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Russell in Gothic expands on the opening, the stolid journalist (Georges Rivière) heads into a London pub and who's there to captivate the patrons with macabre tales but Edgar Allan Poe himself (Silvano Tranquilli). (The great author identifies himself humbly as a "chronicler" of real cases, and smiles as he notices a skull hanging over the hat rack.) A lord's wager, from midnight to dawn in the cursed mansion, the younger man accepts it as a way to establish the superiority of rationality over the occult. "To doubt, even for a second, means to be afraid." Candelabras and cobwebs, wavering paintings and heaving skeletons, a decapitated serpent for scientific purposes. "The death of a beautiful woman is the most poetic subject in the world," thus the tenebrous eroticism of the dark maiden (Barbara Steele) wandering the netherworld of her desires. ("I am alive only when I love," she moans in the heat of the moment, the afterglow is only slightly marred by her unbeating heart.) Antonio Margheriti brings his own evocative perversities to the lush Bava template, as well as a thrifty miniature of Visconti's Il Gattopardo for the castle's history of waltzing specters. The corseted lust of the severe sister-in-law (Margarete Robsahm) explodes in a Sapphic flash, a certain Doctor Carmus (Arturo Dominici) ponders the spiritual thresholds he's trapped in, they all hunger for blood. (A shirtless musclehead materializes periodically to slurp on unlucky necks.) "Notte d'amore e terrore," the finish line at the iron gate turns out to be a spike waiting for the kill. Poe's interview goes unpublished but morbid romance is found, a happy ending after a fashion. With Umberto Raho, Sylvia Sorrente, Giovanni Cianfriglia, Salvo Randone, and Benito Stefanelli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |