Possession (1981)

Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession starts on a note of hysteria and the hysteria level rises steadily. All of the characters exist in a constant state of hysteria.

This is not an overly coherent movie. There are ideas that seem to be just thrown in for the hell of it and are not followed through. At the start of the movie Mark (Sam Neill) is apparently an intelligence agent who has just returned from a lengthy mission. We see a glimpse of the Berlin Wall so we know we’re in Berlin, therefore we assume he was undercover behind the Iron Curtain. This is potentially an intriguing angle for a horror movie to explore - spies exist in a world of deception where nobody is what he appears to be. But we hear no more about Mark’s job as a spy. It’s as if the writers just totally forgot about it. This is all too typical of this movie.

Mark is married to Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and they have a small son, Bob.Their marriage is falling apart. He suspects that she has been unfaithful. We don’t really know what led up to this or how long the marriage has been rocky. We never do find out.

They both give the impression of being deranged babbling lunatics.

Mark finally discovers that Anna has been having an affair with Heinrich. Mark goes nuts, but he goes nuts about everything. Mark confronts Heinrich, and that doesn’t go well.

And then Mark discovers that Heinrich is not his only rival. And his other rival is much stranger.

We get lots more shouting and lots more histrionics. Then we see the monster. Then there are lots of gross-out scenes. When the monster appears the pacing, which was slow enough to begin with, becomes positively glacial. Something is going to happen connected with the monster but it takes forever to happen. And there will be further developments in the marital drama between Mark and Anna, and that takes forever to resolve.

In the meantime Mark has become involved with Helen. Helen is Bob’s schoolteacher. Helen is also played by Isabelle Adjani. It’s like Anna and Helen are two sides of the same woman, with Anna being the bad girl and Helen being the good girl. Maybe each of us has a good side and a bad side. Maybe that explains everything about the human condition. It’s a struggle between good and evil. Pretty deep stuff. We’re talking philosophy here man.

There’s a sub-plot involving a private eye, which also drags. And eventually we get to the infamous tentacle sex scene. Which is as un-erotic as the rest of the movie.

And what does it all mean in the end? I haven’t the remotest idea. That’s not necessarily a flaw. Some of my favourite movies are those that leave the audience wondering what on earth has actually been going on, and wondering what it all meant.

If that sort of thing is done well then you’re left wanting to see the movie again in the hope of teasing out a bit more of the meaning. You’re left perplexed but fascinated. If it’s done badly, you end up simply not caring that nothing made sense. And that, alas, was my response to this movie.

Both Sam Neill (a very fine actor) and Isabelle Adjani give performances that are somewhat incoherent and histrionic.

The performances are totally insane right from the start. We don’t get to see a gradual descent into madness, which might have been interesting. So we don’t get to know them as people. We never see them as anything other than crazed nutters. We have no idea what made Mark tick before he went crazy because we only see him as a crazy person. We have no idea what made Anna tick before she became a psycho because we only see her as a psycho. We do see Mark become more and more unhinged and we do see him descend into complete madness but I think it’s a weakness of the film that he’s already unstable right from the beginning. His descent into madness doesn’t really surprise us. He seems like the sort of guy who is already close to cracking up.

There’s also no gradual build-up as things get progressively stranger. Even when nothing strange at all is happening everyone is shouting hysterically and throwing things. So when strange things do start to happen the impact is lost. These are people who would put their fists through the kitchen wall if they burnt the toast.

Watching strange crazy things happening to strange crazy people isn’t that interesting. It’s what you expect to see happening to such people. It has no shock value. It’s a lot more interesting to see strange crazy things happening to relatively normal, or at least relatively sane, people.

This is what happens when you get a non-horror director trying to make a horror movie. They don’t understand the genre and they make a mess of things.

I loved crazy messed-up trippy weird movies. I love movies that are surreal and disturbing. I even love movies that combine horror with artiness. But just because a movie is crazy and messed-up and trippy and weird and has arty pretensions doesn’t make it a good movie. I don’t think Possession is a particularly good movie of this type.

If you’re going to make a weird movie you have to choose a particular kind of weirdness and stick to it. Even if the viewers never do figure out what is really happening and what it all means they have to at least feel that all the weirdness they’ve seen was in some way connected.

Listening to the audio commentary by the director it’s obvious that this was a very personal film for him. I can’t help thinking it was just too personal. It’s all based on the break-up of a relationship which happened to him, and all the characters are based on real people who were involved in that event. The result is that the movie is packed with minor details that have a deep personal significance for Zulawski, but which are not going to have any significance for the viewer. There are lots of things that make vague sense when he explains them, but when the director has to explain what various things in his movie mean then to me that is bad film-making.

As a horror movie I think Possession fails. It isn’t scary and it isn’t horrifying and it isn’t creepy. There are moments that are disgustingly gross but genuine creepiness requires more than grossness. I suspect that Zulawski thought he was adding a fairytale element to his domestic melodrama but I can’t see that it serves much purpose.

But I don’t think Zulawski had any intention of making a horror movie as such. It’s a story of personality disintegration (made literal in the doubling of Anna and Helen) and the monster is merely some kind of metaphor.

I didn’t like this movie at all but in fairness I should point out that almost everybody disagrees with me on this!

Night of Fear (1973)

Night of Fear was the first Australian horror movie. It’s an incredibly tough brutal ozploitation classic and the story behind it is fascinating.

Producers Rod Hay and Terry Bourke had persuaded the ABC (the Australian equivalent of the BBC) to make a pilot episode for a horror TV series which was to be called Fright. The ABC gave Bourke access to their production facilities and very rashly allowed him to do what he liked. 

Then the ABC hierarchy saw the pilot, Night of Fear, and had collective heart failure. Not only was there no chance it could be shown on television, there was no way it could be edited to make it acceptable for TV. They would have needed to cut at least 40 minutes of the 54-minute running time. It was not a problem with particular images or events in the film - the whole thing was just so relentless violent, sleazy, scuzzy, brutal and confronting.

Terry Bourke wasn’t concerned by their rejection of the pilot because somehow he had persuaded them to allow him to shoot it in 35mm. That meant it could be released theatrically. But there was a snag. The film censorship board banned the movie. And again the problem wasn’t particular moments - it was the tone of the whole movie. They didn’t order cuts. They banned it outright. After an epic fight by the producers the ban was reversed.

The most striking thing about this movie is that there is no dialogue. No dialogue at all. None. Making a movie with minimal dialogue is tricky but possible. Making a movie with zero dialogue is a real challenge but in this case it is not a gimmick. Dialogue would have softened the impact of the horrors.

None of the characters have names. In the credits  Norman Yemm is The Man and Carla Hoogeven is The Girl.

Night of Fear begins with a pretty blonde (played by Briony Behets) riding her horse. She encounters a weird guy who looks feral. The encounter does not end well for the girl.

Then we are introduced to another attractive young woman, also blonde (played by Carla Hoogeveen). She enjoys a game of tennis. She doesn’t know she is being watched.

Shortly afterwards after a motoring mishap she ends up on a lonely dirt track with a broken down car. And she encounters The Man. He smashes the windscreen on her car to get at her. We know something terrible is going to happen to her and we make the obvious assumption about what it’s going to be. But we’re wrong. It’s something worse, something much more twisted. I’m not going to spoil it by telling you what it is.

This is where the cleverness of the absence of dialogue comes in. The Man is so feral and so deranged and so cut off from human society that he is not a man. He’s a monster from a fairy tale or a nightmare. He cannot speak. He cannot understand human speech. There is no possibility of communication with him on any level. This is what makes the Girl’s situation so terrifying. There is no possibility of reasoning with him or pleading for mercy. And she has no way of knowing what he will do next or what his ultimate intentions are. She faces the ultimate terror of the unknown.

This guy makes Michael Myers and Jason seem warmhearted and easygoing. Norman Yemm gives us the scariest psycho in movie history.

Since the Girl cannot communicate with him Carla Hoogeveen has to convey the Girl’s terror without any words at all. She does a superb job.

This movie gets very confronting in an extremely visceral way. After more than half a century it still has the power to shock.

Night of Fear was made on an incredibly tight schedule with virtually no money upfront but it doesn’t look cheap and never seem amateurish. It’s a very professional production and Terry Bourke was a very competent director.

The very short running time works in its favour. There’s not a wasted moment and the horrors build relentlessly. And the ending is excellent.

Night of Fear isn’t quite a slasher but it’s very much in the mould of the increasingly violent horror films being made in various countries at that time. And it’s as effective a horror film as anything being made at that time. It’s not exactly pleasant viewing but it achieves what it sets out to do. Highly recommended.

Umbrella’s Blu-Ray looks great and includes an audio commentary with Rod Hay and Carla Hoogeveen. They are both (rightly) proud of this movie.

Female Vampire (1973)

Jess Franco’s Female Vampire, released in 1973, presents a few problems for a reviewer. It’s one of his most famous films, it’s enthusiastically admired by most (although not all) of his fans and it’s one of my favourites among his films. It is also very extreme in a number of ways. If you’re new to the world of Jess Franco this is most definitely not the movie with which you should start. This one is for advanced students only.

This was a Franco-Belgian co-production and it not only exists in several radically different cuts, it was intended right from the start to be released in several very different versions. It’s not just a matter of different titles. These versions are so different as to almost constitute separate films. The version that matters is the French cut with the title La comtesse noire and in English-speaking markets entitled Female Vampire.

Franco had already eliminated most of the established vampire lore in Vampyros Lesbos, stripping the vampire myth down to its essential. It features a vampire who is an immortal creature who feeds on human blood and uses hypnotic powers to ensnare her victims. With Female Vampire Franco goes further. This vampire kills by draining the victim’s life force during sex. This is a reasonable idea given that vampirism has always been about sex. Franco just makes this explicit.

There is a plot but it’s minimalist to say the least. The Countess Irina Karlstein (Lina Romay) is a vampire, the last of her family line of vampires.

She does not want to kill but she must. She must kill to survive, and to satisfy her erotic cravings. She cannot stop herself. She is trapped. Having disposed of several recent victims she falls in love with a poet, Baron Von Rathony (Jack Taylor). She has no desire to kill him but she cannot see a way of avoiding doing so. That’s it for the plot.

But this is not a plot-driven movie - it’s all about mood and about the forces driving Irina.

This is not one of those Franco movies in which dreams and reality intersect, but Irina goes through her life in a kind of trance state. The forces that drive her allow her to have little awareness of anything else. She is entirely disconnected from human society (her muteness emphasises this).

Irina’s only connection with people is through her seduction and then destruction of them. Part of her tragedy is that she craves real emotional connections. There is still enough human-ness in her, enough of the woman, that she craves love but when she finds love with a man can she love him without destroying him?

Now for the extreme elements I mentioned earlier. These have nothing to do with violence. There is no gore. We not see a drop of blood. There is however a lot of quite explicit sex and an immense amount of very explicit nudity. These do serve a purpose. Irina is overwhelmed by her desires. There is the need to hunt. She hates doing so but it’s a matter of survival. And there are her uncontrollable erotic desires. The hunger for the life forces that she must devour and the hunger for sex occupy her every waking moment.

She seduces her victims by means of hypnotic powers so that they are similarly consumed by desire for her. The nudity emphasises that Irina is unaware of anything other than her physical cravings. The nudity does get the point across.

There is also the stylistic excess. The emphasis is all on mood. It does not in any way look or feel like a movie that is interested in reflecting straightforward reality.

While there is no sense that we are simply watching a dream Irina is so cut off from human society that her existence has a slightly dream-like quality. She is aware of her alienation from human society and from everyday reality. And the movie does have a misty dream-like non-real ambience. We’re seeing things from Irina’s point of view. Which means we’re not seeing things from a human point of view. Franco obviously wants us to feel that this is not quite reality in a straightforward way.

If we saw the world from the point of view of a leopard it would not look like our concept of reality and I don’t think any movie has more effectively conveyed the idea of the vampire as a predator driven entirely by instinct. But with the complication that she has a kind of dual nature, a vampire nature and a woman’s nature.

While La comtesse noire is a more interesting title perhaps Female Vampire is not such a bad title - she is a very female vampire.

There’s plenty of symbolism - the kite, lots of birds, the flapping bird hood ornament on Irina’s car, mist, etc. It’s not complex symbolism but it works.

La comtesse noire is even further removed from our conventional expectations of the vampire movie than Vampyros Lesbos. It’s closer in feel than any of Franco’s other movies to Jean Rollin’s vampire fever dreams. I love this movie but it is an uncompromisingly unconventional vampire movie. If you can accept that and if you’re not put off by a blending of extreme eroticism and artiness then it’s highly recommended.

Barb Wire (1996)

Barb Wire (1996) has a reputation as a trashy Pamela Anderson action thriller. That’s OK. I like trashy thrillers. And it’s a post-apocalyptic dystopian cyberpunk action thriller. That’s OK by me as well. It’s based on a comic book.

It’s the aftermath of the Second American Civil War. Now Steel Harbor is the only free city. It’s city of crime, chaos, corruption, sleaze and depravity. You can have a lot of fun in Steel Harbor and you can get into a lot of trouble.

Barb Wire (Pamela Anderson) runs a bar there, called the Hammerhead. Curly (Udo Kier) manages it for her. 

Barb makes her living in various ways, some legal and some illegal, including bounty hunting and stripping.

She has an uneasy relationship with the local chief of police Willis (Xander Berkeley). Willis is moderately corrupt but Barb doesn’t mind that since she’s moderately crooked as well. There’s some erotic heat between them. An attraction of two morally compromised people.

There’s a totalitarian government and of course there’s a Resistance. There’s a genius scientist named Cora D with the antidote to the government’s most potent bioweapon. She’s on the run. And she needs some high-tech retinal contact lenses to escape detection.

Barb has the contact lenses and they’re worth big bucks and that could be her ticket out of Steel Harbor. But the bad guys (from the totalitarian Congressional government) are determined to get the lenses and to get Axel and Cora D (who are irritating starry-eyed idealists and not that bright).

Axel is helping her to escape. They want Barb’s help. Barb had loved Axel but he betrayed her. Barb has now had enough of causes.

Barb’s brother Charlie is with the Resistance and he’s idealistic and you just know he’s going to get himself into trouble.


Now at this stage you might be thinking that you’ve seen this film before. And if you’ve seen the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Cyborg you have seen it before. The plot is pretty much identical. Barb Wire also owes a lot to Casablanca.

The bad guys are cardboard cutout villains.

The main thing wrong with Barb Wire is that the basic concept is not very original and the plot is very unoriginal.

On the plus side the action scenes are extremely good. I can’t really fault the job done by director David Hogan. He keeps things moving and as interesting visually as he can.

And there’s Udo Kier who is always a joy to watch.

In my view the movie’s biggest asset is Pamela Anderson. Barb is a larger-than-life outrageous comic-book kickass action heroine and that’s how Anderson plays her. And with impossibly voluptuous figure, her blonde hair, her leather gear and her corsets she doesn’t look real. She looks like a comic-book heroine. That’s how it should be.

It’s easy to point out this movie’s many faults (and they are many) but if you don’t worry about the plot you can just enjoy the mayhem. There’s very little gore and very little blood. It’s about excitement rather than gore. It’s also very tame where nudity and sex are concerned. Perhaps too tame.

Barb Wire is a comic-book B-movie with a comic-book B-movie heroine and that’s fine by me. Mindless entertainment but it’s not trying for anything more than that. I enjoyed it. Recommended.

And it looks nice on Blu-Ray.

The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse (1972)

Jess Franco’s The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse, released in 1972, was the last Dr Mabuse film. Purists might argue that it’s not a proper Dr Mabuse film but considering the vast differences between the three Fritz Lang Mabuse movies (made over a period of almost 40 years) and the 1960s CCC Mabuse films there really isn’t any such thing as a proper Mabuse film. It was never a rigidly structured franchise. Franco’s movie has a Mabuse vibe and that’s good enough for me.

This movie exists in two different versions. The Kino Cult Blu-Ray offers us the longer German cut, released with the title Dr. M schlägt zu. The much shorter Spanish cut included most of the same footage but totally rearranged.

The movie was shot in Germany and Spain but is set in the United States, somewhere close to the Mexican border.

Even more than most Franco films this is a movie that it going to bring out all the smarmy sneering snarkiness in reviewers with mainstream tastes. The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is so far removed from conventional Hollywood filmmaking as to inhabit an entirely different cinematic galaxy.

As usual Franco had no money, and as usual he didn’t care. He wanted to create a particular feel in this film and he does just that and does it brilliantly. Everything is too cramped. Scenes look like they were shot inside closets. The framing is too tight. The camera is too close. He uses fisheye lenses when he shouldn’t. Everything is weirdly off-balance. Then there’s the red tint to everything.

Everything is wrong, and it’s all absolutely deliberate. The result is a feeling of paranoia and madness spinning out of control. Franco isn’t interested in being polished - he wants that swirling maelstrom of craziness feel. And it works.

And this is a fine example of one of Franco’s greatest assets as a director - the ability to find bizarre locations that work perfectly and that allow striking disturbing visuals without spending any money at all.

Jack Taylor is odd casting as Mabuse but he’s terrific - he’s a total madman who has no idea just how insane and doomed to failure his madcap scheme is. He’s never specifically referred to as Mabuse, but the German title Dr. M schlägt zu makes it fairly obvious that he is Dr Mabuse. And apparently in the Spanish version he is definitely stated to be Dr Mabuse.

What his scheme is doesn’t matter. It’s a total McGuffin.

Having Mabuse in America, and having him come up against a laidback cowboy sheriff (played in a nicely subtle tongue-in-cheek way by Fred Willliams) adds to the nuttiness.

And there’s the monster, Andros, one of several references to Franco’s early Dr Orloff movies. And yes, there’s a Professor Orloff in this one.

There’s a sinister sexy sadistic kinky female. There’s a stripper. There’s the cowboy sheriff’s girlfriend. There are kidnappings, and murders, and break-ins at secure facilities. The plot makes no real sense, and that’s a good thing. What matters is that things are crazy and they get crazier and everybody is paranoid and they get more paranoid. Dr M and his crew have completely control of events.

And of course there’s a kinky nightclub dancing scene.

It’s quite fitting that the final Dr Mabuse movies should have been made by Jess Franco, given that Fritz Lang was an admirer of Franco’s work.

The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is not quite like any other Jess Franco movie except that it’s weird and offbeat. Which of course means it’s very Jess Franco indeed. He could make movies that were weird and offbeat in lots of different ways. In this case there’s an odd mistiness to everything and the brutalist architecture is perfect for a Dr Mabuse movie.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

The Kino Cult Blu-Ray looks nice and there’s an audio commentary by Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth.

Vampyros Lesbos (1970)

If you’re a eurocult fan you’ve seen Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos. And given that it was one of the first Jess Franco movies to be available on DVD way back early in the DVD era, and one of the first European erotic horror movies available on DVD at that time. There’s a good chance that this movie was your first exposure to Franco’s cinematic world. It was my first Franco movie and my first European erotic horror movie.

So it’s easy to take it for granted. But watching it now for the first time in many years I’m struck by just how startling it must have been at the time. That opening sequence! This is not how you begin a vampire movie. First off we know that we are not in central Europe or England in the 19th century. We are in Turkey. And the setting is contemporary.

The avant-garde music is most emphatically not what you expect in a vampire movie.

The erotic elements are also there front and centre right from the start. We get frontal nudity 60 seconds into the movie.

And then we find we are watching a night-club act. Of course there’s an erotic night-club act in most of Franco’s movies but in 1970 it wasn’t standard practice in horror movies.

And we are in seriously arty territory. This was the most arty period in Franco’s career. Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden (AKA Succubus, 1968) is full-blown surrealism with wild narrative experiments. This was a movie that numbered Fritz Lang among its admirers. Paroxismus (AKA Venus in Furs, 1969) is equally avant-garde. At this time Franco had reasonably serious art-house credentials.

It’s so long since I last saw this movie that I had forgotten that unlike most lesbian vampire movies this is not an adaptation of Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla. It’s an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And while there are some changes it is very recognisably and very consciously an adaptation of Dracula, at least to begin with.

Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) works in a lawyer’s office. She is sent on a journey to the remote home of a Hungarian countess, Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda), who needs some legal document attended to. The Countess is a vampire. In fact the legal documents relate to an estate left to her by Count Dracula. So Linda at this stage is clearly a stand-in for Jonathan Harker. The Countess begins her seduction of Linda, at which point Linda obviously becomes a stand-in for Lucy Westenra (or Mina Harker).

Linda ends up in the care of Dr Seward (Dennis Price) who is clearly a combination of Dr Seward and Van Helsing. Dr Seward his under his care a mad girl named Agra (Heidrun Kussin) who is obsessed with the Countess Carody. Agra is obviously the Renfield character.

At this time period European directors like Harry Kümel (in Daughters of Darkness), José Larraz (in Vampyres) and Jean Rollin (in movies like The Nude Vampire and Shiver of the Vampire) were radically reinventing the vampire movie. Franco appears to be doing that as well but he isn’t really. He is drastically streamlining the vampire myth, jettisoning the non-essential elements of vampire, but he isn’t going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Countess Carody does not sleep in a coffin, she lives in a modernist beach house rather than a castle, she has no feelings one way or the other about garlic and she adores sunbathing.

But all the essential elements are there. She is an immortal creature who feeds on human blood. She has hypnotic powers. She is quite unequivocally a vampire.

So we have major elements of Stoker’s novel established and then Franco starts playing around with them. This is a movie of stylistic excess and as with Succubus the more we see the more we feel that maybe we’re moving in a dreamscape. And we get more touches of surrealism. We know we’re dealing with dreams part of the time. That’s made explicit. But where do the dreams end and where does reality start? And Franco included cool cabaret scenes not just because they were cool. They emphasise that we’re watching a performance. We’re watching the Countess playing a vampire on stage.

Soledad Miranda is mesmerising. She dominates the movie from start to finish.

There are no shadows, no night scenes. Everything is bathed in glorious sunshine. That’s ow Nadine likes it. A girl has to work on her tan, even if she is a vampire. Franco is going out of his way to avoid gothic horror clichés. But it doesn’t feel gimmicky. Soledad Miranda actually has the ability to convince us that she really is a sun-worshipping vampire. This movie is also a great example of Franco’s genius for finding strange but perfect locations.

Vampyros Lesbos is one of the most important movies in Franco’s filmography. This is Franco at his best. Very highly recommended.

The Severin Blu-Ray offers the German cut, Franco’s preferred cut. The Spanish cut was apparently quite different. The most important extra is a perceptive video essay by Stephen Thrower.

Castle of Blood (1964)

When considering Barbara Steele’s career in Italian gothic horror movies it’s easy to focus too much on Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. It’s a brilliant movie but she made at least three others that are just as good - Camillo Mastrocinque’s An Angel for Satan (1966) and the two she made for Antonio Margheriti - The Long Hair of Death (1964) and Castle of Blood (1964). It’s Castle of Blood (the original Italian title was La Danza Macabra) that concerns us for the moment.

Castle of Blood opens with Edgar Allan Poe sitting in a pub in London trying to convince his friend, reporter Alan Foster (Georges Rivière), that his stories of the macabre are not fiction but account of true events. OK, so I don’t know how on earth Edgar Allan Poe could have come to be sitting in an English pub but after the huge success of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies if you wanted to sell a gothic horror movie in the U.S. market you had to give it a Poe connection.

Also present in the pub is Lord Thomas Blackwood (Umberto Raho) who happens to own a haunted castle. It has lain empty and untenanted for years. Blackwood challenges Foster to a wager. All Foster has to do is to spend one night in the castle.

Blackwood warns him that many have accepted this challenge and not one has survived to tell the tale.

Foster figures this will be easy money. Once he enters the castle Margheriti (quite correctly) starts to lay on the gothic trappings very thick indeed. Cobwebs, mysterious creakings, portraits that seem to be looking back at the viewer, doors opening and shutting for no reason. Foster is a sceptic and a rationalist and a man of science. He is not worried.

Then he meets Lord Thomas Blackwood’s relative Elisabeth Blackwood (Barbara Steele). This is odd. The castle has been completely empty for years. Even the servants are long gone. Foster is puzzled but when you find yourself sharing a castle with a smokin’ hot gothic babe who gives every indication that she is in the mood for love you can be forgiven for not sitting down and thinking about what’s going on.

Then Julia (Margarete Robsahm) shows up. She’s blonde but just as hot as Elisabeth but there’s some real tension between the two women. We will later find out that Julia wants something from Elisabeth that Elisabeth is not prepared to give her. Elisabeth very definitely prefers men.

And it’s soon obvious that the castle has numerous inhabitants. And it’s obvious to the viewer that there is something unnatural, or supernatural, going on. Are these people really alive? Are they really there? Foster doesn’t want to consider a supernatural explanation because he is still a determined sceptic, and he doesn’t want to think there’s anything unnatural about Elisabeth because he’s fallen madly in love with her. And they’ve had hot steamy sex. So he is sure she cannot be a ghost.

While we know that the supernatural really is at work are these people ghosts in the conventional sense? They have one or two unusual non-ghosty habits which I won’t say more about because it might involve a spoiler. But if they are ghosts they are oddly corporeal ghosts. Foster really does have sex with Elisabeth. It’s not quite a straightforward ghost story - it’s something much more interesting.

Margheriti directs with a great deal of assurance. He was in fact a master of the gothic horror genre, for which he doesn’t always get enough credit.

The atmosphere isn’t just creepy it’s also mysterious and puzzling.

Barbara Steele is at the top of her game and this is one of her sexiest performances. Georges Rivière is excellent, managing to be bewildered without seeming to be a fool.

It’s a great looking movie. In 1971 Margheriti remade this movie in colour as Web of the Spider (1971). He later admitted that it worked much better in black-and-white but Web of the Spider is by no means a total failure.

Castle of Blood/La Danza Macabra is a masterpiece of moody atmospheric gothic horror. Very highly recommended.

This movie is part of Severin’s Danza Macabra vol 2 boxed set. We get the rather heavily edited US cut of this film, with the title Castle of Blood, but more importantly we get the original Italian cut, La Danza Macabra (with English subtitles and an English-dubbed option) , which includes important scenes that were cut from the US version. There are lots of extras, the highlight being a lengthy video essay by Stephen Thrower but we also get to hear Barbara’s Steele’s reminiscences of the movie. She has very fond memories of working with Antonio Margheriti (she says that the three directors she most enjoyed working with were Margheriti, Mario Bava and Roger Corman).