There’s a moment in Black Magic Rites when a character stares blankly into the void—motionless, detached, seemingly unaware that the camera is rolling. That moment, like many in Renato Polselli’s overcooked mess of a horror film, feels less like intentional surrealism and more like an existential cry for help from the cast and crew. This isn’t a movie. It’s a slow-motion fever dream buried under a mountain of fog machines, fake blood, and vacant stares. And no, you won’t like it.
Plot? What Plot?
Calling Black Magic Rites “plotless” would be charitable. The film functions like a reel of discarded horror fragments, loosely tied together with softcore sex, baroque torture, and a thick coating of Eurotrash sleaze. Ostensibly, it’s about vampires abducting and torturing women during full moons—because, why not? Meanwhile, other characters aimlessly wander a castle looking for something that may or may not be a coherent story.
There’s a thread involving reincarnation. There’s a castle. There’s Isabel, supposedly reincarnated. But by the time the film drags through its second or third drawn-out torture scene, your brain has likely abandoned all attempts to track what’s happening. Even the characters look confused.
The Direction: Polselli’s Pile of Excess
Renato Polselli directs this with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer dipped in body oil. His vision seems to consist of setting a camera down near a naked body and letting the scene play itself out until the actors lose interest. What should be atmospheric or haunting instead plays like an accidental parody of the giallo and Gothic horror traditions.
There are moments of psychedelic lighting—reds, greens, purples—that suggest the influence of Mario Bava or Jean Rollin. But where Bava and Rollin craft mood, Polselli crafts chaos. His use of color, while occasionally striking, is mostly just nauseating. You keep expecting the visuals to mean something. They never do.
The Performances: Are They Acting? Or Just Lost?
To say the actors are phoning it in would assume they had a working telephone. Most performances register somewhere between sleepwalking and suppressed giggling. Louis Paul rightly noted that some actors look seconds away from breaking into laughter, which would’ve added some needed energy. Instead, we’re left with wide-eyed stares, moaned lines, and awkward groping that passes for seduction or menace.
You get the feeling that none of the cast really knew what they were making—or why.
Eroticism or Exploitation? (Spoiler: It’s the Second One)
What Black Magic Rites lacks in coherence, it tries to make up for with near-constant nudity and a parade of sadomasochistic tableaux. Every 10 minutes or so, the film serves up another sacrificial victim: chained, whipped, branded, or licked by inexplicably topless vampires. These sequences are repetitive, clumsily shot, and devoid of any real eroticism. They’re not shocking—they’re boring. What should be titillating quickly becomes tiresome.
The censors in 1972 were blunt about the film’s “degenerate eroticism,” and for once, they weren’t exaggerating. The violence isn’t scary, the sex isn’t sexy, and together they form an unholy union of apathy.
The Music and Editing: The Final Nails
Even if you tried to follow the disjointed scenes, the editing would trip you up. Cuts feel arbitrary, dialogue scenes are looped into oblivion, and transitions give the sensation of being jolted awake from a nightmare, only to find yourself still inside it.
The music, meanwhile, is aggressively mismatched—sometimes jazzy, sometimes dirge-like, often misplaced. It adds nothing to the atmosphere. Like much of the movie, it’s just there, filling space while the story disappears into its own fog.
Cult Value? Or Cult Punishment?
It’s tempting to forgive Black Magic Rites as a product of its era—a psychedelic relic from a time of experimentation and censorship. But even measured against its contemporaries, this film is a mess. There are sleazy Italian horror films that succeed because of their atmosphere (The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), their audacity (The Beyond), or their style (Suspiria). Black Magic Rites has none of these qualities. It’s exploitation without the fun, psychedelia without the vision, and horror without the scares.
Yes, there’s a cult following. There’s always a cult following. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good movie. It just means some people enjoy watching cinematic car crashes.
Conclusion: Skip the Ritual
Black Magic Rites isn’t “so bad it’s good.” It’s just bad. Incoherent, repetitive, and frustratingly inert, it fails as horror, erotic thriller, or even softcore spectacle. Watching it feels like being trapped in a Halloween store smoke machine for 90 minutes while someone plays outtakes from a forgotten porno on loop.
If you’re in the mood for witches, vampires, or erotic horror, you have better options. Black Sunday, Daughters of Darkness, even Lisa and the Devil will serve your cravings with some measure of artistry. But Black Magic Rites? This one should’ve stayed lost.
Verdict: A plotless, tasteless, patience-testing ordeal. Avoid unless you’re conducting your own dark ritual in cinematic masochism.
