This particular little film I had to track down through the means of Youtube, meaning the transfer was rather painfully grainy. An Italian/French production also known as Dance Macabre, Castle of Blood shows little of Poe, but he’s the catalyst for the whole . . . shall we say plot?
A journalist challenges Poe (Silvano Tranquilli) in a pub that his stories are completely fake, to which Poe declares that he has experienced the supernatural in reality. At least I think that’s what he said. The movie kept slipping into French and Italian with no subtitles. Anyway, a Lord Blackwood (of course he name is Lord Blackwood) dares the journalist to spend the night in a real haunted castle.
Wait? What did I miss? Why is there a castle? Where are they? There are no medieval castles in Baltimore or New York that I know of! Did the Italian screenwriters think the United States just has castles lying about?
I really don’t have much else to say on this except that it is one of several Italian horror movies Barbara Steele (Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum actress) made in 1964. There’s lots of jump scares and close-ups of attempted gore with high-pitched organ music. I really thought Poe would be in it more. He really wasn’t even all that upset that his writing was challenged in the beginning of the movie, just amused. I guess Italian Poe is cooler than real Poe.
Apparently this was remade by the same director a few years later with Klaus Kinski as Edgar Allan Poe, but I’m not sitting through it again especially not with that creeper in it.
