I VAMPIRI (1957)

I Vampiri may not be a great film, but it is a very important one and represents a considerable achievement when the circumstances of its production are considered. It is also a pivotal moment in the history of horror cinema as well as the careers of its two immensely influential directors: Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava. So, this newly restored print from Radiance on Blu-ray, boasting a beautiful 2K restoration of the unadulterated Italian theatrical version, will be welcomed by connoisseurs of Italian Gothic—the subgenre it spawned. It’s presented here alongside the significantly re-hashed UK and US cuts, respectively titled Lust of the Vampire and The Devil’s Commandment.

Following establishing shots of Paris over a rather grandiose orchestral opening score of strident horns and edgy strings, I Vampiri starts as a murder mystery when a young woman’s body is pulled from the Seine. The forensic examiner (an uncredited role for director Riccardo Freda) finds no obvious cause of death and no wounds, yet there is not a single drop of blood left in the body. We learn from a classic montage of spinning newspaper headlines that a serial killer known as ‘The Vampire’ has already claimed half a dozen victims.

Our expectations of a straightforward ‘whodunnit’ are confounded within the first 10 minutes when we are led to believe that we’ve clearly seen the face of the killer, reflected in a showgirl’s mirror moments before she is chloroformed. However, as the plot unfolds, things become increasingly less straightforward. At the scene of the abduction, Police Inspector Chantal (Carlo D’Angelo) is frustrated by the arrival of Pierre Lantin (Dario Michaelis), the interfering reporter responsible for those headlines which are attracting constant public scrutiny.

During the first act, I Vampiri deliberately throws in all the tropes of a noir-style police procedural: the beleaguered detective, the young tenacious journalist intent on breaking the big story, and his uncompromising editor (an uncredited role for the film’s scriptwriter, Piero Regnoli) who admonishes Lantin for wasting time and reassigns him to the newspaper’s Society Column as punishment. His first assignment is to cover a society ball being held at the castle of Duchess Giselle du Grand (Gianna Maria Canale), knowing that the roster of filthy-rich guests will grate against the reporter’s leftist views.

At the gloriously creepy ancient castle with its crumbling walls, tattered drapes, and grotesque statuary, we unexpectedly veer towards gothic romance. It is as if we stepped from a German Krimi right into a scenario by Edgar Allan Poe. The coat of arms emblazoned above the grand fireplace bears the motto ‘To Reign in Hell’ and we learn from the young and beautiful Duchess that the family crest dates back to their decisive involvement in the Crusades. She also makes no secret of her strong attraction to Lantin while he appears invulnerable to her charms.

When quizzed about this by Ronald (Angelo Galassi), the photographer accompanying him, we learn through expositional dialogue that the old Duchess Marguerita du Grand tried to steal Lantin’s father from his mother. It seems she was a vindictive and manipulative woman and, at least partly, is why he detests the wealth and unbridled power represented by the du Grand family, although this is now clearly waning.

The young Duchess Giselle explains that now the old Duchess is confined to her room and dying from a maddening illness, she wants to make amends for the wrongs of the past and heal the rift between their families. So, now we are into a generational saga with all the trimmings of a classic work of gothic literature. But wait! In secret chambers beneath the old castle is the laboratory of Professor Julian Du Grand (Antoine Balpêtré)—a set-up that could be straight out of one of Boris Karloff’s ‘Mad Doctors Sequence’ for Columbia Pictures. Just like Baron Frankenstein, the professor has a lumbering assistant (Al Lewis) and is researching the secret of creating life from death…

Perhaps the plot relies a little too heavily on convenient coincidence, such as the familial connections between the du Grands and Lantins. Or the, largely removed, romantic thread involving Lantin and Laurette (Wandisa Guida), a friend of the dead girl dragged from the river in the opening scene, who will later be abducted herself in one of my favourite sequences of this film…

She is stopped on the street by a blind accordionist who asks her to deliver a letter to an address which turns out to be an apartment crammed with creepy antique furnishings. After bolting the door behind her, the butler shows her through to a room where she is to wait for the mistress of the house. Whichever director oversaw these scenes does a splendid job. On entering the waiting room, our attention is drawn to an empty birdcage. Here the score by Roman Vlad is particularly effective as the music tinkles in time to the strobing shadows cast around the room that seem to cage Laurette.

A door ominously creaks open but there is no one there, just a tiny, adorable kitten – not the sort of cat that would claw at a caged canary at all. As she bends to pet the cute fluff-ball, the real predator creeps up behind her with chloroform in his black-gloved hands. I Vampiri is cited as the first film to use the ‘black-gloved killer’ trope that would become emblematic of the giallo genre via Mario Bava’s seminal Blood and Black Lace (1964).

When Lantin and Inspector Chantal turn up to investigate the premises, they find them completely bare. Apparently, no one has resided there since the end of the war, and the building is scheduled for demolition. The scars of war are evident throughout, from boarded-off bomb sites, closed roads, and shrapnel-scarred façades, to the damaged walls at the Castle. This is just one of several telling metaphors alluding to events of the past leaving their mark and threatening to resurface—like a body in the water—and threaten the precarious peace of the present.

There’s so much going on, with plenty of detours between red herrings and reveals, that one thing I Vampiri can never be accused of is being boring. It’s like a couple of entirely different films have been cut up and then reassembled to form a third, completely different story. In many ways, that’s exactly how the finished film came about.

One thing to bear in mind is how ground-breaking I Vampiri was as Italy’s first entry into the horror genre. Horror films weren’t distributed in Italy under the Mussolini regime, so never courted an audience. The closest thing they would have had easy access to were scary Disney films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which is why many early Italian horror films seem to include elements of the dark fairy tale.

So, when Riccardo Freda approached producers at Rome’s Titanus studios with his idea of making a horror film inspired by early German Expressionist cinema and the newly available Universal Monsters cycle of the 1930s, they were reluctant to leap into uncharted markets. He showed them a story treatment and won them over by betting that he could make his movie in less than a fortnight on a budget of 142 million Italian Lire—roughly £60,000 in today’s money.

As this would be his twentieth time in the director’s chair after a string of hits, mainly period action movies, the producers decided the risk may pay off and agreed to his wager pending approval of a full script the next day. Perhaps they had hoped this would be an impossible deadline, but reputedly Piero Regnoli spent all night dictating the screenplay to a coffee-fuelled typist and delivered it in time!

However, 10 days into the shoot, the studios checked on progress and, finding that only half the material was in the can, shut down the production. Riccardo Freda had probably intended to use what had already been shot as leverage for a budget and schedule extension rather than see the efforts of cast and crew go to waste. The studio remained deaf to his pleas, and the project was shelved.

The following year, the director of photography Mario Bava claimed he could complete the production in just a few days —some accounts say two, others say four. Either way, it would have been a miraculous feat. Bava and Regnoli reworked the story entirely to make use of what had already been filmed by adding a new narrative to hold everything together. Extraneous subplots were jettisoned, and some of the characters were renamed and swapped around. The result is a very different film with a simpler story which still benefits from plenty of weird little details that hint at something bigger going on in the background. For example, the different henchmen involved in the various nefarious deeds imply some sort of powerful and far-reaching influence behind the abductions and murders.

Admittedly, the plot remains fragmented, the dialogue is generally succinct and expositional, and characters behave in ways that suggest relationships we just don’t see develop. Despite these and other flaws, I Vampiri delivers a satisfying story. It’s a thinly veiled reworking of the same legend of Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Ecsed that would inspire Hammer’s Countess Dracula (1971) but with a science fiction medical subplot about ‘blood-washing’ and transfusions. Of course, Hammer films had only just dipped their toes into the sci-fi horror genre with The Quatermass Experiment (1955) and X the Unknown (1956) and were yet to begin generating the Gothic horror output that made them famous.

If nothing else, I Vampiri is an eminently watchable feast of gorgeous gothic imagery unlike anything else before. The wonderful, lavishly detailed set designs of Beni Montresor are exploited to full effect by the consummate cinematography of Mario Bava. He also used his skill with miniatures and glass paintings to extend some of them and to give the action filmed in Rome a convincing backdrop of recognisable Paris landmarks. There are several ideas, both visual and narrative, that he would recycle in the first film he’s credited as director, Mask of Satan / Black Sunday (1960)—the masterpiece that kicked off the Italian Horror genre—and both Bava and Freda would be instrumental in defining the genre to be known as ‘the giallo’.

ITALY | 1957 | 82 / 72 / 65 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ITALIAN

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• 2K restoration of the film presented with Italian audio. A careful restoration with sympathetic attention to the tonal grading that does Bava’s photography justice. It looks better than it ever could have before, and the sound has cleaned up nicely. This is particularly welcome to those who have only managed to see dodgy prints on VHS or poor transfers via YouTube.
• Alternate presentation of the UK Lust of the Vampire cut, newly transferred for this release from archival materials courtesy of the BFI National Archive (1959, 66 mins).
• Alternate SD presentation of the US The Devil’s Commandment cut (1960, 72 mins). The two international cuts are significantly different, with additional scenes inserted to pad out the already lean runtime after several scenes were excised. Not only that, but the English-language dubs also rewrite the dialogue, changing the relationships between some of the characters, which only adds confusion to the already fragmented narrative. However, these terrible international versions offer extra scenes that change the movie into something a little more akin to a giallo. Both open with an inserted scene of a woman undressing before being abducted from her bathtub—don’t get too excited though, there’s some nice foundation wear but no nudity. Later there’s another tedious sequence of a woman being stalked by a shadowy figure. Most of the inserted scenes are self-contained vignettes intended to add a sleazy frisson and are blandly shot with some truly terrible dialogue. In a couple, unconvincing stand-ins are used to extend extant scenes. On the plus side, there are additional rats, and the demise of the ‘vampire’ is given a little more emphasis including a satisfying shot of its desiccated face.
• NEW audio commentary by Tim Lucas (2023). No one gives commentary like Lucas, who covers everything one could want to know and then some. In addition to meticulous production notes and biographies of the cast and crew, he clearly explains the simple but ingenious special effects created by Mario Bava for the film, including the rapid ageing and rejuvenation sequences. These were achieved solely by the use of make-up and changing the colour of the lighting, which is imperceptible in a black and white print. He also points out how the skyline of Paris was created using photographs collaged onto sheets of glass placed between the camera and the action. He places the film in context with the cinema of Italy and the international scene. He goes on to share details about the real filming locations, some of which were demolished soon after. He also does his best to unpick which scenes were directed by Freda and which ones by Bava, surmising the necessary script changes that were required to stitch them together. He also discusses deleted and unfinished scenes and their bearing on the original story, which included a murderer, executed by the guillotine, who is reanimated as a sort of zombie enslaved by the medication required to prevent his body from rejecting his reattached head. As Lucas points out, this element would almost certainly have been cut by the censors anyway! He also shares fascinating trivia and meticulous details, such as which other films the headboard prop of the Duchess’s four-poster bed has appeared in. Tim Lucas is the biographer of Mario Bava and wrote the definitive book about his films, Mario Bava: All the Colours of the Dark, first published in 2007.
• ‘Bloodthirst’—a featurette on the making of the film with Fabio Melelli, Mario Bava and Dario Michaelis (2013, 17 mins). Fabio Melelli’s analytical approach begins with understanding the film as a ‘fantastical poliziotteschi’ and discussing how it then segues into gothic horror. He gives an overview of the careers of Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava. Additional insight is brought via an archival recording of Dario Michaelis talking about the making of I vampiri and an archival clip from 1975 of Mario Bava talking about the movie on an Italian television show. A clip of the missing guillotine scene mentioned by Lucas in the commentary is also included.
• Interview with Lamberto Bava (2022, 15 mins). Who better to talk about his father’s career? He recalls growing up against the backdrop of his father’s film productions before becoming Mario’s assistant director, and eventually a director in his own right. After placing I Vampiri in context, he recalls the events surrounding its conception and production.
• Interview with Leon Hunt, author of Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur (2024, 21 mins). He places I Vampiri into a historical framework and contextualises it with what was going on in the cinema industries of the UK and USA. He then tracks the beginnings of Italian horror to earlier forms in the peplum historical epics of Freda and those that Bava worked on as cinematographer. He then talks about the immediate influence that I Vampiri exerted on Italian cinema in the following few years, pointing out that big chunks of Mill of the Stone Women (1960) recycle some strikingly similar ideas.
• The Devil’s Commandment trailer.
• Optional English subtitles for Italian audio and English SDH for English audio.
• Reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters.
• Booklet featuring new writing by Roberto Curti, author of Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957-1969. Not available at the time of review.

Cast & Crew

directors: Riccardo Freda & Mario Bava (uncredited).
writers: Piero Regnoli & Riccardo Freda (story by Piero Regnoli).
starring: Gianna Maria Canale, Dario Michaelis, Wandisa Guida, Carlo D’Angelo, Antoine Balpêtré & Paul Müller.