Nightmare Castle [M]

When a scientist discovers his wife’s amour with another man, he tortures them, murders them, and uses his wife’s blood to restore the youthful beauty of his own lover. He then discovers that his wife had remade her will and left her wealth and castle to her mentally fragile sister Jenny. Desperate to get his hands on the wealth and estate, he marries Jenny and with plans to break down her mind and finally kill her once he becomes the soul inheritor. But as soon as Jenny moves into the castle, she begins to have gruesome nightmares and behave in a most strange manner. Is her sanity cracking prematurely or is it the ghosts of the murdered lovers dishing out a little revenge? 

Well, this was… eerie and macabre, in rather a lot of ways. If the story isn’t creepy enough, there are so many taboo areas explored including S&M, mental illness, vampirism, and even a little dash of the Ed Gein syndrome in the two lovers’ hearts being kept, skewered, in a box. If the dubbing and performances hadn’t been a fair level below par, this would have been a really freaky movie. 

When a scientist discovers his wife’s amour with another man, he tortures them, murders them, and uses his wife’s blood to restore the youthful beauty of his own lover. He then discovers that his wife had remade her will and left her wealth and castle to her mentally fragile sister Jenny. Desperate to get his hands on the wealth and estate, he marries Jenny and with plans to break down her mind and finally kill her once he becomes the soul inheritor. But as soon as Jenny moves into the castle, she begins to have gruesome nightmares and behave in a most strange manner. Is her sanity cracking prematurely or is it the ghosts of the murdered lovers dishing out a little revenge? 

The story stands on its own with all the bases covered for a truly sufficient horror flick: revenge, betrayal, murder, and obsession. What brings that extra level of creepiness and the macabre is the fact that so many taboo areas are either hinted at or considerably explored. We’ve got mental illness with both the ghosts and the scientist being doubly villainous as they exploit the frailties of poor Jenny’s mind. We then have these sadistic torture scenes of the scientist’s wife and her lover at the beginning of the film, which include violent beatings, being chained or tied up, acid, electrocution, and even a scene where the lover is chained to a chair whilst the scientist has sex with his (tied up) wife in front of him (the sex of course isn’t actually shown, but strongly hinted at). Finally we have this vampiric element in the scientist’s pumping his wife’s blood into another woman’s body and there’s a bit of the Ed Gein about the way he skewers the hearts of his wife and her lover together and keeps them in a box. It’s all pretty gruesome and, with the advancements of today’s cinema, this movie could really come into its own and be quite the shocker. Maybe it’s time for a remake… 

It’s all these things that keeps this movie afloat whilst the out-of-sync dubbing and mediocre performances threaten to pull it under the water, which really are the only bad things about this movie (it’s just a shame that they have such an impact). 

Starring Barbara Steele, Paul Muller, Helga Line, Marino Mase, Giuseppe Addobbati, and Rik Battaglia, Nightmare Castle is freaky little film that’s packed with murder, horror, haunting, romance, and drama. I think it’s one that could do rather well in modern cinema if in the hands of the right people.