HorrorMeganthon Part One

 Halloween is my favorite holiday.  It’s a time for fun, for costumes, for candy, and for something I love almost as much as anime and manga: horror movies.

For the last few years I’ve been doing one of those “watch one horror movie per day” challenges for the entirety of October, which I have dubbed the “#horrormeganthon.”  Previously I only chronicled it through social media, but this year I wanted to try something a little different: to write some longer, more complete thoughts on each film on this very blog to share with the world.  Thus, here we are with the first, Gothic-heavy week of Horror Meganthon 2025.

 

DAY 1: DANZA MACABRE

For those who may not know, I have long had a fondness for mid-20^th century Gothic horror films.  These are films that generally don’t have a lot of outright scares or gruesomeness but more than make up for it in sumptuous visuals, solid acting, and loads of spooky atmosphere.  This film fits firmly in that particular wheelhouse, a 1964 Italian horror film (released in the US as Castle of Blood) starring horror legend Barbara Steele, the English actress who made a name for herself with her striking looks and haunting, wide-eyed stare.

This is a ghost story in the most old-fashioned sense, where a skeptical reporter named Alan takes a bet to stay overnight at a haunted manor.  He’s barely set foot within its dusty halls when he meets up with the mysterious Elisabeth (played by Steele) and falls immediate in love (and into bed) with her.  From there things go off the rails as he meets the other spirits within the castle, as he is forced to watch the ghostly tableaus of how they all died.  As the morning draws near, the ghosts make their intentions plain: to drink Alan’s blood so that they can continue to relive their last moments of life, if only for a night, and in turn have him join them in death.

Admittedly, the first two acts of this film are somewhat inert, relying entirely on the spooky scenery of the manor and a somewhat overeager score to scare the audience.  It’s more surreal than anything else.  We as the audience are just as befuddled and helpless as Alan as these figures appear from and fade into the darkness in the blink of an eye or the shutting of a door.  Lucky for Alan, he gets some help from Carsus, a doctor whose curiosity about the supernatural led him to become a ghost himself.  For a while he becomes the Virgil to Alan’s Dante, leading him through the house’s parade of deaths, helping Alan to accept that the strangeness all around him is real (even if he stubbornly clings to the idea that he can somehow still save Elisabeth.  It’s the final act where things get legitimately tense and spooky, leading up to a final twist that manages to be sad, scary, and satisfactory all at once.

Danza Macabre is curiously sensual for a horror film of this era.  Indeed, one of the major themes of the film is how strong emotions can drive a spirit to linger in this world long after its body stops living, serving as both motivations for the hauntings and in particular for their unusual craving for living blood.  I do wish it hadn’t illustrated that point by beheading a snake and watching its body and head thrash as it dies.  I know that Italian horror cinema has an unfortunate history of on-screen animal abuse, but it’s normally confined to the films on its sleeziest fringes, made at least a good decade after this one.

That said, it’s also very literally sensual.  Elisabeth is driven by her libido in both life and death, and more than one scene ends with her writhing and gasping in ecstasy in the embrace of a man.  Indeed, it’s her libido that sets the tragedy of this house in motion, leading to the wedding night slaughter of her new husband, her jealous lowborn lover, and her obsessive lesbian chaperone.  There’s even a bit of nudity, as a later victim strips down to nothing but her hoop skirt.  This sensuality certainly gives this film a very different feel from the more colorful yet restrained offerings from the likes of Roger Corman and Hammer Studios.  I do wonder if the former is the reason the filmmakers insisted on inserting Edgar Allen Poe himself into the story as a character.  Despite what the advertising for the American edit might suggest, this is not based on any of Poe’s works and he’s seemingly there only to set a mood and bookend the story.

While it doesn’t quite reach the exquisite heights of Black Sunday or The Whip and the Body, Danza Macabre can still stand proudly as one of the better examples of early Italian Gothic horror.  Severin Film’s stand-alone Blu-Ray release is not as jam-packed as some of their other offerings, but it features a handsome restoration and enough commentaries and other extras to make it worth anyone’s while.

DAY 2: I DRINK YOUR BLOOD

I Drink Your Blood is a grimy, cynical grindhouse flick from the glory(?) days of exploitation cinema.  It was originally released as a double-feature alongside the 1964 dud Zombie (retitled as I Eat Your Skin), but the trailer makes it clear that I Drink Your Blood was the true star of the show. 

This film is not outright Manson-sploitation (a sub-genre in its own right for a brief time), but clearly the audience is meant to think of Charles Manson and his murderous crew when we first meet Horse and his horde of hippie freaks.  While they play at being some sort of Satanic cult, they’re mostly just a roving group of assholes loosely held together by Horse’s force of personality and threats of violence.  Being assholes, they go out of their way to antagonize the few remaining folks in the small, rundown town they find themselves in, including raping a local girl and dosing her grandfather with LSD when he confronts them about that.  That’s when the girl’s younger brother gets the fateful notion to dose a bunch of meat pies for the group with blood from a rabid dog.  The cult becomes what can only be described as rabies zombies: sweaty, mute, foam-mouthed creatures constantly seeking violence, held back only by flowing water (which is not how the hydrophobia associated with real-world cases of rabies works, but then this film’s version of rabies works absolutely nothing like the real deal).

What struck me most about this film was not its gruesomeness but the nasty vein of xenophobia lurking just under its surface.  There are two groups who prey upon the main cast: the cult and a nearby construction crew working on the dam that is the cause of the town’s downfall.  It was not lost upon me that while the townfolk are all lily-white, both the cult and the crew are groups of multi-racial outsiders.  Both of them are all too eager to indulge their basest impulses and both are ultimately transformed into rabid hordes.  It also should be noted that most of the “heroes” are women and children, as the only non-antagonist men we see are the grandfather, the cult defector Andy (who just so happens to be the blondest, most stereotypical white dude of the group), and the dam foreman who cannot be bothered to drive into town and report any of this trouble until he’s literally getting chased by his own murderous crew.  In the end, all of these men are dead, the cult largely takes care of itself, and the police show up at the very end to indiscriminately kill any remaining outsiders and thus reset the status quo. 

In that sense, I Drink Your Blood works a lot like a slasher movie, despite this coming out years before that genre got a foothold in horror cinema at large.  You’ve got a final girl, as well as a bunch of characters set up to be slaughtered for their sins.  The only difference is that the killer is a microbe instead of some hulking weirdo in a mask.

It's hard to say if any of this subtext was purposeful on the part of the film’s director/writer.  According to him, he was simply tasked with making a horror film that didn’t rely on any supernatural nonsense and took his inspiration from both the Manson murders and a story about an Iranian school besieged by rabid wolves.  That said, it’s not out of character for an exploitation filmmaker of this era to insert themes like this simply for the sake of being provocative.   Either way, the end result is a dour meat grinder of a film.

 It should be noted that I watched the R-rated cut on Tubi, which cuts out the two major instances of sexual assault.  Some might decry this as censorship (since the original was literally one of the first films to earn an X rating for violence), but frankly I didn’t mind.  This film was enough of a dud for me as-is, and leaving in extended rape scenes wouldn’t have made the experience any better or more authentic.

3. DEMONS OF THE MIND

Demons of the Mind is a late, obscure offering from the legendary Hammer Studios at a time when its glory days were long past.  Hammer had first made a name for itself with its Dracula and Frankenstein films, kicking off the Gothic horror craze of the 1960s, but the times and tastes in horror were changing in the 1970s.  Hammer tried intermittently through the years to produce non-Gothic horrors (or at the very least Gothic horrors that didn’t rely on Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee to carry them), but as their fortunes fell these efforts got worse and less frequent.  By the time Demons of the Mind was released, the only thing holding Hammer Studios up were films like Lust For a Vampire or Countess Dracula, ones that relied on beautiful, bicurious, big-titty vampires to draw in audiences that overshadowed other works like this.

There’s no reason that Hammer Studios shouldn’t have been able to pull off a story like this.  It’s a distinctly un-supernatural horror story about a baron who fears his children have inherited his latent madness and formed a dangerously incestuous bond.  He goes so far as to confine them within his manor (in rooms next to one another, of course) and treats them regularly with bleeding and other quack medicine…thus ensuring that they do inevitably go mad and that his son, Emil, does in fact form a desperate, quasi-incestuous, and ultimately murderous obsession with his frail sister Elizabeth.

This is Gothic with a capital G, the sort of story that could have been written by some obscure young lady in the 1800s.  Theoretically it could be produced quite cheaply, as all the studio would need is a small cast, a suitably oppressive manor house to borrow, and a director willing to cultivate the stifling, melodramatic atmosphere that such a story needs.  Alas, that last part is what’s missing from this film and it’s what ultimately holds the whole film back.  This is the story of story where the acting and visuals need to be heightened to make the viewer feel as oppressed and strange as the characters, but the director Peter Sykes refuses to get weird with it at every turn.  The only person in the cast who seemed to understand what tone to strike is Robert Hardy, who plays the patriarch who sets all this tragedy in motion.  The problem is that since almost everyone else around him is playing their parts so normally that he comes off like a ham.  Only Shane Briant as Emil gets close to his level, as he does  manage to capture a sort of frail yet manic intensity.

Demons of the Mind was a failure in its initial release but I would not call it a total failure of a film.  It’s a flawed but perfectly watchable film, a curiosity for fans of the genre or the studio.

4. SCREAM OF THE DEMON LOVER

This 1970 Italian/Spanish co-production is a prime slice of European Gothic horror.  It’s got so many classic horror tropes contained within it: a lonesome nobleman in a giant castle, a beautiful and determined heroine, suspicious peasants (and suspiciously dead peasant girls), forbidden castle towers, secret siblings, sneaky servants, a bit of mad science, a lycanthropy red herring (because it’s not one of those Spanish horror films) all of it mixed together in a story I would summarize as a mashup of Bluebeard and Jane Eyre with a touch of Frankenstein and a pinch of bondage porn.

I think what makes it work so well are the performances of the leads, Erna Schurer and Carlso Quiney.  The former is a beautiful and stubborn lady chemist, while the latter is the handsome yet mercurial baron who hired her in his quest to restore the burnt corpse of his late brother.  Quiney in particular is the real stand out, shifting on a dime from steely and short-tempered to gracious and charming on a dime.  You can understand why Schurer’s character would be so intrigued yet put off by him, even if the two ultimately end up together less because of that tension and more because The Plot Demands It.  Still, it’s their performances that hold the whole film together.

It's not a bad looking film, either, although it doesn’t look as good as it possibly could due to the state of its negative.  Severin Films only had a damaged 16mm negative to work with, and while they did as much as they could to spruce it up the end result is still rather grainy with the occasional bit of physical damage too big for restoration software to erase.  At least it’s better treatment that what it got in its its original US release, where it was paired with the tedious bisexual vampire film The Velvet Vampire.  I only wish this film was more readily available beyond Severin’s initial Danza Macabre set so that more people could discover its charms.