Italian gothic horror in the early 1960s was a booming cottage industry: castles, cobwebs, screaming women, and Christopher Lee collecting a paycheck while muttering through heavy makeup. Some of those films—Black Sunday, Castle of Blood—became classics. The Virgin of Nuremberg (La vergine di Norimberga), however, feels less like horror and more like a dreary museum tour where the guide forgot their script.
There are bad horror movies… and then there’s House of the Black Death, a film so bafflingly incoherent that it feels like a community theater production of Macbeth rewritten by a coven of confused goats. It boasts not one, not two, but three directors, which is impressive until you realize they were all apparently working off different scripts, on different days, and possibly in different dimensions.
This is the kind of film where if you blink, you’ll still miss nothing. Because nothing is happening. All the time. Forever.
Plot? More Like Potluck
The story, as much as one can decipher it without resorting to séance or divination, revolves around two ancient warlock brothers, Belial and Andre Desard, battling for control over their decrepit family estate. Andre spends the entire film bedridden, warning everyone in breathy tones that his brother Belial is “evil.” We know Belial is evil because he has goat horns on his forehead and keeps a personal harem of witches who belly dance around a Satanic altar like they’re auditioning for a Solid Gold remake directed by Aleister Crowley.
At one point, Belial turns Andre’s son into a werewolf through an incantation that may or may not have just been burping aggressively. Then he enchants his niece Serena into dancing like a Vegas showgirl on mescaline. It’s never clear if this is supposed to be horrifying or horny.
There’s also a subplot about doctors, curses, and incestuous implications that are thankfully not explored—because that would require effort. Or plot structure.
Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine: Never Together, Barely Awake
This movie stars horror legends Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine, which is like putting Dracula and Frankenstein on your movie poster—only to find out they never share the screen and were probably filmed in different counties, if not continents.
Carradine, as the bedridden Andre, delivers his lines with all the urgency of someone reading an audiobook through a Nyquil haze. He spends most of his scenes motionless in bed, as if the director told him to “act like you regret signing the contract.”
Lon Chaney Jr. at least gets to walk around in a bathrobe and mutter curses at people while the local community college modern dance class sways around him. His performance is somewhere between “drunken uncle at Thanksgiving” and “confused substitute teacher at a Renaissance fair.”
Three Directors, No Direction
Harold Daniels started this mess. Reginald LeBorg added some “trees.” And then Jerry Warren came in like a cinematic janitor with a glue stick and said, “Hold my bloodied beer.” The final result is a Frankenstein’s monster of stitched-together scenes, jump cuts, and random stock footage that may or may not have been from a weather report.
The movie was shot in black-and-white in 1965, a time when most horror films had transitioned to color. But the monochrome here is less “moody noir” and more “couldn’t afford film stock that year.”
And the editing? It’s like someone threw the film reels in a blender and fished them out alphabetically.
Satanic Soft Jazz and Other Crimes Against Cinema
The film’s true horror lies not in its rituals or transformations, but in its belly-dancing interludes. Every few minutes, the movie grinds to a halt so witches can do vaguely erotic interpretive dances that suggest Satan has terrible taste in music. It’s less Black Mass, more Black Velvet Lounge.
This padding—clearly added by Warren to extend the runtime past “short film”—goes on forever. It’s the horror equivalent of someone playing the same screensaver for 90 minutes and then calling it an exorcism.
Final Verdict: Diabolically Dull
House of the Black Death is a cinematic séance gone horribly wrong—an unholy trifecta of bad acting, worse editing, and a plot so confusing it makes Eraserhead look like a TED Talk. It’s like watching your drunk uncles perform a haunted house play in the basement, only everyone forgot their lines, costumes, and whether or not they were even invited.
And yet… there’s a weird charm to its incompetence. Like watching a cursed episode of The Munsters rewritten by stoned goths with a dance fetish. It’s bad. But it’s gloriously, gothically, goat-horned bad.
★☆☆☆☆ – One star for Satan, one star for Carradine’s bed rest, and zero stars for everything else.
