Last night's viewing. Thanks to film historian and writer Tim Lucas for alerting me to this wonderful film with one of his posts yesterday. HOUSE OF TERRORS is a 1965 Japanese film (originally titled KAIDAN SEMUSHI OTOKO) that has been dubbed into Italian with English subtitles added. The result is a surreal melding of Japanese gothic and Eurohorror, the beautiful B&W photography dripping atmosphere like stalactites. The film starts with a young woman losing her husband after a long and painful mental illness, after which she learns she has inherited the deed to an old property he owned, a mansion invitingly called "Satan's Pit", a place haunted by the ghosts of its previous inhabitants and looked over by a hunchbacked caretaker. The fun starts from the moment it begins and rarely lets up, there's some moments of genuine creepiness and scares and the magnificent spooky sounds and ambient music sounds like it could have come straight off one of those GHOSTLY SOUNDS record LPs later put out by Power Records in the early-70s.
Highly recommended and definitely worth a watch, I don't think the film has been officially released on disc but it can be found on You Tube (apparently the Italian-dubbed print is the only one known to be floating around).
