Nightmare Castle

This week I watched:

Nightmare Castle (1965).

There are minor spoilers in the synopsis, but nothing serious.

Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) discovers his wealthy wife Muriel (Barbara Steele) in the arms of the gardener, David (Rik Battaglia). He captures them, tortures them and kills them, but not before Muriel gleefully informs him that she has made her half sister (stepsister?) her sole heir. Stephen extracts their hearts and uses their blood to rejuvenate his housekeeper and lab assistant Solange (Helga Liné), turning her from an old crone to a beautiful young woman.

That done, Stephen marries Jenny (also Barbara Steele), the half sister of Muriel, in order to get the castle and the money. Jenny has spent a lot of time in a clinic for her sanity's sake, and Stephen and Solange plans to drive her insane. But, in order to have a plausible alibi, they invite Jenny's doctor from the clinic, Dr. Derek Joyce (Marino Masé) to stay. This is when things take a very sinister turn.

Okay, spoilers done, not that anything I said isn't either mentioned in the official synopsis or obvious to anyone with half a brain.

Nightmare Castle is a strange movie. Most of it is actually more of a conventional thriller than a Gothic horror movie, but when it does go Gothic, it goes hard.

Everything that is there is pretty good. The music, the acting, the cinematography, its all fine and solid. Some critics at the time called it uninspired, but I think that is more a question of genre fatigue than the fault of Nightmare Castle. This did get me thinking though. The Girl Who Knew Too Much was released in 1963 and Blood and Black Lace in '64. In other words, Mario Bava had given birth to the Giallo genre and it was grabbing all the attention. The same things happened to Hammer Horror although they pushed on until 1979. Dracula isn't that scary once you've seen The Exorcist, and I think the same thing was happening in Italy but a bit earlier. How can a slow burn, black and white Gothic horror movie that is honestly fairly tame compete with full color blood, sex and murder?

But back to Nightmare Castle. The director Mario Caiano who also co-wrote the script made the movie just to be able to work with Barbara Steele and I think he did a good job. When you compare Nightmare Castle to the earlier Steele Gothic's I've talked about, you can tell his passion for his star, but also a, perhaps subconscious, desire to kick it up a notch. We do get a lot of the classic tropes, but the addition of the torture scene, tame as it is, shows in my opinion a shift in both tone and content. Nightmare Castle is a bit nastier than its predecessors, but don't expect anything too dramatic.

So, do I recommend this movie? Yes, I do. I think Nightmare Castle could appeal to a wider audience than many of its contemporaries. The thriller elements and the horror elements are more main stream than genre pure, which could be more to the taste of the average horror viewer. Nightmare Castle does what it does, and it does it well.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!