(This is based on a cut version of the Italian version of the film; the French version cut down on dialogue and added a lot of softcore lesbian footage; what is missing from the version of the film I have seen I do not know. I do know that this film cries out for a DVD.)
Jean Duprey (Pierre Brice) is a top-notch reporter specialized in weirder crime cases. When Prince Guillaume de la St. Laurent, an old, slightly eccentric friend (and who could blame someone with this name for being an eccentric?) of his writes him a barely understandable letter in which Jean also finds some coded hints leading to parts of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal that don't explain the situation any better than the rest of the letter does, but all convey a certain mood of coming doom, the journalist is worried enough to grab his wife Danielle (Patrizia Viotti) and drive out to Guillaume's house for a visit. After all, the letter can be interpreted as an invitation.
Guillaume's "house" turns out to be the most classic gothic castle you will have found still standing in 1971, complete with plate mails and labyrinthine hallways to make Horace Walpole blush. The household also doesn't partake of the delights of electricity.
Guillaume himself does fit into his home nicely with his physical frailty and his vague babbling about a terrible truth that drives all male members of his family mad and then slowly into death once they have reached the age of 35. Instead of explaining to Jean right out what the hell is wrong and what said truth might be, the Prince prefers first mumbling something about the impossibility of believing it, then a falling into a kind of fit that nearly kills him.
Later Guillaume's wife Rita Lernod (Angelo De Leo) explains a little of her husband's troubles. He has been getting weaker and weirder day by day thanks to a psychopathic dementia that will soon kill him.
Jean is not satisfied with the explanation (since when do people die of psychic illnesses?), nor with the less than trustworthy looking doctor who tends to his friend but keeps his peace.
On their first night sleeping at the castle, Danielle has the first of what will become a series of nightmares. She finds herself as a witch being burned at the castle of the de la St. Laurents, just as it is depicted in a drawing on her and Jean's bedroom wall.
The next evening Jean has a second meeting with Guillaume, who still prefers to speak in riddles, only letting on that the library of the house contains the key to the truth. Guillaume also gives Jean his amethyst ring. Some days later, Jean will find out that the ring contains another of his friend's patented "coded messages that aren't helpful at all".
A little later, Guillaume dies and is nearly instantly buried in the family crypt in a ceremony of doubtful orthodoxy but inherent creepiness.
Danielle is quite happy that this means she'll finally get to leave the castle that feels "evil" to her. The night before their planned departure, she has an even stranger dream. A naked Rita presides on a throne over some more naked young women. A shadowy figure carries an unconscious (and of course equally naked) young woman onto a kind of slab. Rita gets closer to the slab and scratches her victim's chest with suddenly claw-like fingernails.
The next morning, a naked young woman is found dead in the vicinity of the castle. There are no discernible wounds on her body, except for the scratches on her chest...
In a twist no regular viewer of any kind of film will have seen coming, the local police ask super reporter Jean to stay at the castle to help them(!) in their investigation. Probably as surprised as we are, he agrees to the proposition. Rita is glad to have him and especially Danielle in the house a little longer, so Jean starts a long and rather circumcisious investigation that leads him to more dead women and the dreaded truth that drove his friend mad.
All the while, Danielle falls more and more under Rita's hypnotic power, helpfully providing more naked breasts and a little lesbian frisson.
As should be clear from the synopsis, neither a tight nor an original plot are strengths of La Notte Dei Dannati (which translates to "Night of the Damned", by the way); the film instead uses every cliché of gothic horror one could wish to see, without any irony to speak of. The exclusion of irony or humor is a very commendable directorial decision. Irony would have transferred the film from the realm of the dream into the realm of the ridiculous.
The castle interior is a little gothic dream, its lack of windows keeping even daylight scenes mostly illuminated by yellow candle light (and the set looking less like a set). The first scene back in the modern world comes as quite a shock - the castle is so much part of a nightmare that it makes the outside world seem unreal. Additionally, the passage of time as seen in the movie seems slightly skewed in a way more cynical people will interpret as a weakness of the script, but that does in fact only strengthen the irreality of everything happening in the castle until we can't be surprised by Danielle's difficulties in distinguishing between dream and reality.
Director Filippo Ratti was no Mario Bava and had probably even less money to work with than Bava usually did, but he artfully creates the kind of slow and -and I must repeat myself here - dreamlike mood one looks for in an Italian gothic, mostly leaving logic behind for atmosphere and getting away with it easily.
My only real gripe with the film is a certain lack of pay-off. The climax is quite weak, the banishing of the witch looks more like an afterthought than like a grand finale. I am tempted to say this is in keeping with the dream state of the whole narrative, but it's probably more based on lack of funds as well as ideas on the side of the producers.
Be that as it may, La Notte Dei Dannati is a very fine film that deserves to be rediscovered. It should satisfy every friend of gothic horror.
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