Rob Talbot, Author at Diabolique Magazine

*Contains spoilers* “You went to the extreme of murder, all for the sake of possessing me. It's a pity that you did everything... for a body that's dead. Well Kurt, look at that body, look well at the body that is really me!”Barbara Steele as Helen/Mary Karnstein in The Long Hair of Death (1964) Antonio Margheriti’s 1964 monochrome Gothic The Long Hair of Death (I lunghi capelli della morte) has the immediate disadvantage of following on directly from Castle of Blood (Danza macabra, 1964), widely considered to be one of the director's finest films. If not the finest, even if the later likes of Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) and Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (1973) seem more popular today. In fact, such is the beguiling beauty of Castle of Blood that some critics have tended to consider it an “anomaly” in the director's vast and variable body of work. Here’s Alan Frank, writing in his classic 1973 tome Horror Films: ...despite pedestrian direction and abominable dubbing [Castle of Blood] managed to provide some chilling sequences, not least of all its climax. […] What was perhaps surprising was that Margheriti/Dawson, at best a very pedestrian director of everything from costume pictures and sword-and-sandal epics to thrillers and Westerns, was for a while the subject of something like cult attention from a group of British intellectual film critics, before their usual short span of attention drew them on to discover another cult figure for a time. At his best, Margheriti was competent, with no particular personal style, and at worst, which he often was, he must have been glad to have had a pseudonym or two to hide behind. [106] Harsh words. It’s odd that Frank writes about Margheriti in the past tense when the director still had a good many more filmmaking years ahead of him. It's just one example of a critic seizing on Margheriti’s very versatility as a stick to beat to him with. Frank also clearly has an axe to grind with that “group of British intellectual film critics,” whoever they may have been. And that English dub was hardly Margheriti's fault. One does have to concede wild fluctuations in quality throughout Margheriti's massive oeuvre but, as with most of his contemporaries, it wasn't as though he had the luxury of just deciding to eschew other genres and exclusively become some grand auteur of the fantastique. The realities of the industry, and his position within it, meant that his projects consisted in the main of whatever was put on the table by trend and bottom-line-conscious producers and studios. For most, that was what being a working director meant, and still means. Other detractors have cited the early involvement and direction of some scenes by Django (1966) director Sergio Corbucci as the reason for the “anomalous” high quality of Castle of Blood, despite it being mostly Margheriti’s work up on screen. Whatever the case, we do find follow-up The Long Hair of Death (1964) to be the lesser of Margheriti's three Golden Age Gothics, in terms of both atmosphere -building and shock value, with Margheriti working from a script that he didn't much care for. “They wanted to do more of a historical picture with horror elements,” the director told John Martin in 1995. “I don’t know if that was the right idea. It’s not a bad picture, but it’s not Danza macabra – that’s a ten times better picture!” A reasonable assessment, but Long Hair nonetheless remains one of the better non-Mario Bava offerings of what we now call the “Golden Age” and worthy of some love of its own. Where Castle of Blood took Poe as its supposed inspiration, named after a non-existent Poe story and even going so far as to include the author himself as a character, The Long Hair of Death puts one more in mind of early Gothic melodramas like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), situated as it is in a cod-medievalist, mostly castle-bound milieu; although thankfully it eschews such silliness as a giant knight's helmet falling from the sky to crush someone, as in the latter. However, Bava's Black Sunday (1960) and Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum (US, 1961), both starring Barbara Steele, are clearly the film's true influences. Just like Castle of Blood, it exists primarily as another vehicle for our raven-haired young Queen of the Gothics, riding on the coat-tails of those two wonderful classics. “The Pit and the Pendulum was a big influence on Italian horror films,” Long Hair screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi told Roberto Curti (for the latter's excellent Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957-1969). “Everybody borrowed from it.” [125] Barbara Steele in The Long Hair of Death (1964) [Click to enlarge] Despite Gastaldi and co-writer Tonino Valerii's naming of key characters as “Karnstein”, no other gleanings from the fertile imagination of Sheridan Le Fanu are apparent, reminding one of the various randomly-named “Renfields” of Jess Franco's films. The use of the name seems to stem from the fact that Gastaldi and Valerii had also worked together on a loose Carmilla adaptation in that same year; Camillo Mastrocinque's Terror in the Crypt (La cripta e l’incubo, 1964), starring Christopher Lee. The insanely prolific Gastaldi had already made an indelible mark in the Italian Gothic cycle with Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr Hichcock (1962), leading to Bava's The Whip and the Body (1963) and Margheriti's own The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963), but his most significant collaborators would later prove to be Sergio Martino and Luciano Ercoli, on a clutch of superior gialli starting with The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971) and Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970) respectively. Tonino Valerii had worked as assistant director and uncredited screenwriter on the same year's seismic A Fistful of Dollars. Passed over in favour of Margheriti by producer Felice Testa Gay to take the directorial reigns of The Long Hair, Valerii would shortly instead make his debut with western Taste of Killing (1966), and go on to distinguish himself with A Day of Anger (1967) and a superb giallo, My Dear Killer (1972), before re-teaming with Gastaldi once more, along with Sergio Leone, for My Name is Nobody (1973). “Our story takes place at the end of the fifteenth century,” an on-screen caption informs us as the film opens, to the ominous tones of Carlo Rustichelli's traditionally Gothic theme. Rustichelli here replaces the last two films' Riz Ortolani, going by the name of “Evirust” and sadly to slightly lesser effect, great film composer though he was. He also provided the atmospherics for Bava's Blood and Black Lace in that year, and the odd cue from that score is recycled here. And so, thrust as we are into this middle-ages, Mittel-European milieu, we find ourselves visiting a dungeon set, looking familiar from many a peplum (a concurrent genre cycle, just about running its course) of the day, to find one Adele Karnstein (Halina Zalewska) accused of witchery and the murder of the local Count; in fact she's due to be burned at the stake. Adele's eldest daughter, Helen Rochefort (Steele) races to find the late Count's brother and successor, the new Count Humboldt (Giuliano Raffaelli, of Blood and Black Lace and Margheriti's Gamma 1 sequence), in an effort to persuade him to spare her mother’s life. “What can a man ask of a beautiful woman like you?” asks the Count when confronted with Barbara Steele. “There is only one thing that I want.” Our corpulent Count does indeed get his wicked way, but also manages to miss the execution and fails to make good on their exchange. Laura Nucci in The Long Hair of Death (1964) [Click to enlarge] Adele's public burning is witnessed by her smaller daughter Lisabeth (child actor unknown), and the opening of Black Sunday is strongly evoked as the burning witch curses her condemners and calls to Lisabeth to avenge her. Chief among these condemners and the main object of Adele's fury is Humboldt's son, Baron Kurt Humboldt – a real piece of work played by the late, great Giorgio “George” Ardisson (1931-2014). The good-looking young Turin-born actor had spent the past few years emerging as a familiar filone face, clocking up decent roles in Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World and Erik the Conqueror (both 1961), and featuring as none other than Zorro in Zorro at the Spanish Court (1962). The year after Long Hair would see him really hit his stride, appearing in Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and kicking off the most visible portion of his career in the roles of “Agent 3S3” and other Italian 007 “equivalents”. This particular cycle would only last around three years, however, so a move to westerns (including another Zorro) followed, but heading into the seventies Ardisson's career trajectory can basically be seen to represent the exact fate of the entire European film industry in macrocosm. Judging by both Adele and the camera's intense attentions, it's clear from the outset that Ardisson's Kurt Humboldt is to be a central focus of what is to come, and the twitchy, gloating, almost William-Shatner-esque performance he provides over the course of the film ensures that he is just that. He shares a similar jock-like physicality and virility with the typecast American actor, and at times reminds one of Kirk himself; in those episodes where the character is supposed to be possessed by some evil alien force. It's a compelling presence, for sure, offering us a “man you love to hate” in place of a male hero. He is Long Hair's equivalent to the dastardly “Lord Manfred” of Horace Walpole's novel, and something of a pantomime villain as a result. Following Adele's execution, the exploited Helen manages to track down Humboldt Snr. once again, finding him out with his hunting dogs. With no witnesses in sight, he casually pushes her to her death down a waterfall, quipping that her “secret is safe,” for good measure. With no living relatives, young Lisabeth is taken to live in the castle, under the care and...