Original title: I lunghi capelli della morte

The third of Antonio Margheriti’s 60s Gothics, following La vergine di Norimberga/The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963) and Danza macabre/Castle of Blood (1964) doesn’t quite match those two films for quality, though it was far more successful at the box office, and it remains a quietly impressive, if a little sluggishly paced, addition that marvellous string of black and white Italian chillers that followed on the coattails of Hammer Films.

It wears its influences unashamedly on its perfectly turned sleeves, opening with a marvellously shot witch-burning scene that echoes the killing of killing of the witch at the start of Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday/The Mask of Satan (1960). In Bava’s film, the witch done to death by having a hideous mask nailed to her head was played by Barbara Steele – here, it’s Halina Zalewska as Adele Karnstein, sentenced to the pyre for acts of witchcraft. Steele is on hand still, as Adele’s eldest daughter Helen who knows that her mother was falsely accused when she refused the advances of the lecherous Count Franz Humboldt (Giuliano Raffaelli). The Count murders Helen and her younger sister, Lisabeth (Zalewska), is taken into Humboldt’s household. Many years later, as Lisabeth is doomed to marry the count’s shifty nephew, Kurt (George Ardisson), a virulent plague grips the land (shades of The Masque of the Red Death (1964) – Pit and the Pendulum (1961) makes its mark felt too). Things get even stranger when, at the height of a storm, a woman named Mary, who bears a striking resemblance to Helen (Steele again), stumbles into the church and starts to take her revenge of Adele’s persecutors (there are unmistakable echoes of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterly Les diaboliques (1955)) about proceedings).

The Long Hair of Death (the title refers to Adele’s lengthy locks, a handful of which Kurt inexplicable wakes clutching while in the grip of a fever and which are later found enveloping her body in a tomb) is a stately affair, Margheriti not in any undue rush to get through Tonino Valerii and Ernesto Gastaldi’s script. Valerii, who had previously written Camillo Mastrocinque’s La cripta e l’incubo/Crypt of Horror (1964) with Gastaldi, had wanted the film to be his directorial debut but producer Felice Testya Gay felt that he lacked the necessary experience and had Margheriti take the reins instead (Valerii would eventually start directing with the 1967 western Per il gusto di uccidere/Taste of Killing (1966)).

Slow it may be, but Margheriti still conjures up the occasional atmospheric moment. The opening witch burning is terrific and there are plenty of Gothic frills to spice up the sometimes plodding narrative – the skeleton in the crypt that briefly seems to jerk back to life, the resurrection by lightning strike (later copied numerous times, even by the slasher Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986)) and a full blooded climax that more than rewards the patient (it anticipates The Wicker Man (1973) with its final images of a main character being burned alive in a giant effigy). It’s a gorgeous looking a film as any of the 60s Italian Gothics, shot on location in the Castello Massimo in Arsoli (already familiar from Bava’s Black Sunday, Margheriti would return there in 1971 for Nella stretta morsa del ragno/Web of the Spider (1971), a remake of Castle of Blood) by Riccardo Pallottini.

Good looking though it certainly is, there’s no escaping the fact that The Long Hair of Death is more of a weepy melodrama than the full-blooded Gothic horror of Margheriti’s earlier forays into the genre. The revenge plot had already been done to death, the story is basic and not terribly gripping and a supposed surprise reveal towards the end is nothing of the sort – we already knew that Mary was Adele reborn so while it might have come as shock to the characters it elicits little more than a shrug from the viewer. But the cast is fantastic (another familiar face, Umberto Raho, is on hand as a priest), Carlo Rustichelli (credited as Evirust) turns in a fine score and when the set pieces turn up, they’re directed with all the panache we expect from mid-60s Margheriti.

But none of it really feels quite enough. Margheriti himself was less than impressed, telling Peter Blumenstock in Video Watchdog that “I don’t like that one too much. I don’t like the story. The screenplay we had was very badly written and a lot of things were not really fixed in it. On the set, a lot of things turned out to be stupid or impossible, so we had to invent a lot and improvise every day. […] There was hardly any time to think, to invent, or write something down properly, because we had to shoot, shoot and shoot.” A little harsh perhaps as it’s by no means a terrible film, just a bit lacking, a disappointing one compared to Margheriti’s other Gothics of the period.

It was Margheriti’s last Gothic horror if the 1960s. A prolific and restless director, he’d spend the rest of the decade and much of the 1970s dabbling in those staples of Italian popular cinema at the time, science fiction, gialli, spy thrillers and westerns. Web of the Spider was a return of sorts to the Gothic before he found a new market with his gory cannibal film Apocalypse domani/Cannibal Apocalypse in 1980 and a string of action-adventure thrillers that did well in the early years of home video.