If Lucifera: Demon Lover were any more obscure, it would be a figment of your imagination. Scratch that—it already feels like a figment. A half-remembered fever dream filmed inside a fog machine, stitched together from leftover wigs, candle stubs, and plot threads someone dropped down a Gothic well.
Released in 1972 and directed (allegedly) by Paolo Lombardo, this Italian horror film is best remembered for not being remembered at all. It’s a relic from the deepest recesses of the Italian exploitation vault, where even die-hard genre fans venture with caution—and holy water.
The setup is simple: three women visit a creepy old castle rumored to house Satan himself, and one of them falls asleep and wakes up a few centuries earlier, presumably because time travel is easier when your director can’t stay awake on set.
Plot? What Plot?
If you’re looking for a story, go somewhere else. No, seriously—leave now. Lucifera: Demon Lover doesn’t have a plot so much as it has vague occurrences. Here’s the general flow:
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Women go to a castle.
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One of them, Helga (Rosalba Neri), naps her way into the 17th century.
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A man in a red hood stalks her.
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Various shirtless people wander around corridors.
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There’s some heavy petting, some torture, some zooms on people’s eyes, and a goat or two (we assume).
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Someone is maybe possessed. Or cursed. Or mildly annoyed.
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The end arrives with all the clarity of a chalk drawing in a thunderstorm.
That’s it. That’s all. If this plot were any thinner, it would need subtitles to explain itself.
The Direction: Mostly Horizontal
The film was (technically) directed by Paolo Lombardo, though according to Rosalba Neri, the man could barely stand, let alone direct. She recalls he “couldn’t stay awake for more than two hours,” which is both tragic and completely in sync with the energy level of the film. The real horror may be that it was ever finished.
Robert Woods claims he was brought in to finish directing uncredited scenes. Whether or not he actually did is debated, but frankly, it doesn’t matter. The movie has no consistent tone, structure, or visual logic. Scenes fade in and out like ghosts too lazy to haunt anything effectively.
Performances: Stiff as the Corpses They Pretend to Be
Rosalba Neri, usually a genre queen in Eurocult horror, is given little to do here besides wander the castle in increasingly sheer outfits, look confused, and engage in poorly-lit erotica with men who seem more bored than bewitched.
Edmund Purdom plays some variation of “Gothic Man in Torment” and spends most of the movie looking like he lost a contact lens in a dungeon. Robert Woods, in his small part, tries valiantly to add a pulse, but he’s fighting against a screenplay written in disappearing ink.
Everyone else? Background mannequins. The dialogue is dubbed with all the emotional resonance of a broken Etch A Sketch.
Production Design: Hammer Horror on a Hangover
Shot at Castello Ruspoli and some studio in Rome, the set dressing consists of candelabras, dusty drapes, and the occasional dungeon prop left over from better movies. Everything is dimly lit, not for mood, but because electricity costs money.
You can almost smell the mildew. Characters walk down the same hallway six times because the budget couldn’t afford a second hallway. Mirrors crack. Lights flicker. The castle sighs in boredom.
The erotic scenes (yes, plural) were deemed so artistically unrefined that the Italian censors demanded over 180 meters of film be cut—not because they were too hot to handle, but because they were too awkward to endure.
Eroticism, Satanism, and Snoozefests: A Bad Throuple
The film wants to be sexy. It wants to be dangerous. It wants to make you question whether Helga is falling for the devil or just having a really long nightmare in a historically inaccurate nightgown.
Instead, you get scenes of foggy groping, endless eye contact, and a red-hooded demon who walks like he’s late to a Renaissance fair. At no point does anything remotely terrifying happen—unless you count the horror of realizing you still have 40 minutes left.
Final Thoughts: The Devil May Care, But You Won’t
Lucifera: Demon Lover is Italian Gothic at its most incoherent, like someone tried to remake Black Sunday after sniffing too much candle wax. The title promises lust, devilry, danger. What you get is a boring costume drama wrapped in a shrug, drenched in fog, and abandoned by logic.
It’s slow. It’s sleepy. It’s stylish in the way a moth-eaten curtain is stylish. And worst of all? It’s not even fun bad. It’s boring bad, the kind of movie where you start cleaning your living room just to feel something.
★☆☆☆☆ out of 5.
Recommended only for Gothic horror completists, Rosalba Neri loyalists, or film historians looking to punish themselves.
