The Bottom Line: It’s a major event for horror fans: Barbara Steele’s Italo classic is for the first time available fully restored and uncut in its original language — and in 4K Ultra HD.
This 3-Disc set is part of Severin Films’ 8-Disc boxed collection Danza Macabra Volume Two: The Italian Gothic Collection, with Jekyll (1969), They Have Changed Their Face (1971) and The Devil’s Lover (1972). A review of the entire set will follow shortly.
The traditional Big Three in classic Eurohorror were Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda and Antonio Margheriti, who polled third partly due to the non-availablity of his films in their original versions. In the years before home video we American enthusiasts had to scour continental magazines in search of more information. The critics for England’s The Monthly Film Bulletin seemed well informed on Italian pictures; under special ‘film club’ conditions, they may have had access to French and Italian imports before BBFC censorship. *
The first wave of the DVD boom changed everything. Beginning with thrillers by Mario Bava and Dario Argento, there was a constant flow of European horror. The most respected disc boutiques hunted down films held by smaller companies. Blu-ray brought forward even more genre rarities. In just the last couple of years remarkable restorations of some of the most desirable Eurohorror classics have surfaced. The best of Bava is now available in amazing Blu-ray presentations, alongside expressive work by other directors and fringe-benefit oddities from other countries. The once- elusive The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is recently out in Region B and will soon be available in 4K Ultra-HD.
Arriving in a couple of weeks in 4K Ultra HD is yet another big surprise, Antonio Margheriti’s Danza Macabra (Castle of Blood). It’s a top showcase for Barbara Steele, the dark-haired siren who lured generations of fans into the realm of ’60s horror.
The Mystique never went away.
The ‘Cult of Barbara’ began with her debut starring feature Black Sunday. Steele was both sexy and frightening. Her horror characters exuded a dark, morbid glamour. Critic Raymond Durgnat put her in his ‘cinema harem game’ pantheon, just after Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak. To trumpet Eurohorror’s new Queen of morbid sexuality, he quoted French critic-director Jean-Paul Török:
“When aesthetic admiration is absolutely fused with desire and terror, it ‘blacks out’ … Beneath the flowing robe of this young woman with so beautiful a countenance there appear, distinctly, the tatters of a skeleton. Is she any the less desirable?” **
Török was referring to Bava’s Black Sunday, but Steele’s 1964 Danza Macabra is an equally rewarding erotic nightmare — but not in the bowdlerized version that played the U.S. in 1965, often on a Woolner Bros. double bill with Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World. Some heavy editing and dubbing was required to convert Danza into a conventional thriller suitable for all ages.
Perhaps the best film by the erratic, prolific Antonio Margheriti, Danza Macabra’s story is falsely attributed to Edgard (sic) Allan Poe. The storyline sounds too graphic for Poe to sell to a respectable publisher of the 1840s. A haunted castle harbors a group of libidinous ghosts caught in a repeating, perpetual cycle of sex and murder. Poe appears as a character, on his ‘one and only’ trip to England.
Over drinks at a pub, journalist Alan Foster (Georges Rivière) takes a bet from none other than Edgar Allan Poe (Sylvano Tranquili) that he can stay the night alone in the castle of Lord Thomas Blackwood (Umberto Raho). Not long after Alan arrives, he encounters a series of peculiar residents. Appearing without introduction is the alluring Elisabeth Blackwood (Barbara Steele). The hostile Julia Alert (Margarete Robsahm) seems possessive of Elisabeth. The morbid Dr. Carmus (Arturo Dominici) tells Alan that everyone he sees is a ghostly illusion. Alan witnesses a formal ball, followed by an orgy of murders in an upstairs bedchamber. Alan doesn’t know what to think: he sees Elisabeth dead, and then alive again, as if nothing had happened. The villa’s ghosts appear and reappear, to re-perform the crimes that damned their souls.
Come with me — and die of pleasure.
Barbara Steele’s Elisabeth Blackwood is neither a vengeful demon nor a trembling victim. She fascinates the too-gullible Alan Foster. Like one of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, Dr. Carmus lectures Alan on the persistence of life after death. Carmus explains that the punishment for the castle’s damned souls (including himself?) is to repeat their torment and suffering for eternity. “The dead need blood” declares Carmus, but Alan doesn’t realize that he is meant to play a role in the murderous pageant.
Carmus’ ‘tour’ of the castle’s repeating horror rituals starts with the ballroom scene, accompanied by a romantic waltz by Riz Ortolani. The musclebound stablehand Herbert (Giovanni Cianfraglia) refuses to end his affair with Elisabeth despite the return of her husband, William (Benito Stefanelli). Elisabeth can’t resist Herbert’s advances, but tries to fend off the amorous attention of the beautiful Julia. The ensuing stabbings and stranglings play out as one connected, compressed vignette.
Alan is only the latest victim lured to Castle Blackwood by Lord Thomas. He witness a ghostly replay of an earlier couple’s demise. Should Alan leave before dawn and forfeit his bet? The sympathetic Elisabeth aids Alan’s last-minute flight to safety.
Alive and then dead, alive again and then dead again.
Using ordinary haunted house imagery, Danza Macabra maintains a dream-like atmosphere throughout. Alan Foster is too enchanted to take the wager seriously, and foolishly delivers himself into the ghostly game. Does he think everything is an elaborate charade, an initiation into the famous author’s inner circle? Sex attraction does it every time: Alan pays no heed when Elisabeth tells him that she’s already dead. He doesn’t bolt, even after discovering that she has no heartbeat.
As pointed out by numerous others, Danza Macabra is like an evil variant on Arthur Schnitzler’s La ronde. Passions play out in a carousel-like spectacle — lust, jealousy, cruelty, violence. Alan Foster will become the newest member of the dance of the dead.
The uncanny tone — is everything a ghostly illusion? — leads to some of classic Eurohorror’s most erotic moments, with and without Barbara Steele. Elisabeth’s low-cut ball gown is a disorientating eye opener. Herbert’s rough, lustful assault outdoors ends with a suggestion of even hotter activity off-screen. Julia’s seduction-assault on Elisabeth also unleashes violent passions. For once, all this ‘fantastic’ sex activity is central to the story concept. The erotic content peaks with yet another ghostly ritualized repetition, a disrobing moment with the doomed visitor Elsi Perkings (Sylvia Sorrente).
Some of Barbara Steele’s directors saw her as an exotic fetish- object best displayed in filmy nightgowns, or tied half-naked to a whipping post. Danza Macabra connects Steele’s sensuality to a drama of substance. Do the Blackwood Castle phantoms have free will? In the hallucinatory reenactment rituals, Elisabeth is mostly victimized as an object of lust. How genuine is her concern for Alan Foster? Is it her cursed fate to replay that role with every victim of Blackwood Castle?
The uncut Danza Macabra is the most satisfying Antonio Margheriti movie we’ve so far seen. The Italian-language dialogue plays well. Instead of the expected rushed coverage, scenes unspool with style and restraint. We’re told that Margheriti stepped into the director’s chair only at the last minute, and that the filming was prepared by a different director, the equally celebrated Sergio Corbucci.
This is serious Italo Gothic corridor wandering.
Antonio Margheriti’s fluid camera follows Alan, Dr. Carmus and Elisabeth through the gloomy halls, up the double staircase and down to the crypt where lie ornate stone crypts bearing some of their names. The lighting is good, certainly better than the mood-killing high-key work in Margheriti’s The Virgin of Nuremberg. Yet cameraman Riccardo Pallottini doesn’t over-stress chiaroscuro effects, silhouettes, etc.. Individual Blackwoods appear and disappear without warning. Entire tableaux as well — Alan looks away for a minute and a corpse-strewn bedchamber is suddenly empty again. Georges Rivière (Dieterle’s Mistress of the World) brings an unflappable calm that helps these scenes cohere. We’re also curious to learn more, and don’t dismiss Alan as a dope who doesn’t know a trap when he sees it.
The characterization of Edgar Allan Poe isn’t all that memorable; this isn’t the usual image of Poe as haunted or melancholic. Dubbed with a sobering voice, Arturo Dominici (the scary Yavuto in Black Sunday) is a dour and melancholy tour guide. Giovanni Cianfraglia is frequently bare-chested, making us think of popular Italian muscleman movies. The film’s overall sex angle suggests that the filmmakers were aiming for a homoerotic appeal, too.
Danza Macabra’s sex appeal reaches in multiple directions. Blonde Norwegian Margrete Robsahm had been one of several name actresses dropped into Roger Corman’s shoot-on-the-fly Formula One racing movie The Young Racers, along with Marie Versini and the recently passed Béatrice Altariba. Robsahm contrasts well with Steele’s raven-like beauty. Their lesbian struggle bears comparison with Roger Vadim’s suggestive hothouse encounter between Elsa Martinelli and Annette Stroyberg.
The uncensored highlight is the spectacle of Sylvia Sorrente, back-lit in antiquated undergarments. The isolated moment is voyeuristic, yet refined. It goes beyond what’s expected in horror exploitation, expressing in a carnal way Poe’s notion that the most tragic death is that of a beautiful woman.
A cautionary note, to those that won’t abide animal cruelty in film. Dr. Carmus’ metaphysical lecture on the ‘undead’ state includes the killing of a small snake on camera, in close-up. Carmus uses its still- squirming head as ‘proof’ of life after death.
More about how we ‘discovered’ Barbara Steele.
Those of us too young to see Steele’s Black Sunday in theaters missed out, and we never caught it on television either. We first encountered her in photos in Famous Monsters magazine, likely images from Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum. Occasional European stills would appear, but not the provocative & undraped publicity shots for The Long Hair of Death and Amanti d’oltretomba, the kind that decorated the pages of the French magazine Midi-Minuit Fantastique.
Drake Douglas’s widely-read, somewhat inaccurate book Horror! (1966) carried an intriguing synopsis of Black Sunday without identifying its riveting star by name. Carlos Clarens mentions Steele just once in his An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967). That left Raymond Durgnat’s 1967 book Films and Feelings to give us our first formal introduction to the Steele mystique. Readers of the magazine Castle of Frankenstein were surely privvy to the Cult of Barbara much earlier.
In college we rented 16mm prints for screenings, and eventually bought a battered print of Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Only with DVD did partly-acceptable copies surface of Steele’s other work for Riccardo Freda, Massimo Pupillo, Mario Caiano and Camillo Mastrocinque.
Around 2000, we rushed to see a screening of Castle of Blood at the American Cinematheque. The 16mm print was unimpressive, but who cared? Barbara Steele made a personal appearance, accompanied by her friend and agent David Del Valle. She brushed past us exiting the Egyptian’s auditorium, and turned and smiled. She seemed in a good mood, holding court for a few minutes, so everybody was happy. It was much better than a 1990 convention signing, when she seemed intimidated by the long line of autograph seekers.
Our first visually acceptable disc of Castle of Blood was a 2002 DVD from Synapse. Some of the censored material had been spliced back in, but the only audio was the English-language dub. Severin Films’ 2015 Blu-ray of Nightmare Castle included as an extra a very good encoding of the Woolner Bros.’ recut of Castle of Blood, again with the disappointing English audio.
It seemed unlikely that we would ever see these movies in original versions, which made some of us intolerant of the dubbed U.S. variants. And seeing the originals of some Italian shockers doesn’t always reveal a hidden masterpiece. But Severin’s new disc has rekindled our faith that pleasant genre discoveries always lie ahead. Antonio Margheriti’s haunted castle replays a Brigadoon– like yearly ritual in which the dead return for a ‘condensed’ reenactment of murders of passion. Barbara Steele’s all-important Elisabeth Blackwood creates tension because she sincerely tries to save the latest chosen victim. Or is her solicitude a reenactment as well, another part of the ritual?
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