While Mario Bava remains the best-known purveyor of Italian Gothic horror, many other filmmakers tried their hand at the form throughout the 1960s. Arrow Video's Blu-ray set GOTHIC FANTASTICO presents four titles from this classic period, all of which demonstrate Italy’s ability to expand genre beyond the classic literary monsters that dominated elsewhere. Madness, obsession and messed up families are the order of the day in these four lesser-known monochrome gems from Italy’s peak Gothic period, restored in 2K from their original negatives for the first time alongside an array of in-depth extras.
LADY MORGAN'S VENGEANCE: Although she has been arranged to be married to older family friend Sir Harold Morgan (Paul Muller, A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD) by her father Sir Neville Blackhouse (Carlo Kechler, THE WILD, WILD PLANET), Susan (Barbara Nelli, DR. GOLDFOOD AND THE GIRL BOMBS) has fallen for French architect Pierre Brissac (Michel Forain) who has been performing restoration on Castle Blackhouse. When she makes her intent to marry Pierre upon his return from Paris known to her father, he reluctantly accepts as does Harold; however, someone knocks Pierre overboard during his trip and he is believed dead. Susan agrees to marry Harold but subsequently travels with her father to clear her head.
Upon returning to Blackhouse Castle, she discovers that Harold has replaced the old staff with his valet Roger (Gordon Mitchell, BLOOD DELIRIUM), shifty housemaid Martha (Edith MacGoven), and a new lady's maid for her in coldly beautiful Lillian (Erika Blanc, THE NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE). Soon, Lillian is hearing voices, hallucinating frightening sights – including her father apparently being tortured by Roger in the castle dungeons – and on the verge of nervous collapse according to her doctor (Luciano Catenacci, KILL, BABY, KILL!). You guessed it, persons or persons unknown (well, not really) are trying to drive her suicide to inherit her estate. Little do all the parties know that Pierre has been lying in a hospital with amnesia and has only just recovered his memories; unfortunately, he will discover that things will have changed drastically for all involved when he returns to Blackhouse Castle.
This opinion is based primarily on the derivativeness of its screenplay, not from the Hammer and American International models that inspired the Italian horror boom of the sixties but from screenwriter Giovanni Grimaldi's cannibalizing of elements from his own prior screenplays for the Steele/Margheriti gothic CASTLE OF BLOOD and the Spanish/Italian THE BLANCHEVILLE MONSTER (also in this set) not to mention the reminders of the film's better colleagues like NIGHTMARE CASTLE via Muller and Blanc – in a role much like that of Helga Line in the latter film – while Nelly and Forain are easily overshadowed by Mitchell (compared to the muscle secondary heavies of the other films). What surprises the film holds are in the structural twist of the screenplay, but one wonders if this was a clever move by Pupillo and Grimaldi having studied their competition or just a means of shuffling familiar pieces. The ending apes that of CASTLE OF BLOOD but for one aspect that makes the final shot fall flat. Blanc would fare better elsewhere in the Italian gothic and giallo genres, most notably the Italian/Belgian THE DEVIL'S NIGHTMARE in her iconic succubus role.
One night, Alice follows strange noises to the attic and discovers Eleonore restraining a man with a hideously-burned face; whereupon Roderick is forced to reveal to Emily that their father survived the fire but has been driven mad and means to kill her in order to prevent a prophecy from being fulfilled that the family line will end should a Blackwell woman reach the age of twenty-one. As the men join the village in search of the escaped maniac, Emily is beckoned in her sleep by a voice that tries to draw her into the arms of death and only Alice may be able to discover who is really behind it all.
Originally titled just HORROR both in Italian and the English export version, THE BLANCHEVILLE MONSTER title comes from the American release, and the "Blancheville" surname an invention of the English dub track which relocates the setting to Brittany from Scotland, presumably because the English dubbers in Italy thought audiences would not mistake Spain for Scotland but might for France. There is a bit more incident here to give some life to the gaslighting scenario, and twists that seem less logical and purely for the effect of keeping things unpredictable (the killer is nevertheless obvious), and the reveal is no so much ambiguous as confusing as to whether the motive is madness or class snobbery. The end result is less interesting as an Italian gothic than an early Spanish horror at a time when Jess Franco was one of the few practitioners.
Although Marta attempts to show her devotion to Mino, he periodically ventures out into the Italian nightlife and brings back a series of strippers and prostitutes that he winds up killing when they discover that the third party in Mino's attempted threesomes is Laura's preserved corpse. Marta is initially horrified but helps him dispose of the bodies, but even she has her limits and uses Mino's weakness to her advantage in securing a marriage proposal. Things were not particularly rosy in the first place, but the arrival of Laura's lookalike younger sister Daniela (also Blanc) will push both over the edge in different but equally deadly ways.
Another of the lesser-known films of the Italian golden age of gothic horror, THE THIRD EYE is the other film of that genre dealing with necrophilia overshadowed by the Technicolor Barbara Steele/Riccardo Freda vehicle THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK from the same producers Ermanno Donati and Luigi Carpentieri. Co-scripted by director Mino Guerrini and Piero Regnoli, THE THIRD EYE surprises in just how "tasteful" it is in dealing with implied necrophilia and incest; especially compared to Regnoli's scripts for the later far more permissive but clumsier-feeling fusions of the gothic and the sleazy like MALABIMBA, its semi-remake SATAN'S BABY DOLL, BURIAL GROUND, and PATRICK STILL LIVES. The unhealthy mother/son relationship is rather bluntly conveyed in the first twenty minutes but more subtly conveyed is Marta's growing realization that Mino wants sex out of his disposable victims while any lasting relationship will be less romantic and more surrogate child/parent with the gorgeous Pascal actually looking more spinsterish the sexier she tries to dress as opposed to her smoldering buttoned-up appearance early on.
Seasoned horror fans will recognize the Villa Parisi from the likes of BURIAL GROUND as much as the scoring of Francesco de Masi which reworks or recycles cues from Riccardo Freda's Hichcock follow-up THE GHOST. The film was not so much remade as the property reworked – with Guerrini receiving sole screenwriting credit – as Joe D'Amato's BEYOND THE DARKNESS in which the necrophilia, human taxidermy, and graphic murders are splashed across the screen with gusto while the domineering mother is replaced with a housekeeper character who is older than the antihero and all to willing to embrace the unhealthier surrogate maternal aspects of the relationships as a tradeoff for sexual desire. The D'Amato film is more claustrophobic – by design as much as budgetary limitationsm – but THE THIRD EYE is a very beguiling skeleton in the closet of soon-to-be-star Nero.
Consuelo makes it sound as though Fabrizio is a tyrant and sadist who terrorizes herself and her daughter while Aura's response is more ambiguous, appearing to both revel in Fabrizio's attentions while also insisting to Sergio that she is afraid of him. Sergio sees a broken man who wanders around the palazzo in his robe, drinking all day, and losing his hold on reality. Sergio even starts to believe Fabrizio's claim that the two women are trying to set them against one another. When Sergio accepts the job and Consuelo tells him to get rid of Fabrizio, however, the other man turns violent and attacks Aura leading to a scuffle with Sergio that leaves him dead. When Consuelo tells him how to effectively get rid of the body and Aura starts demonstrating similar hot and cold reactions to his affections, Sergio start to wonder if this has all happened before and just what the real connection is between the two women who Consuelo blithely reveals are not really mother and daughter.
Although purportedly based on the Carlos Fuentes novel "Aura", THE WITCH takes liberties with the source novel on the level of desecration, playing like a misogynistic fantasy in which a man who spurns a good woman is destined to be the prey of serial man-eaters who get off on psychologically tormenting men and are both sadist and masochist in response to the violent emotions they rouse in their victims; the culmination of which is a literal witch burning. In spite of this ugly aspect, the film – scripted by director Damiano Damiani (A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL) and Ugo Liberatore (MAY MORNING) – is mesmerizing on a stylistic level from DJANGO composer Luis Enriquez Bacalov's score of cool jazz, tribal drums, and Edda dell'Orso vocalizing, the production design of Luigi Scaccianoce (NEST OF VIPERS), and the Forquet and Tirelli fashions of the leads to the sumptuous monochrome photography of Leonida Barboni, THE POSSESSED) with its circular pans and tracking shots through the dust and decay of the palazzo.
Unreleased in the United States until the bootleg VHS era with a Video Search of Miami subtitled VHS tape being less accessible than some of the other Italian gothics that turned up in the eighties and nineties stateside both officially and from the likes of more affordable, higher-quality grey market mail order labels Sinister Cinema and Something Weird Video, LADY MORGAN'S VENGEANCE first turned up in the digital era as a fair quality TV broadcast and in superior quality as an anamorphic but not English-friendly DVD from French label Artus Films.
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by author and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas who discusses the film's gothic tropes but also notes that the film is longer on gaslighting than on vengeance, noting the intersection of female terror and domestic violence in the genre. In "Vengeance from Beyond" (4:38), Mark Thompson Ashworth discusses Pupillo's gothics, his association with American Ralph Zucker – who would move on from the Pupillo gothic trilogy to the Mark Damon-produced Italian gothic THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT – as well as the discussing Grimaldi's debts to his own CASTLE OF BLOOD, the structural twist, and some admittedly "clumsy" sequences. In "The Grudge" (21:29), author and producer Kat Ellinger notes that British and American horror of the period largely focused on male monsters and male protagonists, drawing parallels between the female monsters and heroines of the Italian gothic with the wronged women ghosts of Japanese folklore and that country's post-war genre work.
In "When We Were Vampires" (24:05), actress Blanc recalls the film as one of her first horror films, discusses her blonde and redhead roles, working with Muller, kissing Mitchell, and has some compliments for Pupillo and cinematographer Oberdan Troiani (BLOOD CEMEMONY). In "Born to Be a Villain" (20:03) Рa re-edited French interview Рactor Muller discusses getting into performing at the Com̩die-Fran̤aise, the actors and actresses who encouraged and supported him, how he wound up in Italy starting with an extra role in FABIOLA, and his tendency to be cast in villain roles which he found more interesting than heroes. "The Pupillo Tapes" (20:16) is a re-edited audio interview with the late Pupillo from a radio show in which he discusses his horror films and his collaborations with Zucker. The disc closes out with the gallery for the original Cineromanzo published in "Suspense" in April 1971 as well as the film's Italian theatrical trailer (2:24).
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by filmmaker and film historian Paul Anthony Nelson who cites not only Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Premature Burial" – along with the Corman adaptations – but also his "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" and a bit of Jane Austen in the film's subplot concerns of Alice caught between two suitors, as well as the American, British, and Italian gothic traditions; however, the track fixate a bit too heavily on the parallels with Poe's Usher rather and the differences in film and text as if it were a literary adaptation rather than using the source as a springboard. In discussing the pseudonymous credits, he suggests that Grimaldi's co-writer might have been Bruno Corbucci without his older brother Sergio (DJANGO) given the "Jr" appended to his "Gordon Wilson" nom-de-plume.
In "Welcome to the Manor" (13:55), Tentori discusses the career of de Martino and how he regarded his horror films as being "of little importance" and suggesting that the director had more in common on this film with Freda than genre stylist Bava in constructing a thriller masquerading as a horror film. The disc also includes the film's American opening credits (3:11) which appended "The Blancheville Monster" to the HORROR title graphic, as well as the film's Italian theatrical trailer (4:16) – heavy on its gothic horror literary attributions – and an image gallery.
Arrow Video's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray from a 2K restoration of the original camera negative not only marks the first legitimate availability of the film in the US and the UK but also the first release anywhere with the English dub (seemingly rarer than the dubs of AN ANGEL FOR SATAN, THE UNNATURALS, and THE POSSESSED since some film historians did not know it had ever been dubbed for export). Seamless branching allows near-identical presentations of the English and Italian versions that swap out the credits sequences – both filled with ridiculous Anglicized cast and crew names – and the presentation blows everything that came before it out of the water while also revealing the cinematography to be of a generally workmanlike feel apart from those moments when Nero's countenance fills the frame. The English and Italian dubs are presented in clean LPCM 2.0 mono with English SDH subtitles for the English version and English subtitles for the Italian.
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by author and critic Rachael Nisbet, and this track is a nice companion to the Heller-Nicholas track on LADY MORGAN'S VENGEANCE, discussing the film's gothic elements but noting how in this film they clash with the modern world, and how the response of both Mino and his mother to change is regression. Nisbet connects the interpersonal relationships with the environment as an attempt by the main characters to stop time and shut out the modern world where the gravity of their aristocratic lineage is diminished.
In "Nostalgia Becomes Necrophilia" (12:01), author and filmmaker Lindsay Hallam who discusses how the less restrictive lives available to women in post-war Italy that the male psyche found threatening even before the sexual revolution were reflected in the genre, while in "All Eyes on Erika" (15:40), actress Blanc recalls the film as her first lead role, working with Guerrini, and her recollections of Nero whom she had already known for some time and was always rigorously studying English with Hollywood in mind while she wanted to unwind and have fun off the clock. The disc also includes an image gallery.
Given the export title STRANGE OBSESSION, THE WITCH came to be known under the latter moniker when G.G. Productions gave it a brief theatrical release in America. Like that distributor's other Euro horror HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, THE WITCH found wider play as part of an Avco Embassy Pictures television package (seemingly uncut). The film made the rounds from mail order VHS companies like Sinister Cinema and Something Weird Video and a typically poor unauthorized DVD release from Eclectic DVD's Sinema Diable line that also included THE NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE and COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE ripped from the Sinister Cinema transfers. It goes without saying that Arrow's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray blows everything that came before it out of the water.
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by author and producer Kat Ellinger who discusses the Italian gothic not as a formula but as a series of touchstones and that it was always experimenting with form, particularly in the case of THE WITCH that looks on the surface like an Italian comedy or thriller with Johnson's Sergio the type played by Marcello Mastroianni in the likes of Elio Petri's L'ASSASSINO or Vittorio Gassman in IL SORPASSO more so than the more bland and stalwart heroes of the "conventional" gothic – including the American and British examples – playing against more charismatic villains, and how Johnson's type of protagonist clashes more so than the usual protagonists once he crosses into the gothic realms associated in the other genres with liminal spaces of the city.
In "Witchery" (3:46), Ashworth reveals his discomfort with discussing the film as it differs so much from the other films in the set, noting how the genre started to morph outside of the golden age of the Italian gothic and the aim of Damiani to do a more psychological and intellectual take. In "Loving the Devil: Ageing and Sexuality in LA STREGA DI AMORE" (24:25), author and academic Miranda Corcoran discusses the history of the witch and her relation to male anxieties, noting how the film plays on stereotypes only to subvert expectations of them. In "The Rome Witch Project" (18:38), author and filmmaker Antonio Tentori focuses more on how the film seems an outlier in the career of Damiani whose other works in the western and crime genres were heavy on social critique and commentary, also suggesting that the film's better-know title is a spoiler and that the ending is rushes. The disc closes with an image gallery.
The four-disc set comes in limited edition packaging with reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Colin Murdoch, an 80-page book featuring new writing on the films by Roberto Curti, Rob Talbot, Jerome Reuter, Rod Barnett and Kimberly Lindbergs, as well as a foldout double-sided poster (none of which was supplied for review).
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