Amando de Ossorio’s Malenka, the Vampire’s Niece is the kind of Gothic curio that makes you scratch your head and mutter, “Well, at least they tried.” On one hand, it’s one of the first vampire films from Spain, with castles, curses, villagers muttering over mugs of ale, and Anita Ekberg wandering through drafty corridors in gowns that look like they were borrowed from Hammer’s costume closet. On the other hand, it feels like Ossorio was so busy hanging velvet drapes and lighting candles that he forgot to make a decision on whether his movie was about actual vampires or just a gaslighting uncle with a taste for melodrama.
The setup is classic Gothic nonsense: Ekberg plays Sylvia, a wide-eyed heiress who inherits a title, a castle, and—unfortunately—a creep of an uncle, Count Walbrooke. Uncle Wally spends his days convincing Sylvia that her family is cursed and her aunt Malenka was a witch who basically set the family bloodline on fire. He insists Sylvia stay locked in the castle, unmarried, waiting for doom to claim her—because nothing says “warm family welcome” like psychological warfare and a little light whipping of the maid.
Now, in the Spanish cut, this is all revealed to be one big Scooby-Doo scam. The uncle isn’t a vampire at all—just a conman playing dress-up to make his niece lose her marbles. That’s the movie’s “twist”: no vampires, just some gaslight and a middle-aged man in a cape yelling about curses. The English-language version, however, slaps on an entirely new ending where Walbrooke actually disintegrates into a skeleton, retroactively turning the film into a supernatural monster flick. So depending on which cut you get, Malenka is either a tale of Gothic fraudulence… or a film that outright contradicts itself in the final ten seconds. It’s less storytelling and more like a drunken dealer adding a wild card to the deck after you’ve already lost the hand.
Anita Ekberg, once the goddess of La Dolce Vita, spends most of the movie looking vaguely confused, as though she’s not sure whether she’s in a vampire movie or a travelogue for crumbling castles of Europe. Her “virginal heiress” routine feels a bit too long in the tooth, but Ekberg still has a commanding presence—even if the script treats her less like a heroine and more like a gullible pawn in Walbrooke’s Gothic gaslight game.
The film’s charms lie in its atmosphere: fog, candelabras, creaky staircases, all the standard Euro-horror wallpaper. Julián Ugarte, fresh off another vampire gig in Paul Naschy’s Mark of the Wolfman, brings a nice dose of manic energy as Uncle Walbrooke, swinging between sinister mastermind and frustrated Scooby-Doo villain. Carlo Savina’s score adds a lush backdrop that occasionally makes the whole mess feel classier than it deserves.
But let’s not sugarcoat it: the pacing drags, the script stumbles over its own contradictions, and the scares are about as sharp as a rubber fang from a dime store Dracula kit. It’s Gothic horror that doesn’t quite commit—equal parts candlelit drama, fake-out mystery, and supernatural cheat.
So, is Malenka worth it? If you’re a Gothic completist, sure. If you like watching Anita Ekberg mope around a castle while her uncle gaslights her in two contradictory endings, it’s practically essential. But if you want a vampire movie that knows what it wants to be, look elsewhere. Malenka is less “bloodcurdling horror” and more “Halloween party where the host can’t decide between tarot cards or a rubber bat piñata.”
It’s a movie where the only real terror is narrative indecision.
