Black Sunday (1960)

dir. Mario Bava cast Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi, Ivo Garrani, Arturo Domenici, Enrico Olivieri, Antonio Peirfederici

It's all about the visuals in this, one of the best-looking horror films of all time. In 17th-century Moldavia, Asa Vajda is executed as a witch (or a vampire, or both). A spiked "mask of Satan" is hammered onto her face as she promises revenge from beyond the grave. When the priests attempt to burn her body and that of her servant, Javutich, they are thwarted by a sudden downpour. Asa is entombed in the Vajda family crypt in a stone sarcophagus complete with a window over her face so she is forced to look upon a cross, thus preventing her from rising. Javutich is buried in the murderers' cemetery. Two hundred years later, the elderly Dr. Kruvajan and his young assistant Dr. Gorobec are passing through on their way to Moscow, when their carriage breaks down right outside the crypt. While the driver effects repairs, the two doctors go into the crypt to look around. Attacked by a (comically huge and slow) bat, Dr. Kruvajan accidentally destroys the cross on top of Asa's sarcophagus, breaks the glass over her face, and cuts himself so that the blood drips into the eye sockets of the dead witch after Kruvajan removes her mask. The doctors leave, meeting Asa's lookalike descendant, Katia on the way out. Gorobec falls instantly in love with her. Meanwhile, Asa awakens. She is still too weak to leave her tomb, but is able to summon Javutich, who, still wearing his mask of Satan, claws his way to the surface in possibly the best rising from a grave sequence ever filmed. Together the two plot their vengeance which involves the death of Katia's brother and father and the possession of Katia by Asa.

However, the plot is not really the point here. The look of this film made Bava an international star director, a status which he maintained up to his death in 1980. Filmed in black and white, this movie is a dark, fog-shrouded fever dream. The impressive sets include the ruined crypt where Asa is entombed, the dilapidated graveyard from which Javutich is reborn, and the spacious interior of the castle in which the Vajdas live. The landscape is made up of dead, gnarled trees, a persistent low fog obscures the ground, and the wind whistles constantly, sometimes combined with the howling of wolves. The look is very reminiscent of the old Universal horrors, though not quite so stylized. However, Bava adds disturbing visuals which paved the way for the gorier (though generally less imaginative) horrors of the late 60's and 70's. When the mask is a pounded onto Asa's face, blood wells up around its edges. When Kruvajan removes the mask, the action disturbs dozens of small scorpions which have nested in Asa's eye sockets. Later, these empty sockets are seen to be full of maggots just before new eyeballs appear in her face. When Asa revives, her face, at first, still bears the marks of the mask's spikes.

In fact, Steele herself is one of the movie's best visual effects. A British actress who at first appeared mostly in Italian-made films, she became a horror star as a result of this movie, with entire films being built around her talents. In fact, she represents the closest any actress has ever come to attaining true Karloff- or Price-style icon status in a genre which rarely has strong roles for women. Black Sunday makes it easy to see why. She is beautiful, but no more so than a dozen other horror actresses. But she has a unique look that is hard to describe. Her thin face, rounded cheekbones, and huge eyes can look truly otherworldly. In Black Sunday, she is equally convincing as the innocent Katia and the diabolical Asa. She truly has a presence that no other actress can duplicate. She is a fine actress, though she was dubbed in nearly all her roles in the 1960s, even in the American-made The Pit and the Pendulum!

Aside from Steele, the acting in the film is hard to judge, since everyone is dubbed in the English-language version and the script for that version is undistinguished. The only other performance really worthy of note is that of Arturo Domenici as Javutich who at least looks wonderfully scary with his mustachioed face, festering skin, and all-black outfit with the Vajda griffon on his chest. However, the acting and script are not the point of this film. The visuals make it great fun, and the fact that it launched Bava's and Steele's careers makes it historically important. It is a must-see.

Horror of Dracula (1958)

dir. Terence Fisher cast Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, John Van Eyssen

One of the most important horror films ever made, Horror of Dracula, along with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), established Britain's Hammer Films as the preeminent horror studio of its era, much as Universal had been in the 1930's, and gave birth to a revival of gothic horror films that would last into the 1970s. Horror also made a horror film icon out of Christopher Lee, who would go on to play Dracula in six more Hammer films and would star in many other classic horror movies. As I write this, fifty-six years later, Lee is still acting, the last of the great horror icons. Lee had already appeared as the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein, but he was, of course, heavily made up and that film clearly focused on the scientist, not the monster. It was Horror of Dracula that made Lee a star.

Cushing, who earned his horror icon status in The Curse of Frankenstein, turns in an excellent performance as well in the role of Van Helsing. He makes Van Helsing believable as a man of science who also is an expert on the supernatural. His presence is so strong that the sequel, Brides of Dracula (1960), revolved around him, rather than the vampire (Lee refused to appear for fear of being typecast), and was nearly as good as Horror of Dracula.

Horror of Dracula introduced literal blood and new levels of sexuality into the vampire film. One of the first things we see in the film is bright red blood dripping onto Dracula's coffin. We never see whose blood this is, nor does this scene ever recur doing the movie; it is meant to show the viewer that this film will be different. Hammer would be taking a different path than the restrained Val Lewton movies of the 1940's and would be taking advantage of greater standards of explicitness that had developed since the US-made Dracula of 1931. This time we would see the vampire's blood-stained fangs and would witness his attacks in vivid close-ups. There had been a suggestion of a sexual component in Bela Lugosi's interpretation of Dracula, but Horror of Dracula made it much more overt. Lucy Holmwood (Marsh) waits for Dracula nervously but with clear anticipation, to come to her bedroom, the way a young virginal bride might wait for her husband on their wedding night. Dracula kisses Mina (Stribling) before biting her neck and she seems sexually satisfied the morning after their first encounter. The portrayal of the vampire as an overtly sexual figure, which seems the dominant image of vampires today, largely began here.

Aside from its historical importance, the movie is flat-out entertaining. It's very well directed. I especially like the fact that Dracula has not one, but several dramatic entrances during the course of the film. Lee is actually onscreen a very small percentage of the time, but his appearances always have maximum impact. The scenes where Dracula suddenly appears at the top of the staircase to a startled Harker (Van Eyssen), charges into the library with bloodstained fangs and bulging red eyes, looms in Lucy's doorway at night are all memorably dramatic (and are all common stills often seen in guidebooks to horror movies). Equally memorable is the scene where a vampirized Lucy, about to bite her mesmerized brother Arthur (Gough), is suddenly foiled by a cross thrust in front of her face from offscreen, held, it turns out, by Van Helsing. Van Helsing and Dracula's final struggle is also impressive and is one of the most famous scenes in horror, as the adversaries chase each other through the castle, leaping over and on furniture.

In the 1931 version of Dracula, Bela Lugosi gave the definitive performance as the famous vampire. But overall, that movie, hurt by the limitations of early sound films, is static and seems like a filmed stage play (it was based on a theatrical adaptation of the novel). Horror of Dracula is much more entertaining. In fact, I consider the Hammer movie to be the best vampire film ever made.

Witchfinder General (1968)

dir. Michael Reeves cast Vincent Price, Ian Oglivy, Rupert Davies, Hillary Dwyer, Rupert Davies

It is 1645. As the English Civil War rages, Matthew Hopkins (Price) travels the countryside accompanied only by his servant, John Stearne (Russell). Hopkins is authorized by Parliament to arrest, try, and execute witches and is paid for every witch that he finds and puts to death. With the cooperation of local magistrates, Hopkins goes from village to village, arresting unpopular locals, allowing the sadistic Stearne to torture confessions out of them, and hanging or burning them. In the village of Brandeston, he accuses the unpopular local priest, John Lowes (Davies) and has him tortured. Desperate, the priest's beautiful niece and ward, Sara (Dwyer), offers herself to Hopkins if he will end the torture and spare Lowes. Hopkins agrees, but eventually loses interest in Sara and has Lowes executed. Soon after, Sara is visited by her lover and fiance, Richard Marshall, a young cavalry officer fighting on the side of Parliament against the King. Furious when he finds out that his oath to protect Sara has been broken, Marshall swears vengeance on Hopkins and Stearne.

When Michael Reeves made this film, he was considered one of the most promising young British directors. He was only 25 when the film was released and had already directed a well-received horror film called The Sorcerers, co-starring Oglivy and Boris Karloff. However, in February 1969, having started work on his next film, The Oblong Box, with Price and Christopher Lee, he died of a drug overdose. It was a tragic loss to horror cinema because Witchfinder General is an outstanding film.

The film is a profoundly pessimistic one, with no really sympathetic characters except Sara. Hopkins is a cold, heartless man who craves power and money and who is entirely insensitive to the suffering of people whom he knows to be innocent. Stearne is simply a sadist. Marshall starts out as a sympathetic character, but as his obsession with killing Hopkins grows, he becomes more and more like his target. In the end, we see that he is capable of the same savagery as Hopkins and Stearne, though not directed against the innocent. Reeves shows us a time and place where people, surrounded by violence, have lost their humanity in the quest to fulfill their own selfish desires.

This is one of Price's greatest roles. He had gained fame for his flamboyant performances in the Roger Corman-directed adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories in the mid-1960's. In fact, AIP, the studio for which Corman directed those pictures and the US distributor for Witchfinder General, retitled the film The Conquerer Worm (a Poe poem) for US showings, hoping to tie it to the Corman-Price-Poe series. However, Price plays this role completely straight with none of the theatrics he brought to the Poe films, or to later films such as Theatre of Blood. Hopkins (who was an actual historical figure) is portrayed as a dead-serious, even understated man, who is never emotional. Price, with his sneering voice, is perfect for the role of a man who is contemptuous of everything and everybody around him. This role proves that Price was not only a horror star, but a good actor.

Witchfinder General was popular enough that it started a disreputable sub-genre of witchcraft/torture movies that are, in some ways, precursors of the recent "torture-porn" films birthed by the success of Saw. Among these were The Devils (1971-directed by Ken Russell), Mark of the Devil (1969), and Mark of the Devil, Part 2 (1972). These films, particularly the latter two, existed basically to titillate viewers with scenes of sexuality and torture. Although Witchfinder General includes these elements, it is much more and stands as one of the best horror films of the 1960s.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

dir. Jacques Tourneur cast Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, James Bell

Betsy Connell (Dee) a Canadian nurse, accepts a job to care for the wife of an English planter, Paul Holland (Conway) on the Caribbean island of San Sebastian. The woman, Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon), is suffering from a strange illness which renders her mute and unresponsive, but still allows her to be ambulatory - a kind of waking coma. Holland's black servant Alma (Theresa Harris) tells Betsy that voodoo may be able to cure Jessica. Falling in love with the brooding Paul, the selfless Betsy decides to take Jessica to a voodoo ceremony in hopes of finding a cure for her condition.

This is one of the best horror movies ever made. The producer, Val Lewton, made a series of low-budget horror films for RKO Studios in the mid-1940's. All of these films emphasized atmosphere over shocks and many of them, such as Cat People and The Body Snatcher are rightly considered among the genre's true classics. I Walked with a Zombie is one of Lewton's best and competes with Cat People as the most admired of all his films. Rather than trying to induce terror or revulsion in the viewer, it goes for a feeling of eerie strangeness. The most famous sequence comes as Betsy leads Jessica toward the location of the voodoo ceremony. Under a dark sky, accompanied by the wailing wind and the distant sound of voodoo drums, the women make their way through fields of tall sugar cane, unable to see more than a few feet in front of them. They encounter signs of death on the way: a cattle skull stuck on a pole, a dead goat hanging on a small tree, a human skull inside a ring of stones, and finally Carrefour (Darby Jones), the towering, cadaverous, zombie (presumably) lookout for the Voodoo priests. Because it is so successful in creating a fearful mood without the presence (or even suggestion) of violence or bloodshed, this is one of the key sequences in the history of horror cinema. There are many other memorable scenes as well: Jessica, in a long white nightdress wandering the grounds of Paul's "fort", Carrefour, seen in shadow, looming outside Betsy's room at night.

Despite the title, I Walked with a Zombie is one of the most literate horror films ever made (its plot was based on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre), and a reminder of what horror films can be. The film deals with the way in which past events can cast a shadow over the present and lead to guilt and unhappiness. The black residents of the island cry at a birth and celebrate at funerals because of the brutal legacy of slavery. Paul is morbid and unhappy and his half brother, Wesley (James Ellison), while seemingly cheerful, regularly drinks himself into a stupor. The kind and brave Betsy eventually uncovers the family secret which caused all this unhappiness, but is unable to prevent tragedy, though the film holds out hope that she and Paul may find happiness together. The movie's horror is in the tortured psyches of the characters, and the fear of the unknown, more than in any horrific event.

Another notable thing about the film is that it is one of the few horror movies to treat Voodoo as a legitimate religion that is not equivalent to satanism. The ceremony that we witness is strange, but Betsy and Jessica, the white interlopers there, are not threatened. The film takes no position on whether Voodoo has any actual power or not; everything the characters experience could have a logical explanation. It is portrayed as a deeply held spiritual belief which helps the black islanders cope with their history of slavery and powerlessness.

I was very glad to have the opportunity to see I Walked with a Zombie again after a lapse of several years since my first viewing, and it was even better than I remembered. It is a must-see for anyone interested in the history of horror cinema, or who prefers atmosphere over violence.

Hardware (1990)

dir. Richard Stanley cast Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch, Iggy Pop (voice)

In a (sort-of) post apocalyptic future, soldier Moe (McDermott) buys the head of a robot from a desert scavenger and gives it to his girlfriend, Jill (Travis) who is an abstract sculptor and plans to incorporate it in her latest work. However, neither character realizes that the head belongs to an ultra-sophisticated military robot that has the ability to rebuild itself from available materials, as well as being programmed to kill anyone it encounters. Soon, Jill is trapped in her loft apartment with this monstrosity.

I watched this expecting an exploitation movie. It basically is, being more or less a low-budget version of The Terminator, though mostly confined to Jill's loft and set entirely in the future. However, it seems that the filmmakers had pretensions to create a kind of quasi-art film since the film is very slowly paced and features some weird imagery that is probably supposed to be symbolic, as well as some philosophical dialogue and an attempt at social criticism. However, these elements felt ham-handed and they seemed to get in the way of the film's plot, rather than contributing to it.

The deaths in the film are notably gory and the sweaty voyeur neighbor played by William Hootkins (who had small roles in Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark) is really repellent. I guess he was supposed to be, but I fail to see what purpose his character served, other than being someone besides the main characters for the robot to kill. Hardware is disturbing without being particularly interesting or entertaining. It is undistinguished low-budget film-making, neither particularly bad nor particularly good.

Kill, Baby, Kill! (1966)

dir. Mario Bava cast Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Eirka Blanc, Fabienne Dali, Piero Lulli, Luciano Catenacci

In a remote Eastern European village around 1907, Paul, a young coroner, arrives to conduct an autopsy on a young servant girl who died in mysterious circumstances. Assisted by the beautiful Monica, a recently-returned local with nurse’s training, he finds a gold coin embedded in the victim’s heart. Soon, other people begin dying in ways that suggest suicide, but what drove them to commit these acts remains a mystery. Perhaps the deaths are connected with a strange little girl in white who appears to the victims before their deaths and of whom the villagers seem deathly afraid…

 

Italian director Mario Bava was a master of atmospheric horror films and, on that score, this is every bit as impressive an achievement as his better-known Black Sunday. The village is filled with large, crumbling stone buildings, narrow alleyways, and cobweb –covered rooms. The nighttime settings and perpetual fogs give the film a powerful dreamlike quality, as figures fade in and out of the darkness and a mournful bell tolls, heralding each death. The English-language title makes this sound like a slasher film, which it most assuredly is not (the original Italian title translates as Operation Fear). In fact, this has more in common with the early Hammer films or even the Universal films of 30 years before than with the slashers (like Bava’s own Twitch of the Death Nerve) that came along just a few years later. The plot is fairly clichéd as outsider Paul stubbornly refuses to believe in the supernatural until faced with incontrovertible proof and contributes to one character’s death because of his insistence on modern medicine over traditional methods to ward off evil. But plot isn’t the point here and this is rivaled only by Black Sunday and perhaps City of the Dead as the most effectively atmospheric horror of the 1960s.

The Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)

dir. Sam Raimi cast Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley

"Kiss you nerves good-bye!" said the poster for this one, but there's nothing to be scared of, though you may die laughing. The pinnacle of the "splatstick" sub-genre (along with Peter Jackson's Dead Alive), this resembles a Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Ash (Campbell), brings his girlfriend to a remote mountain cabin and, while there, turns on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder left by the former owner of the cabin, a college professor who was investigating the occult. Unfortunately, the tape contains incantations from the "Book of the Dead," a medieval guide to summoning demons, who immediately posses Ash's girlfriend. Chopping her head off with a shovel (in a scene perhaps borrowed from Hammer's Plague of the Zombies) he buries her and barricades the cabin against a demonic onslaught, which he must face alone until the arrival of the professor's daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple of rednecks.

The catalog of horrors goes on and on. We get the old standby, the crawling hand, perambulating evil trees, a dancing corpse, a laughing disembodied head ("Hello, lover!"), a "witch" in the cellar (actually the professor's possessed wife), oceans of blood, and much more. The special effects are excellent, but not "realistic." Instead they're caroonish; the dancing corpse and the monster that the "witch" becomes both look like what they are: good examples of stop-motion animation. The demonic trees, with evil faces in the bark, look like something out of The Wizard of Oz.

Few actors ever seemed more like live-action cartoons than Bruce Campbell in this film. The only comparison would be Jim Carrey, whom Campbell strongly resembles, in some of his more manic roles. The demons seem to want to beat Ash up, rather than possess him (though he is briefly possessed) and he suffers just about every indignity one can imagine, even having is own hand turn on him at one point. Ash cuts off the hand with a convenient chainsaw, then, later, attaches the chainsaw to the stump of his wrist ("Groovy!" he says). Campbell is very, very funny in this movie.

I was always skeptical that a movie with lots of gore could possibly be funny, but this film really does take it so far that it's impossible to take seriously. It's far too cartoonish to work as a truly scary film, but as a black, black comedy, it succeeds admirably.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

dir. Mel Welles cast Sarah Bay (Rosalba Neri), Paul Muller, Mickey Hargitay, Joseph Cotten


Dr. Frankenstein (Cotten) welcomes his daughter, Tania (Neri) home from medical school. She's managed to overcome sexism to win recognition as a fully qualified surgeon and wants nothing more than to help her father in his latest attempt to create an artificial man. Frankenstein, however, must pay a group of scummy criminals to steal bodies for him and doesn't want his daughter involved. Without her help, Frankenstein and his loyal assistant, Charles Marshall, bring life to a monster, which ungratefully murders Frankenstein (for no apparent reason) and flees into the countryside.

When Tania finds her father's body, she swears to vindicate his name by creating a new monster, which will kill the original one. Telling the suspicious policeman Captain Harris (Hargitay) that her father was murdered by a thief, she develops a plan to put Charles' brain into the body of a mentally challenged but handsome stable hand. She gains Charles' acquiescence to the scheme by promising him to become his lover once his brain has been transferred. Meanwhile the first monster goes on a killing spree and the police and townspeople become increasingly suspicious.

There are a few good aspects to this movie. Cotten is professional. There are a few moments of effective atmosphere. Neri is astonishingly beautiful.

However, the weaknesses far outnumber the strengths here. The original monster has to be one of the most ridiculous-looking in the history of Frankenstein films. He looks like something straight out of a bad 1950's horror comic. Since the lighting strike that brought him to life also burned his face, the right side of his face is nothing but a mass of burn scars with a protruding eyeball. How his eye survived the fire that burned all the tissue around it is inexplicable, and the makeup looks completely artificial. He also has a huge domed, hairless head, which looks comical rather than scary. He has no personality and we feel no sympathy for him. He kills Frankenstein and a couple of random people, then goes after the gang of graverobbers who dug him up. Why? How does he even know who they are?

This films seems to be a copy of both the Hammer films and the sadomasochistic films of directors like Jesus Franco (all three sex scenes in the film end in death), but it fails on both counts. The Hammer films were low-budget, but were anchored by fine performances in the lead roles by such accomplished actors as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing; this film does have Joseph Cotten, but he has little to do and is killed off early on. Neri is sexy, but everyone else is quite dull and the script gives them nothing interesting to say. The verbal duels between Captain Harris and the head grave robber, which are supposed to sound like tough-guy banter, just fall flat. Franco, at least in his best films, like Necronomicon, could keep viewers interested with parades of surrealistic imagery, but this film is visually quite dull. Between the monster attacks (which aren't very interesting) and the sex scenes, nothing worth watching happens.

This is Neri's film, but she just can't carry it. It's not all her fault; her character is weakly developed suffering from confused motivations. At first she seems to be motivated by a desire to vindicate her father's reputation, but then simply by the desire to create a handsome and smart lover for herself.  The beginning of the move seems to be setting Tania up as a strong, independent woman, but in the end, she's controlled by her sexual desire; she's just a sex object. Spoiler Alert: She successfully creates her new monster just in time to fight the old one, who's returned to the lab. Tania and the new monster manage to kill the original one, and then immediately have sex on the laboratory floor. It strangles her. The End. What? This makes no sense, as the second "monster" actually seems to be a totally rational human being: Charles' (fully self-aware) brain in the stable hand's body. He has no reason to kill her. End of spoiler.

I'd heard a lot about this movie before actually seeing it. I wasn't expecting a good movie, but I thought it might be an entertaining piece of exploitation cinema, or at least a so-bad-it's-good movie. But it doesn't even rise to that level.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

dir. John D. Hancock cast Zorha Lampert, Barton Heyman, Kevin O'Conner, Mariclare Costello

This is my favorite sleeper. Despite a low budget, no major horror stars and a director not known for horror films, this manages to be a fantastically effective and frightening film. Unlike many low-budget horror films of its era, it does not rely on gore or nudity to make it watchable.

Jessica (Lampert) is a young woman just out of a stint in a mental home. She and her husband, Duncan, and a friend, Woody, are moving to an abandoned farm that Duncan owns on an island off the coast of Connecticut. Sneered at by the hostile townspeople (who seem to consist entirely of elderly men), they arrive at the farm to find a rootless young woman, Emily, living in the farmhouse. The kindhearted Jessica convinces her husband to allow Emily to stay. At first, everything seems to go well, but it's not long before strange things start to happen. Jessica sees a strange woman in white running through the woods. She also seems to see a corpse, but when she leads her husband to the spot, it is gone. Emily begins to act strangely toward Jessica and seductively toward Duncan, indicating she may not be as innocent as she seems. When Jessica finds a photograph apparently showing a young woman who drowned at the farm on the eve of her wedding in the late 19th Century, the picture seems to bear a strong resemblance to Emily. Is it all in Jessica's head? Duncan seems to think so and reacts with frustration rather than sympathy when Jessica tries to share her concerns.

One of the film's biggest strengths is in its portrayal of Jessica. She is far from the usual brooding psycho, but rather is portrayed as a cheerful and friendly, in some ways even childlike, woman who just happens to have a fragile grip on sanity, and knows it. Throughout the movie, we hear her interior monologue as she tries to convince herself that everything is normal and to avoid the temptation to confess her fears to her husband. As the strange happenings pile up, and become stranger, we feel great sympathy for Jessica and anger at Duncan for his lack of understanding. It's a masterful performance by Lampert.

The other key performance in the film is by Mariclare Costello as Emily. Starting out as a homeless waif at the mercy of the "legitimate" occupants, she gradually asserts more and more control of the situation. Her transformation is played marvelously by Costello, as we gradually realize there is something very different about Emily. Costello's physical appearance doesn't hurt her portrayal, either. Beautiful actresses are a dime a dozen, but Costello's red-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes give her an otherworldly look that fits the role perfectly. The scene of her "rebirth" as she rises from a lagoon is one of my favorite scenes in any horror film.

It's probably no spoiler to say that the end of the film provides no definitive answers for all the strangeness that has gone before. I usually dislike and feel cheated by ambiguous endings, but this film seems to require one. It's tremendous fun to think back over the film and try to build one's own explanation and answer the unanswered question for oneself. There are several possible explanations, though, strangely, the one suggested by the title seems the least likely. This is a truly original horror movie that doesn't easily fit into any sub-genre. Various sources have referred to it as a zombie movie, a vampire movie, and a ghost story. Whatever sub-genre it may fit into, it's definitely worth checking out for fans of horror films of this era.

Note: If, like me, you're a fan of the 1970's TV series, The Rockford Files, you may recognize the mysterious woman in white. Gretchen Corbett had a recurring role on the detective series as Beth Davenport, Jim Rockford's attorney.

Baron Blood (1972)

dir. Mario Bava cast Joseph Cotten, Elke Sommer, Massimo Girotti, Antonio Cantafora

Italian director Bava made his international reputation through atmospheric Gothic chillers such as Black Sunday (1960) and Kill, Baby, Kill! (1966), then switched gears with Twitch of the Death Nerve, released in 1971. It portrayed gruesome, bloody murders, mostly by sharp implements, on an isolated island and, thus, is often considered an ancestor of 80's slasher movies. In Baron Blood, though, Bava seemed to be trying to return to his Gothic roots, although the film takes place in the present.

Peter Kleist, who has been attending college in the US, returns to his ancestral hometown in Austria. Welcomed by his uncle, and a beautiful architect named Eva (Sommer), he visits the crumbling castle of his ancestor, Baron Otto Von Kleist, nicknamed Baron Blood. The good Baron was a sadistic torturer and murderer, who was burned alive by his own peasants when they tired of his nocturnal activities. The castle is about to be sold at auction.

Peter has some ancient documents that he found which supposedly contain an incantation for resurrecting the Baron, and another one for sending him back to the grave. Despite the warnings of his uncle, Peter and Eva, decide (for no very good reason), to go to the castle at midnight and read the revival incantation.Although they do not actually see the Baron, something seems to be happening and Eva urges Peter to read the other passage. Before he can so so, a gust of wind blows the paper into the fire. Subsequent scenes make it clear that Peter and Eva have indeed unleashed Baron Blood back onto the unsuspecting village, and the Baron resumes his campaign of torture and murder. Peter and Eva gradually realize what is going on, but, predictably have a hard time convincing anybody, including the elderly wheelchair-bound businessman (Cotten) who has bought the castle.

Bava does manage to showcase some of his old flair for creepy atmosphere that helped make Black Sunday and Kill, Baby Kill! so effective. The crumbling, dark, cobwebby castle, with its myriad staircases and dungeon full of rusty torture implements, is marvelous, lending a Gothic air to a story set in the early 1970s. I also liked the look of the revived Baron; he's mostly seen as a shadowy figure in long cloak and broad-brimmed hat, invoking the old 1940's radio character the Shadow, or perhaps Vincent Price in House of Wax. The scene where he chases Eva through the fog-shrouded streets of the village is nearly as good as anything Bava ever filmed. The very brief glimpses we get of his face and hands reveal the effects of the fire that killed him. The acting is acceptable, though Cotten makes his character sound disturbingly like Mr. Magoo! Sommer was quite simply one of the most gorgeous actresses in the long history of film, and frequent closeups of her beautiful face certainly, for me, added to the visual appeal of the film.

Unfortunately, the film also has weaknesses which keep it from being top-drawer Bava. There are many gaping plot holes. There doesn't seem to be any clear motivation for Peter and Eva to go to the castle at night and read the incantation. Peter's young cousin claims to have seen the Baron, but this is before the incantation is read. Don't the characters wonder how Cotten is able to get around the castle when he's confined to a wheelchair and the castle seems to consist mostly of stairs? Like many horror heroines, Eva seems to be initially set up as a capable, smart, and brave woman, but when the chips are really down, all she can do is scream (in one hilarious line, Peter tells her "pull yourself together" after she's witnessed events that would unhinge just about anybody). The film also tends to descend into dullness when the Baron is not lurking about. The Baron himself seems a pretty impersonal menace until near the very end of the film.

This can't really hold a candle to the legendary Bava's best films, such as the ones mentioned above, but it's a good movie nonetheless. If you, like me, enjoy Gothic horrors with lots of creepy atmosphere, this may not make your Top Ten, but is still worth checking out.