romantic implication, it becomes an essential element in the story. In Carmilla the character of the restorer’s son appears briefly in Chapter 5, when he is seen bringing to the castle the old paintings that have been restored to their original conditions; among the paintings there is Mircalla’s:

“I remembered it; it was a small picture, about a foot and a half high, and nearly square, without a frame; but it was so blackened by age that I could not make it out.

“The artist now produced it, with evident pride. It was quite beautiful; it was startling; it seemed to live. It was the effigy of Carmilla!”

In Terror in the Crypt the mysterious portrait—a common presence in Italian Gothic horror films of the period—becomes the key element in a sort of mystery-like detection, as the original painting is discovered to be hidden under another one—an idea which predates both Deep Red and Pupi Avati’s The House with the Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono, 1976). Another example of narrative cannibalism, so to speak, is the scene where Friedrich is startled to see another figure down the hall, whom he discover to be just his own reflection in a mirror. It is a moment almost identical to one in Castle of Blood: whereas in Margheriti’s film the episode is a starting point in passing to suggest the protagonist’s growing unease, here the cheap shock becomes the pretext for the discovery of Sheena Karnstein’s hidden portrait.

Most remarkably, then, Terror in the Crypt avoids most clichés of the vampire film: there is no trace of oversized pointed fangs, whereas Le Fanu insists on Carmilla’s sharp teeth, “long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle.” And the vampire’s final dissolution is staged in a quite inventive manner, not through the usual crumbling into dust, but with Ljuba’s volatilization, shown with no editing cuts via a visual trick à la Jean Cocteau: while elsewhere the tomb of her ancestress Sheena is opened and the body is transfixed with a spike through the chest to put the curse to an end, Ljuba falls to the ground and the camera zooms in on Laura’s stunned expression, then it zooms back out to a long shot, showing Ljuba’s empty robe on the ground—the only sign left of her existence.

The introduction of magic and divination in the story carries the plot in darker and more ambiguous territories compared to the stately literary source. Rowena, Laura’s faithful maidservant, is some sort of a witch who practices black magic, performs disturbing rituals and even amputates a dead man’s hand in order to turn it into a macabre fetish: a character much closer to Mediterranean mentality, with her mixture of superstition and peasant pragmatism, than to Le Fanu’s world. The fact that Valerii and Gastaldi’s vision was firmly rooted in Italian folklore as well as in a vision of the Gothic already marked by their cinematic predecessors can also be found in the curse that Sheena casts over the Karnstein family—a further innovation compared to the novel—which positively recalls Black Sunday. Bava’s debut is openly quoted—or rather, ransacked—in the flashback of the vampire’s execution, as well as in the way the script emphasizes the theme of reincarnation, a key feature in the universe of Italian celluloid Gothic.

Finally, and most remarkably, Terror in the Crypt overturns the physical characters of the two female protagonists. Laura Karnstein, whom Le Fanu pictures as the typical Victorian damsel-in-distress—blonde, pale, chaste and modest in manner and appearance, devoid of sexual desires and devoted to a naive, soppy romanticism she learned in the books—takes on the Mediterranean features, black raven hair and sensual curvaceous body of Adriana Ambesi. In contrast, Ljuba/Carmilla—whom in the novel is described as follows: “her complexion was rich and brilliant; […] her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, […] so magnificently thick and long […] and in colour a rich very dark brown”—has the angelic features of the innocent-looking blonde Ursula Davis, a.k.a. Pier Anna Quaglia.

Which is to say that whereas in Carmilla, the vampire is portrayed as “a female prototype, sensual and perturbing, whose sexuality […] is doubly improductive, being both vampiric and orientated towards the same sex,”⁴ Valerii and Gastaldi skillfully stir the waters, by associating to Laura (the victim) all the characteristics that Le Fanu describes as belonging to Carmilla (the vampire), including the sudden mood changes, to the point of having Ljuba utter the words that Laura says in the novel about Carmilla (“Sometimes she looks at me in a way that scares me, then she smiles and places her arms about my neck”).

The deceptive game is amplified by Julio Ortas’⁵ exquisite lighting, which associates Laura with gloom and Ljuba—a vampire who is not scared of the sun and on the contrary radiates vitality and joie de vivre—with open light. What is more, Mastrocinque builds many shots in a specular manner, putting Laura and Ljuba side by side in order to show the two opposites at once. It is a tricky move, and a smart one—at least for the time in which the film was made: most audiences had not even heard of Le Fanu, and were not shrewd enough to see the trap they were being led into.

The flashback of the female vampire’s execution in Terror in the Crypt openly recalls Black Sunday (author’s collection).

As a result, it was inevitable to many to associate the voluptuous Laura with vampirism, according to a model that had already been established by Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava and their Gothic disciples. Terror in the Crypt’s final twist is even more striking as it sweeps away the supposed duality between the damsel-in-distress and the belle dame sans merci by overturning the roles of Ljuba and Laura: if at the climax of Black Sunday the audience knew what the hero did not, that the beautiful Katia was actually the evil Asa, and delighted in the titillating notion of evil’s alluring face, here the viewer is tricked just like the characters, his moral notions doomed to be tickled and ultimately ridiculed.

In spite of the copious changes to the text, Valerii and Gastaldi captured and amplified the story’s sensual power. In Carmilla the uncanny takes forms related to sexuality and sin, starting with Laura’s shocking pre-pubescent vision (she recalls that when she was six a mysterious visitor penetrated into her bedroom and bit her on the chest), duplicated by the nightmare in which the girl is visited by a feline creature that assumes female form. Also noteworthy is the way Le Fanu alludes to the covert incestuous relationship between the young woman and her widowed father who has secluded her in the castle, not to mention how the writer conveys the exasperated languor of a lazy, mysterious lewdness as well as the idea of a cyclical time (as expressed by Carmilla’s recurring appearances through the years) whose inevitability mocks the woman’s monthly menstrual cycle: the breaking of the chain will coincide with the sterility of menopause.

While far from reaching Le Fanu’s refined allegories, and saddled with its share of clumsy or throwaway moments, Terror in the Crypt is noteworthy for its portrayal of sensuality and female desire. As with many other Italian horror films of the period, the supernatural component allows the scriptwriters and the director to push the pedal of transgression: Ljuba’s demonic influence justifies the lesbian relationship between her and Laura, which forms the film’s core. If Margheriti’s Castle of Blood was the first Italian Gothic to explicitly address the issue with Margrete Robsahm’s infamous attempted seduction of Barbara Steele, Mastrocinque’s film develops the theme of female homosexuality of Le Fanu’s novel as far as censorship would allow.

The Irish novelist lingers on the languorous kisses and caresses from Carmilla:

“She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear […]. And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek. […] From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. […] I experienced a strange, tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence.”

Carmilla’s behavior is so explicit that the innocent young girl even asks herself: “What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade […]?”

Le Fanu’s vampire undergoes melancholic impulses that result in an occasional reluctance towards the victim:

“Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it […].”

Le Fanu even describes the process of vampirization with a crescendo that openly recalls female orgasm:

“Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.”

Terror in the Crypt faces the displacement of roles caused by the same-sex vampiric aggression in an interesting way. The encounter between Laura and Ljuba, which takes place in a similar manner as the novel (the carriage accident near the castle), abruptly interrupts the blossoming of a romantic idyll between Laura and Friedrich. Soon afterwards, Mastrocinque isolates the two women with a close-up that hints at their complicity: they are already unreachable by the male. “I would like to help you feel less lonely,” Friedrich later tells Laura, not noticing that Ljuba has appeared behind his back. “I’m not alone anymore,” Laura replies, after exchanging a significant look with her female friend, who steps by her side: once again the male is rejected out of the female world.

When compared to Blood and Roses, Terror in the Crypt proves all the more surprising. First of all, Vadim transposed the story to contemporary Italy, in a noble estate where the male hero (Mel Ferrer) delighted in feasts and masquerades, including fireworks La Dolce Vita–style. What is more, Blood and Roses told the story from the point of view of the centuries-old vampire Millarca, who reincarnates in Carmilla and subdues her to her own seductive will: thus, the story oscillated between a psychoanalytic interpretation—underlined by a nightmare sequence which, although beautifully photographed by Claude Renoir, overindulged in the most banally didactic Surrealist touches—and a supernatural one.

However, by shifting the focus of the story on Carmilla and making her a victim, Vadim missed Le Fanu’s point, that is a tale told by a victim who is somehow an accomplice of her tormentor, and turned the characters into one-dimensional figures without a will. Mastrocinque’s film does not make the same mistake.

Carmilla came out in the middle of a heated debate on the condition of women in Victorian society. Terror in the Crypt reflects quite a different outlook on the female body and sexuality: 1960s Italy is hungry with novelties and naked flesh, and torn between desire and guilt. “Beauty carries the seed of evil” a tramp says in a scene: a line which can almost be read as a critical gloss to the genre as a whole.

In Italian horror, lesbianism is not seen as a shattering force (as it was against Victorian orthodoxy in Le Fanu’s novel), but as an excuse for voyeurism, and as such is represented with smug, all-male indulgence.⁶ Ljuba—just like Julia (Castle of Blood) or Harriet (An Angel for Satan)—are not viral particles whose apparition is likely to erode the safety of patriarchal society, as will happen in The Blood Spattered Bride (La novia ensangrentada) the novel’s adaptation directed by Vicente Aranda in 1972, which is more attentive to an updating of the discourse about the battle of the sexes within Spain’s sexuophobic culture.⁷

In Aranda’s film, woman and man are two worlds apart, the surreal apparition of Mircalla (Alexandra Bastedo)—a female vampire/alien worthy of Dalí, half-buried in the sand and wearing a diving mask—shifts the focus from voyeurism to the institution of marriage, the alliance between the two women aims at the male’s castration. In Terror in the Crypt all this is, quite simply, a comfortable way to satisfy the curiosity of an audience in search of forbidden emotions, which approached horror movies because of their association to the mise-en-scène of more or less bizarre perversions. Therefore, Valerii, Gastaldi and Mastrocinque get rid of any pretension at a social discourse, and instead capture the pragmatic aspect of the story: “I used to tell Mastrocinque to cut the niceties and get down to sex!”⁸ Valerii would later explain. If, as some critics have noted, in Le Fanu’s story “it is to disguise her desire for blood that Carmilla wears the mask of love,”⁹ in 1970s Italian Gothic it will be the opposite: what in Terror in the Crypt is still merely hinted at, will be explicitly portrayed once the already crumbling walls of censorship are breached.

And yet, even if the representation of sapphic desire is devoid of the punitive harshness to be found in Spanish horror films, as well as the laughable Puritan scrap of Hammer’s subsequent Le Fanu adaptations such as The Vampire Lovers and Jimmy Sangster’s obnoxious Lust for a Vampire (1971), unnatural passions are nevertheless destined to be punished, and Terror in the Crypt is no exception. Yet, the way Mastrocinque’s film portrays sensuality is remarkably effective for an unpretentious genre product.

Take the scene of Laura’s nightmare: the young woman is sleeping, her face seen in profile, in an overhead shot, while melodious music underlines her silent grace. The camera zooms in on Laura’s face, while her hair is caressed by a sudden breeze. The lighting enhances the girl’s facial features and her chest which lifts up and down softly, breathing. Then Laura stands upright in bed, waiting—her eyes framed by a shaft of light in the darkness. What was supposed to be a scene depicting unrest and fear becomes strangely perturbing, even provocative—traits which do not thin out as the scene continues, with Ljuba appearing in the bedroom and Laura kneeling down before her in an adoring pose. The scene ends with a shocking close-up of a skull superimposed over Ljuba’s face, à la Psycho. It is a moment that reworks the representation of the macabre, transforming its meaning: the horrific nightmare becomes the necessary harbinger of seduction, as Laura asks Ljuba to stay with her for the night and the two women disappear behind the bedroom door. The invitation on the part of the victim, as the tradition demands (the vampire cannot enter the victim’s room if not by the latter’s will) assumes an explicit character of a sexual proffer. Laura’s dream predates the wonderful sequence of Daria Nicolodi’s erotic fantasy in Mario Bava’s Shock, if only because it moves from similar assumptions: the exploration of the subconscious and its surrender through tangible phenomena.

Tonino Valerii, who also acted as Mastrocinque’s assistant director on the set, claims he personally shot several scenes. “When this elderly gentleman, who had always directed light comedies, such as Totò’s films and so on, was given the opportunity to make a vampire film, he felt lost. There were things that made him shudder: hanged men, severed hands with burning candles over the fingers and so on … and he made me shoot that stuff!”¹⁰ Valerii claims to have directed the scene with the so-called “Hand of Glory,” Ljuba’s vampiric kiss as well as the sequence of the tramp hung in the bell tower, with the dog trying to release the body and provoking each time a mournful tolling—a scene which also emphasizes the grotesque quality of Italian Gothic when approaching an imagery closer to Anglo-Saxon horror: see the close-up of the dead man’s mutilated limb that accompanies the discovery of the body.

Formally, however, Terror in the Crypt is a rather accomplished work, which is somewhat surprising given Mastrocinque’s alleged disinterest towards the genre. Besides the aforementioned nightmare scene and Ljuba’s final dissolution, another noteworthy moment is the apparition of Tilde’s ghost, in which Mastrocinque uses the same trick as the one adopted by Mario Bava in Black Sabbath’s “The Drop of Water” episode for the apparition of the horrid old woman: the actress, placed over an offscreen dolly, seemingly slides towards the camera as if she was levitating without touching the floor. Mastrocinque also uses the zoom lenses with prodigality, but not just as a matter of cutting time and costs: not only the zoom often synthesizes two shots into one, but is also a good stylistic resource to close a sequence and move on to the next one. The director would go on to direct one more Gothic, An Angel for Satan, starring Barbara Steele.

Terror in the Crypt was released straight to U.S. television by AIP-TV, whereas it played in U.K. theaters as Crypt of Horror. The 2012 Retromedia/Image U.S. DVD release presents the film with the title Crypt of the Vampire, even though the credits still read Terror in the Crypt.

Notes

1. Email interview, January 2014.

2. “We moved down to a Gothic house in Southern Italy to make Maledizione dei Karnstein, a confection of elements of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and here it was my pleasure to be Count Ludwig von Karnstein, the noble father of a brood of lesbian vampires.” Christopher Lee, Tall, Dark and Gruesome (Baltimore MD: Midnight Marquee, 1999) p. 187; Christopher Lee, Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee (London: Orion, 2004), p. 252.

3. Email interview, January 2014.

4. Sandro Melani, “Introduction,” in J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), p. 22.

5. Tonino Valerii states that Ortas was the director of photography during principal shooting, except for the first two or three days, when he was temporarily replaced by Giuseppe Aquari, as the Spanish d.o.p. was blocked by bureaucratic snags. According to Valerii, “Ortas was a young mild man, yet very efficient and quite expert with black-and-white cinematography. He was also an excellent connoisseur of the processes of development and printing of the negative, and he knew what to do to get a very effective result despite the lack of means. Every now and then I saw him approach the script girl after a good take, and tell her to write something down. Once I approached in order to listen to what he said. “Forzar hasta dos cientos” (“Force it up to 200”). Later I discovered at the Technicolor lab in Rome that it was a very delicate process that increased the negative’s receptive power in situations where there was not enough light on the set.” Email interview, July 2010.

6. Pezzotta, “Doppi di noi stessi,” p. 30.

7. Puzzlingly, the script of Aranda’s film deposited at Rome’s CSC library with the title La sposa insanguinata, “The Blood Spattered Bride”—a literal translation of the Spanish title (whereas the film came out in Italy as Un abito da sposa macchiato di sangue, “A Blood Spattered Wedding Gown”)—which bears the date March 23, 1971, has the following line on the front: “Story: Vicente Aranda. Screenplay: Tonino Valerii, Vicente Aranda.” The aforementioned line has been added with a stick under the original one, which credited the script solely to Aranda. However, Valerii denies he ever had anything to do with Aranda’s film.

8. Tommaso La Selva, Tonino Valerii: mai temere il Leone (Milan: Nocturno Libri, 2000), p. 104.

9. Louis Vax, La natura del fantastico (Rome: Theoria, 1987), p. 10.

10. Curti, Il mio nome è Nessuno, p. 22.

The Vampire of the Opera, a.k.a. The Monster of the Opera (Il mostro dell’Opera)

D: Renato Polselli. S: Renato Polselli, Ernesto Gastaldi; SC: Ernesto Gastaldi, Giuseppe Pellegrini, Renato Polselli; DOP: Ugo Brunelli (B&W); M: Aldo Piga, conducted by Pier Luigi Urbini; E: Otello Colangeli; PD: Demofilo Fidani; SD: Franco Cuppini; AD: Giuseppe Pellegrini, Gennaro Balistrieri; C: Sante Achilli; AC: Elio Polacchi; MU: Gaetano Capgrosso; SO: Sandro Ochetti, Enzo Magli; SP: Giorgio Bernardini; SS: Carla Ioviti; CHOR: Marisa and Gianna Ciampiglia [Ciampaglia]. Cast: Mark Maryan [Marco Mariani] (Sandro), John McDouglas [Giuseppe Addobbati] (Stefano), Barbara Hawards (Giulia), Albert Archet [Alberto Archetti] (Achille), Carla Cavalli (Aurora), Boris Notarenko, Jody Excell (Yvette), Milena Vukotic (Carlotta), Gaby Black, George Arms, Romy von Simon, Erich Schonbrunner, Cristine Martin, Maureen Verrich, Olga Jala, Renato Montalbano (Tony), Fidelio Gonzáles (Filippo), Vittoria Prada (Rossana). PROD: Nord Industrial Film; GM: Oscar Brazzi; PM: Fernando Anselmetti; PS: Fausto Lupi; PA: Roberto Bertolini; PSe: Alberto Casati. Country: Italy. Filmed in Narni. Running time: 85 min. (m. 2310); Visa n: 43135 (06.18.1964); Rating: V.M.18; Release date: 06.30.1964 (Italy). Distribution: Nord Industrial (Italy, Regional);Domestic gross: unknown. Also known as: Il vampiro dell’Opera (working title), L’Orgie des vampires (France, 07.23.1969). Homevideo: Artus (DVD, France).

Rare Italian fotobusta for Renato Polselli’s The Vampire of the Opera. Curiously, it features the shooting title Il vampiro dell’opera, whereas the film was eventually released, two years after its making, as Il mostro dell’opera (author’s collection).

In order to rehearse a new stage production with his dance troupe, Sandro rents an old Opera house that has been closed for many years. However, the elderly caretaker urges Sandro to leave at once, telling him that the place is cursed. As Sandro and his company will soon find out, the theater is inhabited by an undead vampire named Stefano, who keeps a harem of undead female slaves in an extradimensional crypt. When the bloodsucker finds out that the lead dancer, Giulia, is the reincarnation of the woman he once loved and who betrayed him, he starts preying on the ballerinas. On the other hand, Giulia realizes that the horrible nightmares she has been plagued by are becoming real…

The early vampire filone started by Renato Polselli’s The Vampire and the Ballerina soon dried up, even before Hammer put in production the second Dracula film starring Christopher Lee: The Vampire of the Opera, produced by Oscar Brazzi (Rossano’s brother), was released in 1964 but was filmed in 1961. The shooting title was actually Il vampiro dell’Opera, the same as the photonovel published in February 1962 in the adults-only Malìa magazine—two years before Polselli’s film eventually came out in theaters. Lack of money caused shooting to proceed in fits and starts, and eventually the film emerged as Il mostro dell’Opera (“The Monster of the Opera”), even though lobby cards had been prepared with the earlier title: in the meantime, audiences’ interest on Dracula’s makeshifts had waned, and the Italian Gothic horror trend had settled on more original territories.

The title changes confirmed how native bloodsuckers did not take root: Dracula worked much better as a trademark on pocket paperbacks than on the silver screen. And if even the charismatic Lee was reduced to a one-dimensional villain with a merely animal presence in Dracula: Prince of Darkness, his home-made substitutes were destined to even worse fates. However, Polselli was once again adamant in pursuing an emphasis on eroticism. Even though according to the credits The Vampire of the Opera was written once again by the trio formed by Ernesto Gastaldi, Polselli and Giuseppe Pellegrini, Gastaldi claims he had very little to do with the script: “I’m not sure, but I think I wrote only the treatment. I think I also read the script and made some corrections. I was frankly surprised to find my name on the credits.”¹

As the title suggests, the script takes very loose inspiration from Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera: the references are limited to the title and the setting, as well as the scene where the vampire (somewhat incongruously named Stefano and played by character actor Giuseppe Addobbati) is watching the company’s rehearsals from a box, while the idea of the bloodsucker’s portrait being the key to his destruction is a nod to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Polselli claimed in an interview that for the film he used again the same skeleton as in The Vampire and the Ballerina.² More significantly, the script recycled the theme of the heroine being the reincarnation of the vampire’s beloved woman—something old-hat in Italian vampire films by 1961—albeit with a twist. Despite the vampire having a whole harem of chained vampire brides who “wait every new moon for young blood to reanimate them so that I can kill them again,” the misogynist flashback which exposes Stefano’s origins, reveals him to be substantially a victim: he was buried alive by his unfaithful lover and vowed to “live to destroy beauty, because your beauty destroyed me many years ago.” Which makes the titular vampire close to the one played by Walter Brandi in The Vampire and the Ballerina, and a rather passive figure as well, similar to most of Italian Gothic’s male characters.

The rest of The Vampire of the Opera plays like a variation on Polselli’s earlier The Vampire and the Ballerina as well as Piero Regnoli’s The Playgirls and the Vampire—i.e., a pretext for showing scantily clad young women, with a little hint of lesbianism to spice up the proceedings. “Don’t you think that a friendship between two women is finer, larger even than love?” a female dancer (whom the protagonist Marco Mariani claims to be “born in the town of Lesbo, in Sappho’s province,” just in case anyone had any doubt) allusively asks a colleague whom she is making a pass at, while the choreography for the absurd ballet—no Red Shoes here, by far—looks more like, as one reviewer put it, “the fever dream of an oversexed choreographer.”

Although he has been iconographically borrowed from tradition, with even an excess of elegance—he looks dapper in his tail-coat and black tie with a gardenia in the buttonhole, Polselli’s vampire manages to escape the clichés. This, however, is less a result of calculation than—to use a euphemism—the director’s idiosyncrasies. The Vampire of the Opera’s bloodsucker sleeps in the requisite coffin, but when they open it, the film’s human characters only find his empty clothes inside. The casket even becomes an extradimensional threshold of sorts that leads to the crypt where the vampire hides, amidst dry ice aplenty and half-naked female vampires chained to the walls. Another mind-boggling notion that the film offers concerns the vampire’s ability to assault only those who are standing still, a pretext for an incredible sequence where the dancers throw themselves into frantic (and uncoordinated) dance steps in order to keep the bloodsucker away, only to eventually collapse exhausted at his mercy.

As for the film’s visuals, Polselli doggedly pursues bizarre effects, yet the results display an overwhelming paucity of technique and style. The opening scene, in which a dancer is being chased by the vampire in a succession of set-pieces and which is soon revealed to be a nightmare, puts together a series of effects that should certify its surrealist approach. The vampire attacks the victim with an unlikely pitchfork, the camera takes on unusual angles and at a certain point even turns upside down. Yet the pompous tricks—such as the “invisible force” that the heroine experiences in her dream, and which is represented by a sheet of glass between the actress and the camera³—cannot even be compared to the involuntary Dada of those trash epics so beloved by the likes of Ado Kyrou, such as Horrors of Spider Island (Ein Toter hing im Netz, 1960, Fritz Böttger), as Polselli lacks even the alibi of naive instinct to make up for his irritating pretentiousness. The director’s tendency towards over-the-top, gratuitous oddities would reach a point of no return in his later films, especially the infamous The Reincarnation of Isabel.

Notes

1. Lucas, “What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood,” p. 41.

2. On this occasion, the director came up with one of his not very reliable anecdotes, halfway between self-created myth and reality. “I remember myself, the leading lady and Brazzi going out one night, arm in arm with that skeleton, in the streets of Narni, where we were shooting The Vampire of the Opera. All of a sudden we heard a siren: people got scared and called the police.” Andolfi, “Renato Polselli tra horror e censura,” p. 492.

3. A similar idea (and effect) was employed in Luigi Cozzi’s Paganini Horror (1989).

1965

Bloody Pit of Horror, a.k.a. A Tale of Torture (Il boia scarlatto)

D: Max Hunter [Domenico Massimo Pupillo]. S and SC: Robert Nathan [Roberto Natale], Robin McLorin [Romano Migliorini] (U.S. version: “Created and conceived by Ralph Zucker and Frank Merle”); DOP: John Collins [Luciano Trasatti] (Eastmancolor); M: Gino Peguri; E: Robert Ardis [Mariano Arditi]; PD/ArtD: Frank F. Arnold [Franco Fontana]; SD: Richard Goldbert [Franco Calfapietra]; AD: Henry Castle [Massimo Castellani]; C: Philip Jones [Luigi Carta]; AC: James Stone [Danilo Salvadori]; SE: Carlo Rambaldi; SO: Geoffrey Sellers [Goffredo Salvadori]; MU: Alan Trevor [Duilio Scarrozza]; Hair: Lucille Gardner [Luisa Maria Garbini]; DialD: Dom Leone; SP: Herbert Penn [Italo Tonni]; SS: Mary Friend [Lina D’Amico]; (U.S. version—Script adaptation: Ruth Carter, Cesare Mancini). Cast: Mickey Hargitay (Travis Anderson), Walter Brandt [Walter Bigari] (Rick), Louise Barret [Luisa Baratto] (Edith), Ralph Zucker (Dermott, the photographer), Alfred Rice [Alfredo Rizzo] (Daniel Parks), Nik Angel [Nando Angelini] (Perry), Albert Gordon, John Turner [Gino Turini] (Travis’ mustached henchman), Robert Messenger [Roberto Messina] (Travis’ bald henchman), Barbara Nelly [Barbara Nelli] (Suzy), Moa Tahi (Kinojo), Rita Klein (Nancy), Femi Martin [Femi Benussi] (Annie). PROD: Frank Merle [Francesco Merli], Ralph Zucker for M.B.S. Cinematografica (Rome), International Entertainment Corp. (U.S.A.); EP: Felix C. Ziffer, J. R. Coolidge; PM: Sean Baker [Marino Vaccà]; PA: Lewis Lawrence [Luciano Catenacci], Nicholas Prince [Nicola Princigalli]. Country: Italy/U.S.A. Filmed at Balsorano Castle, interiors at Palazzo Borghese, Artena. Running time: 87 min. (2500m.); Visa n: 45978 (11.10.1965); Rating: V.M.18; Release dates: 11.28.1965 (Italy); 05.16.1967 (U.S.A.). Distribution: M.B.S. (Italy, Regional); Pacemaker Pictures (U.S.A.); Domestic gross: 65,000,000 lire. Also known as: Crimson Executioner, Some Virgins for the Hangman, The Castle of Artena, The Red Hangman, The Scarlet Hangman, Virgins for the Hangman (U.S.A.); Vierges pour le bourreau (France), Scarletto—Schloß des Blutes (West Germany, 07.14.1967). Home video: Something Weird/Image (DVD, U.S.A.), Sinister Film (DVD, Italy).

Pulp publisher Daniel Parks and his crew—a writer, a photographer and five female models—sneak into a castle in order to stage a photo shoot for one of their lurid paperback horror novels. The lord of the castle, Travis Anderson, allows them to stay for just one day’s work. A retired actor and muscleman who dedicated himself to seclusion and to the narcissistic worshipping of his own body, obsessed with a dream of absolute purity and physical perfection, Anderson goes berserk when Parks’ crew starts staging violent and erotic set-ups in the castle’s crypts. Hallucinating that he is the reincarnation of the legendary “crimson executioner,” a sadistic man who was allegedly executed in the castle’s crypts centuries earlier, Travis starts dispatching the intruders one by one, by submitting them to the sadistic devices in his torture chamber. It is up to Rick, the writer, to face Anderson and save Edith from death…

In the early 1960s, the Gothic was so “in” a phenomenon in Italian popular culture that it spawned not only movies, but also paperback novel series and photonovels. The latter (known in Italy as fotoromanzi) had surfaced in 1947, when the country was recovering from the destruction and the moral and economic desolation of the war years. Photonovels are very similar to comics in their format which consist of succession of panels inclusive of speech balloons and captions. The main difference is that photonovel panels are not illustrations but photographs, portraying real people instead of drawn characters. Photonovels were created by Cesare Zavattini and Luciano Pedrocchi, who launched this hybrid form of popular entertainment in Bolero Film, the first magazine entirely dedicated to photonovels. The first fotoromanzi director, for the magazine Il mio sogno, on May 8, 1947, would become a renowned filmmaker: his name was Damiano Damiani.

Most photonovels were simple, melodramatic love stories, usually variations on the same basic plots: however, by the early 1960s the fotoromanzi had become a real industry, and publishers were ready to jump on the bandwagon and explore uncharted territories. In news-stands, beside the traditional syrupy Lancio photonovels, one could find male-oriented, adults-only stuff such as the series Malìa—I fotoromanzi del brivido, which debuted in February 1961 and offered Gothic stories with such evocative titles as L’urlo del vampiro (“The Vampire’s Scream”), Il castello maledetto (“The Damned Castle”), Il risveglio di Dracula (“Dracula’s Awakening”), Il regno del terrore (“The Reign of Terror”), Il vampiro etrusco (“The Etruscan Vampire”). Conceived by the magazine’s editor-in-chief Umberto Paolessi with journalist and writer Giorgio Boschero, these photonovels were photographed in the very same locations as used for the Gothic horror films of the period.

Moreover, as was commonplace for many genre films, horror movies also had their own photonovel version: this happened ever since I Vampiri (under the title Quella che voleva amare, in I Vostri Film 31, August 1958) and Mill of the Stone Women (Super Star 75, December 1960). Besides proper photonovels, Malìa also published a number of Italian Gothic films in photonovel form: The Playgirls and the Vampire, Slaughter of the Vampires, The Vampire of the Opera, Tomb of Torture, Terror-Creatures from the Grave, The Seventh Grave, Nightmare Castle…

United States double feature poster for Massimo Pupillo’s Gothic horror films Bloody Pit of Horror and Terror-Creatures from the Grave, released theatrically in the United States by Pacemaker Pictures in May 1967 (courtesy S. I. Bianchi).

In a smart bit of self-reference, the world of photonovels and pulp magazines was described with tongue-in-cheek irony by Roberto Natale and Romano Migliorini in their script for Bloody Pit of Horror, where a shabby and somewhat fraudulent acolyte headed by a stingy publisher (Alfredo Rizzo) sneak into a castle for a photoshoot, in order to gather risqué cover art for a series of cheap novels centered on the character of “Skeletrik,” a masked sadistic villain. The starting point recalls an episode of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo cane 2 (1963), about the making of sadistic photonovels, and alludes to the army of writers and publishers who were luring readers by way of naked flesh and cheap thrills—a phenomenon which would later evolve into the out-and-out adult publishing of the following decade—and who were at home in those castles of Lazio that had been converted into film studios.

However, the character of Skeletrik, with the inevitable “K” in the name and a costume in style, is a nod to Magnus & Bunker’s comic book Kriminal, and curiously predates Killing, the adults-only photonovel created the following year by Milan’s Ponzoni Editore, which would soon become one of the most controversial publications in the whole fumetti neri phenomenon.¹ On the other hand, The Crimson Executioner as played by Mickey Hargitay in the film is the mirror image of Lee Falk’s The Phantom, one of the main inspirations for the whole wave of Italian superhero films of the mid-to-late Sixties.

As one critic underlined, the comic book connection drips from every single frame of the film. “Bloody Pit of Horror is a comic-strip movie, with a story told through a series of scenes, pictures and pacing that are more akin to comics than cinema. Inside the empty spaces, that open continually, immobilizing the story, one would often be tempted to insert a few captions and balloons. […] Pupillo (and his screenwriters) might have easily “enclosed” inside a gigantic balloon, floating over Mickey Hargitay’s hooded head, these fantastic lines: “Mankind is composed of inferior beings, physically crippled, weak and insignificant. I, on the other hand, am different. My body is wonderful, perfect. I hate mankind. You won’t die immediately. You will suffer long … and I will enjoy your screams and torments.””²

However, Bloody Pit of Horror’s half-serious approach to Italian pulp can also be applied to the Gothic horror film as a whole, especially since the story takes place in the unmistakable Balsorano Castle (whereas the interiors were filmed at Castle Borghese in Artena) and the cast is a parade of familiar faces of the filone—from Walter Brandi to Gino Turini, from Barbara Nelli to Alfredo Rizzo, who in the 1970s would start an undistinguished career as a film-maker, which included a mediocre erotic/Gothic flick, The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance (La sanguisuga conduce la danza, 1975).

And then—why not?—Massimo Pupillo’s second Gothic film in a row—according to the director himself, filming took place immediately after Terror-Creatures From the Grave³—could be seen as a reflection on the Italian genre industry. Nods to contemporary Italian Gothic abound: the character of the mad and masked tormentor comes from The Virgin of Nuremberg, the opening scene hints at Black Sunday, the theme of the double is one of the Gothic’s recurrent fixations,⁴ while the idea of juxtaposing the villain to a group of potential victims (with a predominance of the weaker sex) of questionable morals recalls the earlier Italian vampire films directed by Renato Polselli and Rizzo has an identical role to the one he played in The Playgirls and the Vampire.

Pupillo’s film gives a good idea of this frantic microcosm, populated by charlatans and scoundrels, where time is money and quality is not an option. What is more, it pointedly (and amusingly) alludes to the incessant erosion of the barriers of censorship and morality—or, to put it in another way, to the inches of naked skin being conquered at the expense of robes and nightgowns. A case in point is the recurring gag of the photographer (producer Ralph Zucker—who, according to Pupillo, also shot some extra footage⁵) who, while setting up a shot of a girl embraced by an armored skeleton (a perfect synthesis of the Gothic and sexy-noir fumetti if ever there was one), keeps sliding down her nightshirt’s strap, which the girl immediately pulls up. The punchline is also ironic, as after defeating the villain, Rick (Walter Brandt, a.k.a. Walter Brandi, a.k.a. Walter Bigari, the former star of The Vampire and the Ballerina and The Playgirls and the Vampire) proclaims: “I won’t write any more horror stories. The man that said life is stranger than fiction made no mistake!” (the Italian dialogue was even more mordant in its self-deprecation, as Rick concluded instead: “I realized you mustn’t play with death and feelings!”).

The narrative frame is actually more interesting than the plot itself. Natale and Migliorini accumulate and combine a number of ideas already seen in previous films: Bloody Pit of Horror reworks the Gothic’s main themes, though applying them—rather than to the female figure seen as a seductive witch/vampire/ghost—to a grotesque bodybuilder, switching gender with decidedly campy results. A good example is the prologue, set in 1648, which shows the Crimson Executioner being executed and is clearly modeled on Black Sunday: the same solemn and gloomy atmosphere, the same stentorian voice announcing the Executioner’s misdeeds, a torture device of exasperated cruelty, a curse exclaimed before dying. Yet the Virgin—or, as the Italian dubbing misspells it, the Widow—of Nuremberg in which the villain is locked looks more like a magician’s device, and the overall effect is that of a bad night club act or a cheap Grand Guignol representation: on top of it all, Gino Peguri’s score—with its electric guitars, trumpets and a warbling female voice—introduces a lounge tone which is poles apart from the macabre, an effect heightened by Luciano Trasatti’s garish colors (in Psychovision, as the U.S. version proudly declares).

United States lobby card for Bloody Pit of Horror, with Mickey Hargitay in action as the sadistic Crimson Executioner (courtesy S. I. Bianchi).

Despite the U.S. version opening with the apocryphal line “My vengeance needs blood!” and claiming to be “based on the writings of the Marquis De Sade”—not to mention the 1972 Italian re-release under the title Io…il Marchese De Sade (I…Marquis De Sade)—, there is actually very little in Bloody Pit of Horror that can be labeled as Sadean. The exhibited cruelty towards women is patently tongue-in-cheek, and often demands a smile: the inventive torture instruments that Travis puts to use are actually just clever gimmicks designed to take off the actresses’ clothes, while Hargitay’s orgasmic frenzy as he jumps from one device to the next in his torture chamber like a child at a fairground is too over-the-top to be anything but amusing. “That’s just a small portion of the torture that awaits you!” the Hungarian actor sneers, after submitting Femi Benussi and Rita Klein to the torments of a rotating cylinder with blades which caused them just a few scratches … and ripped their shirts at strategic points.

Pupillo’s direction is surprisingly lively and mordant, much better than in his film debut. The scene where Moa Tahi is imprisoned on a giant cobweb and menaced by a ridiculous-looking mechanical spider (courtesy of Carlo Rambaldi) exudes a pop and camp spirit which is closer to Magnus & Bunker’s comic books such as Kriminal and Satanik, and perfectly fits Ado Kyrou’s oft-quoted saying that creativity’s worst enemy is good taste. In the same scene, the sight of Walter Brandt laboriously crawling under a complicated tangle of cords connected to poisoned arrows that could instantly kill him, brings to mind the contemporaneous spy and heist flicks, where similar tricks—threads disguised as unlikely laser beams—hindered the hero’s path. But, in a fragrant cultural short circuit, the scene also recalls an absurd variation of the “limbo,” an exotic night club act (the actress is wearing a Hawaiian costume…) that would not have been out of place in a sexy documentary such as the Mondo di notte series.

On the other hand, Mickey Hargitay’s narcissistic displays of muscle have made some critics talk of a homoerotic subtext, similar to that of sword-and-sandal flicks. It is hard to say whether this was intentional. Hargitay’s henchmen, dressed in adhesive white-and-blue striped T-shirts and white trousers that make them look like sailors on leave, are a sight worthy of a Tom of Finland drawing (or a Kenneth Anger film), but Hargitay’s delirious monologues, as he sprinkles oil all over his bare chest and boasts about his “perfect body,” are rather the outpourings of a misanthrope (and misogynist). “He avoided contact with people. Even with me he was distant. I never had a kiss from him,” says (at least in the Italian version⁶) Edith, the woman whom he abandoned just before the wedding. Which brings us to one of Italian cinema’s main obsessions—sexual impotence.

Bloody Pit of Horror came out in the United States in May 1967, on a double-bill with another of Pupillo’s Gothic films, Terror-Creatures from the Grave.⁷ However, it was a heavily edited 74-minute version, with about nine minutes missing (mostly expository scenes of the crew looking around the crypts and the models posing for the shoot, but no extra gore or nudity), the same that popped up again on VHS and DVD over the years. The complete English language version (A Tale of Torture) was released on tape by Something Weird Video (whereas the Image Entertainment disc with the title Bloody Pit of Horror carries the shorter print, with the deleted scenes included as a supplement).

Notes

1. Starting on March 15, 1966, Killing became a success de scandàle in Italy. Its novelty was that, unlike Diabolik, Kriminal, Satanik and the like, it was not a comic book but a photonovel. Its sexual and gory content were quite strong for the period, and caused its makers a lot of trouble, including a trial for obscenity, which eventually led them to tone down its excesses. Killing was published until April 1969, with a total of 62 issues. The director, Rosario Borrelli, was also a well-known character actor in Italian genre cinema of the period, while the mysterious actor who played Killing (always photographed with his face covered by a mask or shown from behind) was eventually revealed to be Aldo Agliata in the 2007 documentary The Diabolikal Super-Kriminal, directed by comic book artist and independent film-maker SS-Sunda [Sandro Yassel Spazio]. In recent years Killing has been published in the United States by Comicfix, in a three-part miniseries under the title Sadistik, by writer/animator Mort Todd, who acquired the rights in 2005.

2. Roberto Guidotti, “I deliri di un sadico narcisista. Il boia scarlatto,” in Piselli and Guidotti, Diva Cinema, p. 36.

3. Pupillo talked about his involvement with Zucker in a 1993 radio interview with Italian film historian Fabio Melelli, which was included as an extra in the Italian DVD of 5 tombe per un medium.

4. However, the way the script deals with the theme of the double is subtler than expected, and bears a psychoanalytical explanation: whereas Edith (Luisa Baratto) was the woman Travis (Hargitay) loved in his “previous” life, the Crimson Executioner whom Travis claims to be a reincarnation of is actually just a dummy with Travis’ features.

5. See Merrill Aldighieri and Lucas Balbo’s documentary Mondo Pupillo—Une conversation avec Massimo Pupillo (2013).

6. The English dialogue is not as explicit in addressing Travis’ sexual shortcomings: “He’s always been a little strange—even with me. He seems so cold, yet I’m certain that he really loved me,” Edith says.

7. The June 14, 1967, issue of Variety mentions Terror Creatures from the Grave on the bottom of a double bill with Bloody Pit of Horror earning $5,000 in release in Providence, Massachusetts. The films had opened in Maryland one month earlier.

Nightmare Castle (Amanti d’oltretomba)

D: Allan Grünewald [Mario Caiano]. S and SC: Mario Caiano, Fabio De Agostini; DOP: Enzo Barboni (B&W); M: Ennio Morricone; E: Renato Cinquini; PD, SD: Massimo Tavazzi; CO: Mario Giorsi; AD: Angelo Sangermano; C: Mario Mancini; SO: Bernardino Fronzetti; MU: Duilio Giustini; Hair: Rino Carboni; SP: Ermanno Serto; SS: Priscilla Contardi. Cast: Barbara Steele (Muriel Arrowsmith/Jenny Arrowsmith), Paul Muller (Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith), Helga Liné (Solange), Lawrence Clift [Marino Masé] (Dr. Derek Joyce), John McDouglas [Giuseppe Addobbati] (Jonathan), Rik Battaglia (David). PROD: Mario Caiano for Cinematografica Emmeci; GM: Carlo Caiano; PM: Pietro Nofri. Country: Italy. Filmed at Villa Parisi, Frascati (Rome) and at Incir-De Paolis Studios (Rome). Running time: 97 min. (m. 2857); Visa n: 45399 (07.10.1965); Rating: V.M.18; Release dates: 07.16.1965 (Italy); 07.05.1966 (U.S.A.). Distribution: Emmeci (Italy, Regional); Allied Artists Pictures (U.S.A.). Domestic gross: 154,000,000 lire. Also known as: Lovers Beyond the Tomb, Lovers From Beyond the Tomb, The Faceless Monster; Orgasmo (U.S.A.); Night of the Doomed (U.K.); Les Amants d’outre tombe (France, 06.05.1966); Amantes de ultratumba (Mexico); Die griezel minnaar/Les Amants d’outre-tombe (Belgium). Home video: Severin (DVD, U.S.A.); Alpha Video (DVD, U.S.A.); Retro Media (DVD, U.S.A.—as The Faceless Monster); Sinister Film (DVD, Italy).

Italian poster for Mario Caiano’s Nightmare Castle (author’s collection).

When he finds out that his wife Muriel has been unfaithful to him, the sadistic Dr. Arrowsmith tortures and murders her and her lover, then removes their hearts from their bodies. Discovering that Muriel has drawn up a new will giving her fortune to her institutionalized sister Jenny, the doctor marries his sister-in-law and brings her to his villa, where Jenny starts experiencing nightmares and hauntings; meanwhile Arrowsmith and his mistress Solange—whom he has rejuvenated through his experiments with human blood—attempt to murder the woman, to no avail. Young Dr. Joyce, who is in love with Jenny, finds out about Arrowsmith’s plans. Eventually, the ghosts of the slain return to exact their bloody revenge…

“The film was born out of my passion for the Gothic genre, and for Barbara Steele, who has a wonderful face—beautiful yet frightening, vampire-like,” Mario Caiano said about his 1965 horror film Nightmare Castle. “Furthermore, we had to make a low-budget film and my father was the producer. I had just discovered a wonderful villa with a friend of mine, an art director who later won an Academy Award, Bruno Cesari.… We had the main location and the actress, so all I had to do was make up a story, taking inspiration from my childhood fears.”¹

The opening scenes of Caiano’s film are a love poem to Barbara Steele: the camera follows and accompanies her moves with sinuous tracking shots, Enzo Barboni’s refined lighting caresses her body with lights and shadows, Ennio Morricone’s sensuous and macabre totentanz celebrates every single gesture she makes, thus emphasizing their seductive nature. The first ten minutes are a hymn to the Goddess of Italian horror: a malicious tracking shot glides forward to show Muriel raising her nightgown and adjusting her stockings, then applying perfume on her neck and between her breasts. Steele is the attraction, not the film.

Nightmare Castle is one of the most accomplished films of the lot in its exploration of eroticism—an ubiquitous and sinuous presence and an irrepressible category in Italian Gothic horror—which earned it a V.M.18 rating from the censors because of its “scenes of blood and ghosts, haunting and obsessive, as well as several sequences of macabre eroticism contraindicated to the particular sensitivity of the younger age.” No wonder the original script was entitled Orgasmo.

What is particularly memorable about the film is the way Caiano depicts Muriel as a contemptuous femme fatale who dominates the male, takes him and rejects him at will: half-drunk, a glass of cognac in hand, she first mocks her husband, teasing his manhood and calling him a “wimp”; then she prepares for the night, waiting to call the virile manservant who will satisfy her cravings.

The disparity between the sexes is immediately clear: it is the woman who calls the shots and the man who obeys. A theme played by the woman on the piano serves as both a signal and an erotic lure: the manservant—a groom, just like Lady Chatterley’s lover, the embodiment of a brute and instinctive masculinity—is just a sex toy to Muriel, as muscle-bound heroes are to the evil vicious queens of the sword-and-sandal genre. It is up to the woman to educate man to pleasure. “I’m going to rid you of your vulgar ways and replace them with other much more subtle and refined,” Muriel whispers passionately to her lover; “I don’t understand you,” he replies; “It doesn’t matter,” she cuts him short.

As other cursed heroines of Italian Gothic—Nevenka in The Whip and the Body, or Elisabeth in Castle of Blood—Muriel claims her own independence from the male and her right to satisfy her appetites. The repressive reaction she faces reveals the dark side of marriage as an institution based on abuse, synthesized by the vision of the two lovers chained in a crypt and tortured to death by the husband.

Paul Muller’s character in Nightmare Castle is one of the Gothic’s most patent Sadean epigones: a Machiavellian husband who schemes to lead his wife to madness, worthy of Anton Walbrook in Thorold Dickinson’s Gaslight. Dr. Arrowsmith draws visible pleasure from the complex para-scientific gadgets that he uses to torture Muriel and the manservant, as well as from dissecting a frog in the film’s first scene, as an unequivocal close-up reveals. “You don’t know yet how long it takes to die of pain!” he whispers to his victims, even though—in one of the priceless gasps of humor running through the film—we see him fill a glass of water before his thirsty wife and then spill it on the floor, in an almost literal replica of a gag seen in Toto the Sheik (Totò sceicco, 1950, Mario Mattoli), one of Totò’s most famous comedies in his home country.

As for its narrative, despite Caiano’s claims that he was extraneous to Italian Gothic (“As for Bava, I don’t remember watching any of his films, perhaps just Black Sunday. I wasn’t influenced by his style, anyway I knew he was a great director, even though I never met him personally”²), Nightmare Castle is the most striking example of how Italian Gothic horror films were the result of a combinatorial narrative. Even though it came out just a mere five years after Black Sunday, Caiano’s film is truly a summation of situations, characters and narrative patterns that are commonplace in Italian Gothic horror films of the decade. Let us see how, in detail.

1. Dr. Arrowsmith is a hybrid between Dr. Hichcock and the mad doctor of Freda’s earlier I Vampiri: he plans to kill his second wife and conducts experiments with rejuvenating blood transfusions. 2. His maid (Helga Liné), who regains her youth and beauty through blood transfusions, recalls I Vampiri’s Duchess Du Grand and, to a lesser extent, Mill of the Stone Women’s Elsie; but she is also the doctor’s accomplice in getting rid of the man’s wife, like in Freda’s diptych (the fact that she is also the doctor’s mistress will return in La vendetta di Lady Morgan and The Third Eye). 3. The stableman (Rik Battaglia) is essentially the same character as the one played by Giovanni Cianfriglia in Castle of Blood: same clothes, same narrative function (he is his mistress’ lover, with the latter being played by the same actress), same end (he dies on the bridal bed) and even the partially disfigured face which characterizes his post-mortem apparitions. 4. Barbara Steele, as the blonde Jenny, reprises almost literally the role of the damsel-in-distress she played in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, while Marino Masé is the young savant who in Freda’s film was played by Silvano Tranquilli; at the same time, however, Jenny is an instrument of her dead sister Muriel’s vengeance, like Katia was of Asa’s in Black Sunday and Helen Karnstein of her mother’s in The Long Hair of Death. All, of course, were played by the British actress. 5. Muriel’s vengeful ghost appears in the final scenes with a half-disfigured face, a nod to Black Sunday.

Barbara Steele as the disfigured face of vengeance from beyond the grave in Nightmare Castle (courtesy S. I. Bianchi).

That is a sign of the tendency towards self-cannibalism that characterized Italian genre cinema, due also to the frantic production system: in those days the sword-and-sandal cycle was undergoing a similar path. The ultimate effect, of course, would be the end of the commercially exhausted filone.

“My love for the genre was born in ’43–’44 during the Nazi occupation” Caiano told an interviewer. “I couldn’t leave home—curfew started at 4 p.m.—and spent my time in the house’s library, reading Edgar Allan Poe’s works, which impressed me enormously.”³ Besides Caiano’s pseudonym, which pays homage to Poe and German Renaissance incisor Matthias Grünewald—who in his works often portrayed macabre Totentänze such as the one that accompanies the credits—the script, by Caiano and Fabio De Agostini,⁴ bears strong echoes of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as it reworks the idea of a heart ripped out of a victim’s chest and hidden.

What is more, Caiano pushes the theme of the double to exasperated heights. Barbara Steele plays two characters who portray the two extremes of the female universe: Muriel is a ravenous black-haired adulteress, sexually uninhibited, who eventually reappears as a vengeful spirit; Jenny is a helpless blonde, inhibited and restless, the designated victim par excellence. Later on, when Muriel turns up as a ghost, her face is half-covered by the hair which hides her disfigured half—a striking image that symbolizes a yin and a yang, beauty and horror, in the same body, and which also recalls a famous art object: Alberto Giacometti’s Surrealist Table, a 1933 sculpture which includes a disturbing female severed head, the face half-covered by her hair just like Steele’s in Caiano film.

It is not the only unexpected surrealistic moment in the film, and it shows Caiano’s accomplished direction, despite Nightmare Castle being shot in just eighteen days, under hasty circumstances. Jenny’s dream—which features a bleeding plant, transfixed hearts kept in a glass case and a faceless man—is part Blood and Black Lace, part Magritte’s famous painting The Lovers.

Another impressive idea, which unfortunately Caiano could not develop, regarded the use of color. “Initially the film had to be shot in black-and-white … and red, but the costs were too high, so I had to abandon the idea,” Caiano claimed, explaining that color would be used to great effect in the pounding hearts scene. Enzo Barboni’s cinematography is another asset: “To save time, Barboni […] turned on a 5000W lamp, took the lens out so as to get a scattered light, and put it down in a corner, in order to obtain the peculiar lighting you see in the film.”⁵ According to Caiano, Morricone’s impressive main theme for the film, played by Bruno Nicolai, was recorded in a Roman church on a huge pipe organ.

Caiano, born in Rome (not Naples as some reference books state) in 1933, was the son of producer and distributor Carlo Caiano. After abandoning studies (classical philology and archaeology), Caiano tried to find his way into showbiz in the early ’50s, as assistant director to Sergio Grieco. He debuted behind the camera a decade later with a number of sword-and-sandal pictures before moving on to other genres. The year before directing Nightmare Castle, Caiano had helmed a Western, Bullets Don’t Argue (Le pistole non discutono, 1964), starring Rod Cameron and produced by a company named Jolly Film. To cover costs for Caiano’s film, Jolly set up another low-budget Western, starring an unknown American actor, Clint Eastwood: Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. The rest, as they say, is history.

Notes

1. Antonio Fabio Familiari, “Intervista a Mario Caiano,” in Tentori and Cozzi, Horror made in Italy, p. 620.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. A former journalist, De Agostini would direct three films, the latter being the Nazi erotic Red Nights of the Gestapo (Le lunghe notti della Gestapo, 1977).

5. Familiari, “Intervista a Mario Caiano,” p. 621.