Antonio Margheriti, billed as Anthony Dawson, made Castle of Blood in black & white and remade it very faithfully seven years later in color. The plot summary here covers both films. Edgar Allen Poe is drinking in a tavern, telling his drunken buddies a story about a dying woman and a man's obsession with her teeth. He seems to be passing this off as a real occurrence, but reporter Alan Foster recognizes it as the plot to his short story "Berenice," though Poe rebuts him by claiming all of his fantastic stories are pieces of reportage. When Foster is skeptical, another listener, Lord Blackwood, bets Foster that he can't spend a night in his abandoned and haunted castle. Blackwood and Poe drop Foster off and plan to pick him up in the morning, with the promise that Poe will give him an interview. As Foster wanders the dusty castle, he begins seeing visions of people dancing and hears harpsichord music. He soon discovers that the castle is not abandoned, but that Blackwood's sister Elizabeth still lives there, as does another woman named Julia. Also present is Dr. Carmus, an expert in metaphysics, who expresses his theory that the self has three distinct parts—body, spirit and senses—and the death of one part does not necessarily kill off the other two. As the evening goes on, a few more folks pop up, and a romantic tangle develops with Julia lusting after Elizabeth, Elizabeth cheating on her husband with the hunky stable boy, and Foster himself turned on by Elizabeth. But soon, these folks start killing each other in bloody ways, and Foster realizes that he’s witnessing the annual All Souls' Day return of damned souls of the undead who are doomed to replay the circumstances of their death. When another couple enters the scene, Foster learns they are a newlywed couple that Blackwood sent here last year who have joined the undead. Eventually, all the ghosts all turn vampiric and start chasing after Foster as they need fresh blood to finish their ritual. Elizabeth agrees to help him escape; will he defy tradition and make it to morning alive?
There's the potential for a really good ghost movie here, and the way the narrative is laid out in the first half-hour or so is promising. The shadowy, Gothic look of the castle is great and the fluid camerawork is impressive. Barbara Steele (pictured above), always an asset in 60s horror films, looks fabulous and gives a solid performance as Elizabeth. But style overwhelms substance; the plot and characters stop developing after a while and the events grow repetitious. Individual scenes are well done: the death of a man while he's making out with Steele; shots of the dusty, cobwebby sets; a dead body in a coffin that we suddenly realize is breathing. The predictable ending is handled well. But I still felt its overall force was blunted from a lackluster screenplay (and it doesn’t help that the film is supposedly based on a Poe story—it isn't), The notes I made while watching the remake were almost identical to the notes I made while watching the original. Anthony Franciosa (at right) gives a more solid performance as Parker than Georges Riviere did in the original, though the sexy Michele Mercier isn’t quite up to Barbara Steele's level. Klaus Kinski, a little less unhinged than usual, has the small role of Poe, and Peter Karsten makes a more effective Dr. Carmus than Arturo Dominici in Castle. Apparently, Margheriti regretted remaking the film in color, but I thought the color worked fine, even if the black & white imagery was more atmospheric, and the sets are more elaborate than in the original. Though I'd hesitate to call either film a classic, both would work nicely as Halloween season treats. [DVD/Streaming–the streaming version of WEB on Amazon is a fairly poor pan-and-scan print, but there is a lovely widescreen version available on YouTube]
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