Funny how all the ghosts in 1964’s Danza Macabra keep telling the protagonist Georges Rivière they are spirits, yet he doesn’t believe them. I have to concede I also would not believe them. And yet, I kept waiting for our hero to realize he’s surrounded by gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts!!! and then one of them to respond, “Well, duh.”
Rivière has accepted a wager from Umberto Raho to spend the night in his haunted castle. This is a bet Raho makes to a different stranger each year, and nobody has survived yet. The ante is originally 100 pounds but Rivière, a newspaper man, claims no honest journalist would ever have that much money on him. Instead, he agrees to do it for 10 pounds. I liked that.
Turns out Raho recruits some poor sap every year on that day, November 1st, to try to survive a night in the house. That he does this annually, and none of the challenges ever sees November 2nd, seems cruel and pointless. Also, I seem to recall the day this attempt is always done is a day which, in some cultures, is usually billed as the day of the…something. Don’t worry, it will come to me.
The castle is sufficiently foreboding just from the gate, with spikes positioned in a manner implying they are to keep people in instead of out, as they would make dynamite footholds for one trying to break in. Once through the gate, Rivière has to cross a cemetery, and he is so startled by everything that I’m surprised he had enough courage to get into the house. Along the way, he jumps at the sight of a kitten. He also somehow gets thoroughly entangled in tree branches so sparse that I suspect the own way I could get stuck to them is if they were actually sewn to my clothes.
Finally inside the castle, he encounters a great many ghosts, all of which are doomed to recreate roughly the same scenarios on this night year after year. Most notable among these is Barbara Steele, the queen of gothic horror movies, what with her weirdly angular facial features and disproportionately large eyes. Soon, her ghost is reliving her death, and her husband in the past is reliving his, and her lover who murdered him is reliving his, etc., resulting in four re-dead bodies in a bedroom in quick succession. It’s like a bizarre version of the old “The House That Jack Built” nursery rhyme. It also turns out those who tried to win the wager in the past are now ghosts there as well, and are endlessly reliving the night they arrived there. I thought that was an interesting touch.
One of the more interesting spirits who isn’t Steele is Arturo Dominici, a professor who took up the challenge in a prior year due to his interest in the metaphysical. That he, needless to say, failed and became a ghost himself is a peculiar spin on an academic “going native”.
This is movie that doesn’t pull its punches, and I was surprised by how cold its ending is. There’s also a single bit I wish had been excluded, and that is a head being cut off a live snake. Alas, a real animal was definitely harmed in the making of this movie.
Aside from that, I found a great deal to enjoy in this film, which is more widely known by its U.S. title, Castle of Blood. Once one sets aside the jarring sensation resulting from watching a bunch of people in 19th century England talk in Italian, this is a much better than average gothic horror picture. This, despite it being based on a short story by, as the opening credits put it, “Edgard Allan Poe”. Perhaps it was, because it isn’t based on anything written by Edgar Allan Poe.
Dir: Antonio Margheriti
Starring Barbara Steele, Georges Rivière, Arturo Dominici
Watched as part of Severin’s blu-ray box set Danza Macabra Volume Two: The Italian Gothic Collecion