Love Theme for Anguished Castles

But art and love are a matter of mouths open in cinnabar, of blackness and redness turned to velvet by assiduous grinding, of understanding the colors that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other: the least that the practice will make you is skillful: beyond which there’s originality… This is all in Cennini’s handbook for painters, as well as the strict instruction that we must always take pleasure from our work.  

-Ali Smith, How to Be Both

Georges Rivière is haughty. Like he smelled something bad. The script? 

Here, in 1964’s Castle of Blood, playing a penurious dandy silly enough to spend the night in a haunted castle on a bet, Rivière seems to think aloofness will be all the protection he needs. It won’t be! Indeed, only one thing can save the film’s leading man from the visual shibboleths of a dying genre, and that’s the cameraman. 

Camera artisan Riccardo Pallottini, playing savior and tormentor, coaxes Rivière onward while punishing his progress. Nobody would be more surprised than the late Signore Pallottini himself hearing his cinematography praised as “experimental.” And yet, this is Gothic Horror’s greatest master shot—a case of push and pull, whose tension and elasticity continue to create rebounding space 118 years after its creator’s birth: so praise it we shall. 

With ace cameramen, point-of-view becomes a more problematic concept, as when George O'Brien wanders glazed through F.W. Murnau’s swamp in Sunrise. There, the camera sometimes recedes from the hero’s advance, sometimes lets him pass and follows him, sometimes loses him altogether to rediscover him later. (This weird rhythm disturbs the frontier that would normally separate our inner reality from whatever lies outside us.) While Castle of Blood’s cliches would seem to be the thumpingly obvious point—a door’s creaking swing illuminates a wall bristling with harnesses and cartwheels… zoom in as a black kitten abandons its lair in a piece of spangly lacework… an organ wheezes as the hero’s sputtering candle casts the impossible shadow of itself on the crumbling masonry—those same hackneyed moments synthesize utterly unexpectedly into cinema pur. 

Amidst thirteen minutes of relative silence, tendrils of Mod hypnogogia ensnare Rivière’s helpless body, an object impaled on Castle of Blood’s iron gate (oh wait, that’s how the film ends). In this farrago concepts like beginning, middle and end are all but irrelevant. The Lumière Sisters can promise you this… Once inside the titular castle, Rivière will have to fight for his place in the spotlight against the sinister hordes of furnishings to which the gliding camera grants a spurious, menacing animation, like the antic armchairs of Maupassant’s story Who Knows?  Indeed, “props” are essential ingredients, visual axioms that define the Gothic Horror film. And nowhere is this more true than in 1960s Italy.  

For now, Georges Rivière is lost inside his own master shot, which begins at the castle gate, little daubs of 1960s aesthetics miraculously harmonize with the 19th century vibe: hairspray lingers throughout this legitimate evocation of monodrama, Romanticism’s stock theme, the solitary and roaming hero — think Schubert’s Winterreise or Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Imaginative audiences may even hear a reversal of male and female norms, psychological torture generally reserved for Gothic Horror’s doomed women—as if the wind were jeering: “Enter Georges Rivière, the mightiest of men wielding the haughtiest of demeanors. Haughtiness initiated in the womb, where something . . . anything . . . everything . . . offended his tiny sensibilities (all the more tender for being so tiny).” The dry ice fog, the wind machine, the spray-on cobwebs, the backlighting, and the reverberant footsteps all emerge from the same Gothic toy box (the one with the squeaky hinge), but Pallottini’s execution is exemplary, and the shamelessness total. 

Since Cabiria, Italian films have utilized the camera to explore space, show off the sets, and to bring the environment to dimensional life.  In horror cinema, this becomes an atmospheric duty: the prowling lens suggests a roving POV dislocated from anyone onscreen.  

In The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963) AKA Horror Castle, again starring Georges Riviere, Antonio Margheriti's camera, again under the control of Riccardo Pallottini, prowls a thunderstormed mansion, first alone, then following Rossana Podestà in auburn wig and negligee, as she lipflaps "Max?" repeatedly, in response to obviously female moans from offscreen/a dubbing studio in Rome. "Max, is that you?" No, obviously not.

The dark and stormy night aesthetic is very on point. Podestà is freaked out by all of it, except, apparently, the torture chamber, complete with caged skeleton, which she wanders into on the ground floor of her medieval home. That's normal, we all have one of those. Margheriti structures the sequence as a series of languid tracking shots, interrupted by abrupt, quick stationary angles which jolts us closer to his leading lady as she gazes from the window (abrupt lightning!) or lights a candle (abrupt lambency!), to the stabs of Riz Ortolani's suspense score, which will, upon the discovery of a leaking iron maiden, segue absurdly but with dreamlike inevitability into a swooning sex-sax pop track for the opening titles—The Love Theme from Horror Castle. When we cut to a giant closeup of a syringe plunger being depressed, Ortolani reacts with furious vamping as if accompanying some beatnik rave. It's not about doing music correctly, it's about shocking and unsettling—and what could be more unsettling than a love theme for an iron maiden? 

Well, how about a tragic figure with a face mangled by Nazi scientists? 

Shot weeks after Castle of Blood but slipping through bureaucratic censorship more efficiently, The Virgin of Nuremberg reaches audiences first—in color so velvety that nigh-obsidian shadows emerge. An illusion perhaps, we nonetheless register Black & White form underlying that fully saturated color palette, that erotically charged excitement Italian cinematographers bring to their experiments with light. And if Riccardo Pallottini is the exemplar of visual experimentation, then Riz Ortolani, who scores both of the above movies, stands in for all journeyman composers. Castle of Blood's musique concrète eschews melody in favor of crashing (a suit of armor falling downstairs in slllloooowww mmmotion, a sledgehammer beating against a bank vault) and shrill, reverberant strings, shivering at the bottom of a well. Eerie high notes that decay more slowly than any plastic skeleton. Low organ hums that seem to be walking us downstairs to somewhere terrible. 

Could that terrible place be Italy’s recent past, shaped by Mussolini and der Führer, or perhaps the imminent future of Italian cinema: leaping from the Gothic toy box into a brave new world of stainless steal cutlery and candy-colored light—into that thug of a genre, modishly dressed and psychically damaged beyond hope? The Giallo, best exemplified by horror maestro Dario Argento, may well embody a nation’s comeuppance overshooting itself, thereby punishing viewers of every nation. Argento pulls us all down in scale to a worm’s eye view—macro closeups of tiny details, the minuscule rendered colossal—unblinking eyes, flies, and even maggots squirming in the teeth of a comb. Then he offers us wide shots, from the Baroque piazza to the hyper-modern Milanese apartment building, agoraphobic vistas exhaling menace whether shadowed, luridly gel-lit, or blasted with sunlight. 

Space itself grabs hold of a whispering politics as Ennio Morricone’s ingenious scores resound like orgasmic nursery rhymes for Il Duce’s grandkids. Gothic Horror—the Giallo’s immediate forebear—cloaks that Fascist orgasm beneath an utterly foreign set of aesthetic choices. Why else should so many visual throwbacks, indeed an entire corpus of undead iconography, arrive willy-nilly to boggle the Mod eye? Amid Italy’s love affair with Fellini and its own sexy ebullience, this otherwise sun-kissed, suggestive peninsula hungers for moon-lit images under German-Expressionist light… Cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra, dungeons festooned with wrist manacles, an iron maiden in every niche, carpets of dry ice fog, dead twig forests, painted hilltop castles, secret doorways through fireplaces or behind beds (both portals of hot passion), crypts, gloomy servants, cracking thunder and flashes of lightning, rubber bats on wires, grand staircases, long dining tables, huge doors with prodigiously pendulous knockers to rival anything in Hollywood. 

A belated guilt reaction to Benito and his flunky, Pope Pius XI?

If so, The Lumière Sisters take our hats off to Italian narcissism, which apparently processed national shame into a viable export, weird tales twisted like strozzapreti. Or “priest strangler” pasta. It was a sin committed by the impenitent witch in Black Sunday that started us thinking along these lines. And we wonder if Italy was still Catholic enough in 1960 to register the gravest sin of all. Final Impenitence finds its voice as the heavens crash around her: “Go ahead," she thunders, “tie me down to the stake, but you will never escape my hunger, NOR THAT OF SATAN!”

We would prefer to speak bluntly, or in oracular terms…

“Italy imports light from Germany.” 

“Barbara Steele is Horror’s first female star.” 

“Italian Gothic Horror looks backward out of necessity.” 

Italy had not yet confronted the not-so-distant past. If any one example typifies the genre’s complicated view of evil, which wonders aloud about precisely where that evil resides—whether in kangaroo courts, the witches they condemn, or a generally cowed national populace—that film is Black Sunday. Before the opening credits roll, priestly authority figures intone their denunciations of the witch: their patriarchal power seems distinctly unattractive compared to the emotional display from British actress Barbara Steele, who, unlike the rest, is acting like a proper Italian. 

It is here that Steele’s years-long sacrifice to poisonous atmosphere begins: a string of motion pictures essentially lock her inside the Gothic toy box where she’s fated to become an object among objects. Her Ferrari-sleek figure finds itself dragooned into solidarity with funeral urns. Since the 19th-century audience for literary Gothic Horror was comprised of far fewer men than women, would it be fair to ask whether Giallo’s advent might be an instrument of brutal violence, even revenge against “feminine” preoccupations? Consider, once again, 1964’s Castle of Blood, the film’s amorous vibes finding their ultimate source in that deathless screen goddess named Barbara Steele, whose marble white flesh photographs like some monument to classicism startled into unwanted Keatsian fever. 

Her presence practically demands that we ask ourselves: “Who is this wraith howling at a paper moon?”

Steele’s male co-star, Georges Rivière, ultimately dies under her everlasting thrall, symbolizing that extremely mortal and flimsy cliche—“patriarchy.” 

Steele’s Elizabeth Blackwood is forced to relive her own violent death once a year, eternally denied redemption or peace. Is it a coincidence that her revenant temptress and sex goddess hits screens the very same year as Giallo, which would transform Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill for women? 

If absolute time can be symbolized, Barbara Steele is its emblem. Her name evokes “stele,” neither clock nor calendar, but an ancient “book of stone” commemorating absoluteness. Realizing this, Italian directors foisted on the young actress a kind of Freudian overdetermination—period baubles and accouterments—coffins from which she’d rise and walk away, free to recite some obscure and darkened catechism. Steele slips par hasard into Gothic Horror, with its sumptuous visual salad of slapdash mullioned windows and chintzy Brilliantine heroes. Meanwhile her enduring power stems from more primal traditions—neglected gods, lost liturgies and funeral rites—palpable bona fides these epics sought, and often failed, to replicate on celluloid.

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 American camera eye is a stalker, the Italian a gawping tourist. And its viewfinder aims at wanton shadows, the infinity of indwelling vistas turned outward, coarsely referred to as “visuals.” Absorbing Steele’s autumnal presence, Pallottini’s cinematography is all mien, silent-era Gothic. 

Others may ask for more. 

For us, that’s sufficient.

by The Lumière Sisters