Love and death amid ghosts, ghouls, and medieval castles mark cinema’s Gothic tradition, a horror subgenre inspired by writers such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker. When Hammer Films spearheaded a British Gothic revival in the late 1950s, other countries quickly followed them into the wilds of boffo box office. The first two Blu-ray sets in Severin Films’ Danza Macabra series focus on Italian productions, while Volume Three shines its clammy moonlight on Spanish cinema of the early 1970s.
The late ’60s and early ’70s were special eras for Spain. After ruling as a dictator for decades, General Francisco Franco was in his final ailing years. His death in 1975 would spark the beginning of democracy and shake off the heavy hand of censorship rooted in the Fascist state and the Catholic Church. This was the period when Spain’s young filmmakers started to explore a vein of native Spanish horror. While they chafed at what couldn’t be shown, they created a cinema that channeled national unrest and anxiety.
Famous names emerged. Jesús Franco quit Spain for freedom elsewhere in Europe. Writer-director-actor Paul Naschy (aka Jacinto Molina) became a star in his films and those of others. He often played fallen aristocratic wolfman Count Waldemar Daninsky, aka, El Hombre Lobo. Amando de Ossorio created a highly Spanish series about the Blind Dead, the shambling corpses of 14th-century Knights Templar who are literally the revenants of militant Catholicism ravaging the country.
After bringing horror to television, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador created a hit film in La Residencia (The House That Screamed, 1969); though its vision of totalitarian oppression was safely set in a 19th-century French girls’ school, nobody was fooled. Similarly, Jorge Grau chose England as the stage for his zombies in Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue or Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (No profanar el sueño de los muertos, 1974), because depravities were free to occur there, but viewers got the point anyway. Submerged socio-political commentary mark two classics of 1972, Vicente Aranda’s The Blood-Spattered Bride (La novia ensangrentada, 1972) and Raul Artigot’s The Witches Mountain (El monte de las brujas).
For a more detailed essay on the era’s Spanish horror and the cultural impulses and meanings that infuse it, see the bonus feature by Spanish Gothic historian Xavier Aldana Reyes on Disc 4 of Danza Macabra Volume Three: The Spanish Gothic Collection. There are many more notables besides these, and the box set Danza Macabra Volume Three unearths, resurrects, and revivifies four obscure goodies to add to the map. Let’s step gingerly into the dark woods and beware of hands thrust up from the earth…
View Severin Films’ trailer for Danza Macabra Volume Three: The Spanish Gothic Collection here.
Necrophagous (1971), written and directed by “Michael Skaife” (Miguel Madrid)
“Necrophagous” means dining on the dead, and certainly cannibalism is a popular trope in both totalitarian-society horror and consumer-society horror. It’s either the oppressive weight of history that’s eating you alive, or the corrupting competition of your neighbors, or both. Modern society itself corrupts with its technology, pesticides, sonic rays, official policies, loss of faith, isolation, and anarchy – pick your poison.
Also known as Graveyard of Horror and The Butcher of Binbrook, Miguel Madrid’s Necrophagous opens with a look at the outside of a castle home to the dwindled English aristocratic Sherringtons. Those of us soaked in Gothic literature will pick up heavy vibes of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story of decline and decadence, “The Fall of the House of Usher“, although Necrophagous isn’t the same tale.
Michael Sherrington (Bill Curran) narrates. Inside the castle, the handheld camera adopts Sherrington’s POV as he shambles around, looks down at one bandaged foot, and then shoves the portrait of his sister-in-law into the fireplace. Then, he witnesses an odd incident on a train, and viewers understand this as a flashback (or at least that the story is told out of chronological order) when he disembarks to learn that his wife and their child have died in childbirth.
Enraged with grief, Michael badgers the whole town for details. Everyone behaves in sinister, hostile, or baffling ways. There are almost too many women to keep track of without a program, all at each other’s throats and having their own flashbacks: the dead woman’s angry mother (Maria Paz Madrid) and two jealous sisters (Marisa Shiero, Titania Clement), Michael’s kind-hearted niece Margaret (Beatriz Lacy), and Lady Anne (Catherine Ellison), the wife of Michael’s mysteriously missing brother. Not helping matters are a fishy, wall-eyed cemetery custodian (Victor Israel), the threatening Dr. Lexter (Frank Braña), the mysterious coroner (Antonio Jiménez Escribano), and a surly, pugnacious police inspector (J.R. Clarke).
An organic story eventually crystallizes from all these characters and their odd, fragmented bits of the narrative. Necrophagous finally allows us to understand that bodies are disappearing from the cemetery to feed some frightful creature buried on the grounds as part of a scientific experiment.
Most of the deliberately confusing events and cross-purposes, such as Michael’s apparent death early on, will be explained. Still, as podcaster Andy Marshall-Roberts’ commentary points out, plenty of unresolved details make no sense and serve little purpose but to bewilder the viewer.
In keeping with Spanish censorship, the events make nods toward nudity and ghastly violence without quite getting there. You’d assume anything called Necrophagous must be gruesome, but not so, though unpleasant things happen. Elements include sexual repression, official unhelpfulness, and how aristocratic pride and decadence literally feed on the people. As with much of the story, the viewer must allow these themes to coalesce in the mind afterward.
Controversially, Necrophagous was co-winner of First Prize at the Sitges Film Festival. Many critics found it too ramshackle or pulpy for such an honor. Madrid (who gives himself a cameo as Mr. Skaife) has some low-budget maverick sensibility that verges on the avant-garde unless it’s mere incompetence. The controversies are discussed in sidebars by Maria Pilar Ráfales, daughter of the festival’s founder, and Ángel Sala, its current programmer.
Scanned in 2K from its negative, Necrophagous will never look better than this. An invasive, claustrophobic, fractured style is detectable, as though replicating a nightmare or a madman’s gibberish. Soundtrack options are offered in English and Spanish. English is probably preferable because imported actors deliver their lines in English. It’s clear that Spanish actors around them are dubbed, so the Spanish track vices the versa.
View the trailer for Necrophagous here.
Cake of Blood (Pastel de sangre, 1971), an anthology by four filmmakers
The fiendishly obscure Cake of Blood may be the most pleasant surprise in Danza Macabra Volume Three. It is very much a product of Barcelona’s avant-garde, cosmopolitan traditions in film and the arts. With no budget, four young filmmakers assembled their friends and made four tales of different historical periods, all playing with themes of religion and the death of idealism. Since the same crew was used throughout, the result feels organic, with each segment contributing its vibe while the elements echo.
José María Vallés (known as a cartoonist) created the first segment, “Tarot”. It begins by following a skinny, shirtless older man with a head wound running fearfully through a forest or jungle. He’s the first of many characters in Cake of Blood who don’t speak, perhaps symbolizing the silent and the silenced, and he passes under the first of two figures hanging in trees. Coming upon a river where he uncovers a woman’s body in the sand with a cross around her neck, he’s surrounded by silent men in monk’ cowls who do him harm. Passing by, also silent, are bedraggled women who witness the proceedings impassively.
An onscreen title informs us that these events took place a thousand years ago, “somewhere in the west”, and then we meet our true protagonist. He’s a weary, wayworn knight or armored crusader on a horse. As played by Julian Ugarte, his pale, thin, bearded demeanor recalls Don Quixote or actors such as Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, and Richard Chamberlain.
Most relevantly, our knight recalls Max Von Sydow in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957), the man who seeks death without realizing it. I’m reminded also of two rich medieval films of this era, John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death (1969) and Juan Luis Buñuel‘s Leonor (1975).
Death is symbolized in “Tarot” by a beautiful woman (billed only as Catherine) who sleeps or lies in state in a ruined castle or church, undisturbed by time or decay. She’s some kind of vampire, although the ending is more enigmatic than predictable. The inspiration might be John Keats’ 1819 poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci“, with its knight-at-arms “alone and palely loitering”.
Also present is a dwarf (Martin Galindo), who is mistaken for a child at first. He’s probably an ex-fool or jester who now raises bees in solitude. He’s the first of many characters across Cake of Blood who dance. To add more meta-mystery, we sometimes hear narration by a woman (or is it the dwarf?) referring to tarot cards that supposedly indicate what’s happening. It’s all very symbolic.
The second segment in Cake of Blood is Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s startling and elegant “Victor Frankenstein”, in which the title scientist (Ángel Carmona Ristol) is a disgruntled man who’s already created his “monster”. Eusebio Poncela plays the monster as a beautiful young man who is mute and moves with a dancer’s grace.
In this bracing reinvention of Mary Shelley’s 1818 horror tale, Victor stands amid a construction by Antoni Gaudi and orders his creation to go forth and wreak havoc by imitating the behavior he sees. Victor also calls him “the new man” who must replace the old, a Nietzschean idea. While the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein kills Victor’s family, that behavior isn’t at Victor’s behest unless, perhaps, we seek an unconscious psychology.
Marisa Paredes, later known in Pedro Almodóvar’s films, plays Elizabeth, Victor’s bride. Neither she nor Victor desires their marriage. They go through with it only at the wishes of the dying bedridden mother, whose will is allowed to dominate their lives—not unlike the dying Franco? The mother perhaps echoes the young death-maiden in “Tarot”.
Also present is Jaime Chávarri (looking fresh from a Grateful Dead concert) as Henry Clerval, who carries on in shameless joy with the equally joyful maid (Charo López). Their carefree pleasures earn the first punishment. One buried undercurrent is that Victor may be motivated by jealousy of their antics, but of whom is he more jealous? By the time Victor realizes he may have gone too far, it’s too late.
Set during Emperor Nero’s reign, Francesc Bellmunt’s “Terror Among Christians” (Terror entre cristianos) takes place in a dense green forest. Two fleeing Christians (Carlos Otero and Fernando Rubio) seek refuge while hoping to meet other exiles. Seeking exile from oppression was part of Spain’s recent history, so the echo is obvious.
As the two men become frightened by creatures in the forest, Christianity’s belief in resurrection and the blood is linked with vampirism and the threat of its spread. The possessed men, women, and children are all serene and beatific, notwithstanding the bloody dentures.
The final segment, “The Dance, or Emotional Survivals” (La danza o las supervivencias afectivas) emerges from the mind of Chávarri, who appeared in “Victor Frankenstein”. In a bonus interview, he states that the title is his play on Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809) and that one of his own favorite themes is “the victim who becomes the executioner.” He also observes that Barcelona’s artists “made political films that were difficult to understand, which was very common at the time.” That’s one way around the censors.
Chávarri’s segment is the only contemporary one, though it gives the impression of happening in an unreal time and space. It opens with the circular telescope image of a woman (Romy, a wafer-thin model with a pixie cut) burying something at the foot of her snazzy house. The telescope is held by a tatty vagabond (Luis Ciges) who seems to have wandered in from a silent comedy.
An elegantly dressed man is played by José Lifante, whom Chávarri describes as looking like a young Dracula. The man encourages the bum to ransack the house and tie up the woman. It’s possible to guess the secrets that will be revealed at the end of this highly stylized puzzle, but the unexpected grace with which they’re revealed makes this segment, astonishingly, the one with a happy ending. The final image reveals more dancing in another callback to The Seventh Seal.
The supple photography by Luis Cuadrado, a spare but diverse score by Juan Pineda, production design by noted painter-sculptor Frederic Amat, and editing by Maricel Bautista all contribute to the stylistic and thematic unity of the four segments in Cake of Blood. Chávarri reports that Josep Maria Forn conceived and produced the project. The segments are full of visual and thematic ideas without feeling rushed, and the whole thing’s over in 90 minutes. Let modern filmmakers take note.
View the trailer for Cake of Blood here.
Cross of the Devil (La cruz del diablo, 1975) directed by John Gilling
Cross of the Devil opens as though a derivative of other films about religious and state oppression, especially the Blind Dead series, before the film reveals itself as its own rich, strange, unpredictable creation. The origins of Cross of the Devil are shrouded in the mists of mutually exclusive claims, so any assertions come with a big proviso. It seems that Paul Naschy thought of creating a rival for the Blind Dead films. He might or might not have shown his script to John Gilling, a Hammer Films director who retired to Spain. Gilling took it over and had Juan José Porto do a complete rewrite, or else the producer did. Or else Gilling wrote his own script and had it translated.
Authors and genre experts Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw provide commentary that compares these competing claims as far as they can. We know that Naschy eventually sued the producer and finally regretted having his name as co-writer because he didn’t like the final product. He felt Cross of the Devil wasn’t his film, and that’s true. It was now Gilling’s, and he kept a tight hand on it.
The major influence on the script is Spain’s 19th-century writer, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, who’s a little like Poe and a little like the English Romantics. Every schoolchild in Spain knows Bécquer’s poems and macabre legends, just as every American student (we hope) knows Poe’s “The Raven” or “The Black Cat”. With allusions to three Bécquer stories, Cross of the Devil presents an array of complicated characters, motives, and events.
Ramiro Oliveros, who bears a passing resemblance to John Travolta (especially when looking befuddled, which is often), is introduced in the opening scene as Alfred Dawson, a 19th-century English gentleman smoking kief in his drawing room. This detail may be comparable to Sherlock Holmes’ cocaine habit. Dawson’s disturbed torpor is intercut with visions of a woman calling his name in panic as skeletal Knights Templar on horseback surrounds her.
Dawson describes his visions to an elegant Spanish girlfriend, Maria (Carmen Sevilla). They’re clearly having sexual relations out of wedlock, so the script of Cross of the Devil is already subverting conventions of proper Victorian gentlefolk. A letter from Dawson’s sister in Spain implores him to visit while she’s having strained relations with her husband after a miscarriage. By the time Dawson and Maria arrive, sister Justine (Monica Randall) is dead from an attack in the mountains.
A passing tramp, one of those ubiquitous red herrings in mystery novels, has been arrested, but does that wrap up the case? Does it have something to do with the legend of the Knights Templar, who walk the earth at the Devil’s Cross? Why the barely restrained hostility from the old widower, Enrique Carrillo (Eduardo Fajardo), and his weasel secretary, Cesar (Adolfo Marsillach)? What does any of this have to do with Bécquer’s legends, one of which is enacted as a story within the story by Emma Cohen and Tony Isbert? Is Dawson just smoking too much kief?
One of the fascinating elements in Cross of the Devil is its balance between supernaturalism and possibly explicable mystery. While Alfred Dawson’s investigations guide us through the story with clarity, we become increasingly confused about what might be going on. There seems to be a masked villain of flesh and blood, but that doesn’t invalidate the legends.
A word about this hero named Alfred Dawson. “Alfred” is probably from Alfred Hitchcock, whose name is the source of Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock, 1962). Italian Gothics were always claiming to be set in England and adopting English names for cast and crew. Antonio Margheriti signed his Gothics as Anthony M. Dawson, and one of those films was Danza Macabra or Castle of Blood (1964), which discusses Poe and uses a Lord Blackwood, named for Algernon Blackwood; you can find that film in Danza Macabra Volume Two. So “Alfred Dawson”, in a film made in Spain by an Englishman, combines all this. Makes you dizzy, right?
Fernando Arribas’ photography in Cross of the Devil is bright, soft, and dreamy, with a touch of kief about it as though we’re all hallucinating the film together. Outdoor scenes are often set in blazing sunlight, while interiors are lit with plenty of candles. Becquer’s legend is conveyed in fantastically beautiful darkness evoking such artists as Francisco Goya and Caspar David Friedrich. José María Tapiador’s design is matched in lushness by Ángel Arteaga’s score.
The commentary track’s discussion of Gilling’s career is especially valuable. In a sidebar, Xavier Aldana Reyes discusses Becquer’s writings and influence in Spain. Scanned in 4K from its negative, this transfer of Cross of the Devil will remind viewers of why box sets like Danza Macabra exist: to rescue unknown gems from obscurity. This and other films in the set have been so impossible to see properly that they have no reputation or receive short shrift. That will probably change now.
View the trailer for Cross of the Devil here.
The Night of the Walking Dead, or Strange Love of the Vampires (El extraño amor de los vampiros, 1975) directed by León Klimovsky
A film that should be given its correctly translated title, Strange Love of the Vampires, is instead saddled with the more generic The Night of the Walking Dead (as per the English credits), but this film from the year of General Franco’s death isn’t generic. Despite many nods to Stoker’s Dracula, León Klimovsky’s film invents its own lore. Vampires are presented as a literal underground community who escape their graves every ten years to run wild, and the crux of the story is given up to moral and political discussion without becoming sententious.
Bashing our ears with a loud, fuzzy electric guitar in Máximo Barratas’ score, the credits announce The Night of the Walking Dead with psychedelic solarizations in red and blue. The Spanish credits are a bonus; they’re more essential because they have more colors and credits, like cinematographer Miguel Mila and writers Juan José Daza, Juan José Porto and Carlos Pumares.
Then we’re jarred by the transition to a 19th-century world of stagecoaches and waistcoats, although that world has odd anachronistic touches. Perhaps the message is that Spain (never identified as such) has existed in a temporal vacuum that’s neither now nor then.
The main character is Catherine (Emma Cohen), a demure and privileged daughter of the moneyed class. She suffers from anemia, which has just taken her sister Mariam (Amparo Climent). To the horror of the modern, rational doctor (Lorenzo Robledo), who’s not from around here, everyone insists on driving a stake through Mariam’s heart just in case. This is pointless because all you have to do is pull the stake out of the corpse, and she rises fit as an undead fiddle ready for love.
Vampires will start ravaging the town like an infection, spreading their dangerous ideas of unrestrained libido, but we learn that the town is already full of sensuality and hanky-panky, so it’s only a mild leap. Meanwhile, the sickly Catherine is restrained from untoward activity because she’s a “nice girl” with strictly moral, old-fashioned parents. When she learns that the boy she loves has turned his naked attention elsewhere because Catherine has “death in her eyes”, she loses the will to live.
That’s when the possible fantasy figure of the legendary Count Rudolph (Carlos Ballesteros) drops by. I suggest fantasy because Catherine forever wakes up after whatever happened, as though she is dreaming half the narrative. Perhaps The Night of the Walking Dead is conjured by her yearning virginal libido, constrained physically and morally by a society that’s making her ill. Contrariwise, her illness unto death might “cure” her of this world’s neuroses.
Although foiled by the cross around her neck from consummating his appetites, Rudolph sends Catherine an invitation to his decadent vampire ball, which has shades of Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, aka Dance of the Vampires (1967). Rudolph explains that vampires are a persecuted minority who must defend themselves. After choosing her corruption when given the chance to save herself and her ex-boyfriend, Catherine becomes uppity and rebellious to her conservative father. She’s ready for liberation.
Thus, as in Bob Kelljan’s Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), vampires are associated with youth cults, hippies, and what mouthy, politicized kids are coming to these days. Despite his rap, Rudolph doesn’t want the vampire life for Catherine or himself, and he reveals himself as a prototype of the bored, self-destructive, romantic vampire.
All these elements turn The Night of the Walking Dead into a heady blood-wine and a kind of a lexiconic crossroads of influences past and future. Klimovsky handles it with style, encouraging the cinematographer to glide and pan seductively around ordinary moments. Startling details abound, like the disturbing night of kidnappings of innocent townsfolk and the moment when the undead Mariam approaches Catherine’s window by walking across a blank, fogbound floor – even though it’s on the second story.
Another 2K scan from the negative, The Night of the Walking Dead offers Spanish and English-dubbed soundtrack options. The Spanish is the most integral, but the English subtitles merely transcribe the English dub instead of faithfully catching all the Spanish dialogue. For example, one character makes a brief revolutionary prediction of an uprising against the bosses, and he mentions Spartacus in the Spanish version. Oddly, the brief clips in the sidebars offer direct, correct translations of the Spanish.
Klimovsky, the son of Russian Jews who emigrated to Argentina, impacted Argentine cinema before relocating to Spain in the ’50s, where he became a major figure in the country’s ’70s horror cycle. As Sitges Film Festival programmer Ángel Sala explains in a bonus, The Night of the Walking Dead is the third of his trilogy that reinvents vampires with originality. In her commentary, author Kat Ellinger goes further into Klimovsky’s career and the place of this title within Spanish Gothic and the genre’s sexual politics.
View the trailer forThe Night of the Walking Dead here.
Necrophagous is the earliest and least interesting title in Danza Macabra Volume Three, and it’s still appealingly bonkers. Cake of Blood and Cross of the Devil are top-drawer, and that’s all the more surprising since they’ve been so obscure to Anglophone viewers. The Night of the Walking Dead is nearly as good. Overall, Danza Macabra Volume Three: The Spanish Gothic Collection serves a tasty treat for Euro-horror junkies and other children of the night.