Barbara Steele returns from an early grave to visit erotic vengeance on Giorgio Ardisson in I LUNGHI CAPELLI DELLA MORTE.


members Giorgio Giovannini and Mario Serandrei—was curiously overlooked for American distribu- tion. And yet Roger Corman ap- pears to have seen and been inspired by it, especially by the TOMB OF LIGEIA-like scene in which Kurt realizes that Elizabeth may really be alive by finding fresh strands collected in her bedside hairbrush. (Elizabeth, of course, was the name of Barbara Steele’s character in Corman’s PIT AND THE PENDULUM, which Gastaldi has acknowledged as the commercial reason for his writing THE WHIP AND THE BODY.) Most of the behind-the- scenes talent is credited with Anglicized names, including composer Carlo Rustichelli, here called “Evirust.” The film contains one of his most haunting and re- fined scores, replete with a tiny


chiming bell that predates the musical pocketwatch motif in Ennio Morricone’s score for Sergio Leone’s FOR A FEW DOL- LARS MORE. Apart from Steele (at her most fetching here), the film is best remembered for its climactic entrapment of a char- acter inside a wicker effigy that is horror cinema’s most con- spicuous antecedent of Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s THE WICKER MAN.


While the film has several good scenes (including a CASTLE OF BLOOD-like mo- ment when a corpse begins to breathe, an illusion here ex- plained by a brood of rats nesting under its shirt), it also has more than its share of longueurs; the number of new scenes showing various candle- bearers entering a dark room to


a stab of mysterioso music be- comes risible after awhile, and there’s an entire unnecessary trip from the bedroom to the crypt and back to the bedroom with Elizabeth’s poisoned car- cass that only serves to pad the running time. Steele’s charac- ter is introduced (with onscreen confirmation via her headstone) as “Helen Rochefort,” not her mother’s name, but is referred to as “Helen Karnstein” after her resurrection, indicating that this became another Karnstein movie in post-pro- duction. There is also a flash of breast nudity shot for the continental market, but the pro- fusion of bad wig hair covering Helen’s entire face in the shot indicates the use of a body double for Ms. Steele. But the film’s most fundamental fault is


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