There’s a long-standing tradition in European horror of misty castles, forbidden rituals, and writhing bodies in candlelit crypts. It’s a formula that’s yielded eerie masterpieces (The Night of the Hunter) and stylish slow burns (The Vampire Lovers). The Devil’s Plaything, on the other hand, is what happens when someone assembles those ingredients, but forgets to turn on the stove—or write a script.
Directed by Joseph W. Sarno, a man known more for erotic curiosity than gothic terror, this Swedish-West German-Swiss co-production sounds promising on paper: lesbian vampire cults, a family inheritance, and a cursed castle full of secrets. In practice, it’s 85 minutes of people slowly walking through hallways, intercut with enough gauzy, softcore bedroom scenes to make Cinemax After Dark blush. The only real horror here is how utterly inert the whole thing is.
Plot: A European Vacation in Purgatory
Two women arrive at a crumbling castle to hear a reading of a will. Why? Who knows. They’re apparently heirs to something—maybe real estate, maybe a demonic curse. Within moments, they’re under the icy gaze of Wanda (played with spooky blandness by Nadia Henkowa), a stern housekeeper/high priestess who runs late-night vampire orgies in the basement.
There’s also a local anthropologist and her conveniently shirtless brother, who crash the castle after a car accident. These two exist to ask questions that the script never answers, then lounge around waiting for Wanda’s cult to start writhing again.
The real villain? Varga, a vampire baroness who was burned alive centuries ago. She now lives on in memory, sapphic ritual, and enough red-tinted flashbacks to give you eye strain. The plot plods forward: Wanda seduces, rituals are performed, people moan in a variety of languages, and any hint of dramatic tension dies faster than the cast’s hair dye in candlelight.
Characters: Vampires, Victims, and Very Little Else
Let’s talk about characterization. Actually, let’s not—because there isn’t any. The cast functions less as characters and more as mannequins in various states of undress, reacting with the emotional range of a European department store window.
Nadia Henkowa plays Wanda with all the seductive menace of a librarian who’s been kept late after closing. Patty Shepard, usually a reliable scream queen, phones in her performance as Delia with a fog of indifference that suggests she may have been reading cue cards off a candelabra.
The supporting cast—especially the anthropologist and her himbo brother—feel air-dropped from another film entirely. They stumble into scenes like tourists who wandered into the wrong Airbnb and just decided to stay. That they’re involved in anything supernatural is news to them, and possibly to the screenwriter.
Direction: Wandering Through Fog and Flesh
Joseph Sarno directs this movie with the urgency of someone stalling for time until the next scheduled nudity. Scenes meander. Characters stare blankly. We get endless wide shots of people walking through forests, castles, graveyards, and possibly their own confusion.
It’s meant to be erotic horror. The eroticism is awkward and repetitive, the horror nonexistent. There are moans, yes, but they’re less expressions of ecstasy or terror and more like the sound you make when trying to stand up from a couch after leg day. Every “ritual” scene blurs into the next: some candles, some breasts, some vaguely Satanic chanting, then cut to someone looking concerned in a hallway. Rinse and repeat.
The pacing is so slow you could watch your own hair grow between plot points.
Themes: Lesbian Vampires and the Curse of No Budget
The Devil’s Plaything flirts with some well-worn gothic tropes—ancient curses, lesbian vampires, family secrets—but never dares to do anything interesting with them. There’s an air of exploitation, but even that feels half-hearted. The film wants to be Carmilla with more skin and fewer clothes, but it doesn’t have the elegance or tension of Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic. Instead, it just leers.
There’s a possible feminist subtext, buried under layers of cheap titillation and bad dubbing. Women dominate this world, and men are mostly clueless or disposable. But if The Devil’s Plaything is trying to say something about power, it forgot to whisper it to the audience.
Cinematography and Atmosphere: A Candlelit Yawn
Visually, the film wants to echo the fog-drenched compositions of Mario Bava or Jean Rollin, but ends up looking more like a hastily shot perfume commercial from 1972. The lighting is soft to the point of blur, as though the cinematographer was trying to save money on makeup effects by making everyone look like a ghost.
Even the castle—a horror film’s best friend—is wasted here. It’s never menacing, never looming. It’s just another dusty backdrop to a series of listless seductions and whispered exposition. If the walls have ears, they fell asleep around the 20-minute mark.
Final Thoughts: A Stiff in Every Sense
There’s an audience for The Devil’s Plaything, but it likely consists of people who mistake “slow” for “atmospheric,” and “nudity” for “plot development.” For everyone else, it’s an 85-minute endurance test in satin robes and cheap fangs.
The worst part? There are moments where you can see what it could have been—a surreal, dreamlike descent into pagan horror, dripping with unease and eroticism. Instead, Sarno delivers a film so lazy, it practically reclines on the viewer.
Grade: D-
The only real curse here is the one placed on your attention span. Watch it only if you’re compiling a dissertation on 1970s Eurotrash horror—or if your idea of satanic terror involves a lot of lounging and very little menace.
