Let’s start with a bold claim: The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave is a film that dares to ask, “What if we combined Gothic horror, giallo murder, and erotic psychosis into one moody mess — and then just gave up halfway through?” It is a movie so singular in its ambition, and so gloriously incompetent in its execution, that it might as well have been written by a Ouija board and shot through a bottle of Campari.
This is a bad film. Not the kind of bad you can forgive with charm, like an Ed Wood fever dream. This is the kind of bad where you pause to make sure your television isn’t gaslighting you. It isn’t merely incoherent — it’s confidently incoherent, strutted out in crushed velvet and eyeliner, drenched in red lighting, and anchored by the emotional range of a damp cravat.
Plot: Ghosts, Guilt, and Ghastly Mustaches
The plot, such as it is, follows Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen), a man who wears the tortured grimace of someone perpetually stuck in the “before” photo of an antacid commercial. Alan has just emerged from a mental institution, having been driven mad by the discovery of his wife Evelyn in bed with another man. Most of us would cry, eat too much, and write bad poetry. Alan? He lures redheaded strippers to his torture dungeon for a little light murder.
And here, dear reader, is where we begin our descent into the curdled fondue of Italian gothic nonsense.
Alan has a family crypt, an aunt in a wheelchair, and a cousin named George who appears to have wandered in from a Bond villain casting call. There’s also a séance, a haunted mansion, a strip club, a woman named Susan who is either a stripper, a ghost, or a red herring (maybe all three), and a bizarre subplot involving poisoned champagne. It’s a stew of Gothic and giallo ingredients thrown together without a recipe, set to boil, and left to simmer until the plot dissolves.
When Alan finally marries a seemingly nice blonde named Gladys (Marina Malfatti), things settle down — for about five minutes. Then the paintings start leering, the aunt gets stabbed, and the ghost of Evelyn pops up like a recurring rash. But wait! Turns out Evelyn isn’t really back from the grave. Or maybe she is. Or maybe it’s Susan wearing a red wig and a bucket of powder. Who knows? Certainly not the screenwriter.
Acting: The Dead Do Not Overact — But These People Do
Anthony Steffen, known for spaghetti westerns, plays Lord Alan with the lifeless charm of a damp tea towel. He is meant to be tormented, sexy, unhinged — but mostly he looks like a man who just got lost on the way to a Hugo Boss commercial. His eyes convey precisely nothing, though I suspect he thought they were conveying everything.
Marina Malfatti’s Gladys seems intelligent — too intelligent for this script. Her line readings suggest she might be in a completely different film, perhaps one where women aren’t routinely slapped, hypnotized, or buried in backstory. Erika Blanc, the stripper/specter Susan, brings the only real jolt of life to the screen, which is a shame because she disappears halfway through the film, presumably having realized she was in The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave and not Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits.
The rest of the cast is filled with giallo stock types: the sneering cousin (Enzo Tarascio), the wheelchair-bound gothic aunt, and various housemaids who wander into frame long enough to scream and bleed out on a Victorian rug.
Direction and Style: A Fever Dream Shot in Sepulchral Soft Focus
Emilio Miraglia directs this film with all the subtlety of a taxidermist on LSD. His camera lingers on every candelabra, every moaning corridor, and every inch of Erika Blanc’s cleavage like a horny ghost trapped in a Cinemax after-dark rerun. There are zooms — oh, so many zooms — often for no narrative reason. A man opens a door? Zoom. A woman lights a cigarette? Zoom. A squirrel blinks? ZOOM.
The film is bathed in red lighting that would embarrass a bordello and features a musical score that veers between funereal organ music and jazz flute, often in the same scene. The séance scene, for example, sounds like the medium was channeling Miles Davis through a haunted kazoo.
Italian horror films from this era often relied on atmosphere over coherence, and that’s fine — style over substance can work when the style is stylish and the substance is not insane. But here, the style is overcooked, and the substance is “rich guy murders strippers because his wife cheated.” It’s less Macbeth, more Dateline: Baroque Edition.
Feminism by Way of Fetish Dungeon
This movie treats women the way a tax collector treats unpaid invoices: disposable, replaceable, and often screaming. Every female character exists to be ogled, manipulated, or murdered. There’s a fetishistic quality to the violence that’s queasy even by giallo standards. Strippers are bound, whipped, stalked in catacombs, and photographed post-mortem — all because Alan has the emotional resilience of a cheese danish.
Yes, these tropes were common in giallo and Gothic horror of the time, but Evelyn commits to them with such masturbatory glee that it becomes grotesque. And not in the fun Vincent Price way. More in the Red Shoe Diaries meets necrophilia way.
The Ending: Deus Ex Swimming Pool
Ah, the finale — where all good Gothic mysteries are resolved with… acid pool fertilizer?
That’s right. After a plot involving red wigs, faked hauntings, conspiracy, and double-crossing gold diggers, the climax involves George falling into an acidic swimming pool filled with sulfur-based fertilizer. He screams, melts like a wax figure at a barbecue, and we are told that Alan — the original villain, torturer, and multiple murderer — will now just go on living his life, presumably starting a second career in real estate.
Justice, Italian horror style: when in doubt, blame the pool.
Final Thoughts: Evelyn Came Out of the Grave — And I Wish She’d Stayed There
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave is not a good movie. It’s barely a functional one. But it is, in its own perverse, sleazy, deeply confused way, a memorable one. It plays like a Scooby-Doo episode if Scooby was replaced by a dominatrix and everyone had unresolved trauma.
It has all the hallmarks of Eurocult cinema: graphic violence, psychosexual melodrama, and a script that reads like it was translated from Italian to French to Esperanto to English by a distracted parrot.
★☆☆☆☆
One star. The grave may have opened, but my patience slammed it shut.
