I have always been a creature of the gothic. Long before I understood why certain things called to me — the crumbling manor, the flickering candle, the woman in the corridor who knows too much and says too little — I was already reaching for them. My bookshelves are the evidence. Decades of vintage gothic romance novels, their spines cracked and their pages soft with rereading, their covers featuring the obligatory woman in a flowing gown fleeing a house with one lit window. I know that woman. I have always been that woman, in the literary sense at least.
So it surprises me that it took me this long to find the films.
It happened the way the best discoveries happen — by accident, on a restless evening, with a bowl of soup and nowhere particular to be. I put on something called Nightmare Castle, a 1965 Italian Gothic horror film, not knowing quite what I was walking into. Within the first ten minutes I understood that I had found something that spoke the exact same language as every gothic novel I have ever loved.
The Woman in the Frame
The first thing you notice is Barbara Steele.
It would be impossible not to notice Barbara Steele. She has one of those faces that the camera falls in love with immediately and completely — enormous dark eyes that seem to contain entire rooms of shadow, a quality of presence that is simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous, the face of a woman who knows things she probably shouldn't. In black and white she is extraordinary. The contrast of the photography finds something in her features that color would soften into something more ordinary, and ordinary is the one thing Barbara Steele has never been.
She plays the unfaithful wife, which in a 1965 Italian Gothic film is the role that sets everything terrible into motion. And terrible things do follow, in the way of these films — the castle having its opinions, the husband having his dungeons, the housekeeper knowing absolutely everything and choosing her moments with the patience of someone who has been waiting a very long time.
This Is My Bookshelf, But Moving
Here is what struck me as I watched, soup cooling on the coffee table and the Kentucky night pressing against the windows: this is exactly my vintage gothic novels. Every element is present and accounted for.
The brooding husband with his secrets and his lower levels. The beautiful woman trapped in the architecture of a marriage that has revealed its true nature too late. The castle itself as a character, stone and shadow and the specific cold of rooms that have held suffering. The housekeeper — there is always a housekeeper in these stories, always watching, always knowing, always positioned precisely at the intersection of loyalty and something darker.
My gothic novels taught me to read these elements like a language. The crumbling estate means the family is rotten at its foundation. The locked room means the past is not finished. The woman who looks too long at the portrait means the present is haunted by something the official history declined to record. The candle that goes out means pay attention, something is about to shift.
Nightmare Castle speaks this language fluently and without apology. It is not trying to be anything other than what it is — atmospheric, gorgeous in its black and white severity, committed to the Gothic tradition with the specific devotion of Italian cinema in the 1960s, which took its horror seriously and its shadows even more seriously.
The Nosy Housekeeper and Other Gothic Institutions
I want to say something about the housekeeper because she deserves her moment.
In gothic fiction — the novels and apparently the films — the housekeeper is never merely domestic staff. She is the castle's memory. She has been there through things that have not been recorded anywhere official, and she has made her own quiet decisions about what to do with what she knows. She moves through the corridors with the authority of someone who understood the house before its current inhabitants arrived and expects to understand it after they are gone.
The housekeeper in Nightmare Castle is magnificent in precisely this way. She knows. She has always known. And she is positioned in relation to the husband in a way that the gothic reader will recognize immediately as significant — the alliance between the keeper of secrets and the maker of them being one of the genre's oldest and most reliable sources of dread.
I watched her and I thought of a hundred housekeepers in a hundred gothic novels, all of them variations on this same essential figure, and I felt the specific pleasure of recognition, of finding a familiar face in an unfamiliar room.
Why Black and White Is the Gothic's Native Language
The novels I love deal in atmosphere the way other fiction deals in plot. The atmosphere is the point. The creeping dread, the light that falls wrong, the temperature that drops without meteorological explanation, the sense that the house is aware of you in ways that houses are not supposed to be aware of anything.
Black and white photography does for film what prose does for the gothic novel. It strips away the distraction of color and leaves only shadow and light, contrast and depth, the face in the darkness and the darkness around the face. It is the visual equivalent of the gothic prose style — spare where it needs to be spare, ornate where the ornament serves the mood, always in the service of atmosphere rather than mere decoration.
Nightmare Castle is beautiful in this way. The cinematography understands that the shadow is as important as what the shadow falls on, that the corridor half-lit is more frightening than the corridor fully revealed, that Barbara Steele's face in three-quarter darkness is worth more than any amount of explicit horror.
A New Section of My Shelves
I came to this film by accident and I am leaving it with a new direction for this blog and a new section, metaphorically speaking, of my shelves.
Classic cinema — particularly Italian Gothic horror of the 1960s, and the broader world of classic Hollywood that I have barely touched — turns out to be the visual equivalent of the books I have always loved. The same grammar. The same architecture of dread and beauty. The same woman in the corridor, the same lit window, the same castle with opinions.
Barbara Steele leads to Mario Bava. Mario Bava leads to an entire tradition of Italian Gothic cinema. And beyond that, the black and white Hollywood world — Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and Gene Tierney and all the extraordinary faces that the classic camera loved — is waiting with its entire catalog of shadows and drawing rooms and secrets behind closed doors.
My gothic novels taught me to love this language. The films are teaching me that the language was always visual as well as written, that it lives in the shadow on the wall and the face in the darkness as much as it lives in the sentence on the page.
I did not expect a restless evening and a bowl of soup to open this particular door.
But that is the thing about gothic doors, isn't it. They are always where you least expect them. And they always open onto something you were always going to find.
***All images were obtained through a google image search, I do not claim any copyrights to any images shared in this blog, they are used for informative purposes only