TAKE FIVE...
“I Was Prepared To Spend The Night With
Horrible Ghosts... Instead, I Find You!”
- Black Sunday
- Castle of Blood
- Terror In The Crypt
- Nightmare Castle
- Castle of the Living Dead
"We rarely have visitors here - It's like living in a tomb, or somewhere at the very edge of the world..."
Scratched footage, bad dubbing, poor sound quality, atmosphere-spoiling Italian sunshine, disappointing 'day-for-night' sequences, stilted B-movie acting and tediously slow proceedings... Honestly, was there much to commend these European creepies from the early sixties, - that is, if you were lucky enough to find them at all at your local cinema?
And yet these "classics" of Euro-gothic have survived the test of time, have been embraced by a whole new generation of thrill seeking young collectors, who have established a new nostalgia for a culture which existed often before they were born.
Having found themselves restored as new dvd releases, blogged, reviewed and written about in such film culture studies as Kevin Hefferman's intriguingly titled and detailed Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold these creature-features are now worthy of a new consideration. We can now sit back and enjoy at our leisure the qualities that the Italian filmmakers and their real-life locations brought to a genre already repleat with its own traditional themes and motifs. Quite often, what was added, were moments of pure romance, surrealism, oneirism, almost poetry. ... To the castle.. and don't spare the horses...!
BLACK SUNDAY
 |
 |
Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio)
Italy 1960, 87 Min Black and White, English, Italian
A vengeful witch and her fiendish servant return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch’s beautiful look-alike descendant. Only the girl’s brother and a handsome doctor stand in her way. —IMDb
is a 1960 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava, from a screenplay by Ennio de Concini, Mario Serandrei and Marcello Coscia (who was uncredited). The film stars Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Arturo Dominici and Ivo Garrani. It was Bava's directorial debut, although he had completed several previous feature films without credit. Based very loosely on Nikolai Gogol's short story "Viy", Black Sunday was considered unusually gruesome, and was banned in the UK until 1968 because of its violence. The British censor made cuts to most of the scenes of violence, and the film was not released uncut in Britain until 1992. In the U.S., some of the gore was censored, in-house, by the distributor American International Pictures before its theatrical release to the country's cinemas. Despite the censorship, Black Sunday was a worldwide critical and box office success, and launched the careers of director Mario Bava and movie star Barbara Steele.
Black Sunday
Decades after its original release, Black Sunday has continued to maintain a positive critical reputation. In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), Timothy Sullivan wrote, "A supremely atmospheric horror film, Black Sunday was Mario Bava's first and best directorial job, and the first of the 1960s cycle of Italian Gothic cinema [...] [The film] remains [Bava's] greatest achievement, without a doubt one of the best horror films ever made."
According to Tim Lucas, Black Sunday has had an "almost incalculable influence" on artists and filmmakers. The film's opening inquisition sequence was a strong inspiration for many similar scenes appearing in such movies as The Brainiac (1961), La cripta el l'incubo (U.S. title: Terror in the Crypt) (1963), Bloody Pit of Horror (1965) and Michael Reeves's The She Beast (1966). Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula recreates several scenes from Black Sunday nearly exactly as they were filmed, in homage to Bava's film.
Tim (Sleepy Hollow) Burton has explicitly cited Bava's film as an inspiration, noting "One of the movies that remain with me probably stronger than anything is Black Sunday... there's a lot of old films – [Bava's] in particular – where the vibe and the feeling is what it's about... [t]he feeling's a mixture of eroticism, of sex, of horror and starkness of image, and to me that is more real than what most people would consider realism in films..."(text edited from Wikipedia)
 |
| Burn witch, burn... |
 |
| Black Sunday begins: The masking of the witch greatly troubled the censors |
 |
| The scene as replicated in Crypt of the
Vampire aka "Terror In The Crypt"
|
 |
| The unrepeatable Gothic romance of Bava's Black Sunday |
CASTLE OF BLOOD
"When I finally write this story, people will say it's... unbelievable."
Castle of Blood (1964 Italian: Danza Macabra also known as Castle of Terror)
Castle of Blood (Italian title: Danza Macabra) is a 1964 Italian horror film directed by Antonio Margheriti, using the pseudonym Anthony M. Dawson. This film is also known as Coffin of Terror, Danse macabre, Dimensions in Death, La Lunga notte del terrore, Terrore, The Castle of Terror, The Long Night of Terror, Tombs of Horror, and Tombs of Terror. Runtime: 87 min
A journalist 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 Soul's 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 need his blood in order to maintain their existence. Barbara Steele plays a ghost who attempts to help the journalist escape. - Silvano Tranquilli plays Edgar Allan Poe in this movie, and the credits claim that the movie is based on a short story by Poe. In reality no such story exists, although in the opening scene Poe (Tranquilli) is seen recounting the end of Poe's story "Berenice" (from Wikipedia)One reviewer has written, "The film evokes a great atmosphere, considering that budget and shooting schedule must have been pretty tight: smooth and interesting camera-work (particularly some tilted shots used for disorienting effect), expressive shadowy lighting and the expansive yet claustrophobic sets, all of which are beautifully complemented by a fine and eclectic score by Riz Ortolani. There are several other qualities that elevate the film rightfully to its renowned place in the pantheon of Italian horror, not least of all is the presence of two highly attractive ladies - Barbara Steele and Margarete Robsahm." (IMDb)
 |
| Candles at the ready... |
 |
| Barbara Steele up to no good... |
 |
| Exploring the cobwebbed corridors: Georges Rivière |
 |
| Barbara Steele and Margarete Robsahm in Castle of Blood |
Terror In The Crypt
"It's so beautiful here... this is a spot where one could come for pleasure ... or for death."
Terror In The Crypt (1964 Italian: La cripta e l'incubo; also known as Crypt of the Vampire)
Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. First published in 1872, it tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire named Carmilla. Carmilla predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years, and has been adapted many times for cinema.
Carmilla, the title character, is the original prototype for a legion of female and lesbian vampires. Though Le Fanu portrays his vampire's sexuality with the circumspection that one would expect for his time, it is evident that lesbian attraction is the main dynamic between Carmilla and the narrator of the story:
Carmilla selected exclusively female victims, though only became emotionally involved with a few. Carmilla had nocturnal habits, but was not confined to the darkness. She had unearthly beauty and was able to change her form and to pass through solid walls. Her animal alter ego was a monstrous black cat, not a large dog as in Dracula. She did, however, sleep in a coffin.
Some critics, among them William Veeder, suggest that Carmilla, notably in its outlandish use of narrative frames, was an important influence on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. 
Terror In The Crypt is more-or-less a faithful adaptation starring Christopher Lee and was produced in Italy in 1964 under the title La cripta e l'incubo (Crypt of the Vampire). One reviewer has written; "Though only superficially faithful to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's famous novella, "Carmilla," this picture merits praise for its consistent visual distinction, and a unity of mood, (elsewhere, and accurately described as "stately") that lift it far above the overpraised (and dramatically disjointed) "Castle of the Living Dead" which Mr. Lee completed about the same time. Allegedly set in Styria, but filmed in Italy, this film boasts deep focus black and white cinematography that clearly takes its visual cues from Bava's "Black Sunday." Indeed, this film even features a witch condemnation sequence rather similar to the one depicted in the earlier film. - The castle interiors are alive with looming shadows, the rooms dressed with the appropriate paraphernalia of the genre, (flaming braziers, suits of armor, baroque prickets and saint statues) while the exteriors contain some of the most enchanting landscapes one could wish for--not to mention unforgettable nightscapes--as of two women fleeing across a hillside in billowing peignoirs and lit by the moon, (rather like the cover of a Phyllis Whitney novel). Also in its favor are some scenes quite faithful to Mr. Le Fanu's original, as in the barouche accident which occasions the arrival of the vampiress, (here re-named "Luba" for inexplicable reasons). There are some demerits: a heroine that looks like a cross between Barbara Streisand and Maria Callas, and an Elke Sommerish Lady in Waiting whose adulterous relationship with Mr. Lee seems entirely gratuitous.Nonetheless, admirers of 1960s Italian gothics need to re-examine this piece which is often unfairly dismissed, as it warrants far more attention and respect..."
 |
| Majestic Christopher Lee effortlessly brings authority to the role of Count Ludwig Karnstein |
 |
| The corpse emerging from a coffin and pointing out her murderer is one of several striking and gloomy scenes |
 |
A beautiful Laura Karnstein, (Adriana Ambesi), daughter of the honorable Count played by Lee, witnesses
the film's atmospheric opening sequence as in a dream |
 |
| Nighttime and daytime trysts between Laura and her sultry new friend Lyuba: one garden scene clearly emulates the original illustrations to Le Fanu's 'Camilla' having Laura sit with her left hand upon the arm of the garden seat as in this illustration by Michael Fitzgerald for Carmilla |
 |
| illustration by Michael Fitzgerald for Carmillain The Dark Blue, January 1872 |
 |
| "All the obligatory goth-horror elements are well represented, including thunderstorms, spontaneously dying candles, secret passageways, hidden vaults, etc. There are also a handful of uniquely grisly and genuinely horrific images in the film like the sight of a hunchback hanging dead from a chiming church bell, a corpse emerging from a coffin..." |
Nightmare Castle
Nightmare Castle (1965 Italian: Gli Amanti d'oltretomba also known as Night of the Doomed in the UK, Lovers Beyond the Grave and The Faceless Monster)
"I've asked you before not to come down to my laboratory while I'm busy with my experiments."
"The Faceless Monster" is an entertaining, if derivative, slice of Gothic hokum that depends almost entirely on genre stalwart Paul Müller's larger than life portrayal of the evil scientist, Dr. Arrowsmith, and "Queen Of Horror" Barbara Steele's good girl/bad girl double act. The film has plenty of shadowy atmospheric imagery set around the castle, and it benefits plentifully from the extra gravitas lent to the proceedings by Ennio Morricone's excellent organ based score; but director Mario Caiano is no Mario Bava, and his direction often falls a little flat and is a long way from the dark fairy tale feel of the genre's greatest works. This can be a problem since Gothic Horror depends almost entirely on atmosphere to engender the suspension of disbelief necessary to make the whole thing work. Too many times in "The Faceless Monster" we are reminded of the dodgy script and silly story when Caiano lets the atmosphere slip long enough for our attention to be drawn to these negative elements.
Thankfully, everything is saved by the bloodcurdling last twenty minutes of the film when the supernatural elements take over and Barbara Steele gives an especially compelling performance as the mad and vengeful ghost of the mutilated Muriel in this last segment.
When Steele played both the evil Princess Asa and the innocent Princess katia in Mario Bava's "Black Sunday", she set a trend in Gothic Horror for representing good and evil as different sides of the same personality. Bava's genius was to have both Steele's good and evil incarnations look exactly the same and equally as a beautiful. "The Faceless Monster" once again sees Steele playing duel roles, but the film is far less subtle — with Jenny's sweetness and innocence sign-posted by having the actress sport a blond wig, while the mad and evil spirit of Muriel sees Steele give her usual dark and sultry performance. The film's concentration on torture and sadism is fairly explicit (although tame by today's standards) and this certainly helps Caiano pull the whole enterprise off -- but only by the skin of his teeth! No classic then, but definitely still worth a look."
Castle of the Living Dead
Castle of the Living Dead (Il castello dei morti vivi) (1964)
"With Your Permission I Will Remove The Body To My Laboratory..."
"In the early nineteenth century, a roguish troupe of circus performers is lured with the promise of gold to the remote castle of one Count Drago (Christopher Lee, of course), there to provide a private performance of their travelling show. They soon find themselves getting knocked off one by one by Drago's sinister assistant Sandro, as played by Mirko Valentin (the gaunt actor who a year earlier had featured (uncredited) as 'The Living Skull' in Antonio Margheriti's The Virgin of Nuremberg, also alongside Lee). But no simple murders are these; it transpires that Drago intends to preserve them all for eternity as 'living statues' with a serum that he has invented. In particular, for some reason, the exceptionally attractive Laura (Gaia Germani, fresh from Lucio Fulci's The Maniacs)." (Starburst)
 |
| Garden of Bomarzo |
What it lacks in pace and believable translated dubbed dialogue, the film more than makes up for with its icy, sepulchral stylisations. Beautifully shot in shadowy monochrome by cinematographer Aldo Tonti (who’d previously worked with Fellini on “Nights of Cabiria”) and making maximum use of the brooding interiors of the Castello Odescalchi in Rome, we’re given more than a hint of Count Draco’s morbid predilections from the off, thanks to the forbidding menace suggested by his frigid surroundings, shrouded as they are in a constant pall of flickering darkness. Christopher Lee, caked in white make-up here, with heavy-cast black eyes, looks like a bored, cadaverous dandy somnambulist in immaculate velvet and regency frills; but as well as being an aristocratic aesthete from the same morbid cast as the anti-heroes who inhabit the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, he’s also a Hammer-esque mad scientist, busy perfecting a fast-acting preservative in his Frankenstein-like laboratory deep behind the castle’s ill-lit interior walls. Accordingly, not only castle Draco itself but even the surrounding countryside has been subjected to Draco’s unnatural ideas of perfection -- as the troupe discover when they come upon a petrified raven, artfully placed in a tree on the forested pathway into the castle."...
..."The fact that the crone’s nursery rhyme predictions appear to seal all of these characters’ fates in stone from the very start just adds to the overall feel of frozen fatalistic ennui which shrouds the whole movie. Garden designer Pirro Ligorio’s striking, 16th century park statuary makes a perfect gargoyle-themed backdrop for the increasingly dreamlike atmosphere created by Tonti’s black and white cinematography, and during such scenes slanting camera angles accompany Angelo Francesco Lavagnino’s peculiarly diverse score (which includes histrionic strings over the title credits, plucked electric guitar motifs and music cues in the genre of folky, sixties style beat balladry) to engender a tone that inhabits the sweet spot where the low budget, midnite movie surrealism of “Carnival of Souls” meets the elegant poise of Bava’s “Lisa and the Devil”. Sutherland and Lee would also come together again the following year in the Amicus film, “Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors” -- but “Castle” easily eclipses it and most other efforts from the period for sheer offbeat strangeness; it’s slightly awkwardly staged at times, and the screenplay is hardly a harbinger of great poetry for the ears, yet the memorable visuals and the cast of grotesques, and the shadowy nightmare atmosphere so redolent of a twisted dream, certainly brings more than enough to the table to make this a very worthwhile addition to the collections of Lee enthusiasts and euro-gothic horror buffs alike." 
Castle of the Living Dead has a stranger history than most films of the genre. It’s actually a U.S. production -- shot in Italy with a cast consisting mainly of Italian and American actors, with Lee at the head. Though the IMDb seems to think otherwise, the credited director, Warren Kiefer (Herbert Wise for the English dub), was not the pseudonym for some mysterious Italian auteur called Lorenzo Sabatini, but was actually also an American filmmaker and writer -- at least according to researcher and author Jonathan Rigby in his recent book “Studies in Terror”. Adding yet more tantalising intrigue to this mysterious tale, Michael Reeves, the cult British director who shot “The Witchfinder General” with Vincent Price, was also in charge of the film’s second unit work -- leading to yet more persistent rumours that he may have also shot large chunks of the main body of the movie un-credited (although that, again it seems, appears unlikely). It does mean, though, that Reeves got to work with no less than three screen horror legends -- Price, Lee and Karloff, during the course of his short career! Distributed in the UK by the redoubtable Tigon films, who initially paired it with Vernon Sewell’s “The Blood Beast Terror” to little acclaim,- as Benjamin Halligan points out on the DVD notes, by 1967 Castle of the Living Dead would have seemed quite dated and in its way was more related to the "lexicon of the Universal horrors of the 1930s". The film ended up as one half of a Christopher Lee/Barbara Steele double-bill, paired with Steele’s “Terror Creatures from the Grave” -- but has rarely been seen since, until it's recent DVD release.
"I Just Wanted You To Stay Here With Me... For Ever"
Castle of the Living Dead
Il castello dei morti vivi
Le château des morts vivants - French title
Crypt of Horror
Saw all these films as a child they are some of my favorites. Great post!
ReplyDelete