We’re living through a time of horror. Cinematically speaking, of course. Whether for Halloween or in general, an overwhelming and bewildering number of scary tales are flooding the home video market from all directions and labels.
For the kind of scares that give you pleasure instead of lying awake in stress, the following list selects five recent releases of newly mastered spookery that have one thing in common: the films all hail from the 1970s. We’ve done this for the sake of order amid chaos, and because there’s just something about 1970s horror.
Why are 1970s horror movies so alluring? Perhaps the question is loaded, for just about all 1970s movies feel alluring, the least being watchable curiosities and the best being masterpieces. We believe it’s got something to do with that decade’s desire to unshackle from various strictures of censorship, taste, and politeness in the arts, politics, and cultures of the world, not to mention a general reaction to world events.
Horror movies are a convenient, ubiquitous, hydra-headed form for expressing and processing our real-world cultural fears and freak-outs. These films may be from the 1970s, but the fears they face are no less real in these times.
1970s Halloween Horror Movies
Dan Curtis’ Late-Night Mysteries
This Kino Lorber Blu-ray set reaches back to 1973 to deliver four shockers produced for late-night television by Dan Curtis. He’s the master behind Dark Shadows, the soap opera that aired from 1966 to 1971 and has spawned revivals and media tie-ins galore. After that series wrapped, Curtis moved on to TV movies, including such classics as The Night Stalker (1972) and Trilogy of Terror (1975).
More obscure are the four Late-Night Mysteries here, which give off a videotaped soapy vibe in these horror movies. The best is the only supernatural entry, The Possession of Carol Enders. When two women die at the same moment in a hospital, the spirit of one possesses the other’s body, and that ghost ends up investigating her own murder.
The mystery is nicely handled, and Meredith Baxter enjoys herself as a woman in the wrong body. The best non-fantasy is the brooding Come Die with Me, in which George Maharis plays a wastrel who becomes the love-slave of a repressed housekeeper played by Eileen Brennan.
Both films are directed by Burt Brinckerhoff near the start of his prolific TV career. The other two titles on the Blu-ray are Herbert Kenwith’s Shadow of Fear, starring Claude Akins, and Lela Swift’s Nightmare at 43 Hillcrest, starring Mariette Hartley. All four films come with commentary.
Bloodstained Italy
Three 1970s obscurities populate this Blu-ray set from Vinegar Syndrome, and the common quality is a genre-bending bait-and-switch mentality. Giulio Petroni’s Obscene Desire (L’osceno desiderio, 1978) sounds like softcore porn but turns out to be a gothic variant of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) with post-Exorcist and Omen vibes.
Leopolda Savona’s Death Falls Lightly (La morte scende leggera, 1972) has a guy who didn’t kill his wife (or did he?) hiding in an abandoned hotel where bizarre things happen. The main story can be guessed, but there’s one nice twist.
Best and campiest is Riccardo Ghione’s The Bloodstained Lawn (Il prato macchiato di rosso, 1973), whose title hints at the absurdism of what turns out to be a sociopolitical satire. A kinky, rich couple corral a group of social outcasts for a plot involving blood and robots. When not blasting Richard Wagner’s music, the score by Teo Usuelli emanates the era’s hip Italian vibes.
All three films in Bloodstained Italy are gorgeously scanned and restored in 2K, and all come with commentary and interviews.
The Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse
A parade of women in fabulous couture, elegant coiffure, and extravagant eyelashes wanders through artfully lit corridors and other photogenic locales while schlubby men discuss the comatose plot, and the musical score flows from lazy lounge to shrieky jazz. Such is the world of Jesus Franco, the indefatigable Spanish auteur of horror movies.
His German co-production, The Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse (onscreen title: Dr. M schlaegt zu, 1972), riffs on the superspy-and-master-criminal films invented by Fritz Lang in the silent era, as an alleged criminal genius in a lighthouse connives to steal the formula for something or other. There’s a Frankenstein monster, a brassy ecdysiast, a cowboy sheriff, and plenty of mod decor.
Francophiles know better than to watch his films for plot. Reviewers who happened to wander into one of his epics tended to use words like “ramshackle” and “incompetent” to describe his no-budget cinematic improvs, which resemble dreams captured on celluloid. Their unity becomes clearer upon seeing how the countless titles reflect one another in funhouse mirrors. In other words, Jesus Franco is an acquired taste.
A dual critical commentary leads devotees by the hand on this disc from Kino Lorber.
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death
Zohra Lampert is a celebrated cult actress who never broke into household fame, and one of her key roles is in John Hancock’s 1971 enigma Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.
As she narrates her own tale, Jessica has just emerged from a mental breakdown in an asylum when she and her husband take in a strange young woman as a boarder. Soon, everyone in town is acting strangely. Are they vampires? Zombies? Figments of Jessica’s imagination? All we know for sure is the film casts a haunting spell.
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death has been on DVD from Paramount and Blu-rays from Shout Factory and Imprint, and you mightn’t think another journey to the digital well is called for. Still, Vinegar Syndrome serves up a freshly remastered UHD/Blu-ray combo with new extras, and the results are as clammy and foggy as anyone could need for this unnerving chiller.
Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror
Paul Naschy, also known as Jacinto Molina, is an important actor-creator in Spanish horror movies, and Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror introduces his long-running character of Count Waldemar Daninsky, a tragic werewolf. The role allows Naschy to show off his prize-winning bodybuilder’s chest and his love for Gothic cinema.
While the Spanish title is El Marca del Hombre Lobo (The Mark of the Wolfman), this shorter English-dubbed incarnation was issued in the US as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror in 1971, with TV prints appearing two years later. Spain witnessed its version in 1968, effectively launching that country’s horror tradition. The Spanish original isn’t included on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray, but there’s a bonus set of deleted scenes.
After being infected by a werewolf revived from the tomb, Daninsky gets himself locked in a castle dungeon by a helpful young couple. A strange doctor (Julian Ugarte) and his wife (Aurora de Alba) arrive to help, except they turn out to be effete vampires who work their hypnosis on the couple until the climactic monster free-for-all.
The only element lacking in Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror is Frankenstein. Instead, in an absurd detail, we’re told the original werewolf is named Wolfstein. Talk about bait and switch.
What makes Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of the US release special is the rarely seen 3-D version, as performed in a difficult, protracted restoration by 3-D Film Archive. You must possess a 3-D TV and a player to view it properly. If not, the other options are the murky red-green anaglyphic version with glasses included, or else the plain flat version, which is preferable.
There are two commentaries; the most informative is an encyclopedically researched one by film scholar Tim Lucas.