A Crisis of Passion
Making her Italian screen debut in Black Sunday in August 1960, Barbara Steele glowered into Mario Bava’s lens, and at that pivotal moment in cinema’s manic history something shone forth so ancient that even the most devout heretic experienced inchoate shivers of remorse. The mod summertime of the new decade was arrested, plunged backward, whereupon a strange, atavistic transformation occurred: the audience, pious enough to register shock at the intended effects, was nevertheless unprepared to confront the triumph of alchemy and necromancy over mere sackcloth and ashes. Shamefaced in the dark like Catholic schoolchildren remembering all they had been taught, the audience stared back at Steele’s eyes – a pair of druid’s eggs, bestowing true and everlasting illumination, as opposed to religion’s metaphorical kind – and shuddered inwardly at things no mere mortal could comprehend.
But what kind of “object” are we dealing with in Barbara Steele? Of course, the answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical equipment – and here we’ll risk the cliché “otherworldly” to describe her famous emerald eyes. As if sparked to life by silent-film magician Segundo de Chomon, the supreme master of hand-tinted illusionism. Peculiar even within the context of gothic tales served up on celluloid, her eyes flash at us from well beyond the Gothic’s allotted time and place in history. Occasionally like a Victorian child molded from pellucid porcelain, and sometimes a skull with fleshy lips, eyes open and deep like two pits into the infinite. When the cameras are trained on her, they are not passive receivers recording visual information but deadly carbon-arc projectors probing the psychic crawlspaces where skittering impulses dwell.
There are eyes that photograph as soulful, as opposed to merely expressive—allowing the onlooker a glimpse into the funnel end of eternity. Think Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart, whose eyes simultaneously invite and repel inquiry into the unwritten histories behind them. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, great movie stars are defenestrating their spirit essence right down the lens. Joan Crawford could scrub bathtubs merely by glancing at them. And that wonk-eyed Siamese sex cat, Karen Black, worried us with her revelation that some lazy eyes are less lazy than others.
Then there is Barbara Steele, whose famed peepers hint at the corrosive void that has replaced her soul. They offer a brief glimpse at the corrupted flesh beneath an unblemished alabaster encasement. Steele photographs like an imperious statue inwardly cursing all those who gaze upon it, as if some monument to classicism were startled into bitter sentience, or unwanted Keatsian fever. Her marble-white flesh remains an aesthetic plea for the proscenium arch's return to drama, and her columnar bearing and soaring height fused her to the monochrome of director Mario Bava's cursed pasteboard castles. This was the monster wrought by Italian genre horror: a theatrical form of the archaic. A wraith howling at a paper moon.
"Stars", unlike their thespian counterparts, do not need scripts or stories to thoroughly inhabit a motion picture. Histories without language, or even thought, flicker behind their eyes. Their presence – ineffable, diaphanous, seductive – provides the audience a beacon to follow to its only narrative conclusion. Outside the realm of this splendid cosmology, movies that rely on actors and 'acting', the common tools of theater, tend to miss the mark when metaphysics come into play.
As a visual form, Barbara Steele summons that occult universe – in this realm, she needs no interference from middleman auteurs. Her control of the camera’s gaze, like that of all movie stars worthy of the term, is primal and innately physical; an ancestral gift of bone structure handed down by prim Brits and soulful Portuguese peasants, and a sculptured riddle where good and evil join forces in somber disharmony. Her face becomes cinema's reawakening of an image which loomed large for 19th century Symbolists: The black star.
Italian commercial cinema, for example, often took avant-garde notions beyond metaphor. Beyond the bounds of routine physics the star is rather an eye that projects dark matter instead of light.
As such, Barbara Steele is one of cinema’s true abominations – a light-repelling force that presents itself in an arrangement of shadows on the screen. No “luminary,” Steele is celluloid anti-matter, a slow burning black flame that devours every filament around it. Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, but a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent, summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt. Filmmaking is the darkest and unholiest of arts (done right, that is), and for Mario Bava it becomes the invocation of beast and woman from the unconsecrated soil of nightmares. Steele remains the high priestess of the crepuscular and buried chambers of the imagination; the pure pleasure center of original sin and the murderous impulse buried just below the surface. She reminds us that existence itself is the highest form of betrayal and a continuing curse on all those forced to endure it.
Steele was made to inhabit this precise screen persona as crafted by necromancer Riccardo Freda in The Horrible Doctor Hitchcock: a subterranean passageway, falling off into shadow. A pale figure glowing in the gloom. Her coal-black eyes offering still another glimpse of an even darker pit. Though green in the real world, they often appear unlit on film, at times evoking in Steele a slinky pneumatic tadpole.
Steele’s facial features resonate as a cacophony of jarring notes with no unifying theme to connect the haughty (and haunted) femme fatale gaze with its twitchy moue kisser betraying a rodent-like carnality and a keen vermin instinct for satiation. The effect is an almost comical identikit mugshot, combining the homicide victim with the homicidal maniac. Nothing quite lines up. And yet this portrait rendered from oddly intersected lines reveals not just a genetic blueprint for an abominable hybrid, but confirms Steele’s ability to convey the competing compulsions of predator and prey within a single body. A sneering, weak-chinned guttersnipe possesses the lower half of her face as if super-imposed upon a Victorian trophy wife whose portrait portends a cursed lineage. Here the artist captures that exact moment the wounded and conniving waif peers from those imperious orbs before retreating into a buried childhood memory.
In the lithographs of Odilon Redon, black is responsible for building form while white hovers both above and below it, adding to its unsettling dimensions. Redon's cosmos is governed by an unexplained moral sentience absorbing the power of conventional light, rendering it as a numinous absence. Wan, baleful, free-floating heads – often neither male nor female – throw shadows into shimmering relief. These glimmers of whiteness remain ever elusive; they do not vanish and yet they register as possibly elsewhere, beyond the otherwise tenebrous unity of the picture plane. To speak of the "Surreal" in such cases would be to murder a word; verbicide by chronic inflation and abuse – the commonest kind of death.
The “Marvelous,” once a surrealist instrument (another sad example of the hopeless rhetorical ditch between then and now) can perhaps be visually constituted in the diaphanous fraudulence of Italian genre horror movies. Everything depends on the eyes with which we choose to behold a vision molded by darkness – take Steele’s impenitent witch cursing God at the stake; originally presented to a peasant audience! Her twilight persona would look oddly out of place just three years later when, like an unwilling immigrant in Fellini’s 8½, another kind of “murder” takes place: this time through the aesthetic decorum and good taste of continental modernism.
Where Steele’s Italian films are concerned, we move forward into the past. They are, in a sense, silent movies. “The loss of voice for me has always been devastating…. It’s almost like some karmic debt….” Her sonic presence was eclipsed in a string of crudely, sadly dubbed horror vehicles, yes, including Black Sunday – no doubt aficionados of the great Mario Bava will object to our calling it a “vehicle.” But there is no denying that whenever Steele appears, the storyline falls away. Anachronism rules; we see it in the director’s exquisite sets, all keyed and subordinated to his ingénue’s stark loveliness (understood in black and white, molded by Italian cameramen into disquieting and sudden plasticity). Like a hot-blooded funerary sculpture made of alabaster, raven hair piled high, Steele’s already imposing height summons schizoid power and satanic sorcery – she’s Eros and Thanatos dynamically balanced. The famous opening sequence still leaves otherwise jaded film students traumatized, as it did a young Martin Scorsese once upon a time. Barbara Steele’s defiant witch, spewing a final curse upon her mortal judges, pierces to the bone with its dramatization of human relations.
While Italian movies robbed Steele of her voice, they liberated her from its narrow meaning in Britain. Leading ladies in Brit films tended to be well brought-up young things, unless they were lusty, working-class “wenches” like Diana Dors. Even at Hammer, where sexuality was unleashed regularly via bouts of vampirism, the erotically active roles usually went to continental lovelies (Polish immigrant Ingrid Pitt got her work permit based on Hammer’s claim that no native-born actress could exude such desire and desirability). Steele turns up all too briefly in Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959) as an art schoolgirl, the only kind of role that might allow for both intelligence and a certain liberated attitude. And Steele was exactly that type. Her appearance is so arresting, you want the movie to simply abandon its plot and follow her into some fresh storyline, what and where doesn’t matter.
In Italy, Steele suddenly became class-less and nation-less, devoid of associations beyond those conjured by the chiseled cheekbones and enormous eyes (convincingly replaced with poached eggs by Bava for a special effects shot). Her inescapable exoticism didn’t make sense in her native land, her bone structure suggesting a Latin, Slavic, or some other ethnicity. Omninational, omnisexual, and definitely carnivorous.
Generally remote with his actors, whom he regarded mainly as compositional elements in his films, Bava made a capricious move by selecting his female lead from a magazine photo-spread. Today it appears as a stroke of genius. Was it luck? Or, perhaps her now legendary eyes suggested a bizarre and beautiful leitmotif: to be destroyed, resurrected, and played endlessly on a register of emotions – extreme emotions, and taboo delights.
Steele shares an anecdote about her director’s temperament and working methods on Black Sunday… “Everything was so meticulously planned that Bava rarely asked me for multiple takes. There was no sense of urgency or drama, which was rare for an Italian director…” One detects deep ambivalence as she vacillates between little jabs at Bava (“He was a Jesuit priest on the set, somewhere far away.”) and gratitude. “There was a tremendous feeling of respect, whereas in my earliest roles at Rank I always felt shoved around, practically negated by the pressure of production.
“Bava did go absolutely berserk once,” she goes on. “John Richardson, this gorgeous, sinewy creature, for some reason couldn’t carry me across the room. And I was like eleven pounds in those days. We had to do it over and over, twenty times or something, and whenever John stumbled or dropped me, the whole crew would be in hysterics. We were all howling with laughter, except for Bava – he went simply wild! Eventually, some poor grip had to get down on all fours, and I rode on his back in a chair with John pretending to carry me.”
If Black Sunday summarizes the union of spiritual and physical dread, it’s precisely because Steele stands in for everyone in this dream-bauble, she is everyone everywhere, an all-consuming autumnal presence. Which, of course, provides Mario Bava with something truly rare – a face and mien as unsettling as horror films promise but hardly ever deliver. The devastation she leaves behind, her anarchic displacement, which has nothing to do with conventional notions of performance or “good acting,” defies description. Yet it is precisely here, in his compositional meaning, that Bava earns the label of genius – groundswells of fog, lifeless trees, gloomy dungeons, Steele’s absence in shifting penumbras and voids.
If Black Sunday came to be seen as a “cult classic” – embraced in the main by horror fans, geeks, Scream Queen idolaters and the ComicCon crowd – then what of the (always self-regarding) more discerning moviegoer? Could such high-minded commisars of capital “C” Culture permit themselves to take Bava’s film and Steele’s outré thespic gift seriously? The sorcery by which personality appears to survive on-screen, any screen, remains a deep mystery; only the shadow of an appearance survives. And yet, there are faces that reveal not merely a rigorous adherence to “character,” but the subterranean depths of the soul.
Insofar as Black Sunday was doomed to become an untamed species of necro-frippery from the outset, the question arises: Was Bava aiming high or playing to the cheap seats? Does he seek some numinous back alley to the absolute as we wend our way through one horror genre motif after another as predictable as the standard reincarnation scene only to discover an entire blighted landscape calibrated to accommodate Steele’s hot Sixties Sybil?
By presenting Steele as a skull with eyes midway through her Black Sunday regeneration, Bava caricatures her appeal perfectly. Great beauties are often celebrated for their bone structure, and Steele, forever seeking to displace herself in the gaudy space/time continuum of cinema, beats them all with the dome of her brow, the angle of her jaw, the cut-glass cheekbones. Romantics rhapsodized on “the skull beneath the skin” – Steele is X-ray sex personified. Which created one hell of a sticky predicament for her.
When Bava elevates her, he also enslaves her to kitsch for the rest of her life. He places Steele more firmly in cinema than any other director, Fellini included. The movie-going consciousness tends to be a prison for those who are dislocated from reality in the minds of horror fans. She and Fangoria are pressed together. Sealed in memory.
When I first met Barbara Steele about eighteen years ago, we somehow found ourselves sitting in front of a Brancusi sculpture here in New York City. A filmmaker acquaintance joked afterwards: “Steele beats bronze!” Indeed, at 67 she was still stunningly beautiful, flirtatious, frighteningly aware of the power of her stare.
She was a painter in her youth, so it’s not surprising that, even as we visualize her in a voluptuous, cinematic world of castles and blighted landscapes, her own self-image is perennially absorbed by art – in the sense of Andre Malraux’s Museum Without Walls.
“A friend of mine just had a show of his art in a little cinema here – very small paintings, about 8 inches by 6 – and then they projected them onto one of their screens and they looked fantastic! Size is everything! Unless you were born in the Renaissance… then you were surrounded by silence and stone walls, shadows and glimmers of gold, and faces that are like spells they look so informed.”
Steele speaks of her “old, suspicious Celtic soul,” her bitterness at having “flitted through movies par hazard,” and a newfound desire to make audio books (what colossal revenge!). It’s poetic really, this doppelganger, a ghost-like screen persona following her around. Whenever we think of the effect her movies have had on us, the following words of Charles Lamb leap to mind.
Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras – dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition – but they were there before. They are transcripts, types – the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to effect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body – or without the body, they would have been the same… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual – that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy – are difficulties the solution of which may afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.
Even the wooliest metaphysics can be hard to separate from actual violence. Case in point: the night of September 22, 1796. Charles Lamb had his own brush with horror, when the future poet and author of children’s stories found himself removing a bloody knife from his sister’s hand. A spasm of matricidal rage that would land her in a mad house, and tending to prove, once again, the need for genres of terror and trepidation. For a moment at least, Steele seems to agree, bowled over by the Lamb anecdote, literally screaming: “AND THAT NAME – LAMB – IT MAKES YOU THINK OF SUCH INNOCENT BRITISH LANDSCAPES!” She’s a fairly solitary and introspective person on the one hand, capable of intense and unexpected eruptions of joy on the other, which may be why Italians have always embraced her – a shared gloomy zest for life, fatalism and pasta. There’s something intensely porous about her (as porous as film itself), which helps clarify her otherwise inscrutable tension with that alter ego on the screen, the one she so busily downgrades.
A handful of Italian directors recognized Steele’s power to generate sparks without speaking. Riccardo Freda once described those enormous peepers of hers as “remarkable” and “metaphysical” – “like the eyes of a Chirico painting. Sometimes, in certain kinds of light, her face assumes an aspect that doesn’t seem quite human, and would be impossible for any other actress.” Freda balances two art forms, cinema and painting, with Steele acting as the fulcrum. She stands in for a kind of ecstatic visionary experience.
And yet we’ll never know quite how seriously the filmmakers approached these farragoes. They fuse the kind of outrageous plot twists pioneered by Psycho and Les Diaboliques with all the gothic trappings familiar from The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, and Poe’s morbid, overheated imagination with the new sexual liberality of sixties cinema, already curdled into something icky and sadistic and necrophile, as if decades closeted by the censor had fermented a fetid corruption infecting every glance. The dialogue is always unspeakable in any language (hence, perhaps, all that dubbing, as a kind of disinfectant/alibi), while the plots collapse with the impact of a single breath of air, and the characterization remains strictly puerile. But the potent sex-death brew is nevertheless intoxicating, the visuals sleek and seductive, and the eyes follow you about the room.
Nightmare Castle (1965) starts off in Lady Chatterley mode as Steele cheats on her mad scientist husband (“At this rate you’ll wipe out every frog in the entire county,” is an opening line less pithy but more arresting than “Rosebud”) with the horny handyman. She’s soon murdered on an electrified bed, hubby preserving her heart for unexplained reasons while using her blood to rejuvenate his mistress. Then he marries her insipid blonde half-sister (Steele again in a blonde wig) and tries to drive her mad. So we now have Gaslight merged with Poe and every known revenge-from-the-grave story.
The identical twin bifurcate further: blonde Barbara goes schizoid, possessed it seems by her departed semi-sibling. Dark Barbara comes back as a very corporeal revenant, hair occluding one profile, like Phil Oakey of the Human League. Tossing the locks aside, she reveals…the horror!
Almost indescribable in terms of plot, character or dialogue, the film looks stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and alabaster skin. Apparently the product of monkey-typewriter improvisation, the story serves as a kind of postmodern dream-jumble of every Gothic narrative. You might get a story like this if you showed all of Steele’s horrors to a pissed-up grade-schooler and then asked them to describe the film they had just seen. As a result, the movie takes what Dario Argento likes to call the “non-Cartesian” qualities of Italian horror to the next dank, stone-buttressed level.
A shadow-self equating with luxurious, decadent pain, summoning leftover ancient Roman excess or Florentine backstreets, the contortions of Art Nouveau with its flowers, prismatic walls and perennial themes of ripeness/rottenness, and sadomasochism. While various directors have helped mold Steele’s naturally unsettling screen presence into nightmare visions, it’s her vulnerability that we tend to remember. Open and sensitive even as she materializes in the viewer’s mind as a kabuki demon one moment and a radioactive waxwork the next, she enacts a kind of alchemical transformation, an appeal to what Keats called negative capability – to appreciate something without wholly understanding it – in fact, to submit to the object as mystery.
The Ghost was Riccardo Freda’s second film to feature a character called “Dr. Hichcock,” but with characteristic eccentricity it has no noticeable relationship to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Steele plays another adulterous wife copulating in the greenhouse amid the mulch (as in Nightmare Castle) while plotting to murder her suicidal, crippled husband (why they don’t simply let him top himself is a mystery unsolved). There is no ghost, and the one incident of apparent spectral possession gets explained, ultimately, as one character lip-synching another. The plot, in other words, hinges entirely upon dubbing; a po-mo touch whisked into the typical witches’ brew of conspiracy, crypts, and a Scottish castle with telltale Italianate touches.
“Oh, Riccardo Freda and I had our own private opera going,” Steele recalls, never coy on the subject of directors, particularly one who prompted such palpable tension in her acting. “We worked these demented eighteen-hour days on The Ghost thanks to some insanely extravagant wager on a race horse Freda made.” She chuckles. “So the picture absolutely had to wrap in a week.” Director, cast and crew pulled together amid claustrophobic 19th century interiors, every detail considered, composed, lit with frazzled perfectionism – “a desperate thing,” Barbara says, “like fighting a war.”
The Long Hair of Death (1964) was directed by one of the Italian cinema’s most able all-rounders, Antonio Margheriti, who made westerns, gothics, gialli, sci-fi nonsense and just about every other kind of genre. In it, Barbara’s character’s mother is the one to be burned as a witch, cursing her persecutors. Barbara merely gets shoved into a cataract only to rise from the grave and, with her sister, embroil her enemies in a Diaboliques-style plot that results in infernal revenge.
Visually, this is a triumph: Barbara kneels at the pyre and scatters her mother’s ashes to the night winds, a thin drizzle picked up by the movie lights illuminating wafts of smoke and cinder. She achieves one of her greatest visual moments, under a slanting, charred crucifix. The villain’s demise, superbly absurd, has him sealed within a cartoonish effigy, which makes him look like the lost Goth member of the Banana Splits (original line-up: Drooper, Fleagle, Snorky, Bingo and Scabies). Gleeful villagers set him ablaze, ignorant of the role they play in Barbara’s master plan. It might seem that for once Barbara’s character is single rather than double, but the script assigns her a fresh name upon reanimation (from Helen to Mary Karnstein), though her name on her tombstone is Rochefort, for reasons that never become clear.
Danza Macabra begins with the old chestnut of the hale and hearty chap induced to spend the night in a haunted castle for a bet. It also throws in Edgar Allan Poe, and uses its subsequent apparitions as a kind of time travel device, allowing the penurious hero to glimpse the demises of those who have gone before him. One of these is Steele, yet again up to Lady Chatterley antics with the muscle-bound gardener in the stables. And then everyone turns out to be a vampire, though the origins of the bloodsucking plague never get properly established.
Like Margheriti, director Sergio Corbucci (a father of spaghetti western sadism with Django) serves up a murky travelogue of the Gothic mind, wafting down draughty corridors for minutes on end, while a musical saw whines eerily on the soundtrack. Steele is already enmeshed in an undead love quadrangle (husband/lover/lesbian stalker) when the hero crashes in to complicate her existence, shagging her as the camera pans to the fire, and only noticing the lack of a heartbeat afterwards. Steele is a good bad girl, whose motivation and true nature remain up in the air until the last few minutes, which manage to stir chunks of Lost Horizon and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow into the seething stew. The appallingly cynical conclusion (Poe worries that nobody’s going to believe this one) confirms the hero’s earlier observation: it’s the living you have to keep an eye on.
The perfectly sensibly titled Five Graves for a Medium (there is a medium in it, and five graves) got re-titled Terror-Creatures from the Grave and Cemetery of the Living Dead. Stylish, sepulchral, location-shot, it combines a contemporary mystery with echoes of The Third Man (is the master of the house dead or did the witnesses lie?) and an ancient curse from the time of the plague. Disappointingly, Barbara is neither undead nor a major character: true, she’s a murderer, and a soapy bath scene hints at lesbianism, but she’s merely one of a gang of killers, and long scenes go by without her. Ideally, we prefer Barbara in dual roles so there’s twice as much to enjoy.
Still, it’s moody and unusual, shot by Antonioni’s cameraman Carlo Di Palma, and the display case with severed hands that comes to life and starts wriggling is quite arresting. For once, there’s a gardener with whom Barbara is not gardening.
Boundaries should be crossed in a Steele movie: she breaks class barriers by screwing the help (in at least three of the films – here she’s a retired actress married above her station, but cheating on her hubbie) and violates the border between life and death with insouciant ease. And she breaks character, switching from good to bad or splitting her persona into two distinct figures, making identity itself worryingly fluid enterprise. Any movie that neglects to have her do these things risks being a profound disappointment.
An Angel for Satan casts Barbara in a suitably schizoid role: she arrives at the family home to become its mistress, and already there’s talk of a curse involving a statue of an ancestor fished from the lake. So there’s Barbara in stone, and Barbara in the flesh, and soon she’s showing marked signs of possession – or is it something else?
Despite a Scooby Doo/psychological ending eschewing the supernatural, and despite a plot that doesn’t ultimately make a lick of sense, this is one of the most extreme, delirious Italian Gothics ever made, and comes closer to being a proper film than any of its competitors – Francesco de Masi’s unsettling, melancholy score lifts it out of mere pulp and into the realm of the art house.
It’s one of Steele’s best performances, too, with the character’s madness motivating some striking scenes of S&M cruelty. As soon as we meet the gardener, a hulking near-mute, we anticipate greenhouse shenanigans, given Babs’ history in these things. Instead, she strips nude in the open countryside, lashes his face to ribbons with her riding crop, and then incites him to rape and murder local women. Yet, in spite of that, she somehow manages a happy ending!
Fortunately, Steele’s stint in Italian horror all took place in actual cemeteries, castles, and dungeons. The great exception to the rule is Black Sunday, which, of course, relies on studio sets – Mario Bava’s revolutionary Gothic drifts through its narrative like a sleepwalker, unconcerned with such technicalities as characterization and whether it’s day or night. Meanwhile, Steele (ideal citizen for this dry-ice Moldavia) walks among actors who may as well be furniture from Ikea.
The credit “A Jolly Film,” appearing immediately after Barbara has had a mask of spikes smashed onto her face with a huge sledgehammer, sets up a wince/guffaw dichotomy best exemplified by its cheap production values and stilted dialogue jostling with an eerie visual imagination full of bizarre moments (an exploding coffin). Laughter disrupts the dream-flow at which the picture aims, but without completely staunching it, so that time passes in hypnagogic free-fall, that too-tired-to-sleep delirium wherein little jolts keep sparking you back into reality, only to slump you back into somnolence as the movie drains you of life and reason.
Plywood characters totter through Bava’s puppet theater, crossing from day to night in a single cut, brandishing candelabras that cast impossible shadows (how can a light source cast its own shadow?), their wooden dialogue falling from their wooden lips, only the invading force of Satanism offering any recognizable human vivacity. Steele’s witch is not only fully justified in her revenge, as established in scene one, but she’s the only figure with meat on her bones – and we see how it gets there in a gruesome "re-incarnation” that renders the word literally: a re-skinning.
If time can be symbolized, Barbara Steele is its emblem. Her name evokes “stele,” neither clock nor calendar, but an ancient stone commemorating absoluteness. Realizing this, Italian directors foisted on the young actress a kind of Freudian overdetermination – period baubles and accoutrements – coffins from which she’d rise and walk away, free to recite some obscure and darkened catechism. Steele slips into Gothic Horror, with its sumptuous visual salad of slapdash mullioned windows and chintzy Brilliantine heroes, while her enduring power stems from primal traditions – neglected gods, lost liturgies and funeral rites – palpable bona fides these celluloid epics sought, and failed, to replicate.
The face of Barbara Steele, being one of them, possesses the kind of beauty that elicits mixed metaphors in any attempts to pay homage. Celtic oracles knew Barbara Steele as the Blackthorn, a tree of portents associated with imminent strife. She reappeared on velum, as interlaced water fowl in the Book of Kells. Endless incarnations as Jean Delville’s esoteric muse, all eyes and silver light, deposit Steele smack in the 19th century. Yet in the hands of Mario Bava, she would become impenitence made flesh before the opening credits begin to roll; cinema’s greatest unatoned one-finger salute to the proper placement of denouements.
Flickering in projected movie light, from life to death and back again, Steele, not unlike a character out of Poe (though not one he ever committed to print) comes closest to embodying his ruminations on rhythmic flux and its cosmic implications. And, in spite of their tackiness, Steele’s Italian horror films (The Long Hair of Death, Nightmare Castle, An Angel for Satan, et al.) attempt to render a few lyrically high-flown ideas about the infinite, as Poe describes it, that “shadowy and fluctuating domain, now shrinking, now swelling with the vacillating energies of the imagination.” Cinema is usually spoken of in terms of light, but without darkness to mold it there can be no image.
Vampires, creatures of the night slain by sunlight, occupied movie theaters in the 1920s and never departed. They sit next to us in the dark, having ceded their powers of hypnotism to the glowing screen itself. Any serious meditation on this idea of vampires as movies or movies as vampires must include Steele’s face, which, though not classically beautiful, is yet haunted exclusively by those emotions never granted names. Her visage is an axiom of cinema, a rogue ineluctable attraction.
And if we cannot look away, then let’s blame art for being of a higher calling than common sense. “Stare long enough at a mirror,” wrote Cocteau, “and you will see Death at work.” Stare long enough at a movie screen, and you will see nothing but movies, though your life drains away just as surely.
Hitchcock, the Catholic filmmaker who placed film where the church had been, dedicated his life to it, and never once questioned what purpose it had. It sustained him like faith sustains the devoted. When he couldn’t make films anymore, he went to bed, stopped eating, and died. His brother had previously committed suicide, a major sin in the Catholic religion and yet positively celebrated in cinema, which can be said to be more Cathar in its origin, as Theodore Roszak intuited. Roszak’s novel Flicker imagines the history of cinema, semi-seriously, as a conspiracy theory, with Cathar heretics plotting to end the human race by replacing the tainted matter with pure spirit. Movies, far from life-affirming, have always celebrated death and destruction, showing us humans reduced to a pure illuminated essence; heavenly stars rather than dull, corporeal creatures.
Steele evokes a raven-haired female Lazarus, seductress of the mortal coil, where all epiphanies originate. No ingénue, before or since, has embodied such powers of conjuration on the screen, proving that cinema preserves the dead better than any man-made embalming fluid. Like amber preserved holograms, the undead of the moving image flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion. And so we see Steele in multiples; that is, not as a single person but rather as a bizarrely beautiful and highly unstable corpus of oscillating images.
The difference between American and European cinema has often been crudely ascribed to the contrast between a medium of story and one of image. As a living icon more suited to catching the light than reciting dialogue, Steele found a natural home in Europe. There had already existed an American tradition of the fantastique that shared the Italian’s contempt for logical plotting and motivation. Edgar Allan Poe’s fever-dream fictions eschewed coherence and plunged heart-first into delirium. Movie adaptations generally preferred to ground the madness inside the plot, or opted to go arthouse-expressionist.
By the Sixties, another option, neither mainstream nor arthouse, was becoming available: exploitation. As Steele was beginning her career in Italy, American producer-director Roger Corman had already inaugurated a popular series of films loosely based on the stories of Poe, starring Vincent Price. With a sharp eye for golden nuggets, Corman snapped up the budding horror icon, imported her from Italy, and cast her in a gothic concoction about revenge from beyond the grave – his version of The Pit and the Pendulum. It had more in common with the twisty thrillers of the Les Diaboliques school than it did with its source, which consists entirely of infernal machine and no plot.
In so doing, Corman introduced Steele to American cinema, forging a connection between her ineffable screen presence and the world of faked death, substitutions, doppelgangers, and insanely convoluted plots to carry out murder, or to gaslight neurasthenic protagonists into catatonia. There had been only hints of this in Black Sunday, but the Rube Goldberg criminal master plans would follow Steele back across the Atlantic and finally get spliced into the DNA of the Italian horrors she returned to.
Corman and screenwriter Richard Matheson were also smart enough to trade on Steele’s best asset, her wide, captivating eyes. They end their film with an extreme close-up of her looking from the visor of an iron maiden, while offscreen an ironic death sentence is being pronounced. Like a diabolically possessed Lillian Gish, Steele stares down the camera, the audience, death, and time in a single powerful gaze.
The solid universe is evil, transparently the work of a corrupt demiurge. “In celluloid we trust,” says Herzog, meaning that film, being made of matter, is a more reliable and reassuring medium than the abstract 1s and 0s of digital. But digital is the apotheosis, the falling away of the last bit of earthbound solidity that tied film to matter. The camera transmogrifies money into light as Boorman rightly observes; flesh into flicker, the world into dancing grains or pixels, the fact of existence into its mere information. And it doesn’t look to be reversing course. CGI landscapes all take on a cartoon quality, their obsession with the digital answer to the ancient rift coming in the form of a fascist dystopia.
For prophetic examples of CGI’s sterility, on need only visit the Seventies Canadian architecture captured by David Cronenberg in his early sci-fi shockers. Steel and glass monstrosities that are even more terrifying than the mutants lurking behind their shiny facades. Shivers, Cronenberg’s first real commercial movie, seems to be a film, as fellow horror auteur Clive Barker put it, about turds that want to crawl back inside you. But the real horror comes about through the sterile Canadian settings, a luxury apartment block so devoid of humanity that it made the director himself want to run naked through its halls, screaming insanely.
Among the building’s respectable inhabitants we find Barbara Steele, an acidic lipstick-lesbian who, in contrast to the others, plays one of the more alive characters. The film simultaneously fears a revolution (imagined as sexual assault, bodily invasion, mass psychosis, and the reversion of bodily functions) and welcomes it, even though its conservative side plainly comes through. Most of the characters who fall prey to the crawling raw-liver parasites become infected via mouth-to-mouth contact. Steele, luxuriating in the bath with a glass of red wine, gets violated by one of the rubbery slugs as it emerges from the plughole. The woman who rejects penetration gets it anyway, against her will. A nasty scene in a film whose best material tends toward a more polymorphous sexual anxiety.
Initially, Cronenberg had cast elfin Sue Helen Petrie to play his screaming female lead only to learn that she was incapable of crying on camera. To overcome this blockage, she encouraged him to slap her face before the camera began to roll, which quickly became a routine occurrence on set. But nobody bothered to inform Steele about this inspiring approach, which left her in a state of shock. “Barbara stands up,” the director recalls in Cronenberg on Cronenberg, “(she’s real big, and she was in high heels) and literally grabs me by the lapels and lifts me up. She says, ‘You bastard! I’ve worked with some of the best directors in the world. I’ve worked with Fellini. I’ve never, in my life, seen a director treat an actress like that. You bastard!’ She was going to punch me out.”
We recently verified the story with Steele, who immediately pulled us into her world of imagistic buzz-saws. The conversation zigzagged from horror fans’ fascination with body fluids (“They’re doomed to give head to menstruating women”) to her theme-appropriate feeling about flying at night (“Oh, it’s like being a sperm again”) to drama-laced tales of her flings, affairs and her “brutal marriage.” Everything she says has an erotic charge. On quitting Europe for the States: “It’s like leaving the flesh of your favorite lover.”
Then a gentleman calling himself Steele’s “personal archivist” showed us a touching photograph of Barbara in her teens selling tchotchkes, miscellaneous bric-a-brac. And before we could inquire about her street-seller days, she was already there waiting for us:
Portobello Road… There was a gypsy next to me selling silver – his large hands were covered in rings – silver ones for his girl children – gold for the boys. I was young and enthralled by the exotic debris in these cauldrons of life. In Rome they have something called The Mountain of Pity – a long leather conveyor belt would slowly run around this room that looked like something out of the Vatican. Old fur coats – gold teeth – paintings – top hats – violins – leather gloves made for a child – worn out boots – diamond wedding rings… Flea markets and tattered circuses – early Fellini – freaks and whatever’s behind the curtain… It still excites me.
She murmurs like an organ in the basement…. Or, to borrow here from Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love, a horror tale with purely serendipitous connections to Steele: “Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.”
“When did I ever deserve this dark mirror?” she asks. “Clever you – I feel you’ve just twisted and wrung out an old bible to dry that’s been left somewhere outside lost in timeless years of…” She pauses. “…of rain.”
She made her Italian screen debut as a revenant. And in that way she taught us all that the eye is nothing like a camera. It projects, and therefore thwarts our automatic and hopeless urge to resolve the shape-shifting persona into any singular or static image. She cannot be reified.
Barbara Steele’s appearance in 1960’s Black Sunday even today shocks us with its febrile sexuality, forcing us to ask ourselves – why do we saddle her with diminishing monikers like “Scream Queen”? And, more fundamentally, why does her power and presence trouble and vex every narrative she touches?
by The Lumière Sisters