[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Castle of Blood (1964)

Following an evening spent interviewing author Edgar Allen Poe in an English tavern, journalist Alan Foster (Georges Rivière) accepts a bet to spend All Hallows Eve night in a supposedly haunted castle.

Italian director Antonio Margheriti returns to Gothic horror following the previous years excellent Virgin of Nuremburg. A genre he would also visit with this same years The Long Hair of Death and with 1973's excellent Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye. Castle of Blood shows, and make no mistake here, that along with the other three mentioned films Margheriti was Italy's top Gothic horror director (Sorry Mario) and it's a crying shame he made only four films in the genre, preferring it seems science fiction, crime and fantasy.

Castle of Blood is an absolute delight of Gothic cinema. Rather than going all out for shocks, Margheriti clearly has an understanding of the Gothic and allows an atmosphere of dread to slowly build from the moment Rivière begins to make his way to the castle. The journey on foot is slow, dark and incredibly eerie. Even as he enters the castle the gloomy corridors and rooms are lit only with a candelabra he carries. It really is truly atmospheric and quite wonderful and thankfully it never lets up throughout the films hour and a half run time.

Once established in the castle Foster meets Elizabeth Blackwood who apparently resides there, but unbeknown to him she's actually one of the many ghostly apparitions that appear every Halloween when the fabric between reality and the spirit world is at it's most vulnerable. What the put upon writer soon comes to understand is that the ghostly residents need blood - in this case his blood - in order to return the following All Hallows Eve.

The characters are well rounded, believable and nicely written, ghosts or otherwise, in fact Sergio Corbucci 's screen play i'd say is practically flawless. Even lesser characters such as the lovely Sylvia Sorrente when she shows up in the final reels are fully fleshed out. In fact Castle of Blood is everything you could want from Gothic horror from it's eerie atmosphere of dread and decay to startling visuals and impeccable performances.

Highly recommended.