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The gothic mode in Italian horror was effectively launched, and reached its early apotheosis, with the release of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday in 1960. An ensuing tidal wave of likeminded films flooded the market throughout the ’60s, before starting to dry up in the early ’70s, as the more modernist-inclined (and frequently more graphic) giallo came into prominence. Now Severin Films has gathered together four vintage examples of the Italian gothic trend in their new box set Danza Macabra Volume One. When it comes to sex and violence, those two requisite mainstays of the genre, the films run the gamut from almost timidly titillating to unabashedly lurid.

Renato Polselli’s The Monster of the Opera, from 1964, opens with arguably its strongest set piece, which is revealed to have been a dream sequence. This allows Polselli to openly embrace a surrealist aesthetic through oneiric slow motion, tilted cameras, disorienting high- and low-angle shots,...

Each month, we're commissioning a different artist to create a movie poster for a film exclusively playing on the platform. This January, José Luis Merino has made a poster for Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, which is receiving an exclusive global streaming premiere on Mubi starting January 13, 2021 in the UK and other countries.

The poster art for this 1973 Spanish horror yarn, reproduced on the cover of Troma’s new DVD, shows Gothic zombies, underground tombs, stitched-up corpses and buxom females—all depicted in that hand-sketched, morbidly colored, pulpy style that hoped to draw in an audience. To top it all off, there’s Last House On The Left-inspired ad copy that reads, “For the Squeamish, Keep Repeating, It Can’T Be True, It Can’T Be True, It Can’T Be True…” Ah, if only such motion pictures themselves were as good as their advertisements, but The Hanging Woman (a.k.a. La Orgia De Los Muertos, Return Of The Zombies and Beyond The Living Dead) is a fairly slow-going affair.

The narrative follows the structure of a murder mystery, with aloof, secretive townspeople in a 19th-century Scottish village getting picked off one by one by unseen, growling, shadowy figures—though admittedly,...

Lloyd Kaufman's Troma has announced that they will release "La Orgia de Los Muertos" (aka, "The Hanging Woman"), a Spanish/Italian co-production directed in 1973 by José Luis Merino Starring Stelvio Rosi, Gérard Tichy and Paul Naschy as Igor. As put by the press release: Paul Naschy plays a supporting role as a deranged gravedigger in this zombie movie, set in a small highland village in 19th-century Scotland, where a stranger's arrival to claim an inheritance is met with apocalyptic visions and other evil omens. The town unearths a crypt full of horrors, including a devil-worshipping coven and throngs of the living dead.. . . .