A sadistic count tortures and murders his unfaithful wife and her lover, then removes their hearts from their bodies. Years later, the count remarries and the new wife experiences nightmares and hauntings.
Amantes de ultratumba, De griezel minnaar, Les amants d'outre-tombe, Amor de Vampiros, Stoiheiomenos pyrgos, Stoiheiomenoi erastes, The Faceless Monster, Любовники из могилы, The Night of the Doomed, 亡霊の復讐, Les Amants d'outre-tombe, 梦魇城堡
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All the stars are for Barbara Steele. And for Morricone's soundtrack.
There’s a great SAW-style trap in this movie. The plot is interesting, with its own strange choices, but it plays like a charming gothic nightmare, literally. The film begins with vice, continues with vice, and just keeps spiraling deeper into it... you know what I mean. It follows a familiar formula, but it’s ‘spiced up’ with a vendetta that isn’t all that entertaining.
First of all, the film struggles to bring its more intriguing ideas to the surface. The supernatural here isn’t just a matter of ghosts or vengeance. It also reaches for something deeper, a kind of subconscious projection through its characters. Guilt swells like a dark tide,…
Spooktober IV: Morte all'italiana
Director Mario Caiano pays tribute to the gothic horror genre and Barbara Steele with this uneven movie starring the icon on a dual role as the woman who becomes victim of his husband after finding her getting jiggy with the gardener, which he also disfigures before killing them. However, after getting rid of them, he realizes he’s not the heir to her fortune and all he has worked for will be taken from him. So he decides to marry her wife’s unstable sister (also played by Steele) to get the cash by driving her mad and taking her custody. But this being a gothic horror movie, things don’t go as planned.
In my opinion, the film's…
I'm willing to believe a man can set up elaborate electrocution traps all over his house, that he can invent a blood and frog serum that makes an old woman look young and beautiful again, that flowers bleed and ghosts can haunt a castle and manifest and kill at will, but two Barbara Steeles and a Helga Liné all marrying or falling in love with Paul Müller? OH COME ON. They would all be out in the greenhouse making love with Rik Battaglia. Müller too. The movie looks great and sounds great and the camera spends plenty of time lingering over Barbara Steele's face which is exactly where it should be, in her dual roles of the innocent and not-so, the mad and the damned. I think I've watched too many Edgar Wallace mysteries because I keep waiting for a clever trick twist ending that never arrives, it's all quite a straightforward haunting.
Gothic horror following in the footsteps of the great Black Sunday and once again featuring Barbara Steele in a dual role. As the title suggests; the film takes place in a castle and focuses on a man who murders his wife and her lover - but not before finding out that she cut him from her will in favour of her imbecile sister! Cut to some time later, and the man returns to his castle with a new bride! The proceeding plot is essentially a ghostly gaslighting affair as our antagonist tries to drive his new wife insane in order to get his hands on the money. The main standout of this film is obviously the atmosphere. The old Gothic…
“You don’t know yet how long it takes to die of pain!”
Blood & Terror: Barbara Steele in the Nightmare Castle
I was too much of a hedonist and I got bewitched by Italy.
—"Barbara Steele in Conversation," 2009
The film was born out of my passion for the Gothic genre, and for Barbara Steele, who has a wonderful face—beautiful yet frightening, vampire-like.
—Director Mario Caiano, in interview with Antonio Fabio Familiari
Ennio Morricone soundtracks the undressing and greenhouse sex having of Barbara Steele. AKA Night of the Doomed, this is the main attraction and obvious standout from the Severin blu-ray set, because besides Steele, you’ve got heavy hitters like Morricone writing the music (with playing by Bruno Nicolai) and genre…
Barbara Steele was born to roam spooky castles wearing diaphanous nightgowns. She was so convincing even I felt a draft!
I had one more day of freedom, I mean one more day before the October madness starts, so what to watch? Well this was a perfect creepy castle, doomed lovers, ghoulish ghosties, evil painting, organ playing, toasty fireplace, gothic feels & Barbara Steele October Eve pick! This isn't anything you haven't seen before - gaslighting, anti-aging "experiments" (bc of course the creepy castle has a basement laboratory, I mean duh) etc - but they got the vibe down. It's a nice homage to 30s and 40s gothic horror, which is kind of funny watching it now since 1965 itself was so long ago, but the retro vibe makes it feel less dated than a lot of "groovy man!" 60s films. All the performances were good but Barbara Steele just owns this shit.
Of the gothic horror films made between 1963 and 1965 in which Barbara Steele fucks a dude who is not her husband on the floor of a greenhouse, this is definitely the worst, a reality which is made all the more disappointing by its spectacular opening, the delicious nastiness of which remains pretty shocking even today.
Sadly, after Stephen (Paul Muller), the husband of Steele's Muriel, gets done torturing and killing his wife and her lover (oh, and cutting out and saving their hearts), he returns to being almost comically bland, at one point spending his after-dinner time shouting impotently about how much he hates a doctor whose study he's reading. Though the events that the follow the murders —…
Castles seem to be where all the freakiest shit goes down in old horror movies.
This has a great premise but drags on too much. One can only withstand so much gothic organ music on the soundtrack. The things I do for Barbara Steele! Poor Babs, she plays a dual role here, stuck wearing an obvious blond wig for most of the movie. Why didn't the Jenny character simply have dark hair and Muriel could have been the blond? Although, when Ghost Muriel returns from the grave, her hair made me think of Samara from The Ring, which added another layer of creepiness that was much needed.
Barbara Steele plays dual roles so when the first one is tortured and killed, the second one, a mentally unstable stepsister, makes her entrance. It's the blond hair that gives away the identity of the second one, but she's a different character, more delicate, but the blood of Barbara Steele still pulses through her veins. The opening Steele laughs at her husbands experiments with blood while his long time assistant Solange looks on. They've caked makeup on Solange's face and put a wig with white hair on her to make her look old. The blood experimentation shit restores her youth to a cute twenty-something brunette. All carried out within the confines of Nightmare Castle, which belongs to Steele to go…
A mad scientist torture-murders his unfaithful wife and attempts to gaslight her mentally unstable sister into handing over control of the possibly haunted family castle so he can keep his elderly lover eternally young. It's all very gothic, as you might have guessed.
There's a lot of familiar stuff at play here, but the production oozes B&W horror atmosphere, leavened with striking sadism, tripped-out hallucination sequences, a Morricone score and a couple of damn-the-torpedoes lead performances by Paul Muller and Barbara Steele (in a dual role as both sisters).
Plus there's a vengeful painting that sends people messages, and lord knows I'm a sucker for those.
I actually really enjoyed this. I’m new to gothic horror I think is the term for this but from what I saw here I’m really digging it. Thunderstorms, wrought iron fences, castles, murder, surgeries, reanimated dead people etc. There’s a lot of really fun facets of horror that have made the genre what it is.
This really suffers with its pacing and story though. It’s hard to follow at times whether that was my poor attention or it’s writing I do not know. But other than that it’s not a bad watch.
“I’ll do my best to dream about you.”
Play me some wistful piano music, Barbara. And say my full name in your curse so I know it’s real. We’re back at Villa Parisi again (Burial Ground). There are no undead Etruscans but there are plants dripping blood growing in the soil of a murdered wife’s charred remains! Jess Franco favorite Paul Muller is our mad scientist. Barbara Steele is the dual-role countess/sister with ferocious eyes and sunken cheeks. It’s Italian filtered Tell-Tale Heart with a bit of de Sade philosophy, rejuvenation serum and proto-giallo gaslighting. About 20 minutes too long, but when you’ve got Steele on contract, and those interiors, I guess you gotta shoot, every, shot.
