Poster artwork courtesy of
Dean Harris and Silent Scream.

As Stefano Della Casa has noted, the Italian horror cinema defined itself in contrast to its Anglo-Saxon counterpart by "taking as a central figure not the monster or the mad scientist, but Woman."¹ Riccardo Freda's I vampiri ("The Devil's Commandment," 1957), with its spectacle of Gianna Maria Canale aging on-camera, first hinted at the momentousness of this choice, whose consequences became clear when Mario Bava's La maschera del demonio ("Black Sunday," 1960) introduced the darkly expressive beauty of Barbara Steele to a startled public. Freda's two films with Steele-L'orribile segreto del dottor Hichcock ("The Horrible Dr. Hichcock," 1962) and Lo spettro ("The Ghost," 1963)-further established the British actress as an icon of horror and confirmed the centrality of the image of Woman in Italian horror films.

In Nightmare Castle, Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) kills his unfaithful wife, Muriel (a dark-haired Barbara Steele), and her gardener-lover, David (Rik Battaglia), removes their hearts, and uses Muriel's blood to restore the youth of his devoted housekeeper, Solange (Helga Line). Stephen marries Muriel's stepsister, Jenny (Steele as a blonde), in order to gain possession of Muriel's estate, which Jenny has inherited. He and Solange scheme to drive the mentally fragile Jenny insane, while, independently of their machinations, Muriel's spirit seems to be also influencing Jenny. At the film's climax, Jenny's psychiatrist, Derek (Lawrence Clift), inadvertently brings Muriel and David back to life by removing their hearts from the dagger on which Stephen has kept them impaled. Muriel kills Stephen; Derek throws the hearts back into the fire, consigning the revived dead pair back to nonexistence, and he and Jenny flee the house.

Despite its over-burdened plot, combining pseudo-science with the supernatural, Nightmare Castle is obsessed with a small number of motifs that it abstracts from all context of plot, let alone any social, political, or even geographic context. The film takes place almost entirely in castle interiors, frequently in darkness. Although the 100-minute version of the film (titled "The Night of the Doomed") is more fluid, the abrupt cutting of the drastically shortened prints usually seen in the United States³ aptly emphasizes the repetitiveness of the narrative, which consists largely of encounters between Jenny and either Stephen or Derek, intercut with scenes in which Stephen conspires with Solange or tries in vain to interest Derek in his experiments. In scene after scene, characters inconclusively discuss Jenny's condition. Occasionally, the film lurches to some dramatic highlight as if out of generic obligation: Jenny has a dream recreating Muriel's fatal trip to the greenhouse; a butler is electrocuted while reaching into a filled bathtub. The holocaust that allows the movie to end answers no internal narrative necessity but is caused unpredictably, by accident.

With his pointlessly elegant camera movements, Caiano establishes a visual style limited to external concerns and gratuitous gestures, achieving an effect that feels at the same time cloyingly aestheticized and somewhat crude. Actors move as if directed by hypnosis, their gait slow and cautious (so that the use of slow motion in the dream sequence, if noticed by the viewer, registers as pedantically redundant), their line readings funereally deliberate, as if they were algorithmically calculating their dialogue according to some abstruse mnemonic system. A typical shot sits Solange and Stephen in foreground armchairs, him reading a book (a favorite pastime of both characters throughout), her staring uncomfortably, while Jenny blunders moth-like into the deep-focus background.

Even the film's violence is depressing. The early scenes of Stephen tormenting the chained Muriel and David seem intended to embarrass rather than mortify or titillate the viewer. As played by Paul Muller (a good actor who once worked for Rossellini and later appeared in multiple Jess Franco films), Stephen seems uncommitted to his own cruelty, a dilettante sadist. Muriel's dragged-out exclamations of "No! No! No!" take us out of the world of actual suffering and into a theatrical world where overacting is a sign of art and pleasure. In the final sequence, the resurrected David is a lobotomized zombie, slowest of Caiano's slow-moving troupe, while Muriel is an acid-scarred house-of-horrors spook on a rampage of Steele-isms: in a memorable shot, she backs out of camera range, chortling compulsively, her eyes fixed on her offscreen husband, whom she has just burned alive.

One of Nightmare Castle's assets is its charming English dubbing. Although I'd like to see the Italian version of the film, it's hard to believe that an exchange like the following could be improved in any other language, unless, perhaps, it were translated by computer:

MURIEL: I'm going to rid you of your vulgar ways and replace them with others much more subtle and refined.
DAVID: I don't understand you.
MURIEL: It doesn't matter.

In Italian, one would also lose Stephen's pronouncing "hallucinogen" as "hallucin-oh-gen" and, most importantly, the credible forlornness and self-absorption that Jenny's line readings transmit (Steele dubbed her own voice in this role, I think). When her husband accuses her doctor of seeking to take advantage of her, she protests: "I've known Derek for years. He's such a good friend of mine. He's so affectionate and unselfish," stressing the words "years," "friend," "affectionate," and "unselfish" with the same plaintive intonation. Steele convinces the viewer that this is indeed how a slightly spoiled heiress (perhaps one who attended, as did Steele, London's Chelsea Art School) would sound if someone criticized her shrink.

Photo credits: Dean Harris, Silent Scream, and Sinister Cinema.