Count Dracula (1971)

Original title: Hrabé Drakula

The Victorian era. Jonathan Harker (Jan Schánilec) is sent to Transylvania to finish some real estate dealings with one Count Dracula (Ilja Racek), who is acquiring a new, gloomy, home in England. Well, and if you don’t know what happens next, you might want to make your way to Project Gutenberg.

This Czechoslovakian TV movie is more than just an interesting artefact for being the only Dracula adaptation I’ve ever heard of directed by a woman, Anna Procházková. It is also a genuinely fine film that makes much out of what clearly were very limited means. Stylistically, this fluctuates between some moody and appropriately bleak locations – the castle corridor and snowy Transylvania are the greatest example here, and the director milks them for mood and impact for all they are worth – and not terribly detailed interior sets. The latter are often used during cramped closed-ups – probably to help people on the kind of TV most Czechoslovakian viewers must have had at the time to see any damn thing at all – that are still highly effective and curiously moody. It often comes as a bit of a shock when the camera gets further away from the action, and this, too, Procházková uses very well, emphasising the moments of danger and strangeness.

Squeezing Stoker’s novel into a running time of seventy-five minutes would have been impossible, so there are heavy cuts to the material – Quincy Morris goes gets the shaft as he always does, but so do Renfield and the last voyage of the Demeter – and what’s kept in of the material is often heavily compressed for time. Though, unlike many an adaptation, Procházková and co-writer Oldrich Zelezný have a great idea of which core set pieces of the novel they want to keep and why they want to keep them. It’s genuinely impressive work that manages to do the novel’s mood in its best chapters justice throughout.

Lost Soul (1977)

aka The Forbidden Room

Original title: Anima persa

Tino (Danilo Mattei), a provincial late teen without much of a clue what to do with his life, comes to Venice to try his hand at studying art. He’s taken in by his uncle, the engineer Fabio (Vittorio Gassman) and aunt Sofia (Catherine Deneuve) to live with them in their decaying palazzo. Half of the place isn’t in a fit state to dwell in anymore, and Sofia and Fabio are very adamant about Tino not going into the attic. That’s pretty much the only thing husband and wife are agreeing on, though: Fabio is a dominating, verbally abusive hypocrite who very casually belittles Sofia, and she is fearful and neurotic about things Tino can grasp even less than the audience does.

Tino quickly – so quickly I’d hardly call it a spoiler – finds out there’s somebody else living in the house. His uncle’s brother is locked up in the attic room, incurably mad, raving, with Fabio his only human contact. Well, and the prostitute that visits once a month, apparently doing her thing with the madman while Fabio watches.

Given how quickly we learn about the man in the attic, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise there are more secrets in the palazzo, some concerning the dead daughter of the couple and the effect her death had on the marriage. Eventually, Tino will find out about all of them.

Dino Risi’s Lost Soul is not your typical Italian Gothic horror, but rather a somewhat arthouse-minded classy drama that thoughtfully takes influences of European Romanticism and Gothic horror to explore ideas of bourgeois hypocrisy and the loss of innocence through a revelation of family sins. Until its final revelations suggest that coming at things from this sideways direction of Gothic horror will still very much leave you making a horror movie. In fact one whose final revelations suggest a depth of perversity and sad corruption, Risi made the right choice not including Christopher Lee and his whip collection.

It helps Risi’s case for the sideways Gothic that Venice – particularly shot as clearly and moodily as DP Tonino Delli Colli does here – seems the perfect place to tell a tale of modern, sadly Gothic decay. It is, after all, a city grand but clearly on its slow way towards nowhere, full of stories terrible and wonderful (there’s an indelible, short sequence where Fabio explains some of the stories surrounding some palazzos they pass on their way to Tino’s school), enticing, but probably smelling of death below its perfume.

As a narrative, there’s very little actually happening here on the surface, but what’s lacking in action is made up by thoughtful and complex dialogue sequences full of allusions, suggestions, and the sharp needles of truth, filtered through fantastic performances by Deneuve (who is so good, you nearly buy her utterly counterfactual bits about the horrors of her aging which in reality are not at all visible on her face) and Gassman. There are layers of meaning – personal, philosophical, political – in the dialogue, but it feels not at all as if it were straining to carry them all. Risi’s touch appears so light, it can only result from a great feat of control.

Obviously, this is not a traditional Italian Gothic, but a film that uses choice elements of the form so well, it still is one of the hidden gems of the genre.

The Invasion of the Vampires (1963)

Original title: La invasión de los vampiros

Dr Ulises Albarrán (Rafael del Río), comes to small town somewhere in the Mexican countryside. He’s not a doctor of medicine, mind you, but of the occult arts, and he has been sent here by his master Cagliostro. Cagliostro (whom we, alas, never meet on screen), has had dreams about vampires and this particular place, and has sent his student to do some good as well as to do some practical research on vampires.

He’s got his work cut out for him, for the town is already haunted by regular vampire attacks that began with the disappearance of one Count Frankenhausen (Carlos Agostí) and the mysterious death of his wife. The only member of the family left alive is the couple’s daughter Brunhilda (Erna Martha Bauman). She now lives in the creepy Frankenhausen manor with her grandfather on her mother’s side, the delightfully named Marqués Gonzalo Guzmán de la Serna (Tito Junco) and his not the least bit suspicious housekeeper Frau Hildegarda (Bertha Moss). Frau Hildegarda is very loyal to her master, you understand – and if not, she’ll tell you, in her absolutely not suspicious manner.

Brunhilda is suffering from bouts of illness that may very well be more in the wheelhouse of a doctor of occultism like Albarrán than a proper man of medicine. She’s also clearly the heroine to romance here for him. That is, whenever the good doctor isn’t involved in making boric acid (a very important weapon against vampires), staking corpses, investigating the vampire business with the town’s mayor, or trying to not get obstructed by the very unhelpful town priest who’s rather quick with threatening excommunication and making people anathema for a parish priest.

Ah, Mexican Gothic horror, how much do I love you. Miguel Morayta’s Invasion of the Vampires splits the difference between the pulpier side of the Mexican version of the genre and the darkly atmospheric, jumping between wonderfully and outlandish action and name-dropping of occult matter of the sort that would not have felt out of place in a Weird Tales story of the less reputable sort (Jules de Grandin versus Count Frankenhausen would certainly have been a possibility) and scenes of moodily lit – or rather shadowed – crypts, foggy landscapes and decaying opulence set to a score of highly variable weirdness.

The contrast between these two modes of the Gothic gives parts of the film the whiplash quality of one of one’s more vigorous dreams, a uncertainty in tone that fits at least this particular tale of the supernatural rather well. This is the kind of movie having a character called Frankenhausen is not the most outlandishly psychotronic element but rather par for the course.

Speaking of the psychotronic, the final act features a delightful fight between our occultist hero and a huge, fuzzy vampire bat just a couple of minutes before a genuinely eerie sequence during which an already staked horde of vampires rises from their graves to surround the manor and attempt to call characters to their doom – there’s even a visual hint of Romero’s zombies here, though those gentlethings typically lack the handy stakes and the sirens’ voices of your dead loved ones.

Other delights are the incredibly overdone performance by Moss, who makes most Renfield performances in cinematic history look restrained without having to eat a single spider, and the complicated vampire lore that has vampirism as a family curse, as a supernatural disease and as a dubious way to world domination (tariffs are apparently the way to go in the real world).

I’m sure Cagliostro approves as much of all this as I do.

The Vampire (1957)

Original title: El Vampiro

Called back home to the Sycamores, the country estate where she grew up, to help care for her sick aunt María Teresa, young Marta (Ariadna Welter) steps into a more sinister situation then caregiving. It’s never a good sign when the local villagers don’t dare go out at night, and when the only vehicle willing to take one home is a cart carrying imported Eastern European soil.

On the plus side, Marta meets strapping, stupid and cowardly Enrique (Abel Salazar) just after she steps off the train carrying her to Gothic Mexico, and he is her contractually mandated romantic lead (as well as the obligatory odious comic relief), so there’s that. In fact, we will later learn that Enrique has already been involved in the business of Marta’s family before they meet, for he is secretly a doctor of medicine, called in by Marta’s uncle Emilio (José Luis Jiménez).

Once Marta and Enrique arrive at the Sycamores, they learn María Teresa died two days ago and has already been buried. Marta’s other aunt Eloísa (Carmen Montejo) has changed a bit since our heroine last saw her. She looks rather young for an old lady and has gotten into the habit of glaring sinisterly. Of course she’s wearing a cape now. The servants and uncle Emilio are clearly disturbed by more than María Teresa’s death, something that may very well have to do with their new neighbour, Count Duval (Germán Robles), a cape-wearing gentleman we the audience have already witnessed sucking the blood of a child. Duval has plans for the estate, the family, and Marta, many of them involving further bloodsucking, both literally and metaphorically. Worse still, Marta slips into gothic heroine mode rather quickly and become utterly useless, so all that stands between her and vampirism is Dr. Enrique.

El Vampiro is the movie that really put gothic horror as a mainstay on the map of Mexican cinema, seeing as it combined a smidgen of the modern age, Mexican cultural concepts concerning the supernatural, much of Universal horror with even more expressionist shadows and made a box office hit out of it. The country’s cinema would take a couple of decades of eventually pretty threadbare productions to cure itself of the macabre on screen for a while, but before that, it was one of the great countries of gothic horror together with Italy and Great Britain (one might argue Japan’s kaidan movies belong here as well, and glance longingly at Corman’s Poe cycle).

While not a perfect film, Fernando Méndez’s vampire movie hits so many of the pleasure points of gothic horror it is difficult not to swoon as often as Marta does. The whole mood of the film is lovely, how everything is drenched in shadows, every inch of screen estate looks and feels decrepit and decaying (art director Gunther Gerszo’s work is breath-taking), and even the silliest rubber bat with the most visible strings can’t change that.

Of course, silly rubber bats are a gothic mainstay as well, as are madwomen (Alicia Montoya) hidden away somewhere, premature burials, poison rings, superstitious villagers, smug vampires and their hatred of consense in relationships, cobwebs so thick, they might catch a bat, dramatic climaxes in burning rooms and so on, and so forth. Whatever you might wish for in this kind of production, Méndez and co. have probably found a place for it, and most certainly one that makes it look incredibly good.

Along the way, the film does things differently from time to time: romantic lead and comic relief are typically not united in the same character, nor does the romantic lead usually come over as quite as much as an idiot as Enrique does. This isn’t the only mix of two usually distinct character types in one role here: eventually, the film’s hidden madwoman character will also turn out to be its Van Helsing, and frankly, the actual hero of the piece. Which is a very satisfying development.

As satisfying as is all of El Vampiro – it’s no surprise that it made a lot of money and awoke the gothic instincts of Mexican cinema again.

Nosferatu (2024)

Ironically, Robert Eggers’s version of Nosferatu takes even more elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula than did Murnau’s delightful original example of spirited copyright infringement. In quite the move, it appears to do so via Coppola’s version of Dracula, with which it shares the erotic intensity/fixation, the emphasis on artificiality, the love for loopy accents, and the willingness to stick to an aesthetic even if this will cost you half of your potential audience, because it’s simply the right one to use for the material, damn it.

Despite this, Nosferatu 24 stands in direct dialogue with Murnau’s film. It may use very different aesthetic methods yet it achieves the same atmosphere of dreams turned haunting/haunted, while dragging to the surface certain things Murnau couldn’t quite articulate (or intertitle) concerning Ellen’s sexuality, or really, sexuality as a whole. There are yawning abysses of subtext here, and I look forward to a the next few decades of film academics coming up with ever weirder interpretations, particularly now that David Lynch has decamped.

The concept of virginity and clear-cut sinlessness saving anything or anyone is right out in this century, obviously. Instead, Eggers goes for a much more complex reading of guilt, and lust, and self-sacrifice that feels more dramatic as well as more true to the inner life of actual people. Zulawski’s Possession is an obvious touchstone here, and not only because Lily-Rose Depp’s approach to the role of Ellen Hutter seems possessed (mere inspiration isn’t enough for this film) by the spirit and hair of Isabelle Adjani from that film.

Despite its more truthful psychology, this, as the Zulawski movie – and certainly all versions of Dracula important to this Nosferatu -really isn’t interested in “normal” human psychology expressed via the often empty gestures of psychological realism at all. Every expression and emotion here is gigantic, Gothic in a sense that would make Byron and Poe nod approvingly (just don’t look at what they’re doing with their hands), creating the/a truth of life through being larger than life. As much as this is the most Gothic of horror movies, it is also a very folkloric reading of vampire mythology, not in the “folk horror” sense, but in how it treats the supernatural and its rules not as some kind of weird science, but as something truly inexplicable in its nature and its ways of being.

Visually, this is a feast of the Gothic and the macabre, full of shots that feel as if they came from half-remembered dreams that will now be very hard to ever forget again. At the same time, parts of the movie look and feel as if they were taking place in the same physical spaces as did Murnau’s original, or as physical as the also always metaphysical and occult spaces of this film can be. This never feels like Eggers wasting energy on ironic nods, quotations or movie nerd self indulgences, however, more like an evocation of the actual physical presence of Murnau’s original, if that makes any sense. Clearly, to me, this is the kind of film that invites a drift into the fanciful and the mystical, but then, this a film that left me breathless watching it for its sheer power. There are shots, whole scenes, in here my typically very forgetful self will never lose now until dementia takes me – something this shares with the original, fittingly.

Which is appropriate for a film that’s so suffused with various characters’ obsessions, all too often with Ellen as their centre, the fulcrum who eventually ends most of these obsessions by an act of self-sacrifice that’s not so much tragic than it is an act of the kind of self-actualization that also ends the self.

On a less high-falutin’ note, I find it pretty damn difficult to watch Willem Dafoe’s version of not-Van Helsing here, and not imagine him sticking a good-natured middle-finger in the face of Sir Anthony Hopkins, CBE.

The Man and the Monster (1959)

Original title: El hombre y el monstruo

Famous pianist Samuel Magno (Enrique Rambal) has retreated from the limelight for mysterious reasons, hiding away in a hacienda on the outskirts of a small Mexican village. He’s ready for some sort of comeback, though. He has arranged the big public reveal of his protégé Laura (Martha Roth), whom he believes to be the Greatest Pianist in the World (piano fans around the world are keeping records and score tables of piano duels, I assume).

Because of this coming attraction, surprisingly two-fisted music critic Ricardo Souto (Abel Salazar) comes to town for an unarranged interview. Magno, living alone with his severe and rather creepy, cat-carrying, mother (Ofelia Guilmáin) and Laura, is very reticent about any attempts of Ricardo’s to speak with him, but Laura is rather smitten by Ricardo (he is played by the writer/producer, after all).

Ricardo for his part stumbles upon Magno’s secret. It concerns the corpse of the former Greatest Pianist in the World (also Martha Roth) locked into a side-chamber, a pact with the devil, and the fact that Magno turns into a furry-faced fiend whenever he plays the piano (because the devil has a weird sense of humour).

As regular readers know, I just love Mexican horror cinema of this era. The Man and the Monster, directed by the often genuinely brilliant Rafael Baledón, is no exception to that rule.

As usual, I find myself particularly delighted by the film’s mixture of genres and tones. At its core, this is of course a contemporized gothic horror version of the Faustian pact (with shades of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, if you want to see it that way, and I certainly enjoy doing that, if only to annoy the squares), but it is also a vigorously played melodrama, as well as the kind of monster movie that includes a wild fist fight between a music journalist and a furry fiend the journalist actually wins.

As is so often the case in his movies, Baledón is a master of drenching rooms into long and deep shadows, of having his characters throw meaningful, heavy glances at the slightest provocation – though provocations here are generally not slight – and of treating the silliest, slightest moments of the script with a heaviness of emotion and expression that to me often seems at the core of what makes Gothic cinema so impressive and expressive.

Baledón is particularly honest about where the visual style of his gothic horror is actually coming from – the nods to Universal cinema and the shadows of a – typically not gothic as we non-academics understand the term – Val Lewton production are there and accounted for (lovely as ever), but there’s also that brilliant, minimalist scene in which Magno flashes back to his pact, emoting in front of a set that’s all classical movie expressionism and could be taken directly from Caligari.

On a subtextual level, this is a film curiously fitting to our times in some regards, seeing as it concerns a man of influence and power first taking control of the life of a young woman to then be able to destroy it for his own convenience. Of course, she is also saved by her two-fisted music critic instead of doing any of her saving  herself, which would not play well in a contemporary movie, but this is still a film made in 1959. And a rather wonderful one at that.

The Five Venoms (1978)

aka The Five Deadly Venoms

aka 5 Deadly Venoms

The dying master (Dick Wei) of a kung fu clan known as the House of Venoms regrets the rather dark and dubious deeds he and many of his students have committed over the years. His final wish made to his last student, Yang De (Chiang Sheng), is for the young man to find his other surviving students, observe their virtue, and dispatch them if necessary. There are two problems here: even though his master has taught Yang De a smattering of all the techniques of the House – namely the styles of the Gecko, the Toad, the Centipede, the Snake and the Scorpion - the other students have all specialized, and he’ll not be able to stand against them in single combat. Making matters more difficult is the fact that most of the students have never actually met one another, so finding the people whose virtue Yang De is supposed to evaluate could turn out to be rather difficult. One suspects the master of the House of Venoms never had the time to learn of the power of the style of Drawing.

However, there’s another surviving member of the House of Venoms who has retired to a small town in the country. He has stolen and hidden away the clan’s treasure, and the master is convinced the other Venoms are bound to look for him and it. So Yang De really only needs to travel there and keep his eyes open, beat the villains he can’t beat without teaming up with a virtuous venom who may or may not exist, find the treasure himself, and give it to charity. Simple.

As it turns out, the Venoms are indeed all in town looking for the treasure – some committing increasingly horrible deeds of violence and betrayal while others do try to act noble.

Chang Cheh’s The Five Venoms is often overshadowed by the later films featuring its five leads. They were soon to be known as the “Five Venoms”, and consisted, besides Chiang, of Philip Kwok Chun-Fung, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Lo Meng and Wai Pak. These five were great screen martial artists when working more in the background or alone, as they more often than not before this, but absolute magic when brought together. Later films do indeed provide even more opportunity to showcase their particular artistry.

However, one of the strengths of Five Venoms as a movie is that it is particularly willing to put its martial arts – though there’s still a lot of it, all of it great and often highly imaginative – aside for a bit to mirror Chang’s generally dark, pessimistic and woman-less – one can’t help but suspect a connection there - world view not only in rather dark ideas about the nature of many people but also a mood of the Chinese gothic. The use of torture and cruel, non-martial killing methods used by the evil Venoms does slot into Chang’s taste for a bit of on-screen cruelty, but combined with some choice shadows draped over some well-known Shaw sets and camera work that suggests more than a passing acquaintance with Italian Gothic horror (or similar ideas about how to suggest dread and decay visually), it does sometimes suggest that this particular version of ancient China is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Witchfinder General, if not locally, then spiritually.

Because two genres aren’t enough for Chang and the writer of more movies than many people have seen in their lives, Ni Kuang - who is of course on script duty here - this is also a bit of a classic murder mystery concerning at first an investigation by observation into the moral nature of the Venoms and then one about the identity of the elusive final Venom, Brother Scorpion, a cruel, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order, complete with red herrings.

It’s a combination I find irresistible, particularly when it is held together as well as it is here – philosophically, on a plot level, and aesthetically.

The Phantom of the Convent (1934)

Original title: El fantasma del convento

Friends Alfonso (Enrique del Campo), Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), and Eduardo’s wife Cristina (Marta Ruel) find themselves lost in the woods at night. A rather creepy man shows them the way to a monastery they have heard curious rumours bordering on fairy tales about. The friends expect the place to be a ruin, but in actuality, it is populated with monks who have taken a vow of silence they occasionally break for exposition. Thus, the ideal place for the trio to stay the night instead of staying lost in the woods.

However, the monastery seems to have a strange influence on the visitors that brings out their repressed desires and the darkest sides of their personalities. Eduardo and Cristina have been quietly lusting after one another for quite some now, but on this night in this place, this desire turns destructive – Cristina turns into a proper femme fatale, while Eduardo just can’t help but stop lying to himself about his feelings and now believes that taking his best friend’s well-being into consideration is rather less important than getting the man out of the way.

When they are not consumed by their private drama, the visitors are spooked by various strange occurrences – monks that seem to disappear where there’s no place for them to disappear to, monks badly hiding their skeletal hands, and a door nailed shut with a cross from behind which horrifying, human cries drift.

The Phantom of the Convent is a very early example of Mexican Gothic horror, featuring motives that would reoccur in movies from the country as a matter of course during the next four decades at least. Here, director Fernando de Fuentes (also responsible for the first Mexican talkie only three years earlier in 1931, or so the Internet tells me) still seems somewhat uneasy with the truly creepy stuff in a couple of scenes, whereas others demonstrate a firm grasp on the proper use of the interplay of light and shadow to create the mood of dream-like strangeness which best occurs in dilapidated surroundings that is so important for this particular style of horror, whatever its country of origin.

There are also rather a lot of hints at one of Mexican popular cinema’s great strengths in the coming decades – the ability to use genre tropes and visual hallmarks of an international tradition and mix them productively with more local interests and ideas. Here, it’s a – to my eyes, nearly a hundred years later, on a different continent – specifically Mexican Catholicism expressing itself through typical Gothic horror monks and the mood of an old-fashioned ghost story. There are also some surprisingly unpleasant looking corpses in the film’s later stages that surprised me to find in a film from 1934, from anywhere, but that are clearly inspired by the same type of mummification process we find in the mummies of Guanajuato.

As it goes with cinema from a very different era, Phantom of the Convent pacing isn’t really to modern tastes – there’s a tendency of scenes to go on a bit too long for my contemporary (non-blockbuster mode) tastes, and the feeling of a film pulling some punches it needn’t have pulled even in 1934, but there’s also a sense of languid, Gothic beauty (a Poe idea of beauty for sure) to The Phantom of the Convent that makes up for these failings in spades.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1979)

Architect Jonathan (Robert Hays), is asked by his old school friend Roderick Usher (Martin Landau) to visit the Usher family mansion, situated in a dismal swamp, as quickly as he can possibly make it. Jonathan’s a pretty obliging character, so she packs in his new wife Jennifer (Charlene Tilton) and goes on a very peculiar version of a honeymoon with her.

As you can probably guess, Roderick and his sister Madeline (Dimitra Arliss) are the last of their line, and both are suffering from a curious hereditary illness that increases their senses so much, they will eventually lose their minds from exposure of the outside world and even die from it.

Roderick, the saner of the two siblings, has developed a curious idea. He believes that the decaying state of the Usher family is intimately connected to that of the family mansion, a place so dilapidated, it’s a wonder it is still standing. But, thinks Roderick, if Jonathan were to find a way to save and strengthen the house, this would in turn save and strengthen the Usher family, saving himself and Madeline.

Strangely enough, Jonathan’s early attempts at humouring is friend and strengthening the foundations of the building do indeed appear to begin to influence Roderick’s health for the better. However, Madeline seems to be beyond the point of anything but an increasingly murderous madness, and she has taken a bit of a dislike to Jennifer. There is also more to the connection between the Ushers and their house than Roderick lets on.

Though I wouldn’t exactly call James L. Conway’s TV version of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” a completely successful movie, it does go in interesting directions to turn the very short story into a feature length film. Stephen Lord’s idea of turning the connection between the Ushers and the House that is mostly metaphorical in Poe into more of a concrete element of the plot is rather wonderful, and enables the kind of actual Gothic horror plot Poe had no need for, while also giving proceedings, at least to my tastes and eyes, the kind of weird turn you could imagine Poe using if he’d been a 1930s or 40s pulp writer. It’s a clever and effective turn that at once makes some of the metaphorical construction of the film more obvious to the slower members of the audience, and enables the rest of the film to not just be a worse looking retelling of the Corman version.

Visually, the film isn’t great shakes – there are a couple of effective enough looking sets, and Conway is nothing if not professional, but only a very few scenes tell us much through forms, colours and movement instead of dialogue and performances. Fortunately, the performances are generally pretty strong. Sure, Jonathan isn’t terribly interesting a character, and Hays performance is on the bland side, but when has it ever been any other way with the romantic male lead in a gothic horror movie? Tilton, whom I mostly know from her Dallas days, on the other hand, is rather effective at looking increasingly frightened and freaked out by her surroundings and her rather threatening encounters with Madeline; Arliss is pretty great at making mad eyes, which really is all she needs to do here. And Landau, probably not the obvious choice for Roderick, is actually rather fantastic. He makes much out of the strangeness of his character’s regaining of vitality and mental fortitude later on in the movie, but his time as dramatically nervous wreck with age make-up is just as convincing.

All of which turns this into a rather more interesting movie than I expected going in. I still think more visual flair would have done it a world of good (a world of sickliness?), but I do appreciate it for having some actual ideas about what it is adapting, and having a good crack at doing something with these ideas on a TV movie budget.

The Black Castle (1952)

Sometime in the 18th (17th?) Century. Sir Ronald Burton (Richard Greene), just returned from the business of imperialism in Africa, learns that two of his closest friends have disappeared in the Black Forest.

The place they were last seen is suspiciously close to the estate of one Count Karl von Bruno (Stephen McNally). Von Bruno is an enemy of Burton and his friends from their colonial adventures, and would have good reason to want to take vengeance on them; he certainly has the lack of scruples to make any such vengeance very cruel indeed. He has, however, never laid eyes on Burton, so Burton decides to pull political strings to go undercover as a hunting guest at the Count’s castle, in the hopes of finding out what happened to his friends, and to hopefully save them from a dire fate.

He gets into rather more trouble than he initially expected, but is helped by his rather egalitarian ways with the lower classes as well as his quick fencing arm. Burton will need all the help he can get, for his motivations are quickly shifting from those of the investigator and possible revenger to a man very much in love with von Bruno’s wife, Elga (Paula Corday). Elga reciprocates very much, for she was married off to her hated husband for political reasons – one can’t help but assume blackmail to have been involved given how much of a villain the guy is. Other complications involve a mute strongman who hates all Englishmen (Lon Chaney Jr.), the mysterious and somewhat sinister Dr Meissen (Boris Karloff), as well as a (non-metaphorical) pit full of crocodiles.

Nathan Juran’s mix of swashbuckling adventure and gothic non-supernatural horror tropes The Black Castle is rather a lot of fun even eighty years later. The script by Jerry Sackheim builds a highly enjoyable castle of tropes that provides opportunity for physical derring-do as well as for gothic melodrama (there’s even some Romeo and Juliet style coma draught business) while Juran – not always the most exciting director – puts a lot of effort into finding the point where the lighter style of the historical adventure movie and gothic horror in the Universal manner meet visually. His use of light and shadow certainly often creates a pleasantly creepy mood that’s very effectively intercut with the handful of scenes where Burton demonstrates his physical abilities. Some very fine sets add to the effect.

The cast is in fine fettle, as well. Greene makes for a believable, rather human, hero, while McNally, Michael Pate as his main henchman and Chaney Jr. milk the possibilities of the gothic swashbuckler villain for all it is worth.

Another of the film’s strengths is its willingness to give its character a second dimension, so von Bruno’s hatred of Burton isn’t completely without reason, and some characters who would usually just do what their evil boss says are allowed to have agency and moral complexity of their own. I was particularly taken with Karloff’s first sinister but increasingly troubled Dr Meissen. Karloff was always able to do sympathetic villains particularly well, and does wonders when he is allowed to play an actual human being like here.

So The Black Castle ends up being a rather wonderful mix of two related but seldom mixed genres that turn out to be as close to my heart in blended form as they are separated.

The Ghost (1963)

Original title: Lo spettro

Somewhere in the Scottish countryside in 1910. Dr John Hichcock (Elio Jotta) suffers from a nearly complete paralysis of a kind respectable medicine has no way of curing. Hichcock himself has come up with experimental treatments using curare and other poisonous substances. Given his state, he can’t really experiment on himself, though. It has taken the good doctor quite some to time to find another physician willing to commit to these experiments, but when the film starts, Dr Charles Livingstone (Peter Baldwin) has been living in the mansion, testing Hichcock’s treatments for some time now. Until now without any success, unfortunately.

What Hichcock doesn’t know is that his wife Margaret (Barbara Steele) and Livingstone have started an affair. Margaret is working on convincing Livingstone to murder her husband. The younger doctor is after all excellently positioned to make it look like a death from natural causes, and Margaret would very much like to get rid of her old, mean-spirited husband but keep his money. Livingstone eventually agrees – the Power of Barbara Steele compels thee – but murdering a man and ending up happily ever after are different things.

For one, Hichcock hasn’t actually left all of his money to Margaret, and the couple need to do rather a lot of grubbing, perhaps adding a bit of grave robbery to their list of crimes, to get around that little problem by stealing the loot before anyone knows how much of it is there. Then there’s a less easily soluble bit of trouble – the couple appear to be haunted by Hichcock’s ghost, who shows himself in increasingly intense ways that put rather a lot of strain on the murderers’ relationship.

To my eyes, The Ghost is among director Riccardo Freda’s best films. For much of its running time, its combination of Gothic and thriller tropes produces more than just a pleasant frisson, though it certainly does that as well. The film clearly takes place in the same imagination space like Poe’s “The Black Cat” or “The Cask of Amontillado”, but Freda never quotes directly from this particularly Gothic forbear. Instead he is aiming for a shared mood of psychological derangement as expressed through the art of deep shadows and tellingly symbolic colour contrasts. Even in the mediocre print I’ve seen shots like that of Steele in full Victorian widow garb, clutching a bunch of red flowers to her chest while kneeling in front of Hichcock’s tomb are pretty spectacular to look at, suggesting all those darkly romantic ideas about beauty, death and guilt that are part and parcel of the poe-etic.

Steele is as wonderful as ever. Her inherent mix of attraction, weirdness and intensity always made her a spectacular presence in Gothic horror surroundings, so much so that looking at her actual characters as written tends to be beside the point.

The only element of The Ghost I’m not terribly happy with is its unsurprising revelation of the haunting being no such thing. Though, to be fair, the supposedly mundane explanation includes astral projection. This isn’t a deal-breaker, especially since it also sets up a very macabre ending for everyone involved, but a natural explanation feels like a bit of a cop out after a film has gone so out of its way to create an atmosphere of the gothic macabre.

Crypt of the Vampire (1964)

Original title: La cripta e l’incubo

As tradition holds it, centuries ago, the witch Scirra (Ursula Davis) cursed the noble family of the Karnsteins. Today, as of 18xx, Laura (Adriana Ambesi), daughter of the contemporary Count Karnstein (Christopher Lee), suffers under terrible nightmares during which various family members are killed, perhaps by herself. Unable to watch his daughter suffer, and fearing the old curse might be real, Karnstein sends for the scholar Friedrich Klauss (José Campo) hoping Klauss might find the truth about the life and death of Scilla, thereby either debunking the whole curse business or discovering a way to lift it.

Klauss isn’t the kind of scholar who spends a lot of time in the stacks, though, and seems to spend most of his days trying to flirt with Laura and his nights having mildly spooky encounters.

Things turn rather more dramatic once Laura and Klauss encounter a mother and daughter who were involved in a coach accident. The mother (Carla Calo) needs to get wherever she’s going badly, but her daughter Ljuba (Ursula Davis, hmm) is clearly in no state to travel with her now. Laura does of course offer for Ljuba to stay in their creepy old castle with the Karnsteins until her mother comes back, and so they have a new houseguest.

Laura falls for Ljuba in the least sub subtextual bit of lesbian attraction imaginable, and soon the two young women have hardly an eye for anyone but each other, throwing the heaviest of heavy looks, and spend much time in each other’s bedrooms at night. Klauss certainly has lost all attraction for Laura. At the same time, the young woman’s nightmares turn ever stranger. Eventually, members of the Karnstein family do indeed start dying like they do in her dreams.

Her father and Klauss soon begin to suspect Laura of being the killer, though they dare not quite express it; they are not terribly bright.

Camillo Mastrocinque’s Crypt of the Vampire is one of the more curious adaptation of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”. It puts the core of the tale into a very different Gothic horror tale about the kind of witchy revenge the makers of Italian Gothics were more than a little obsessed with. The filmmakers do realize that the lesbian angle is somewhat important to the tale, but I’m not too sure they understand how and why, so Le Fanu’s thematically much richer lesbian vampire tale becomes rather diluted between this and the witch angle. However, the film’s portrayal of the intense, clearly sexual infatuation between Laura and Ljuba is highly effective, carrying erotic tension as well as an undercurrent of danger.

As a narrative, Crypt leaves rather a lot to be desired – the pacing is often curious and somewhat plodding, things never quite seem to come together logically, and characters never seem to have much character. However, as a bit of Italian Gothic horror, little things like a logical narrative and thematic depth really aren’t what the film is aiming for – this really is best seen as a pure evocation of mood through the play of light and shadow, the vigorous use of tropes and clichés as anchors to cling to in a narrative that doesn’t provide for the more typical expectations of logical narrative development. Like most good pieces of Gothic horror – and this is certainly good, perhaps even great – the film’s great strength is is ability to create a mood of the eerie and the macabre, its ability to feel like a very peculiar dream, where you won’t remember silly things like a plot the day after having watched it, but will find some scenes – Laura’s final dream, the moment when Laura draws Ljuba into her darkened chamber and both women disappear into darkness, Christopher Lee’s face during the climactic staking, the curious doppelganger/mirror business with Klauss – returning to your mind’s eye from time to time for years to come.

Three Films Make A Post: Tell Me Why You Don’t Like Sundays

Phenomena aka Fenómenas (2023): This Netflix production by Carlos Therón isn’t the remake of the Argento movie one might fear, but rather a film that seems to imagine the Conjuring series, but with bickering middle-aged women (one of them the inevitable Belén Rueda) replacing the sexed up version of two right-wing con artists. Which is such an obvious improvement, one wonders why nobody did something like it earlier.

Therón does a good job of mixing the expected stylistic interests of modern mainstream horror with a very Spanish sense of humour without things ever exactly turning into a horror comedy. The spooky business isn’t original but fun and done competently enough to make this a very pleasant surprise.

The Seventh Grave aka La settima tomba (1965): This often amateurish Gothic horror meets Old Dark House piece directed by one-time filmmaker Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo is certainly not what you’d call a good movie, or a hidden gem, but recommends itself to the likes of me through moments when exactly the film’s flaws – terrible continuity, dubious lighting, stiff yet overheated acting, and a complete lack of aesthetic taste – turn it interesting. It’s a very traditional psychotronic film in that way, blowing one’s mind a little by seeming devoid of any actual understanding of how to make a “proper” movie.

Terror in the Streets aka Akuma ga yondeiru (1970): The first third of this horror-tinged mystery by Michio Yamamoto portrays the increasing social and economical isolation of its heroine (Wakako Sakai) as if by some shadowy evil force that seems to prefigure 2020’s Invisible Man with wonderful paranoid and melodramatic intensity in a way that might even suggest some kind of feminist thought being involved. Any idea of that disappears in the middle of the movie, when things become increasingly silly and surreal, with an utterly bizarre nightclub marriage without consent scene as a particular high point.

Yamamoto unfortunately can’t keep the tension or the sheer hypnotic bizarreness of what came before up in the third act. But then, who wouldn’t crash and burn when tasked to tie up what came before in a standard mystery knot?

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

1830. A West Point cadet dies in what at first appears to be a suicide. Somebody breaking into the morgue the evening after to very literally steal the corpse’s heart does make the place’s leadership change their minds about that, though, and they call in a retired New Yorker policeman living in a cabin not too far away from the Academy. Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is a gifted investigator, but he’s not too happy to be drawn into his old profession again. He lost his wife and later his daughter some years ago, and would really rather prefer to drink himself into a stupor and wallow in his grief; he’s not too keen on West Point as an institution either, for reasons that will become clear later. However, he is also fascinated by the case and its macabre circumstances, something that will only increase once further murders happen. Landor acquires a kind of assistant among the cadets in form of one Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). Poe is an outsider among his peers thanks to his combination of romantic weirdness and intelligence as well as his predilection for poetry and the weird. He also has a brilliant mind made to solve puzzles and ciphers, which will stand everyone involved in good stead, especially once things take a turn into the occult.

Going by what I’ve heard, Scott Cooper’s historical mystery with a touch of the Gothic seems to be a bit of a marmite movie, with any given critic either bored to tears or really fascinated by the film and its general mood. I’m part of the latter group, but then, the former seems to believe this in many ways very traditional mystery with an occult bent – and some more modern touches for the last act – to be a procedural. Everyone watches a different movie, apparently.

Be that as it may, I’m not usually terribly font of mysteries that enrol a random famous person from history as a detective; often, because little in these persons’ works or life suggest any interest in these matters (sorry, Oscar Wilde). Poe, on the other hand makes a lot of sense in a detective role, as the father of the modern detective story as well as through his public fascination with puzzles and hoaxes. Cooper, providing his own script from a novel by Louis Bayard makes great use of this, as well as of Poe’s macabre and grotesque and romantic (in the traditional sense of the word) side.

Melling is a great as Poe as well, finding mannerisms and language that makes him feel eccentric and emotionally overblown in many regards, but never drift into caricature. Rather, this Poe is a complete human being, and it makes perfect sense that this version of Poe and Landor begin hitting it off like a strange father/son duo. That Bale’s great doing the very standard “detective haunted by the past” bit should come as no surprise. In fact, he’s so good at it that later developments that could strain belief make perfect sense.

Add to this the film’s wintry mood of rural, US gothic, the various occult shenanigans, and Cooper’s calm, un-showy but often quietly intelligent direction, and a cast so full of great actors (there are Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, Lucy Boynton and Gillian Anderson, for example) it can throw away someone like Charlotte Gainsbourg on a minor role, and you’ve pretty much made a film so centred around various of my favourite interests, I’m bound to love it.

As a matter of fact, The Pale Blue Eye does quite a bit more as well. This is very much a movie about how the failure of all figures of authority and respect at just doing their damn jobs and treating their communities with respect and fairness destroys first single members of these communities (in ways that can be lethal, spiritual, or mental) and then the community as a community, without most of these men of authority ever even understanding what is truly happening; one might think because they do not want to see it, though the film isn’t really telling.

Apart from that, there’s also a much more personal story here, about grief, justice, and the things that might come after, but getting further into this would lead us into unnecessary spoiler territory.

Vikrant Rona (2022)

aka VR

Several decades ago (the film officially speaks of “almost half a century”, and I’m not sure if this is supposed to mean the late 70s or the early 80s). A small Indian village somewhere in the middle of a tropical forest is hit by a series of possibly supernatural occurrences and serial killings that suggest a nasty occult ritual is going on. One of the victims is the village’s chief of police. The place is also basically overrun by smugglers, so there is the potential of all of this being a nastier version of the old Dr Syn gambit.

In a curious twist of fate and very suddenly, extremely macho cop Vikrant Rona (Sudeep) appears in the village. He quickly starts taking care of business, swaggering and threatening when he isn’t actually investigating. He’s clearly stirring something up, too, for there is a series of attempts on his life. Though, to be fair, these may very well be caused by all the testosterone the guy is oozing causing allergies.

Freshly returned to the village, young Sanju (Nirup Bhandari) becomes also involved in the investigation, in between bouts of wooing the delightful Panna (Neetha Ashok). These two start on their own parallel investigation that will eventually lead them to a rather horrifying suspicion.

I believe Anup Bhandari’s Vikrant Rona is the first Kannada language movie I’ve seen or written about here. Sensibility-wise, the film is close enough to what I’ve known of contemporary Hindi or Telugu cinema, so it wasn’t much of a problem for me to appreciate its brand of stylized, sometimes wonderfully moody, sometimes loveably silly, slickness. Tonally, I’d actually compare it with Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee movies from Hong Kong, only that Vikrant Rona mixes its twisty mystery with a smidgen of horror not with wuxia but with a bit of melodrama and action in the patented Indian manner.

The action is of the wonderfully overblown and entertainingly overdirected style that’s typically for most of what I’ve seen coming from India right now, in its own way as disinterested in proper fighting techniques as a modern wuxia or a superhero movie, going for maximum loudness, heft, and visual impact. Which can go terribly wrong in the hands of some directors (repeat “Michael Bay” ten times in front of a mirror and he will appear, but only for a tenth of a second, because then the first edit happens) but is just a whole lot of fun here. Particularly enjoyable are an early fight scene on a smuggler boat during a storm that also moonlights as a bit of a musical number, meant to establish Vikrant Rona’s bona fides as an asskicker, and the grand finale that starts as one of the more insane (that’s a compliment) dance numbers I’ve seen and turns into a riot of stunts, peculiar fighting techniques and colours. But whenever else VR punches someone, it is still the beginning of a very good time for the audience.

Speaking of musical numbers, while I’m not the biggest fan of the heavy use of autotune as a vocal effect on generally already very high voices some of the music has going on, as a friend of 70s Hindi cinema, I was rather happy with the pretty traditional way most of them were integrated into the plot, usually to express intensified emotions via choreography that’s just as fun in its own way as the action sequences are.

Speaking of “fun”, given the nature of the killings in the film and certain elements of the plot I’m not going to spoil, I found myself surprised by the general sense of it during the proceedings. It’s not that the film doesn’t have a sense of or respect for its own Indian Gothic (for lack of a better term) elements and the emotional heft of some of the story it is telling, it’s just that these elements so regularly are subsumed under VR’s absurdly overblown machismo (so overblown I couldn’t even get annoyed at it) and the joyful way the film throws out its many, many twists and turns (some of which are pretty damn obvious, some come as really cool surprises I wouldn’t have believed this particular film to get up to), this film of terrible secrets of the past, family suicide and child murder never feels all that emotionally threatening. And because the Vikrant Rona really is that fun, this isn’t an actual weakness but just the basic facts of its nature.

Challenge the Devil (1963)

Original title: Katarsis

Shot by gangster types of his acquaintance, a man of dubious morals escapes into the monastery of Padre Peo (Pier Vido), in wilder times a friend of his. Apparently, it’s all about a set of documents the gangster types believe their victim is holding out on them. He, on the other hand, believes these documents were stolen from him by his friend Alma (Alma De Río).

Padre Peo decides to visit Alma at the club where she’s doing “erotic” dancing and ask her for the documents, so that everybody can go home alive and well. When she’s reticent, Peo tells her the story of his religious/moral awakening, which takes up most of the film’s running time.

Once, Peo was part of a gang of bohemian thugs led by a poet who never seems to do any poeting. Instead, the gang roams the Italian countryside in their cars and beats up strangers, as bohemian types are apparently wont to do in Italy. Eventually, they end up in a seemingly deserted castle where they start on what the film decides to call an orgy, until they are interrupted by an old man (Christopher Lee in age make-up), who does a highly dramatic declamation about the hair of his lover, his pact with the devil to keep her forever young, and the devil’s usual betrayal. He asks the bohemian thugs to search the castle for the lover’s body to give her a proper burial; in return, he’ll give them all the riches of his castle.

Thus ensues many a scene of random wanderings through castle sets of varying quality full of shadows, mirrors and weird traps that never really hurt anyone. Apparently, wandering long enough through cobwebby corridors full of dubious metaphorical nonsense makes you want to become a monk. Who knew?

Challenge the Devil as directed by one-time filmmaker Giuseppe Veggezzi is a strange, awkward but also rather interesting little movie. It really doesn’t make much sense as the exploitation plus religious messaging movie this at least purports to be, but that really only strengthens the pleasantly weird impression the whole affair made on me.

The curious genre hopping helps there, as well, of course, seeing as how the film starts as a spy/gangster film, switches over to ten minutes of (bad) singing and dancing, and then shifts towards the metaphorically gothic, never connecting the different moods that come with these shifts in any sensible manner. It’s very Italian in that, expecting its audience to go with the flow of shifting atmospheres and genre rules.

The film’s moral ideas – perhaps coming from a position of honest Catholicism, perhaps from the more amusing one of exploitational hypocrisy – are vague at best, and its attempt at selling a bit of symbolic rambling through a castle as a big spiritual event that burns the evil out of one’s soul is as unconvincing as it is bizarre. Challenge is a bit too quaint for its own good – especially in an Italian movie from 1963 – and has rather adorable ideas about what an orgy is supposed to look like. Apparently, really awkward “wild” dancing and bongo drumming are as animalistic as orgies get. The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy clearly didn’t miss out on much.

What’s pretty great about Challenge is the aesthetic presentation of its very weak case against Satan. The black and white cinematography by Angelo Baistrocchi and Mario Parapetti is very beautiful indeed, and Veggezzi uses this beauty, the artificial yet also starkly impressive sets full of black backgrounds and curious shadows, to create an at times very evocative mood of the dreamlike, suggesting the emotional and subconscious impact of these surroundings and slightly weird experiences on the characters much more convincing and effectively than anything in the actual script does. This isn’t quite enough to turn this into a lost classic, but does certainly make it more than just worth the while for anybody who does love the shadowy black and white of the Italian gothic like I do.

Vampire Moth (1956)

Original title: Kyuketsuga

Fashion designer Asaji Fumiyo (Asami Kuji) and her stable of in-house models come under dire threat. A shadowy man with a badly disfigured face and a very characteristic set of teeth whom the film will call the “wolf man” (with a good understanding of the European conception of the werewolf as interpreted by Hollywood) because of these strange and creepy biters blackmails Fumiyo for something. He’s also not at all against committing a peculiar murder or two, especially when it means he gets to play with the legs of models. He’s apparently only interested in the legs, too, for the rest of the body of his first victim is returned to sender in a packing crate, with a big moth positioned over one nipple. And hey, he’s also sending moth-themed cake, so he can’t be all bad, right?

Given the moth-obsession, one might suggest our wolf man could somehow be connected with an elderly moth specialist who has the habit of visiting fashion shows to glare at the models and sneer at the fashion. That guy even lives in a moth-themed creepy mansion. For the first half of the film, a fashion company man (the film seems to dislike actually using character names, so your guess is as good as mine) and model Yumi (Kyoko Anzai) are trying to understand what the heck is going on the amateur detective way. Pretty much at the movie’s halfway mark, their job is taken over by legendary consulting detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Ryo Ikebe). He’s obviously got his work cut out for him.

About half the sources on the English language net I’ve seen seem to mix up this adaptation of one of Seishi Yokomizo’s Kozuke Kindaichi detective novels with The Ghost Man, a different 50s Kindaichi movie. It’s an easy mistake to make when you can only go by secondary sources, for the plots of both films do have rather similar set-ups. As with The Ghost Man, I can’t say if the different tone and style of the film to the Kindaichi books which have been translated into English is actually coming from the adaption or Yokomizo’s source. I can at least say that I find the film’s suave version of Kindaichi a bit bland compared to later movie versions of the character as well as the books in the series I have been able to read.

While they start out somewhat similarly, Vampire Moth does become increasingly different from the other movie. While they share a pulpiness in plotting and their approach to the mystery genre, the film at hand does contain no relevant nudity apart from a couple not quite bared breasts, and director Noboru Nakagawa downplays the proto ero guro elements he could have used.

Instead, Nakagawa – well-known for some brilliant kaidan movies in those parts of the West who care about old Japanese horror films – does dial up the spookiness whenever possible, using all the tricks of the creepy trade that stand him so well in his ghost movies. As usually, these are very much of a kin with the techniques of gothic horror used in Italian black and white movies of the same era, while also keeping to the slick visual standards of Japanese studio films of this and later times. There’s an absolutely incredible sequence where we follow our amateur detectives and the moth fan’s servant through a series of creaking doors through a mansion that’s all shadows and moth-fixated art, as if we were walking through a mind that becomes increasingly decrepit and weird, until our protagonists and we find another corpse. There are also fine macabre set-pieces concerning a pair of dancing legs, as well as a highly improbable and confusing plot to enjoy, where counting the number of villains and their actual identities can become too much for the armchair detective in front of the screen, and so adds to the strangeness of the film as well.

The Japanese gothic is only half of the film, however, for it seems highly interested in contrasts between the gothic and the high fashion modern (quite clearly following a parallel development to the giallo in another of these regular parallels between Japanese and Italian genre film). To my eyes, Nakagawa’s style often suggests the gothic, the macabre and the strange as the repressed underside of the glitter and the light, embodying all the ugly, unpleasant and nasty things the high modern won’t admit into their world. Until the repressed violently drags them into its world, of course.

Which isn’t at all a bad impression to achieve for a pulpy pot boiler of a macabre mystery movie that’s twenty years older than the guy watching it.

The Monster of the Opera (1964)

aka The Vampire of the Opera

Original title: Il mostro dell’opera

Sandro (Marco Mariani) the somewhat hyperactive director of a modern dance troupe has finally found the right place to make his dream project come true. It’s a long-abandoned old theatre that comes with a caretaker who only speaks in dire warnings and insinuations. Obviously, the place is supposed to be cursed. So there surely isn’t a vampire running around behind the scenes just waiting to get his teeth into Sandro’s prima ballerina (or however you call the position in modern dance) Giulia (Barbara Hawards) and whoever else takes his fancy.

Apparently, Gilulia is somehow connected with the vampire’s great love who doomed him to his bloodsucking existence, and the rather strange events he begins inflicting on the dancers are part of some plan for eternally recurring vengeance. Well, either that, or he really likes to poke underdressed women with a humungous pitchfork.

The Monster of the Opera was directed by Renato Polselli. Given that he also brought us The Ballerina and the Vampire, a film not containing any ballerinas but quite a bit of dancing, it’s pretty clear that the man had a genuine interest in putting some (or a lot of) dancing into his gothic horror movies, an interest clearly going above and beyond the opportunity female dancers lend the exploitative mindset to put women in outfits you’d otherwise never get away with. Unlike the earlier ballerina movie, being a sleaze genuinely seems to be only the tiniest part of Polselli’s motive for all the dancing – rather, this appears to be a genuine attempt to use modern dance as a part of the horror business.

I’m not sure I’d quite call it a successful attempt. Particularly in the film’s early stages, there seems to be an overabundance of dance numbers, not all of which are terribly well integrated into the plot, and the heavy lifting for the horror parts of the film is done elsewhere. Namely, right at the start of the film, in an exceptionally nightmare-like, heavily expressionist vision/dream sequence Julia and the caretaker seem to share (the film keeps it somewhat ambiguous) that isn’t just incredible to look at as something that feels like a refugee from some fantastic lost masterpiece of expressionist silent horror filmmaking, all built out of shadow, over cranked and undercranked camera work and images taken directly out of one’s nightmares but which also prefigures the strange mood and nightmare logic the film will take on in its third act, after all the dance numbers and the lounging of half-naked 60s hotties is done with, and the very early 60s portrayal of artistic people being energetic is through.

Then, the film actually makes pretty brilliant use of the dancing as part of the plot, too, trapping the dancers on stage via invisible walls, threatening them to dance or get sucked dry or pitchforked by the vampire, and suggesting nothing so much as the mediaeval dancing sickness to the viewer, turning what was once sexy-ish and a bit exhausting truly macabre, and deeply strange in feel.

Which is more than enough reason to power through one dance number too many during the first two acts, and makes this a rather interesting example of various attempts to transplant Italian gothic horror into modern times.

In short: Malenka (1969)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the ending, but it really is the ending’s fault!

aka Fangs of the Living Dead (which is a recut version)

Model Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) is really, really happy that her mother died and left her a castle situated in the European version of backlot Europe as well as the title of countess. To be fair, Sylvia never knew her mom and has been raised by her father who never spoke of his marriage and the past, but still…

Keeping with her sociopathic streak, Sylvia has no problem at all in leaving her fiancée Piero (Gianni Medici or “John Hamilton”, if you prefer) in the loving care of his insufferable comic relief buddy Max (César Benet) just a couple of weeks before she’s supposed to get married to him. Arriving at the town below her shiny new old castle, she’s first greeted with the usual gothic horror welcome in the local inn, villagers in this place not just staring and muttering but also taking huge back steps. Things only improve slightly at the castle. Her uncle (Julián Ugarte) is living there right now with a couple of very rude servants and one Blinka (Adriana Ambesi), owner of some very cleavage heavy gowns and a pair of fangs.

Dear uncle is a bit of a weirdo himself, never getting up before nightfall, telling vague stories about an evil ancestor named Malenka who looked exactly like Sylvia with a different hair colour. We all know where this is going, until the film crashes down in a risible “it’s all a plan to drive Sylvia insane” ending that’ll make you want to punch director/writer Amando de Ossorio somewhere more painful than his face.

To be fair to de Ossorio (who as we know would improve doing this sort of thing in the future), this was his first horror movie, and the gothic horror styles the film is working in were relatively new to Spanish cinema at this point in time, so I can excuse some wavering in the script. The idiotic plan for driving Sylvia insane, though, there’s no way to excuse, for it makes no sense, needs a whole village full of idiots and decades of preparation that must have started before Sylvia was even born.

Sylvia as portrayed by Ekberg doesn’t make for a great heroine either. She’s superficial, has not a single interesting character trait, and Ekberg’s performance is absolutely terrible, full of the shrillest, fakest emotion you’ll find outside of a political rally, weird facial contortions and a complete lack of believable humanity. Not that anyone else here is much better, mind you.

At least the film does tend to be pretty to look at. De Ossorio gets some good visual mileage out of the castle and decent interior sets,  and the colours pop in a very 1969 way. Which can be enough to endear a film to me, but in this case, the script and the acting (let’s not even talk about the fearless vampire hunter duo of Piero and Max) seem to go out of their way to be actively annoying and downright stupid.

The Hanging Woman (1973)

Original title: La orgía de los muertos

Sometime in what I assume to be the late 19th Century. Globe-trotting man of action Serge Chekov (Stelvio Rosi) comes to a small town in backlot Europe for the reading of the will of his recently deceased uncle. What he initially encounters in the village are a population with a hysterical fear of the night, and the corpse of a woman hanging from a tree in front of the graveyard.

The corpse turns out to be his cousin Mary (Aurora de Alba). As Serge soon learns at the reading of the will, Mary would have been his co-inheritor of dear uncle’s wealth, as well his new ward. It’s a bit of an awkward situation, but even the lovingly rude inspector called from the next town over (Pasquale Basile) can’t hang anything on the newcomer, particularly once it turns out that Mary hasn’t actually hanged herself but died of heart failure – out of fright – only to be tossed up the tree later.

This is only the beginning of Serge’s troubles, for his late uncle’s household is a peculiar one: there’s dear uncle’s wife Nadia (Maria Pia Conte), a self-declared black magician who has inherited nothing of use to her (land without serfs, she complains), and seduces Serge as quickly as possible for better prospects; a butler (Carlos Quiney) with anger issues that don’t hold up against our hero’s two-fistedness; Professor Leon Droila (Gérard Tichy), a scientist whose experiments concerning the electrical energies dissolving in death the uncle financed, and who now fears to lose his financing as well as his cellar lab in uncle’s mansion; and Droila’s lovely daughter Doris (Dyanik Zurakowska), obvious good girl love interest. With this cast of characters – also including the great Paul Naschy hanging around the borders of the plot as a necrophiliac grave digger - it’s no surprise that Serge soon has to fight off murderous attacks, does not fight off seductions, sits in on a seances, romances Doris and solves the mysteries surrounding his uncle’s death.

So it’s pretty useful for the film that Serge is a moustachioed Italian 70s macho who is as good at punching people – living and dead – than he is at baring his chest; it’s also a very nice change for a gothic horror movie to have a protagonist so lively, he’d feel right at home in a Eurospy movie instead of the usual stiff-necked pieces of wood who tend to be the least interesting bits of their respective movies. While I never managed to actually like the guy (machismo this large is not one of my favourite character traits, and I’m immune to bared male chests), he’s certainly highly entertaining to watch even when he’s just having a conversation, exuding nervous energy.

I just called José Luis Merino’s The Hanging Woman a gothic horror movie, but apart from that, it is also a macabre mystery whose mystery solving-process is driven much more by Serge’s two-fistedness than too much clever ratiocination. Which isn’t a complaint in a film with as much pulp energy as this one displays.

The pretty wild genre mix works very well for the film in particular because Merino displays a hand for all the genres and tropes he has packed in here. The early scenes of gothic horror as well as the obligatory séance are wonderfully creepy and claustrophobic (with a picturesque graveyard featuring as something as a bonus), the action scenes of Serge doing his Serge stuff are as punchy as they are supposed to be, and the sleaze elements are enhanced by some choice early 70s psychedelia. Who, after all, wouldn’t want the film’s main sex scene to consist of Nadia and Serge rotating on a bed intercut with Naschy’s Igor zooming in on one of his dead sex partners? Well, please don’t answer that one in the comments, come to think of it.

Speaking of sleaze, another high point of the film is the scene in which Nadia dresses up as a corpse to seduce Igor (the film never gets around to telling us what she actually wants from him there), only to be rejected as way too alive for the man’s tastes when she starts moaning a little. Naschy, as Naschy did, really seems to get into this sort of thing, too, providing this creepy dude with feverish intensity. But then, this is one of those sort of gothics where really everyone in the cast seems to enjoy going all out – even Zurakowska’s good girl is not as boring as those usually are, actress and script giving her at least some backbone.

All, this – and some sweet undead make-up – adds up to a film bound to entertain anyone even vaguely interested in 70s European cult cinema and its wild and woolly ways. The Hanging Woman is a keeper.