The Long Hair of Death (1965)

Original title: I lunghi capelli della morte

The 15th Century. Adele Karnstein, the mother of Helen (Barbara Steele) and her kid sister Lisabeth, is accused of witchcraft thanks to the machinations of Kurt von Humboldt (George Ardisson), the son of the local ruler, Count Humboldt (Giuliano Raffaelli). Helen is willing to pay the rather steep price of sleeping with the count if that should set her mother free, but the Count’s apparently not a man to pay what he owes afterwards, so Adele is still getting burned. The woman, certainly no witch before that, curses the Humboldts, their descendants and their lands.

Helen finds herself dying in an “accident” a short time later, too. However, perhaps bitten by a slight case of conscience, Humboldt does take little Lisabeth in to raise her as what amounts to a daughter - and since we never see or hear about the two girls’ father, we might get some additional thoughts about what kind of a man the good Count is.

Ten years or so later, Lisabeth has grown up to be played by Halina Zalewska. Her mother’s curse seems to come true, for the land is plagued by drought and pestilence, turning the Count into a very bitter and angry old man. Kurt has developed what goes as a romantic interest for the kind of guy the is in Lisabeth. The girl wants nothing to do with him whatsoever, but once the Count dies mid-rant, she is in no position anymore to say no to his “proposal” of marriage.

Some time later, things have not improved for the Humboldt lands. Lisabeth, while not having grown to love Kurt for obvious reasons, has grown somewhat possessive of him, finding it difficult to reconcile this feeling with her hatred for her husband as a Humboldt as well as an individual. On the night of a terrible storm, Helen – in a fantastic sequence - rises from her grave and turns up in the Humboldt’s chapel. Kurt, who, like everyone else who knew Helen, doesn’t recognize her at all, quickly falls in terrible lust with the woman who now calls herself Mary, breaking whatever the emotional bonds between him and his wife may be, and soon starts to plan her murder. From there on out, things begin to go very badly indeed for the man, madness and much worse awaiting.

The Long Hair of Death is certainly not the best of the gothic horror films of house favourite Antonio Margheriti (as usual, working under his nom de plum of Anthony Dawson in most parts of the world), it being paced a bit too leisurely even for its genre and time and not quite delivering the dramatic tension of Horror Castle and Castle of Blood. However, it perfectly encapsulates the tone of morbidity and perversity always lurking under the surface of its genre, and every positive human feeling is perverted into its worst form.

Love in particular as portrayed here is a terrible power for the worst, but then, all love in the film is twisted in some way, shape or form. This is exemplified in Kurt’s desire for Lisabeth, a feeling that never rises above the wish to possess her in whatever way possible. The kind of love that eventually arises in Lisabeth in response, however, is just as terrible in its own way, mirroring his sense of possession where hatred would seem the much healthier alternative. And let’s not even think about what exactly is going on between her and her dead sister, supernatural vengeance perverting this relationship too until it is only a tool for destruction. Clearly, there is something very wrong in the lands of the Humboldt’s.

Margheriti’s goes all out in emphasising the way all the central human relationships here seem perverted and twisted, apart from a handful of genuinely human gestures between Lisabeth and the lady Grumalda (Laura Nucci). But then, Grumalda’s motherly love for Lisabeth will also make her complicit in the vengeance plan from beyond the grave, paying back Kurt’s cruelty with just as much of their own.

All of this is clad in an increasingly nightmarish mood of stark contrasts between shadow and light. The decrepit corridors of the castle becoming ever more labyrinth-like, and the paths the characters take through them increasingly draw them downwards towards the castle’s crypts (and death). It’s morbid in a very precise way.


On the acting side, Steele, not surprisingly, dominates proceedings with sheer charisma (technique really isn’t something of much use for an actress or actor in Italian horror of this time), which is only fit and proper since Helen as Mary does dominate the other characters one way or the other, too.