Spaghetti Gothic 101: Nightmare Castle

Not my favorite Barbara Steele movie (that would be The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, coming to The Midnight Room next week), but any way you slice it Nightmare Castle packs an awful lot of bang for your buck. This is another one I originally purchased on VHS from Sinister Cinema years ago. The censored version as originally released in the US is in public domain, so there are numerous DVD editions floating around at various price ranges.

In 2009, Severin Films acquired the rights from the European copyright holder and presented Nightmare Castle in as near to a perfect print as we will probably ever see, restoring close to fourteen minutes of footage along with the rest of the original music score by Ennio Morricone. Morricone is well known to Spaghetti Western fans as the composer of the scores for For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Sad to say his idea of a Gothic soundtrack is mostly overblown organ music and ridiculously over-the-top romantic themes that swell at inappropriate moments.

The story itself is a garish mishmash of Gothic tropes beginning with mad scientist Dr. Steven Arroway’s discovery that his wife is having an affair with the hunky gardener. Arroway systematically tortures the young lovers with whips and chains before dousing them with acid and electrocuting them. I guess if you’re going to dispatch adulterers you may as well do it in style.

Greedy Dr. Arroway thought he was going to inherit his wife’s money, but before her death, Muriel left her fortune to her half-sister Jenny, a blonde dead-ringer for Muriel incarcerated at the local insane asylum. But wait – it gets better.

After coaxing Jenny into leaving her money to him in her will, Arroway breaks her out of the asylum only to attempt to drive her mad all over again. What he doesn’t count on are Jenny’s psychic dreams in which she learns that someone murdered her sister in the greenhouse. There’s some other weird stuff about the mad scientist’s experiments – he restores the wrinkly housekeeper’s youth and raises plants that drip blood, and there’s a handsome love interest for Jenny in the form of her former psychiatrist who makes house calls.

The plot is lurid and as Grand Guignol as the soundtrack. The star of the show is, of course, Barbara Steele, demonstrating her acting chops as both Muriel and Jenny. (She plays duel roles in Black Sunday and An Angel for Satan as well). Many reviewers of her films around the internet have commented that she is put to best use when the camera makes a fetish of her face and body. Ultimately, she is as pure a 1960s sex symbol as Bridget Bardot and Raquel Welch.

As I mentioned earlier there are numerous DVD versions to choose from, but the Severin release is the only one worth purchasing, not only for presenting the most complete version for American audiences, but also for the outstanding thirty minute interview with the dark goddess herself.

I’m not much of a film critic, just a lifelong fan of these creaky old horror shows. If you’d like to know just how revered some of these Spaghetti Gothics are among collectors and horror fans, check out what some of the experts have to say at the links below. 

Classic-horror.com

DVD Savant

Horror News.net

Cinema Strikes Back

1,000 Misspent Hours

Two Birds With One Stone: Whip and the Body (1963)

Bridging my mini-series on ghosts at the movies with a mini-series on Italian Gothic Cinema comes Mario Bava's bizarre bit of S&M Gothic, Whip and the Body. Barbara Steele turned down the role of Nevenka, here played by the stunningly beautiful Israeli actress Dahlia Lavi. Nevenka has recently married Christian Menliff, but as the story opens, Christian’s brother, Kurt, played by the menacing Christopher Lee, returns to the family homestead and picks up where he left off with lovely Nevenka, namely a sadistic relationship where Kurt loves to wield the whip as much as Nevenka loves to be on the receiving end of it.

Kurt’s return throws the entire castle into turmoil. Everyone has a bone to pick with Kurt in one way or another, so it comes as no surprised that Kurt is stabbed to death in the shadows at the climax of Act One.

Kurt’s death introduces the core of the film: a long, hallucinatory sequence in which Nevenka imagines Kurt has returned from the grave. One of my favorite moments of the film is when Nevenka is summoned from her bed by the sound of a whip cracking in the night and follows it through the dusky corridors of the castle.

During the final act, the story by Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra, and Luciano Martino pulls out the red herrings left and right. As mentioned earlier, any number of characters in the tale had motive to kill Kurt. We are even led to believe that Kurt is not really dead. The final denouement of the film is a revelation of terrible beauty.

Whip and the Body is presented in a full restored and uncensored European version (in English) from VCI Home Video. The colors are eye-popping. I would not recommend the movie be watched while under the influence of certain consciousness expanding drugs. The DVD package also includes a booklet and commentary track by Tim Lucas, one of the finest scholars of mid-century horror films around.

While the sadism plays a strong theme in the movie, don’t let that dissuade you from watching this film. By today’s standards it would probably pass with a PG-13 rating. Whip and the Body manages to be a lush, romantic, erotic and ultimately Gothic masterpiece all at once.