Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.
You never really know what you’re going to get into with an older horror movie, and for me, that’s especially true when it’s an Italian horror movie. I don’t always love Italian horror movies, finding them to be much more about the spectacle and very often short on plot and coherence. Castle of Blood (or Danza Macabra in the original Italian) comes from before the era of the giallo, though, and also features Barbara Steele in a prominent role. Steele is always a net positive.
The plot is straight out of the mid-‘60s horror playbook. A journalist named Alan Foster (Georges Riviere) confronts Edgar Allan Poe (Silvano Tranquilli) about the authenticity of his stories. In the world of this film, Poe’s stories are viewed not as fictions, but as eyewitness accounts of the supernatural. Confident that there is no supernatural, Foster takes a bet with Lord Thomas Blackwood (Umberto Raho) to spend a night in the man’s castle. Specifically, he is to spend All Souls’ Eve (otherwise known as All Saints’ Day) in the castle. According to Lord Blackwood, no one has done this successfully; everyone who has attempted it has died.
