Barbara Steele

While this movie may not have been one of Ms Steele's greatest accomplishments in film, it was beautiful in its own way. She delivers as the slutted-out Muriel, lascivious and lustful, devious and devilish, while her bizarre old husband plots and plans. (Celine and her husband, the oldest living Canadian? I could not help but notice the similarities, except that Celine Dion is not pure evil. Not yet.) Anyway, when the innocent Jenny arrives in the gothic compound, things begin to get interesting.

The film focuses on the gothic obsession with woman's dark and evil side. Solange and Muriel are hideous creatures, foul and stinky, motivated by (wicked) female sexuality, while Doctor Arrowsmith seems motivated by ... what? Selfishness? Greed? He, too, was a strange creature of evil. Only Jenny and her saviour, the appropriately handsome Dr Joyce, seemed human at all.

I would recommend this flick to anyone who likes horror, beautiful women, handsome men, dark and intense romantic scenergy, Italian fright films, and the gothic. Interestingly, the film focuses on blood and flesh in a strange way, theorizing that "flesh, like love or hatred, cannot be destroyed -- it's all the same" (not an exact quote), so that the ghostliness and corporeality all blend together into one vision of fright.

Barbara Steele's first filmic horror experience was in BLACK SUNDAY (or, in Italian, La Maschera del demonio), directed by the Italian genius Mario Bava (which see), and everything in her career has astonished me. Okay, enough praise, I just want to recommend this film highly. Steele's face photographs so beautifully that it holds the story together.