This season pays tribute to gothic horror royalty, Barbara Steele (1937–), a British actress who worked across Europe and the United States and whose name became synonymous with haunted castles, the aura of dry ice, candelabra-clutching women returned from the dead and occult ceremonies. Steele starred in a string of iconic horror films in the 1960s, including Mario Bava’s groundbreaking Black Sunday (1960), Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962), Antonio Margheriti’s The Long Hair of Death (1964) and Castle of Blood (1964), and Camillo Mastrocinque’s An Angel for Satan (1966), becoming famous as the “Queen of All Scream Queens”. Her notoriety was also noted by Federico Fellini, who featured her alongside Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale in 8 ½ (1963). This long-overdue season includes five of those key films as well as Vernon Sewell’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), in which Steele’s role as a 300-year-old witch with green skin did absolutely nothing to diminish her extraordinary onscreen beauty. After her early, mostly dispiriting work for Rank in Britain, Bava invited Steele to star in his directorial debut and the rest is history. Although her featured roles petered out in the late 1960s, a new generation of filmmakers paid homage to Steele’s legacy by casting her in their early films. These included her striking performance as a fierce prison governess in Jonathan Demme’s “chixploitation” opus, Caged Heat (1974), as well as memorable turns in David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) and Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978). In the early 1980s, Steele swapped acting for producing, winning an Emmy Award for the epic World War II drama, War and Remembrance (1989), before occasionally returning to acting in films like Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River (2014). She remains one of the true icons of Euro-horror.
7:00pm BLACK SUNDAY
Mario Bava (1960) 87 mins – M
Called “the best Italian horror film” by Cult Movies author Danny Peary, director-writer-cinematographer Bava’s adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s story merges horror and fable. Its eye-popping visuals and prowling camera suggest the haunting power of delicate nightmare pocked with moments of rarely surpassed beauty and horror. Steele’s breakthrough double role as the virginal Katia and the vampiric witch Princess Asa, whose body is marked by the stigmata of unholy penetration, questions the two options traditionally imposed on women in Western religious imagery and remains her most iconic performance.
CTEQ ANNOTATION
Mario Bava’s Black Sunday aka The Mask of Satan
by Christopher J. Jarmick
8:45pm PIT AND THE PENDULUM
Roger Corman (1961) 80 mins – M
Compelled to investigate the strange goings-on in a castle in 16th-century Spain, a young Englishman (John Kerr) investigating the death of his sister (Steele) encounters her husband, Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price), a figure on the brink of madness. Steele’s character has allegedly died of “fright” but remains an eerie and troubling presence. Screenwriter Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) liberally adds to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of possession, torture and entombment, leaning heavily on the atmosphere of fear and mental torment provided by its Spanish Inquisition era setting and the striking cinematography of Floyd Crosby (Murnau’s Tabu).
7:00pm THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH
Antonio Margheriti (1964) 96 mins – Unclassified 15+
Though this thoroughly engaging film was criticised by director Margheriti for its erratic script (which he co-wrote), Steele’s trademark talents and looks shine through in her emblematic dual role, helping to cement her legacy as the queen of Italian gothic horror. Aided by the film’s striking imagery and palpably ominous atmosphere, Steele oscillates between sultry innocence and a mysterious, commanding presence. Her virtuosic performance elevates this once underappreciated film to its contemporary status as a minor classic of the form.
8:50pm CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR
Vernon Sewell (1968) 87 mins – M
Sewell’s penultimate film marshals a remarkable confluence of eclectic talents, as Steele’s 300-year-old Black Witch of Greymarsh oversees S&M orgies in greenface while battling Boris Karloff’s occult expert in Christopher Lee’s isolated manor house. Three icons of mid-century horror have a blast amidst the psychedelic stylings of cinematographer John Coquillon (who also shot Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) and the Swinging ’60s score by Peter Knight (renowned for his lush orchestrations for Scott Walker and The Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin). Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Dreams in the Witch House”.
7:00pm THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK
Riccardo Freda (1962) 87 mins – Unclassified 15+
In this perverted tale of lust written by the prolific Ernesto Gastaldi, Steele stars as Cynthia, the newlywed wife of a twisted scientist (Robert Flemyng) with necrophiliac tendencies. Made at the height of the Italian horror boom it parlays a veritable haunted house worth of inventive gothic horror tropes, from flowing drapes and thunderstorms to locked doors and dark corners. This rich kaleidoscope of colour and horror is drawn out in luscious detail by genre specialist Freda and cinematographer Raffaele Masciocchi. Shot during the extended production of Fellini’s 8 ½.
8:40pm 8 ½
Federico Fellini (1963) 138 mins – M
Lauded by Roger Ebert as “the best film ever made about filmmaking”, and spawning countless imitators from Woody Allen to Bob Fosse, this playful, deceptively autobiographical Oscar-winning reverie on the mysteries of the artistic process is one of the landmark works of European art cinema. Hot on the heels of their worldwide success with La dolce vita, Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni (Guido) once again teamed up to explore the porous boundaries between life, art and dreamlike imagination in this exhilarating circus-like comedy memorably scored by Nino Rota. Also starring Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée and Steele as three of the women in Guido’s life.
4K DCP courtesy of Cinecittà Luce.
CTEQ ANNOTATION
“A Fantastic, Enchanted Ballet”: Federico Fellini’s 8 ½
by Wheeler Winston Dixon