Halloween ’24 is looking good, as we chalk another genre landmark onto the list of excellent special edition discs. Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava’s thriller is the initial foray into Italo horror, a meeting of Gothic notions and modern medical chills. Gianna Maria Canale is the ravishing Duchess whose beauty is preserved through sordid science; Wanda Guida is the latest victim tapped for sangue fresco to benefit the aristocracy. Cinematographer Bava rescued the troubled movie with re-shoots, his first major directing effort. Horror researchers have been studying it ever since. This release contains the Italian original plus two versions altered by distributors to create an exploitation ‘adult’ release.

I Vampiri
Region-Free Blu-ray
Radiance
1957 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 82, 72, 66 min. / The Devil’s Commandment, Lust of the Vampire / Street Date October 28, 2024 / Available from Radiance / £17.99
Starring: Gianna Maria Canale, Carlo D’Angelo, Dario Michaelis, Wandisa Guida, Antoine Balpêtré, Paul Müller, Angelo Galassi, Renato Tontini.
Cinematography: Mario Bava
Production Designer & costumes: Beni Montresor
Art Director: Beni Montresor
Gaffer: Antonio Rinaldi
Visual effects: Mario Bava
Film Editor: Roberto Cinquini
Original Music: Roman Vlad
Screenplay by Riccardo Freda, Piero Regnoli, Rik Sjostrom story by Regnoli, Bava
Produced by Luigi Carpentieri, Ermanno Donati
Directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava

The 1950s horror boom ignited in England, with a daring Technicolor shocker that broke all the rules. Hair-splitting film historians will stipulate that the actual first Eurohorror of the decade came a month earlier, with an Italian picture. Riccardo Freda’s  I Vampiri had a rocky start, for sure. Five years passed before it was released for English-speaking territories, revised with new scenes for the adults-only market. Its genre significance wasn’t acknowledged until much later than that.

More famous for what it represents than its actual merits, I Vampiri once existed only as a collection of confusing production stills and posters. A July 2001 Image DVD release satisfied the curiosity of new fans of Eurohorror than were keen to learn more about directors Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava. This new remaster by RAI TV and presented by the U.K. company Radiance gives us the original Italian-language Titanus release, plus encodings of two English language versions, revised for grindhouse distribution.

It’s a vampire movie, but with no vampires…

Good research has cleared up some of the questions behind I Vampiri — was it really a flop at the box office?  Did it have any influence?  The film itself doesn’t yield many clues. Tim Lucas’s new audio commentary tells the tale, explaining why the show doesn’t quite hang together.

A string of murders of young women terrorizes Paris. Hoping to uncover the killer, the ambitious reporter Pierre Lantin (Dario Michaelis) irritates the Inspector Chantal (Carlo D’Angelo) by nosing about in police business. Pierre is pursued romantically by Giselle (Gianna Maria Canale), the wealthy niece of the elderly, reclusive Margherita Du Grand, a Duchess. Giselle is gorgeous but Pierre resents her attention: long ago, his father suffered a broken heart at the hands of the cruel Duchess, and Pierre doesn’t want to be hurt the same way.

Pierre thinks he has a good lead on the killer when he connects the drug addict Joseph Signoret (Paul Müller) to one of the missing girls. Warned off by Inspector Chantal and told by his editor to drop the story, Pierre instead narrows his sights on a small group of female students that fit the victims’ profile. But one of them, Laurette Robert (Wanda Guida of  The Revolt of the Slaves) is kidnapped before he can interview her.

It turns out that the situation is more horrible than anyone thought possible — the ancient Castle Du Grand holds more secrets. Scientist Professor Du Grande (Antoine Balpêtré) fakes his own death, and seems capable of reviving a man from the dead. He commits atrocious crimes to maintain the beauty of a relative, a proud aristocrat.

We’re told that the original story writer Piero Regnoli had been a film critic for a Vatican publication, and that he dashed off his first plot outline in just a day or so. The final film is split between a crime investigation with Gothic trimmings, and a medical horror thriller. The ‘vampires’ are a word coined to sell newspapers.

The central idea in I Vampiri is the notion of a beautiful woman who retains her beauty by stealing it from younger females, through some terrible magic. That’s basically the Countess Báthory legend, souped-up with modern medical ideas. In 1957 the notion of mixing a detective story with Gothic horror was not at all bad, but the unspooling of the mystery here is not particularly exciting. The film’s poster promises Gothic thrills and maybe a fiendish monster. I Vampiri has an impressive castle settingthat looks Gothic, but for most of its running time we’re investigating apartment blocks and following a reporter through newsrooms.

The movie wasn’t a hit in Italy, but that can’t be blamed on the lack of an established horror genre. As finished, I Vampiri doesn’t seem to know what kind of story it is telling. It never seems fully committed to horror thrills. Of the story’s four or five killings only two are shown on-screen. The female victims are kidnapped by a burly henchman and given injections of sedatives, but none of the vampiric (or in this case, medico-vampiric) attacks on them are shown.

Was Italian censorship responsible for the lack of harder horror content?  Even Bela Lugosi had been allowed to close in on his prey before a discreet fadeout. The only hint of what exactly is happening to these women is in dialogue references to needle marks found on their corpses. The ‘vampire’ figure’s only aggressive act is to shoot a male victim with a gun, because he breaks into her rooms to declare his love to her. Under these circumstances it’s unlikely that even Italian audiences would be aware of a vibrant new genre a’borning.

What is now obvious is that the first wave of Eurohorror that followed was more like I Vampiri than The Curse of Frankenstein. Between 1959 and 1962 there appeared thrillers about twisted medical experiments, and young women kidnapped and murdered to restore another woman’s youth, or to repair her face or body — in  Italy,  France,  Spain, and  Germany.

Despite its CinemaScope camerawork and some elaborate sets and art direction for the core scenes in Le Château Du Grand, the original Italian version meanders around its subject matter. Much of the dialogue is bald character exposition, with people explaining their backgrounds, and often the exact psychology behind their actions. The reporter Pierre has an assistant, that with no warning suddenly decides that he needs to make a daring romantic play for the icy Giselle Du Grand. She responds by explaining, in full, her personal vendetta against Pierre. The drug addict Joseph Signoret is apparently killed in one scene. He is simply seen lying around Professor Du Grand’s mad lab — until we suddenly see scars on his neck indicating Frankenstein-like experiments.

Tim Lucas and Roberto Curti explain that when Riccardo Freda left the film unfinished, the producers handed the job to rescuing it to the Director of Photography Mario Bava. It became Bava’s directing debut. Freda seems to have filmed most of the scenes with his movie star wife Gianna Maria Canale, and that Bava improvised new material to depict Pierre Lantin’s clashes with Inspector Chantal. People talk a story, very little of which is shown. The show mostly marks time until Pierre is ordered to report on a social event at Castle Du Grand. Seemingly essential scenes are ellipsed. After the secret of Giselle Du Grand is revealed, we don’t even see what happens to her. It’s assumed that Pierre and the kidnapped heroine will now become a romantic item. The male leads share a smug conversation before heading out for a cup of coffee.

Bava must really have been in a time squeeze, unable to fully iron out wrinkles in the story or finesse production details. We’re surprised when the daytime ‘Paris’ exteriors are much less attractive than the handsome interiors in the Castle and elsewhere. The anamorphic lens often behaves well, but numerous shots exhibit the ‘CinemaScope Mumps.’

Bava’s camera tricks to fake a French location shoot are pretty awful, even if they draw critical praise in the disc’s extras. He appears to use photo cutouts, blown up and mounted in front of his lens, to add Paris scenery to his street exteriors. Neither the perspectives nor the contrast are a good match, and we can see errant reflections in the glass holding the cut-outs. The final composites are pretty dire, nothing like the often undetectable illusions in Bava’s later films. In the film’s very first shot, the Eiffel Tower is convincingly relocated … to a vast featureless landscape.

The fantastic centerpiece of the film are the age transformations of Giselle Du Grand. When the beautiful woman becomes emotional, she turns into a haggard crone before our very eyes. The change happens without a cut — Ms. Canale’s perfect skin suddenly grows lined and strained, and even her teeth look rotted, shattered. In his extra featurette, critic Fabio Melelli lauds this effect as something invented by Mario Bava, but it is now well known as a B&W camera trick with filters and colored makeup, first seen in silent movies. It was used to show the miraculous cure of lepers in the silent Ben-Hur; its most notable appearance was in the 1932 classic  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde photographed by camerman Karl Struss. When MGM remade Jekyll it bought and suppressed the Oscar-winning 1932 version … another reason why Bava’s trick may have seemed brand-new in 1957.

Seen today, the transformation scenes are repeated at least once too often. Since we have little emotional attachment to Giselle or Pierre, the dramatic impact is muted. The illusion at least connects with the victim Laurette — although the Professor’s process isn’t really explained, we can see Laurette turning older while Giselle gets younger. Bava would of course repeat the gimmick much more successfully, with Barbara Steele’s witch in  Black Sunday.

The lighting cinematography in I Vampiri is excellent, always atmospheric and beautifully lit: the Du Grand castle, the crypt, Professor Du Grand’s mad lab and various police offices. Gianna Maria Canale is made to look particularly cold and forbidding, despite being drop-dead gorgeous. That leaves Wandisa Guida’s Laurette as the liveliest person on screen, trying to escape from her castle chamber with its noose, and finding an arrangement of unexplained corpses in the dungeon next door. It’s interesting that the key Italian poster art features a stunning Guida close-up, instead of a portrait of the name star Gianna Maria Canale.

I Vampiri displays several elements of the coming wave of Eurohorrors mixing Gothic and modern themes: bizarre experiments on beautiful girls to benefit a hidden woman’s beauty; a doglike servant who procures victims via chloroform attacks. Fans of Bava and Riccardo Freda will eat it up, especially in this excellent remaster. Although no classic or even consistently logical, the show is indeed historically important to the genre. In 1957, we can really see the Horror film taking a major leap forward, in this picture, Hammer’s Frankenstein thriller, and Jacques Tourneur’s superb  Night of the Demon.

The Roman film industry seems to have been a place where everybody knew everybody. When Tim Lucas suggests that Mario Bava stepped in to help out on many films for which he did not take credit, we believe him. Bava and Freda were close collaborators, and Freda worked several times more with producers Luigi Carpentieri and Ermanno Donati, most notably on the top Italo horror pictures  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock and  The Ghost with Barbara Steele. It’s great to have the IMDB to help make these connections, even if the experts tell us that their credits are riddled with errors. The IMDB lists actor Carlo D’Angelo as also having played in Howard Hawks’ classic costume epic  Land of the Pharaohs — as Joan Collin’s bodyguard Nabuna. The uncredited actor playing Nabuna is a genuine muscleman with (to me) an entirely different face.

Radiance’s Region-Free Blu-ray of I Vampiri is going to be snapped up by collectors. The B&W images on this remastered disc make the show look brand new, untouchedg. We can really appreciate the ornate castle interiors; the cinematography is unusually sharp for anamorphic pictures of this vintage.

To follow Radiance’s product description, 3 separate versions are present. In addition to the Italian-language original, we’re given an HD copy of the U.K. release Lust of the Vampire, from 1959, cut down to 66 minutes, from a copy kept at the BFI. In standard def is the American The Devil’s Commandment from 1960, at 72 minutes. The basic recut adds some salacious material, filmed by the U.S. distributor, of the first victim being attacked, some inserts of rats and a shriveled head, and of a creepy guy (Al Lewis, later of TV’s The Munsters) menacing a captive Wandisa Guida.

Not all Radiance discs are Region-Free but the good news for U.S. buyers is that this one is.

We recognized the work of composer Roman Vlad right away, being familiar with his superb music score for The Horrible Dr. Hichcock many times. These tracks are a little uneven, but most of the suspense cues work well. The waltz heard in the ballroom not quite so much — it sounds like little more than the same two measures being repeated.

Radiance’s extras would attract us even if we owned another release of the same title. This review was written with a check disc, so we couldn’t assess the insert booklet included with final product. It carries an essay by Roberto Curti, whose research in Eurohorror has been quite extensive. Curti wrote an entire publication devoted to I Vampiri, which I assume is not what’s included in this disc set.  →

Fabio Melli’s featurette Bloodthirst starts with a discussion of Mario Bava’s red-blue ‘aging’ trick, and then surprises us with a vintage TV piece in which Bava, on an Italian talk show, demonstrates how it was done. Bava comes across as a really fun guy!  Actor Dario Michaelis contributes as well. On other interview featurettes we hear from Bava’s filmmaker son Lamberto Bava, and critic Leon Hunt, who delivers a nicely organized evaluation of all things I Vampiri. Hunt has also published a book on Mario Bava.

Capping the extras is Tim Lucas’s information & analysis-rich audio commentary. Tim exercises his proven skill as a movie detective, examining the ‘filmus delecti’ for clues as to what was shot by Riccardo Freda and what scenes are Mario Bava’s rushed reshoots. Considering that Bava had to reinvent an entire storyline and merge it with footage already filmed, it’s quite an accomplishment, even with its flaws. If Bava’s matte shots faking Parisian skylines are barely passable, it’s probably because he had to come up with them overnight, without any sleep.

Tim points out roles played by Riccardo Freda and Piero Regnoli. He doesn’t waste time explaining the revisions committed by ‘Releasing Corporation of Independent Producers’ to create the trashy American cut, released 5 years later. We don’t mind, the same way we’ve blocked out our one viewing of the ‘exorcism’ recut of Bava’s marvelous  Lisa and the Devil, years later.

More interestingly, Lucas reminds us that the film’s original storyline interpreted the villainous character played by Paul Müller very differently. A scene of ‘Joseph Signoret’ being guillotined was apparently filmed, because it shows up in a German trailer. Professor Du Grand apparently sews Signoret’s head back on and revives him to do the dirty work of procuring young females. That original plot twist makes us think of two previous ‘medical horror’ pix that Piero Regnoli could very well have seen. There’s of course Karl Freund’s classic  Mad Love, with Peter Lorre tricking Colin Clive into thinking he’s resuscitated the guillotined corpse of knife murderer Edward Brophy.

But there is also Chano Urueta’s crazy  El monstruo resuscitado (1953), a Mexican film that had an Italian release as Il monstruoso Dottor Crimen. As in I Vampiri, a journalist (Miroslava) investigates a mysterious gothic castle where crazy medical experiments are being performed. Resucitado even has a quasi-zombie character, raised from the dead by a mad doctor for the same purpose, to carry out kidnapping and killings. The Mexican movie was co-written by an Italian, Dino Maiuri, who also wrote for Luis Buñuel, and later, Mario Bava. Yes, Italo horror does seem to have been a very small world.

I Vampiri turns out to be a crossroads of horror film history, with multiple paths to be explored. It has plenty of genre graces to be discovered; Mario Bava fans will simply enjoy the director’s first stab at sustaining a Gothic atmosphere. It’s a serious attempt at a different kind of horror thriller, and a real starting point for the coming wave of Italo Gothics. Tim Lucas leaves us with an interesting visual — an interviewee told him that Riccardo Freda saw street traffic pause to look at I Vampiri’s eye-catching poster, but then move on to look for a different movie. The director decided that Italian moviegoers were prejudiced against Italian thrillers, assuming them to be cheap imitations of better films from England and America. Fom that point forward Freda Anglicized the credits on his horror work.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

I Vampiri
Region-Free Blu-ray rates:
Movie:
Video:
Sound:
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Tim Lucas (2023)
Interviews:
with Lamberto Bava (2022, 15 mins)
with author Leon Hunt (2024, 21 mins)
Making-of featurette Bloodthirst with Fabio Melelli, Mario Bava and Dario Michaelis (2013, 17 mins)
The Devil’s Commandment trailer
Insert booklet featuring new writing by Roberto Curti (not reviewed).
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 09, 2024
(7210vamp)

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