Al the names: multi-monikered Italian horrors bathe Barbara Steele in blood, wall Lucia Bosé in stone, dub everybody into other languages, badly

Visiting the local video store with a fresh hankering for horror I discovered a number of recent DVD releases showcasing a subgenre I’ve previously neglected to dig very deeply into: the Italian horror films of the 1960s and 70s. Which inevitably leads to a lot of castles, a lot of Barbara Steele, and a lot of lousy dubbing. I’m fine with the first of these attributes, positively delighted about the second, but not so big on the third. I’ve watched an unhealthy number of movies in my life and learned to groove with a great many conventions that initially put me off, but lousy or excessive dubbing, whether in low-budget chillers or in the films of Fellini, Pasolini or Pontecorvo—the Italians apparently have an endless tolerance for this—has always had a numbing effect on me, washing whole movies with a layer of technical artifice and incongruity that keeps me from investing as fully as I’d like to. I’m not sure if any of the films below helped to cure that entirely, but watching people get whipped, dissected, bitten and burned alive does go some way toward distracting one from such niggling annoyances.

When listing the commonalities between the bulk of Italian horror films, I should also add alternate titles, of which there are usually a good half-dozen for every film. I’ll try to stick to the ones most commonly used. Previously available only on an ultra-crappy disc, Nightmare Castle, aka The Faceless Monster, aka Lovers Beyond the Tomb or Amanti d’oltretomba (1965), has been restored and newly released by Severin. Deliciously perverse and intriguingly ambiguous, its narrative of infidelity, bad science and cursed legacies proves richer than its recycling of gothic tropes might imply. There are two central locations, the castle of the title and its adjoining greenhouse, the first being a place of decrepitude and rot while the second is fecund and sensuous. It’s in the greenhouse that Lady Muriel Arrowsmith (Steele) trysts with her stable hand David (Rik Battaglia). But it’s in the castle dungeon that the lovers, chained to the wall, are forced to endure the torments of Muriel’s scientist husband, Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller). Echoes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover abound, but erotic or class transcendence is swiftly squandered in the name of jealousy, sadism greed.

Having disposed of his wife, Stephen can only inherit Muriel’s fortune by marrying her mentally ill sister Jenny (again, Steele), whom he takes in and begins to model after Muriel with a hint of the necrophiliac drive of Vertigo’s Scotty. Jenny takes to the game so well that she begins dreaming of meeting a lover in the greenhouse, and uncovering the truth about her sister’s demise. As directed by Mario Caiano and scored by a young Ennio Morricone, Nightmare Castle is pleasingly thick with monochromatic gloom and doom and benefits tremendously from Steele’s effortlessness with swinging from positions of power to unease and terror. Those huge eyes hold so much.

Unfortunately, neither Steele’s talent nor her strange beauty are able to help She-Beast, aka Revenge of the Blood Beast, aka Satan’s Sister or La Sorella di Satana (66), now available from Dark Sky Films. Written and directed by British filmmaker Michael Reeves, it starts promisingly with a riveting expository prologue about a community gathering to torture and kill a witch—clearly echoing the prologue of what perhaps remains Steele’s greatest achievement, Mario Bava’s legendary Black Sunday, aka The Mask of Satan or La Maschera del demonio (60). It then quickly succumbs to a wildly uneven contemporary tale of British tourists on holiday in Transylvania, a place where nearly all the locals are impoverished inbred dolts and staunch communists, spouting lines like “Privacy breeds conspiracy!” and “I have petitioned the government for new wallpaper.” The main problem here is really just that She-Beast can’t quite decide if its horror or comedy, though anyone watching can clearly determine that it should have opted for the former—the high-speed, Keystone cops gags are woefully limpid.

A far better investment in Central European vampire lore arrives in the shape of Legend of Blood Castle, aka The Female Butcher, aka Bloody Ceremony or Ceremonia Sangienta (73), slyly directed by Spanish veteran Jorge Grau and now out on a new disc from MYA. No Barbara Steele this time around, but instead we get Lucia Bosé, who some of you might recognize from Death of a Cyclist (55), which was released last year by Criterion in a special edition. In a sense, Blood Castle is a story of marital renewal, albeit of a sinister and myopic sort. In this heavily extrapolated retelling of the story of Elizabeth Bathory, Bosé plays the Countess with surprising texture and sympathy, despairing for the aging of her flesh while her husband only gets excited by watching his falcons rip apart their prey, and by the unfulfilled possibility of sex with peasant girls. When he dies and returns as a vampire, the couple discovers a new kind of partnership in which he finds pretty virgins to kill and drains their blood for the Countess to bathe in, an ostensible formula for rejuvenation that Grau does little to make seem like more than a delusional effort. The real Bathory was said to have been responsible for over 600 deaths before being sealed up behind a brick wall for the rest of her life. Bosé doesn’t get quite that far, but her reign of terror is still pretty impressive, thanks especially to Grau’s graceful camera work, hampered only by some pretty clumsy editing and a few rather dated looking zooms.

Youth gone vile: Eden Lake

They set out for the weekend to some remote locale, where the placid water snuggles up against a beach that’s good for camping. The realization, only upon arrival, that this favourite spot from years ago has since been appropriated as stomping grounds for the rowdy teenage offspring of local yokels fails to dissuade them from pursuing their romantic getaway. But Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are handsome middleclass Londoners—dare this horny young couple park their luxury Jeep and set up their tent amidst the unmistakably hostile country trash, marble-mouthed folk who don’t take kindly to outsiders, who above all look out for their own? Such actions are of course rarely advisable in horror flicks.

I rented it for the cover, which was slightly throwback in a good way, suitably gaudy, with the vague promise of atmospherics. The recent weeks haven’t yielded a whole lot of solid options for this column, so I did what I guess most people do, or at least those who still patronize video stores. With so many movies to see for work and a never-ending list of titles I’m hunting down based on my own nerdy obsessions, I don’t browse blind like I used to, but when I do I often wind up in the horror section, wondering to myself who the hell makes all these movies. In theory I love horror movies. I grew up on them. But there are so relatively few good ones, and only one way to find the genuine diamond in the rough. 

I won’t fool you. Eden Lake, the debut of British writer/director James Watkins, is no great shakes. It’s not one of these if-you-don’t-normally-go-for-horror crossover films. But it is quite interesting in its way, especially in the first third or so, and it is impressively creepy, especially in the middle, and though it does get really, really, dumb, it saves most the dumbest parts for the end, where coincidences pile up so high that this basically realistic narrative seems to be striving in vain to become boundless nightmare.

(A notable exception to the way I’ve divvied up the movie is a super-dumb moment that falls right smack-dab in the middle—and consider this a spoiler. It’s perhaps the most ludicrously bathetic scene of marriage proposal in history, with a beat-to-hell Steve sputtering on about honeymoons to India while a wound the size of an egg roll vomits little burps of blood from his side.)

Cinephiles will quickly see some or all of the bold-writ filmic precedents for Eden Lake’s narrative, and I figure they’re meant to. Before they even get into the woods to encounter the brats from hell, Steve begins to suffer a string of slights to his manhood. Jenny’s sweet about the whole thing, but really, shouldn’t he stand up to the rude hicks and impertinent punks and defend the honour of his extremely fetching female? The echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) resound loudly, and pleasingly, too, as it’s a story begging for renovation. I started to wonder if, once she inevitably assumed the role of protagonist—after all, that’s her, nubile and covered in muck, hiding behind a tree like Barbara Steele on the disc’s cover—would Jenny gradually take up the gauntlet of defender of property and bourgeois dignity in a clever gender reversal? The answer: Mmmm, sorta.

The other obvious model for this story is Deliverance (72), emphasized in the unabashedly classist depiction of rural folk as vicious xenophobes. Yet a peak sequence of sexual violation, so central to the hillbilly horror of Deliverance, and so seemingly inevitable in this equally tawdry scenario, is conspicuously absent, even when the teens actually have Jenny tied up and unconscious. Perhaps this is because Watkins sees these kids, whose leader is so completely vile, sadistic and devoid of any psychology as to be a sheer monster, as being so contaminated with violence that their hormones have actually been stunted into submission. Yet, rest assured, juvenile antics nonetheless rise to the fore, with the teens, apt and uncritical pupils of the modus operandi of Abu Ghraib, making videos with a phone of their acts of torture. This abstraction of aberrant behaviour through voyeuristic technology—and that technology’s capabilities for erasing or revising events after the fact—ultimately aligns the film, perhaps surprisingly, with either of the interchangeable versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (97/07), which shares with Eden Lake the peculiar quality of being at once truly terrifying and grotesque and silly, academic and numbing.

It’s worth pointing out that Reilly is pretty fearless. Even when the film demands that she slip at the drop of a hat to being a crazed animal hell-bent on revenge to a trembling griever for the retribution that befalls her tormentors—the film’s first scene lets us know that Jenny’s got a soft spot for kids—Reilly, who you might recognize from Mrs Henderson Presents (05) or Pride and Prejudice (05), dutifully fills out each moment with some sort of emotional logic. It’s really quite something. There should be some sort of Academy Award for valiant efforts toward salvaging the integrity of stuff like this.