Director – Emilio P. Miraglia, Screenplay – Massimo Felisatti, Emilio P. Miraglia & Fabio Pittorru, Story – Massimo Felisatti & Fabio Pittorru, Photography – Gastone Di Giovanni, Music – Bruno Nicolai, Set Designer – Lorenzo Baraldi. Production Company – Phoenix Cinematografica Roma S.p.A..
Cast
Anthony Steffen (Lord Alan Cunningham), Marina Malfatti (Gladys), Rod Murdock (George Harriman), Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Dr Richard Timberlane), robert Maldera (Albert), Erika Blanc (Susie), Umberto Raho (Farley), Joan C. Davies (Aunt Agatha), M. Teresa Toffano (Polly), Paola Natale (Evelyn)
Plot
Lord Alan Cunningham is haunted by the memory of his late wife Evelyn. He likes to pick up red-haired girls and bring them to his villa in the countryside where he takes them to the dungeon in his basement and whips and kills them. At a party, he meets Gladys and decides that very night that he wants to marry her. However, not long after they marry, the ghost of Evelyn begins to appear around the house.
The Italian Giallo film emerged in the 1960s and its films have gained a cult following. The essence of the giallo genre was formulated, although not created, by Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), which originated most of the style that would be associated with the genre – of extravagantly colourful lighting schemes; murders with a psycho-sexual focus; and ornate directorial set-ups.
Predating the giallo film by a couple of years was the Continental Gothic, another genre that emerged out of Italy, created by Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960). This produced a body of brooding Gothic works usually shot in black-and-white and taking place in 19th Century settings or earlier and drawing much on the tropes of 19th Century Gothic literature. The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave comes with one foot in the Continental Gothic and the other in the giallo – the giallo film never bothered with ruined castles and dungeons or manifestations of the supernatural, which were the meat and bones or the Continental Gothic. This does at least offer one amusing take on the Continental Gothic reimagined as a stripper routine where Erika Blanc is brought in in a coffin to a stage lit by candelabra and emerges to do her thing.
One oddity is that the film seems to be wanting to give the impression that it is set in England, no doubt due to the popularity of Hammer Films and the Anglo-Horror Cycle around this time (which was a big influence on the Continental Gothic with stars like Christopher Lee even travelling to Italy to appear in some of the films). Anthony Steffen plays a lord and is said to live in a castle. However, the architecture of the villa and settings are definitely not English but distinctly Italian. Not to mention that the cars are left-hand drive rather than right-hand as they would be if we were in England.
Anthony Steffen helps Erika Blanc adjust her collar
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave comes with a fantastic opening that nails perfectly the mix of sophistication, disturbed psychology and pathological sexuality that lurks beneath the giallo film. Anthony Steffen picks up redhead M. Teresa Toffano and brings her back to his villa. The images throughout the scene – the cool sophistication of Steffen in his sleek green sports car; the arrival at the villa and the journey through rooms in abandoned ruin to arrive at a modernist apartment; he telling her to choose something to wear and she parading about topless in a fur-lined gown, before Steffen takes her down to his dungeon, imprisons her and brings out a bullwhip – are a striking mix of contrasts. Elsewhere, the film is filled with gorgeously decadent shots like naked romps in slow-motion in the grounds of the villa, pens of foxes, or an opening scene where Steffen makes an escape from a sanatorium through grounds that have a grassed amphitheatre filled with ruined statuary.
The film taps a level of kink that was always budding not far beneath the surface of the Continental Gothic, overtly in films like The Terror of Dr Hichcock (1962) and Night is the Phantom/The Whip and the Body (1965) and indirectly in the psycho-sexual focus of Blood and Black Lace et al. On the other hand, this feels like a sensationalistic hook that has been used to hang the film on. The Sadism and Torture element is not well integrated and you are not clear how we go from Anthony Steffen haunted by his wife’s death to wanting to torture and kill other redheads. It feels an improbable stretch even as the contorted psycho-thriller psychology of giallo films go.
In actuality, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave turns out to be far less interesting than it suggests it is going to be. The dungeon and torture elements abruptly vanish about halfway through. Anthony Steffen marries Marina Malfatti but then seems to see reappearances of his dead wife, the titular Evelyn. The film gives us less in the way of these hauntings than we expect. There is then [PLOT SPOILERS] an abrupt Rationalised Fantasy reveal to show there is no ghost, just an elaborate scam to steal Anthony Steffen’s fortune. Here the film does a blatant borrowing from the classic French Les Diaboliques (1955), whose elaborate twist was reused by a number of the Psycho-Thrillers of the 1960s. It is the intriguing, if unfulfilled, idea of Les Diaboliques reinterpreted as a giallo film. Not to mention, the film ends up with a very contorted moral point-of-view as a result – where Anthony Steffen is initially portrayed as a serial killer before the end of the film where he has become the sympathetic victim of a confidence scam.
This was one of six films directed by Emilio P. Miraglia (1924-82), who had elsewhere made crime films and Westerns. His one other venture into genre cinema was the gialloThe Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972).
