Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe: Castle of Blood (1962)

About twenty years ago I stumbled on a video company called Sinister Cinema which specialized in public domain films of every exploitation genre imaginable: old movie serials, juvenile delinquent, sword and sandal, poverty row mysteries, bottom of the barrel sci-fi, and of course, horror. I was eager to get my hands on copies of some of the more obscure films I had watched on Scream In when I was a kid, movies like Black Sunday and Terror in the Crypt. Once I started ordering from the catalog, I was hooked and picked up some fun things as well like Roger Corman’s Swamp Women, Ed Wood Jr’s Jail Bait, and a campy hoot called Teenage Devil Dolls. But the real excitement for me was the chance to finally see some of the legendary and, until then, unattainable Barbara Steele flicks such as Castle of Blood and The Terror of Dr. Hichcock.

Today, my collection of VHS tapes from Sinister Cinema is buried in a box in my basement. Since the advent of DVD, there have been a number of film companies who have gone to great lengths to painstakingly restore some of these gems. Hichcock remains unattainable, but in 2002 Synapse Films remastered and fully restored the wonderful entry in Italian Gothic cinema, 1962’s Danza Macabre, better known as Castle of Blood stateside, restoring bits of risqué dialogue and some brief female nudity.

Castle of Blood purports to be based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. It bears some resemblance to his story Never Bet the Devil Your Head, but beyond that it is strictly a fabrication of screenwriters Sergio Corbucci and Giovanni Grimaldi. Like the American counterparts filmed by Roger Corman, Castle of Blood doesn’t adapt Poe as much as it captures the dreamlike quality and sometimes hallucinatory feel of his work.

 

Poe himself appears in the prelude at the Inn of the Four Devils, where he is being interviewed by British journalist Alan Foster. In the tavern, Poe and Foster meet Lord Thomas Blackwood who offers Alan Foster one hundred pounds if he can survive the night at the haunted Blackwood family castle. Foster accepts the wager, Poe and Blackwood drop him off at the estate and the fun begins.

Visually, like most of the other Italian Gothics from the early 1960s, Castle of Blood takes its cue from Corman – we are treated to plenty of cobwebs and candelabras, mysterious piano music, and drop dead gorgeous babes, most notably Barbara Steele who somehow cornered the market on haunted Gothic heroines in many of these films. Like most boys my age who were mesmerized by her Gothic glamour, I’ve had a lifelong obsession with the actress and her films to the point where the dead heroine of my novel, The Haunting at Blackwood Hall, is not only named after Steele’s character of Elizabeth Blackwood from Castle of Blood, but possesses her physical description as well.

Castle of Blood is slow moving by today’s standards, but it positively drips with Gothic aura in its tale of a house full of ghosts who relive the last five minutes of their lives every night at midnight. While the movie has several long passages of the characters wandering through the cobwebs with eerie music playing on the soundtrack, we are also treated to some stunning outbursts of violence and even a bit of lesbian erotica. Due to the slow pacing, Castle of Blood is not necessarily to everyone’s taste. But if you are a lover of cinema as visual art and ready to tackle something different in the Gothic genre, please give Castle of Blood a try. The Synapse release is still available from Amazon.

I realized I have been writing this blog for well over a year now and have not yet touched on the Italian branch of Gothic horror films. Expect more in the weeks and months ahead.

Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe: January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

For kids growing up in the US in the 1960s, Saturday night television was a thing of wonder when we were allowed to stay up late with a bowl of popcorn and a bottle of root beer, shivering with anticipation as the minutes kicked down to the start of our local fright show. In my city it was called Scream In and was hosted by a groovy hippie vampire named The Cool Ghoul. Week after week he brought us the best in (mostly Gothic) horror films from the 40s, 50s, and early 60s. We saw our first Hammer films on these programs, low budget shockers such as Francis Coppola’s Dementia-13, dubbed Italian imports, and of course, the Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination. Few things were scarier to me at that age than the bloodied hand of Barbara Steele rising from her tomb to stalk Vincent Price through the womb-like corridors of Medina Castle in 1961’s Pit and the Pendulum.

British film critic David Robinson accurately pointed out, "As in (Corman’s) House of Usher, the quality of the film is its full-blooded feeling for Gothic horror - storms and lightning, moldering castles and cobwebbed torture chambers, bleeding brides trying to tear the lids from their untimely tombs." Indeed, Pit and the Pendulum is so soaked in Gothic atmosphere that I have probably watched this film on VHS and DVD more than any other. On any rainy Saturday afternoon, sleepless midnight, and of course, the Halloween season, I find myself being drawn back to Castle Medina and the ravings of Vincent Price again and again.

To today’s younger audiences who have grown up with more graphic shockers, Pit and the Pendulum might seem too cheesy to take seriously. I have to admit that if Vincent Price was any more of a ham his performance might be mistaken for Christmas dinner. But when you drill down through the blood and thunder soundtrack by Les Baxter, the lashing rains and crashing waves, Daniel Haller’s art direction which fills the frame with an almost unparalleled Gothic atmosphere (watch for more about this guy in future posts), what we have left is a truly disturbing portrait of a mind on the brink of psychological collapse.

For those not familiar with the plot of Richard Matheson’s adaptation (spoiler alert), Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) is the son of Sebastian Medina, one of the Spanish Inquisitions most notorious torturers. At an early age, Nicholas witnessed the death by torture of his Mother and Uncle at the hands of his Father, accusing both of marital infidelities. Here we have what is unofficially known as Wicked Father Syndrome, a motif found in several of Corman’s horror films as well as a staple of 20^th century romantic Gothic fiction. This psychological fissure casts Medina as a true Byronic hero, making him a character to be both feared and pitied. The irony of this childhood trauma is that his own wife, Elizabeth (played by the ever ravishing horror film icon, Barbara Steele) has engaged in adultery with Nicholas’ best friend, Dr. Leon. The core of the plot revolves around an elaborate gaslight wherein Dr. Leon and Elizabeth fake her death, going so far as to bury another woman’s body in Elizabeth’s crypt. Nicholas, and the audience, have been led to believe that Elizabeth is dead, which brings us to the memorable scene of Elizabeth rising from her tomb, very much alive.

If Pit and the Pendulum were to be adapted today, the film would undoubtedly focus on grisly torture effects, much as it did in a 1991 version. With its music, art direction, atmospherics and emotional histrionics, Corman’s 1961 film remains one of Gothic cinema’s major milestones.  

“Neeeecholas!”