This 1970 movie has an identity crisis. The case said it was titled Scream of the Demon Lover. The title card for the movie said it is The Killers of the Castle of Blood, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Among other titles it has gone by are Castle with the Gates of Fire and The Hanging Woman.
Weird, but all those titles are equally inadequate for this Italian gothic. In a nutshell, this film stars Carlos Quiney as the village’s baron, who is using science to try to resuscitate his dead brother. The baron is under suspicion for the deaths of several comely young women from the village. It isn’t that large of a village, so you think even one such death would have these folk of the earth grabbing their pitchforks and Frankenstein rakes.
Quiney has placed an ad seeking a biochemist to assist him with this work. We don’t see that ad, but I like to think it specified somebody with experience in resurrection, and I wonder how Erna Schurer, as the sole applicant, reacted to that.
Our mad scientist is unpleasantly surprised to have that woman arrive in response to the ad. I think he should have rolled out the red carpet for her, since the only person who would give her a ride up to the castle is some guy immortalized on IMDB for this film as “Driver Turning Rapist”. Imagine having that on your film CV.
I like how Schurer tears into Quiney. He, in turn, just keeps upping the number of months of pay he will give her to leave immediately.
Schurer convinces him to let her stay on. Myself, I think she should have kept holding out for more money. She may have been thinking that when she first sees the charred corpse that is his brother’s remains soaking in a bathtub.
She even keeps working there when, every night, she is taken by a mysterious figure to a dungeon when she is tied down, stripped and fondled. And yet, she is never raped, and so we know the mystery man isn’t Driver Turning Rapist. Instead, in these nightly sessions, the stranger keeps going on and on about her purity.
In the meantime, women are still getting killed around the village, but usually not before we’ve seen them naked at least once. This is one seriously horny film, and it only now occurs to me that seems to be characteristic of the gothic genre. I guess there’s that weird trade-off of the prudishness of some people only making them more randy.
A scene where Schurer gets out of the bath even seems to comment on this. “Haven’t you ever seen a woman take a bath before?” “No, not naked.” What? Do the women in this movie bathe while wearing one of those weird sheer garments the school girls wear in The House That Screamed?
Despite being competently made overall, the film has some curious technical and editorial lapses. A few shots are wildly out-of-focus, something that always drives me mad. If you can’t bother with proper focus, why bother making a movie at all? As for the editing, one scene had me wondering if Schurer had been raped and murdered at one point. That’s not what happened, and the resulting confusion is so unnecessary that I didn’t care if the misdirection was accidental or intentional.
If there is one aspect of this picture which impressed me, it is how it makes Schurer a skilled and knowledgeable surgeon. The script also gives her agency, and she is determined to do what she wants.
Whatever name you call it by, The Scream of the Hanging Woman Killers of the Castle of Blood with the Gates of Fire is a slightly above-average gothic thriller, elevated mostly by the surprisingly strong character written for Schurer.
Dir: José Luis Merino
Starring Erna Schurer, Carlos Quiney, Agostina Belli
Watched as part of Severin’s blu-ray box set Danza Macabra Volume One: Italian Gothic Collection