Castle of the Living Dead (Il castello dei morti vivi) | 1964
- Locations |
- Italy
- DIRECTOR |
- Warren Kiefer
This fairly undistinguished Euro-horror, one of several low-budget shockers with which Christopher Lee earned a crust in the 1960s, deserves mention for its footnotes in history.
It's the screen debut of Donald Sutherland, as both a hearty soldier and also (unbelievably and hugely enjoyably) the old witch who prophesies doom, doom and more doom. He seems to have been enormously grateful to the director, Warren Kiefer, when it came to naming his son.
The film is probably best known as the first professional credit, as Assistant Director, of Michael Reeves, the promising director of the enormously impressive Witchfinder General, who died at the age of 25. It's the only film I know of which credits the Second Unit Director on the DVD jacket.
His contribution to the film is the subject of discussion (he also added to the script and briefly appears as an extra), but I'll stake my reputation as a movie buff that he was responsible for the opening 'hanging' sequence, which has a visual and directorial style lacking in the rest of the movie.
The locations are also remarkable. The main setting, the castle of Count Drago (Lee), where his experiments in preserving the dead would have been the envy of Norman Bates, is Villa Giustiniani Odescalchi, Piazza Umberto I, Bassano Romano in the province of Viterbo.
Much of the palace we see today dates from a massive expansion it underwent in the 17th century. It was bought by the state in 2003, restored and opened to the public in 2016.
The castle’s other claim to screen fame is appearing as King Henry’s “English castle” in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, but it's also claimed to have appeared in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard and Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (I need to investigate further).
The wildly elaborate sculpture garden is another location entirely. This is the Parco dei Mostri (Park of Monsters) in Bomarzo, about 30 miles further north. Properly called Sacro Bosco (Sacred Grove), it was commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini, supposedly to help him cope with the grief of his wife’s death.
Carved in the 16th Century from existing boulders and the actual bedrock, the park’s strange creatures have fascinated artists such as Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí.
That giant face with the gaping mouth is the Orcus (Ogre) and you can glimpse it briefly in Terence Malick's The Tree Of Life. The park is also seen in Franc Roddam’s The Bride (1985) and Peter Hyams’ The Relic (1997).
