There are bad horror films, and then there are horror films so catastrophically inert that even Satan himself would leave the theater halfway through to go catch a matinee of Love Story. The Night of the Damned (La notte dei dannati), a 1971 Italian curiosity directed by Filippo Ratti, is one such endurance test. It arrives billed as gothic horror but plays more like a community theater séance staged by people who couldn’t frighten a toddler with a rubber spider.
If The Mephisto Waltz at least dressed its silliness in Jacqueline Bisset’s cheekbones, The Night of the Damned shows up in a moth-eaten costume cape it bought secondhand and pretends it’s couture. This is horror by way of discount Halloween decorations—flimsy, gaudy, and liable to fall apart in your hands.
A Prince, a Curse, and a Plot from the Dollar Bin
The story begins with Jean and Danielle Duprey, a married couple who receive a letter from an old friend, a prince who seems to have borrowed his entire vocabulary from Charles Baudelaire. He sends riddles, cryptic references to Les Fleurs du mal, and an invitation to his castle. Any sensible couple would set the letter on fire and get on with their lives. Jean and Danielle pack their bags.
Once at the castle, they meet the prince’s wife, Rita (Patrizia Viotti), a woman with the allure of an overworked hostess at a seaside trattoria. The prince is dying of some generational curse that makes men in his family deteriorate after age thirty-five. Instead of a doctor, he seems to need an exorcist, or perhaps a better screenwriter.
Jean quickly discovers a book about witchcraft, an ominous ring, and a 17th-century sorcery trial featuring the name Tarin Drole. After a few Scooby-Doo-level deductions, he realizes it’s an anagram of Rita Lernod. Surprise: the prince’s wife is actually a centuries-old witch. Cue the fake thunder, dry ice, and an audience wondering if there’s still time to sneak into a different movie.
Horror So Tame It Could Babysit
Horror depends on atmosphere, but The Night of the Damned has all the atmosphere of a bus terminal at noon. Shadows fall in the wrong direction, the castle looks suspiciously like an abandoned soundstage, and the supposed nightmares of Danielle involve her being burned at the stake in a sequence so tepid it resembles a Renaissance fair rehearsal.
The film wants to be gothic, but it’s about as spooky as a lost episode of Scooby-Doo where the gang forgets to bring the dog. Danielle faints on cue, Jean discovers one limp clue after another, and corpses turn up in ways so bloodless they feel like administrative oversights. Even the ghost of the prince, which should have been a terrifying set piece, looks like a man who wandered onto set after missing his bus home.
Acting: Or Whatever This Is
Pierre Brice, a French actor best known for playing Apache chief Winnetou in a string of German westerns, stars as Jean. He spends most of the film squinting, as if trying to read the subtitles from too far away. Patrizia Viotti as Rita has the thankless task of being both witch and seductress but ends up with the charisma of a wet sponge. Angela De Leo, as Danielle, does little more than tremble, gasp, and make the audience nostalgic for Barbara Steele, who at least knew how to suffer beautifully in Italian horror.
Every performance is so wooden you half expect the set to burst into flames from the friction. If acting were measured by how convincingly one can stand in a hallway and look mildly confused, this cast deserves Oscars.
Music by Recycling Bin
Carlo Savina provides the score, but anyone paying attention will notice that much of it is recycled wholesale from his earlier work on Malenka. Horror thrives on music—think Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking strings in Psycho or Jerry Goldsmith’s satanic choruses in The Omen. Here, Savina seems to be rummaging through his leftovers, microwaving yesterday’s cues and hoping nobody notices the smell.
It’s less a score than an apology, an aural reminder that even the composer had better things to do.
Production Values: Gothic on a Budget
Shot in Ceri, Cerveteri, and Elios Studios in Rome, the film makes lavish use of crumbling sets that look one stiff breeze away from collapse. The cinematography by Girolamo La Rosa has the sickly pallor of a postcard left too long in the sun. The editing by Rolando Salvatore is so slack you can feel entire reels of film begging to be put out of their misery.
At one point, Jean throws a boulder to interrupt a satanic ritual. Instead of suspense, the sequence inspires giggles. The witch instantly ages into a hag and dies, as though the director suddenly remembered he had only ten minutes of runtime left and wanted to wrap things up before lunch. The castle explodes (offscreen, naturally), and Jean and Danielle go home. When another letter from another prince arrives, Danielle burns it, which is the most relatable act in the entire movie.
The Censors and the Nude Version
If the movie weren’t already bad enough, it also achieved the rare distinction of being accidentally screened in France under the title Les nuits sexuelles, padded with sleazy nude inserts featuring lesbian tickling and handmaiden orgies. This was apparently meant to spice up the box office, but instead made audiences demand refunds when the wrong version was screened in Genoa. Imagine being so boring that even naked women can’t save you. That’s The Night of the Damned.
A Box Office Curse
The movie grossed a measly 82 million lire—about what a Fellini film spent on espresso. By the time it limped to the censors, the production company Primax had already gone bankrupt. The audience, too, went bankrupt—emotionally, spiritually, and in some cases financially—just from sitting through it.
Final Damnation
The Night of the Damned is a film damned not by witches or Satan but by sheer mediocrity. It wants to be Black Sundaybut has the elegance of a moldy sandwich. It flirts with Baudelaire but lands squarely in bathroom graffiti. It whispers of curses, but the only real curse is having to watch it.
The title promises a night of terror, of sin, of blood-soaked gothic grandeur. What you get instead is eighty-six minutes of shrugs, fainting spells, and recycled music cues, capped with an explosion that looks like it was borrowed from a fireworks safety film.
If you want Italian gothic horror, watch Mario Bava. If you want Eurotrash sleaze, there are plenty of other options. If you want to waste ninety minutes and question your will to live, The Night of the Damned is waiting. Just remember: the true horror is not witches or curses. The true horror is boredom.
