Barbara Steele and the Universe

Confession: I am a fanboy collector of Raymond Durgnat’s self-published, comic-book size Motion magazine. In particular Motion #4, Companion to Violence and Sadism in the Cinema. On its cheaply printed cover, an apparition appears. Or should that be reappears? The British Board of Film Censors had decided to ban an ingenue of unsettling beauty, or rather, to ban the Italian Gothic launching her star career, Black Sunday (1960).

I won’t even attempt neutrality, a critical appreciation of the sacred image turning Raymond Durgnat’s paper bauble into my own personal Rosetta Stone. Barbara Steele meets our gaze with eyes as glassy as the camera lens, face dotted with perforations black as her pupils, so it’s like being stared at by a dozen eyes at once, windows not of any soul, but of an obsidian emptiness. Durgnat was hardly immune to those unnamable subtleties called presence.

But unlike lesser critics, he left his subject alive and well after he was done dissecting the concrete workings of its magic. That he fetishizes Steele with such spontaneity in 1963, the last year before Giallo would turn Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill, now seems prescient. Again, only a fanboy would gush over a triviality like that — a mere quirk of historical timing. And yet, I take comfort from Durgnat’s own openness; susceptibility to what I’ll call a consequential wistfulness, best expressed when he writes: “There is no real horror without beauty, as Keats would have said if he could have beheld Black Sunday.”

One day I decided to cold-call Barbara Steele, who has since become my pal of two decades as well as my favorite telephone fabulist. 

Me: "You're a closet exhibitionist.” 

Barbara: "And YOU'RE the closet!” A BIG closet, with intricate Elizabethan locks made of brass. The inside is lined with baize so that nothing can be heard, a place where Mozart rehearsals are held.” Then, in a typically brutal segue, she told me about a gynecologist who displayed various objects he’d extracted from miscellaneous vaginas — these included small dolls, rocks and glass jars. Now, maybe her baroque imagery was a nod to her salacious (yours truly) audience; or maybe her own prodigious noggin acts as a repository, an immense cabinet of curiosities that resides within, awaiting some mysterious incantation to unlock its secrets. After all these years, I still can’t know. My self-assigned job is simple: to record as much as I can, from her lofty greetings — “I’m calling as a courtesy” — to her unexplained, and hopefully figurative, goodbyes — “That’s when I started shoving apple cores up their asses” (hangs up). 

*

I was filming in Austria on Halloween night in the ancient mining town of Eisenstadt, the film TIEF OBEN. We had great steaming wooden vats of hot red wine for everybody to keep them going. It was arctic weather, snowing fiercely when the director suddenly asked all the extras to be naked other than their boots and the little mining lamps on their heads. Naturally they refused. At which point the director tore off his own clothes in a rage as a challenge…and was the lone white freezing body in the dark night. 

In the middle of this frenzied rebellion, I decided to walk home alone. The local villagers had made little paper boats that they sent down the river set alight, a ritual of remembrance for their dead relatives… 

Suddenly a dozen motorbikes came roaring by with everyone on them dressed as skeletons. They got off their bikes and started to dance around me in a circle holding hands – then they mounted their motorized steeds and took off into the night making unearthly shrieks and whistles….

I continued walking on in this medieval village surrounded by ghosts…. 

What a ride. In the course of a conversation about something thoroughly innocuous — miscellaneous home repair, let's say, or weather in Los Angeles, or something equally drowsy — she’ll slide, right before you know it, into the syntax of an Andre Breton. Suddenly we’re discussing a marriageable chair made from Van Gogh sunlight, then the hordes of damp, obese, bikini-clad horror fans that haunt the autograph shows. She's rushing off later to an event dubbed Crypticon Seattle, or some such extraordinary thing. Why, only yesterday she archly characterized the looming trauma of the event as “moving into a Dianne Arbus weekend.” 

It's downright incongruous. Not the event, really, or even her presence at it (though when you think about it, there is that). No. It's the whole universe summoned by the totality of this woman's life through just a few minutes' gab: the high culture allusions (Arbus, Van Gogh) slamming up against the sweat-soaked, panting cheapness of her destination; as if all of it laid bare particular facts concerning the last century. But then, this essential incongruity has always embraced Barbara Steele. In Europe — unlike the United States, where certain lines of division are observed more devoutly than we care to admit — the boundaries between high and low culture, art and trash, are not so much permeable as they are wholly non-existent.

If Federico Fellini, for example, could pop for the price of a dazzling cameo in Otto e Mezzo (1963), chances were that a Mario Bava or a Riccardo Freda could afford you as lead in a still-forbidding gothic chiller or, later, a candy-colored giallo. In other corners of the globe, ours for instance, a career arc like that would be viewed rather askance, a garden variety one-way journey to the skids or, worse, American-International Pictures. Barbara Steele was different. Always. She could leap like a ballerina out of Nightmare Castle and into Young Törless; or from Terror Creatures from Beyond the Grave into L'Armata Brancaleone. “I was made for horror,” she finally admits after years of denials, a pronunciamento confirmed by the thunderclap that is Black Sunday.

Steele’s appearance is, even now, a shock of such febrile sexuality that it forces us to ask ourselves — why do we saddle her with diminishing monikers like “Scream Queen”? And, more fundamentally, why does her force of personality seem to trouble and vex every narrative she touches?

Of course, the answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical equipment — and here I’ll risk repeating a clichéd word about those famous emerald eyes of hers: “Otherworldly.” As if sparked to life by silent-film magician Segundo de Chomón, the supreme master of hand-tinted illusionism. Peculiar even within the context of gothic tales on celluloid for the consumption of Mod audiences, flashing at us from well beyond their allotted time and place in history.

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 in Black Sunday she gives 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 unlit 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 us all.

Where Steele’s Italian films are concerned, we are watching silent movies of a sort. “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 whenever Steele appears, the storyline falls away. Anachronism rules. Not to mention 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, satanic sorcery—she’s Eros and Thanatos dynamically balanced. I’ve screened the film many times; and the famous opening sequence invariably leaves my otherwise jaded film students looking traumatized. (Just as a young Martin Scorsese was shattered by it once upon a time.) Barbara Steele’s defiant witch, spewing a final curse upon her mortal judges, pierces to the bone.

While Italian movies robbed Steele of her voice, they liberated her from what it had meant in Britain. Leading ladies in Brit films tended to be well brought-up young things, unless they were lusty and working-class 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 school girl, the only kind of role that might allow for both intelligence and a certain liberated attitude. And Steele really 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: it wouldn’t really matter what.

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, but that bone structure could suggest Latin, Slavic, or anything else. Omninational, omnisexual, but definitely carnivorous.

Generally remote with his actors, who were nothing more than compositional elements to him, Bava’s capricious move of selecting his female lead from a magazine photo-spread looks almost prescient in hindsight. 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, that is, tabooed 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…” I’m suddenly detecting 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 is a summation of spiritual and physical dread, it’s because Steele is everyone in this dream-bauble, everyone and everywhere, an all-consuming autumnal atmosphere. Which, of course, provides Mario Bava with something truly rare — a face and mien as unsettling as horror films always claim to be and almost never are. The devastation she leaves behind, her anarchic displacement, which has nothing to do with conventional notions of performance or “good acting,” is hard to describe. And here Bava earns his label of genius through compositional meaning—amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is an absence impossibly concretized in penumbras and voids. She is a force of nature never to be repeated.

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 revenge-from-the-grave story ever.

The identical twin half-sisters (?) 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 snow-white skin. Apparently the product of monkey-typewriter improvisation, the story serves as a kind of post-modern dream-jumble of every Gothic narrative ever. 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 just saw. As a result, the movie really takes what Dario Argento likes to call the “non-Cartesian” qualities of Italian horror to the next dank, stone-buttressed level.

When I first met Barbara Steele about twenty years ago, we somehow found ourselves sitting in front of a Brancusi sculpture here in New York City — I remember a filmmaker acquaintance joking afterwards: “Steele beats bronze!” Indeed, at 66 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 André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. She asks me to show her my paintings and when we dodge the subject out of shyness she offers:

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 I think of the effect her movies have had on me, the following words by 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 shadow-self up on the screen, the one she so busily downgrades.

“They sense something in me,” she once said of her fans, but surely it was true of her directors also. “Maybe some kind of psychic pain.” The diva dolorosa of the 1910s, reincarnated as voluptuous revenant. More plainly: Barbara Steele is the first female horror star, although no one, including Steele herself, has bothered to notice this enormous fact — before Black Sunday women had been associated with the horror genre only in fits — Elsa Lanchester was iconic in The Bride of Frankenstein, but her horror career was blasted to atoms at the moment of creation. Fay Wray screamed impressively in King Kong and The Mystery of the Wax Museum, and character players like Gale Sondergaard became typed in sinister roles, and there were exotics like Acquanetta (possibly born Mildred Davenport), "star" of three Universal ape-woman “films," but nobody showed any real staying power. Steele embodies that moment when Italian concepts of the witch, la strega, went toe-to-toe with God himself.

Before Black Sunday’s opening credits roll, in a blatantly interior exterior night space, priestly authority figures intone their denunciations of the witch: their patriarchal power seems distinctly unattractive compared to the emotional display from Steele, who, unlike the rest, is acting like a proper Italian. Then a hulking, hooded Muscle Mary wielding an enormous sledge hammer is entrusted with the task of banging the spiky mask onto our witch, who also gets branded in smoldering closeup — WHY? Since they're going to kill her anyway. With your basic sickening thud, the iron mask is pounded onto Steeles' face-bones, gore jetting from the eyeholes in gleeful, sick relish. In the moments before she dies, her eyes burn infinitely hotter than any branding iron; and, momentarily, that ultimate patriarch — a Catholic God, bearded in his heaven — evanesces. The formerly passive object of desire and presumptive human sacrifice, shoots her Final Impenitence from metaphysical eyes.

Expressionism has a way of achieving transcendence without much caring about the lines it crosses; and Steele is nothing if not a natural, even physiognomic case of lived expressionism: you don’t need askew sets or painted shadows with a face like that. If, instead of expressing emotion through the decor, or through refined acting or method-school angst, you were going to do it just by being an exquisite and uncanny human sculpture positioning yourself just so, you needed a look that contained contradictions, complexity, confusion, a different madhouse of passion from every angle. 

Enter a 22-year-old actress holding the patent on gothic atmosphere, and occasionally leasing it to cinema. Not to mention the most gifted film critic who ever lived, johnny-on-the-spot, to seal her in memory. Pondering Barbara Steele from a distance of three years, because Black Sunday had been banned in England, Steele’s original supplicant, Raymond Durgnat, poured critical infatuation onto the page. And he did so in the spiritual home to every true cinephile, i.e., his mother’s basement. Where does Steele herself emerge from but the “Rank Charm School,” another dark hole in the ground? Actors’ energies were systematically tamped down, imprisoned in elaborate instructions about the “correct” way to walk, to get out of a car, to sit, to stand, every movement roboticized so that actual human emotion is bound to appear like a strange eruption amid the congested artifice, a breaking-through of Life which perversely feels more like demonic possession or madness. Durgnat describes a quality beyond performance, capturing the sylph I know and love: “Surely vast tracts of virgin territory lie unexplored to a screen personality situated, perhaps awkwardly, but how fascinatingly, somewhere in the regions between a Celtic feminine occultism and a devil-may-care energy.” 

Steele’s mutable visage, its discordant composition (Durgnat calls it “an art-school face, with something wild and regional, possibly even Mary Webb-ish”) finds a dark liquid pool to be Protean in. American films use the camera to bird-dog the cast, or to push in, making thought perceptible. Since Cabiria, Italian films have used the camera to explore space, show off the sets, bring the environment to dimensional life. In horror cinema, this becomes an atmospheric duty, the prowling lens that suggests a roving POV dislocated from anyone onscreen. Absorbing Steele’s autumnal presence, Italian cinema pits the anachronism of its silent-era Gothic mien against a Brylcreem world. 

While American horror movies struggle for a prosaic sense of following characters into danger, Italian entries in the genre float or somnambulate, adrift from narrative and character, jerking into sudden focus in shock moments and then gliding off again, glassy-eyed and detached. Barbara Steele’s face follows the same identikit pattern as the cinema that launched her — possessing beauty that invites mixed metaphors.

The id of Irony made flesh, she is an instinctive shape-shifter who can summon a steely, almost self-parodic Vaudeville act of her own presumptive star power (Elizabeth I, by way of Norma Desmond); lashing out wildly against other women like a blind man with a pistol — the word ‘hate" fluorescing, dancing on chapped lips into telephone dada. Steele-speech is composed of startling word-images, piled giddily on top of one another, evoking the landscape around her L.A. home – “coyotes come down the hill like perfect ghosts, walking like Nijinsky,” the Adriatic – “all wonderful 2000-year-old blonde stones – breathing light – like an old cathedral – every cell in my body receives this landscape like a blind man” – Paris –“every encounter is like a little love affair… including the dogs…” – Croatia – “nocturnal medieval eels, swimming in the skull-infested Roman fortress, under the full moon in the inky sea” — or Senator Elizabeth Warren’s earlobes — “two appalling clitorises”.

Durgnat places her between the Ancient and the Mod, while her career naturally equates High and Low. Pauline Kael, who never publishes her program notes on Black Sunday, sees other strange harmonies. “The resurrected 200-year-old witch Princess Asa and the beautiful Princess Katia are both played by the English actress Barbara Steele in a deadpan manner that makes evil and good all but indistinguishable.” It takes a Brit with roots in Portugal to embody both paganism’s shameless desire and Catholicism’s threat of fire and brimstone — and balance them effortlessly, as Steele does. Her directors also become human fulcrums. Maybe the influence is Rome itself: even the lowliest pornographer or horror movie hack, based in such a city, would be immersed in ancient beauty. The Immortal City could be very immoral too, but the elegance and grandeur would impose themselves even on junk. Black Sunday was shot under battle conditions — a brutally cold December that saw cast and crew extremely ill with a virus — tending to reinforce Steele’s image of herself as a screen presence: “I don’t want to wear crinolen, I’m just a big blade.”

It is impossible to imagine Barbara Steele not surrounded and adored by men. Onscreen she oozes sex and sinister energy: a zealously witchy abandon that radiates from those eyes, those fingers, that voice; the inner Goth hippy-chick (a new paradigm!) with no solid contour to contain her. Steele’s features — two eyeballs with enough aqueous humor to make at least three; the cute little nose and massive slab of forehead — are those of a baby or a porcelain doll left over from the Victorian era.

Melting through the period trappings is an affect that is “Sixties” to the point of hysteria. It has an incongruous innocence that nevertheless reminds one and all just how neatly Lewis Carroll’s Wonderlandian flights of fancy fit into the mod-a-go-go psychedelic zeitgeist of all those decades ago. Otto e Mezzo remains a living, black and white testament to the notion that she will forever be — in critic Raymond Durgnat’s shorthand for that now-iconic moment when her youthful smile beamed from beneath a black, wavy-brimmed hat — “a modern girl.”

Last week I received an L.A. weather report from the diva.

“Sunny and sweet here, though my street is packed beautiful ghosts,” coyotes again, “waiting to eat somebody’s cat.” And I hang up the phone feeling giddy when she signs off: “Have a groovy day!” 

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. An old photograph reveals Barbara in her teens selling tchotchkes, miscellaneous bric-a-brac. Before I could inquire about her street-seller days, she was already there waiting for me:

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.” 

Plunged into my own twisted glory whenever she describes America as “a banged up Chevrolet” or “a dirty Tampax dipped in red ink,” I also imagine Barbara standing before a much broader, though cowering, audience.

by Daniel Riccuito

Special thanks to Tom Sutpen and David Cairns