Castle of Blood / Danza Macabra 1964

I can remember when I’d first watched this as a child in my room late one weekend night. There was an early spring breeze blowing the curtains in and out in the precious darkness of my bedroom. I had my own little black and white television set. The cool and fragrant air puffling from outside kept wafting in. I felt sensations of chills and excitement.

I hadn’t yet seen anything quite as hauntingly mysterious as Barbara Steele’s Gothic dark beauty and the ballroom scene, which almost transported me into the television set, right into the ballroom itself, making me feel part of the ghostly ball.

It has remained in my psyche for days. For years now, actually, it was one of my first experiences with Gothic romantic horror. The sensations of longing, death, and shadow overtook me. Back in the 60s, when they used to run this film late at night, I vaguely remember seeing it in total, not having cut out the scene with Julia kissing Elisabeth, so the lesbian overtones that remained in the earlier version of Castle of Blood aired in its entirety.

I had purchased a copy of the film from Sinister Cinema  (who really did have an impressive catalog, but they’ve since closed their doors), which lost some of the film’s continuity because it cuts out certain portions, perhaps because of the language inconsistency in places or the dubbing. Recently I obtained the film as it had been original released.

In particular, in the segment where Julia tries to convince Elisabeth that they belong together, she makes very overt sexual advances toward Elisabeth after defending her from being killed by her lover, Herbert. The edited version only alludes to the fact that Julia has an attraction toward Elisabeth, which could be perceived as merely jealous rivalry. It’s the same with the newly released DVD version of Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s masterpiece,  The House That Screamed 1969 with Lili Palmer –

Sunday Nite Surreal: Serrador’s The House That Screamed: Elegant Taboos in the Gothic Horror Film-The Fragmentation of Motherhood, castration and the enigma of body horror

where a cabal of lesbianism was rampant at the boarding school, but certain scenes have been hacked to pieces. Thank god I’ve saved all my original VHS factory releases and have a version that is closest to the one I remember from the actual movie I saw in the theaters during its official theatrical release here in the U.S. Mary Maude is way too hot with that whip, to hack that segment apart. Including the scene where Lili Palmer kisses Teresa’s (Christina Galbo) back tenderly after she makes Irene (Mary Maude) whip her mercilessly. But the scene needs to come to its visual fruition in order to show Sra. Fourneau’s sexual repression.

Along with Castle of Blood/Danse Macabre, there were a few other films that affected me so profoundly when I was really young. Such is the case with Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971), Lemora-A Child’s Tale of The Supernatural (1973), The Haunting (1963), as I mentioned: The House That Screamed (1969), Rosemary’s Baby, of course. Silent Night Bloody Night (1974), Night of The Living Dead (1968), Curse of The Demon (1957), The Devil Commands (1941), The Uninvited (1944), and John Llewelyn Moxey’s City of the Dead or Horror Hotel 1960.

Director Antonio Margheriti has created a lasting atmosphere of, yes, the macabre. A haunting shadow place where phantoms waltz to an otherworldly melody.

The device of using Edgar Allan Poe as an active character in the play adds an interesting element to the story, yet the origin of Danse Macabre comes from French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who wrote his tone poem in 1874 as an art song for voice and piano and then reconfigured it for violin. It is based on a French superstition that claims that Death comes at Midnight every Halloween night and calls forth the dead to rise from their graves and dance for him while he plays the fiddle.

Margheriti adopted the American name Anthony Dawson after realizing that the translation of his name was actually Anthony Daisies, thinking it too effeminate for his persona. The prolific Italian director, Margheriti, started out in the 50s Italian film industry as a scriptwriter but went on to direct science fiction, horror, spaghetti westerns, and cult Giallo films. To name a few, he directed Steele in The Long Hair of Death 1964 Christopher Lee in Horror Castle (The Virgin of Nuremberg) 1963, Claude Rains in Battle of The Worlds 1961, Web of the Spider 1971, and the awful Cannibal Apocalypse 1980. Most of his films were directed under his pseudonym Anthony Dawson. Margheriti was the only Italian filmmaker who worked directly with American production companies like MGM, United Artists, 20th Century Fox, and Columbia Pictures.

Of interesting note:

Director Richard Morrissey denied for years that Margheriti had anything to do with directing Andy Warhol’s Flesh For Frankenstein 1974. Morrissey claims that Margheriti mostly worked as a technical adviser on that film, only actually directing a very brief segment of it.

BRIDES OF HORROR – Scream Queens of the 1960s! – Part 4: The Dark Goddess-This Dark Mirror

Castle of Blood stars the inimitable, the iconic doe-eyed Barbara Steele as Elisabeth Blackwood, Georges Rivière as Alan Foster, and Margarete Robsahm as Julia Alert. Arturo Dominici ( Henry Kruger) as Doctor Carmus. Silvano Tranquilli ( Montgomery Gleen ) as Edgar Allan Poe, Umberto Raho (Raul H. Newman) as Lord Thomas Blackwood, and Giovanni Cianfriglia as Herbert, although IMDb has him listed as Killer. He did his share of the killing in terms of stabbing, choking, neck-breaking, and blood-drinking. Sylvia Sorent plays the ill-fated bride.

When the film’s credits roll, they say Story by Jean Grimaud and Gordon Wilson Jr. From Edgar’s “Dance Macabre” screenplay by Grimaud and Wilson. Yet I am unaware of any of Poe’s short stories that this would have been based on. This is why I refer to Camille Saint-Saëns tone poem of the same name which seems to be the preeminent and prevailing origin of this theme.

The wonderful music composed by Ritz Ortolani later on, he must have shortened his name to Riz. Margheriti used Ortolani for many of his films in various genres. He’s known for so many earlier scores, for films such as The Yellow Rolls-Royce, One on Top of The Other 1969 Woman Times Seven 1967 with Shirley MacLaine,  The Vilachi Papers with Charles Bronson 1972,  Kill Bill Vol 2 and Inglorious Bastards 2009.

The short synopsis goes as follows. A young English journalist, Alan Foster, shows up at the 4 Devils pub to try and get an interview with Edgar Allan Poe. He finds Poe telling a ghost story to another man seated at a table inside the pub. He winds up making a wager for ten pounds with Lord Thomas Blackwood that he cannot survive the infamous “night of the dead,” which is the first midnight in November. Each year, Lord Blackwood does this, with unsuspecting victims who wind up falling prey to the phantoms who dwell there in his ancestral castle. Lord Blackwood’s grandfather was The Hanging Judge of London. Alan decides to take the bet, and the three men take Blackwood’s carriage to the castle. Once at Castle Blackwood, Alan meets the beautiful Elisabeth (Steele), and both instantly form an attraction. Lord Blackwood sends people to the castle each year so Elisabeth might walk that one special night a year.

Also lurking in the castle is the mutually exquisite Julia, whose portrait hangs in the great hall and seems to come alive whenever Alan looks at it. Julia seems possessive of Elisabeth and warns her not to befriend Alan, but Elisabeth has fallen for the handsome young man who will “bring her life.” What Alan soon finds out after making love to Elisabeth is that she has no heartbeat and that she is truly dead, a ghost who has come forth on this night with the other inhabitants of the castle. They must drink the blood of the one who has wagered their life away in order that they might dance again the following November.

Eventually, Alan succumbs and is reunited in death with his beloved Elisabeth, who not only has a ghost husband, William, but a lover, the gardener, and stable hunk, Herbert. Along the way, Alan is guided down a slippery path of self-destruction by scientist/doctor Carmus, who warns him of how the senses live on after death. Each year, the dead relive their destinies and re-enact how they each met their fate. In the end, Alan escapes the inner sanctum of the castle’s vampiric ghosts with the help of Elisabeth, only to have the great iron gate spike impale him through the neck.

I do have several questions of my own, such as why Elisabeth Blackwood, the sister of Lord Thomas, would have her grave randomly placed on the outside grounds instead of the family tomb. If so, whose corpse was it inside the crypt, that materialized from pure vapor, and which ghost did they become in the flesh?

Elisabeth’s husband, William, the newlyweds who last took the wager, or even Dr. Carmus—none of these individuals would logically be buried in the castle’s crypt. The castle served merely as a site for wagers or as a secluded space for Carmus to conduct his experiments away from skeptical colleagues. It certainly wouldn’t house Herbert the gardener’s tomb either. This inconsistency creates a noticeable rift in the continuity and logic of the narrative for me as a viewer. However, the film’s mesmerizing visual storytelling compensates for these lapses in coherence—at least, it does in my experience.

Continue reading “Danza Macabra / Castle of Blood (1964) “I Was Prepared To Spend The Night With Horrible Ghosts Instead I Find You!”” →