Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
Old Gothic horror movies are very much their own thing. There’s a sense that they desperately want to be scary and while they often come with a weird sense of torture behind the scenes with a soupçon of Poe-style necrophilia, but they’re not really scary in the modern sense. There may not be a more gothic-y Gothic horror film than Nightmare Castle (Amanti d’Oltretomba, if you prefer, sometimes called The Faceless Monster, and for some reason called The Night of the Doomed on Tubi), in large part because of the presence of the great Barbara Steele, the queen of the 1960s Euro-trash castle-based horror film.
We’re going to dive head-first into the illicit sex angle with this one. Scientist Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) has a loveless marriage with his wife Muriel (Barbara Steele). He plans a trip away from their estate, but actually doubles back to catch Muriel making the beast with two backs in the greenhouse with the gardener David (Rik Battaglia). Not willing to stand for such treatment, Arrowsmith tortures both of them and eventually kills them, only to discover that he has not been named the heir to Muriel’s fortune. The actual heir is Muriel’s step-sister Jenny (also Barbara Steele). Needing a new plan, Stephen takes the opportunity to remove the hearts of Muriel and David (for, honestly, plot reasons). He also uses their blood to create a serum to rejuvenate his servant Solange (Helga Liné).
So how are we going to get Barbara Steele back into the film? By bringing her back as Jenny, who just inherited all of Muriel’s goods and money. Jenny, we learn, has been institutionalized and is not mentally stable. Stephen’s plan is to marry her (which he does) and drive her crazy so that he can inherit everything from her. The plan is to make her think that she is being haunted in the castle, which will eventually allow both he and Solange to live happily ever after. To help with the plan, he brings in the young and handsome Dr. Derek Joyce (Lawrence Clift), who is not in on the scam. In fact, Dr. Joyce soon comes to the conclusion that Jenny is actually being haunted by supernatural forces.
Since this is a horror movie, it’s soon going to be clear that Jenny actually is being haunted by supernatural forces, specifically the spirits of both Muriel and David. Revenge is a-comin’ from both, which is exactly what we expect. The question is whether Jenny and Dr. Joyce will be a part of that revenge, caught up in that revenge, or spared from both death and being complicit in what happens at the end.
In large part, Nightmare Castle is a sort of precursor to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death in terms of the basic plot. It’s set in a Gothic castle, of course, and in this movie the supernatural elements are actually real, but it’s not hard to draw a line from this movie to the other. That said, Let’s Scare Jessica is a better movie and a more interesting one in large part because Nightmare Castle is desperately slow. It takes forever for anything to happen in this, and it would be extremely easy to cut this down by a good 20 minutes or so. An 80-85 minute running time gives you the same story with much less dragging.
The truth is that Nightmare Castle is just that—a slow Gothic film where not much happens past the first 15 minutes or until the last 15 minutes. One of the major plot points, keeping the hearts of David and Muriel, seems to happen because we need that to be relevant at the end of the film.
I’m as happy to watch Barbara Steele walk around with her eyes as wide as possible, hair draped over half of her face as the next guy, but really, she’s had plenty of films that are better than this one. Watch it if you’re a completist or a Barbara Steele fanboy, but if you are, you’ve probably already seen it and have moved on to rewatch Black Sunday for the tenth time.
Why to watch Nightmare Castle: Barbara Steele is the queen of European Gothic horror.
Why not to watch: Boy, is it slow.
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