Der Teppich des Grauens / Carpet of Horror / Il terrore di notte / Terror en la noche

Within the opening minutes we learn that the cast of this 1962 krimi includes Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Dor and Werner Peters and that its director is Dr Harald Reinl. We also get establishing shots of London, meant to convince us that the film wasn’t made on a studio backlot in Germany and failing in this regard, and, of course, the opening murder, committed via a pellet that sublimates to give off a deadly gas. The victim was about to reveal the identity of a feared master-criminal. Scotland Yard are brought in to investigate…


The hand of doom

If all this is familiar stuff, there are also some unusual things about The Carpet of Terror – a somewhat misleading title, perhaps, but also one that sensibly downplays the Zyklon-B aspect of the killer's modus operandi for the German audience of the period – that make it worth the krimi enthusiast’s time.

For starters Fuchsberger's character, Harry Raffold – the allusion to gentleman thief Raffles is quite deliberate – is not a Scotland Yard man but rather a member of the secret service. This leads to a spot of confusion when he is arrested by an over-enthusiastic Scotland Yard man.


Fuchsberger and Besari

Raffold also has a black sidekick, Bob, played by Pierre Besari. While basically the film's Eddi Arent character, his ethnicity is never made an issue. This is in sharp contrast to monster roles like Al Hoosman's Bhag, where blackness and primitive savagery were part and parcel.

Behind the scenes there are also various points of note. Carpet of Horror was produced neither by Rialto nor by CCC but by Germania Film GmBH. Perhaps consequently it was based not upon an Edgar Wallace or Bryan Edgar Wallace source, these being the properties of Rialto and CCC respectively, but rather an imitation Wallace by German writer Louis Weinert-Wilson.

The film was also a Spanish and Italian co-production like most of Germania's output. Talent from both countries is present behind and in front of the camera including co-scriptwriter Eugenio Martin and composer Francesco De Masi – beneath a Germanised pseudonym – and actors Eleonora Rossi-Drago and Antonio Casas. As such, it might be considered a forerunner of CCC's co-production crossovers like the krimi-giallo What Have You Done to Solange? and Jess Franco's The Corpse Packs His Bags.


Who?

In other ways Carpet of Horror is more business as usual: Dor plays the orphan who has come into an inheritance of £50,000 and who ends up being rescued by and marrying Fuschbeger; most members of the criminal gang are leather-coated proletarian types; the police have a very un-British propensity for carrying and using firearms, and Big Ben's chimes are heard even when the action has relocated to a country house far outside of London.




The gang and the master's (non-)voice

Reinl also again engages in his Lang-isms, with the criminal mastermind a Mabuse like acousmetric figure who we never see until the end and who communicates with their minions via a TV monitor.

Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People

The second krimi to be made for Rialto by director Harald Reinl, Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People begins much where his first, The Fellowship of the Frog, had ended, as the mysterious master criminal Shelton who has hitherto run rings around the police is captured at last.






In case anyone doubts that we're really in London, England

Gunning down a policeman in a desperate bid to escape Shelton is sentenced to death by hanging. Facing the executioner in prison, Shelton seems remarkably calm, indicating that he will have his revenge on those present and the others he holds responsible for his death.




The hanged man's revenge?

Believing Shelton's warnings to be nothing more than an idle threat, Inspector Long (Joachim Fuchsberger) is about to resign from the force and take up a job in his father's Lord Long's bank.

Two things put paid to this plan.

The first is the Inspector's promotion to Chief Inspector, received on account of his bringing Shelton to justice. The second – far more important – is the question of whether Shelton, who apparently took his own life with poison to cheat the hangman, is in fact dead as a series of apparitions and accidents ensue.

Not believing in ghosts, Long orders the exhumation of Shelton's body, revealing a coffin filled with bricks and a hit list of targets, some already effectively crossed off and the remainder including himself and beautiful young bank worker Nora Sanders (Karin Dor, Reinl's wife at the time).

Though things get somewhat bogged down at this point with a confusing number of characters and subplots and a locked room mystery as another victim is somehow shot in the head in his hotel room – the various individuals having been gathered there to better allow Long to protect them whilst contuining the investigation – they pick up for the third act with a suspenseful game of cat and mouse between hero and villain(s) in the latter's trap-laden hideout.






Shelton's appearances and disappearances are well executed

If there is perhaps already a sense of deja vu about some of the characters and situations, the more Mabuse-like figure of Shelton provides Reinl more scope to play Langian games than the Frog did, pointing the way towards his actual Mabuse films, whilst the introduction of Eddi Arent's soon to be patented comic relief figure – here a police photographer who habitually faints at the sight of blood or a corpse – points the way forward for the Rialto series as a whole. (Arent had appeared in Der Racher, but it was not a Rialto production and proved to be a one-off from Kurt Ulrich Studios.)

Visually the film presents an advance on its predecessor, with some pronounced expressionist touches around the phantom Shelton's brief appearances in the shadows and / or fog, various chiaroscuro effects and some attention-grabbing but nevertheless restrained compositions alongside the elegant dolly work.




The good-humoured Long responds to the phantom's note by correcting his rank to Chief Inspector

There are also some repeated visual motifs such as the frequent Langian clocks – Reinl tellingly overlaying the first with his credit and cutting away from it at the exact moment of Shelton's intended execution – and the sudden appearance of a noose before the hangman in an ironic reprise of the noose he had placed before Shelton. (Reinl's way of introducing the nooses into the frame is also somewhat reminiscent of Leone's in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly)

The process shots, featuring racing cars and speedboats, are less satisfactory unless we work on the possible but unlikely seeming premise that this was intentional on Reinl's part, as a way of giving the film more of a 1920s or 30s feel, or of further drawing attention to its filmic nature beyond Arent's character. (Here it's worth remembering, however, that some of critics who would likely have taken Reinl to task here may well have been more sympathetic to the equally obvious process work in Hitchcock's Marnie, indicating the difficulty of drawing a clear distinction between bad filmmaking and Brechtian distanciation.)






Shelton as Mabuse

Heinz Funk's score is more experimental than its immediate crime-jazz predecessors, featuring some suitably disquietingly weird timbres and effects alongside the more usual suspense cues.

There is no ende gag yet, nor any Hier Spricht Edgar Wallace, though the Goldmann's novel is specified – nummer 11 in the series.

Edgar Wallace - Der Frosch mit der Maske / The Fellowship of the Frog / Frøen med masken

To quote Frank Booth: “This Is It!”

The it in question being the beginnings of the modern krimi film, the first of some 40 odd works based on the work of Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace to be made in West Germany between 1959 and 1972.

But whilst many such European genre film firsts are necessarily somewhat tentative, as with the 25 or so Italian westerns made before A Fistful of Dollars that imitated rather than transformed the pre-existing American models, it emerges as a surprisingly confident production whose imprints can still be felt in many a later entry in the series.

Certainly the missing elements, such as stock footage establishing that the film was 'really' shot in London – or more to the point wasn't – the colour credits sequence, and the twelve gunshots followed by the “Hier spricht Edgar Wallace” announcement are in the minority and only really become evident when the film is considered in the light of hindsight.

To itemise what we do have: a strangely attired master criminal; professional and amateur investigators, the former from Scotland Yard; a Soho nightspot, complete with singing femme fatale; a damsel in distress; a would-be avenger; a comic-relief butler; a blind peddlar who isn't all that he seems; a country house; the criminals' secret base; some neat self-referential touches – one investigator goes undercover as a lighting man and records a crucial crime scene with a concealed camera; a distinct propensity for British bobbies to seemingly carry firearms as a matter of course; and a confusingly large number of somehow interconnected characters to provide intrigue, victims and suspects as and when required.

The master criminal is the titular Frog, the head of a three-hundred strong gang identifiable by their numbers and the brand they all wear. His own identity is unknown, with the quest to unmask him propelling the story onwards at a characteristically breathless Wallace pace, wherein one year of undercover work by Inspector Higgins is telegraphed into a single sentence and a brief scene in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to apprehend the Frog.

As Higgins' body is found, complete with a couple of potential clues, footprints which do not match and a reside of cement dust in the dead man's mouth, the true investigators are revealed in the form of Inspector Hedge of the Yard and Richard Gordon, an American of independent means who affects the manners and lifestyle of an English gentleman – he is also the employer of the butler – and might as well be one.

Gordon and his butler are played by Joachim Fuchsberger and Eddi Arent, soon to become typed as the definitive hero and comic relief figures respectively, although Fuchsberger's heroes would hereafter tend more to be offficial representatives of the law.

With the man with the non-matching footprints soon identified as Mr Bennett we are next introduced to his son Ray and daughter Ella, whom the more attentive viewer might already recognise as one of the Frog's next targets, Higgins being the other.

While Ella is the dutiful daughter, concerned for her father's and brother's well-being – Mr Bennett always seems pre-occupied by his trips into London on unspecified business – Ray is somewhat wayward, with a desire for an easy life that leads him into trouble as in a short space of time he goes on to ignore the advice of the avuncular Mr Johnston at his work; anger their employer, the fearsome permanently be-gloved Mr Maitland, and winds up in a Soho club where he falls for the resident singer, named Lolita.

Sure enough, she is also involved with the Frog; even if we're still no clearer as to his identity – though Gordon suspects he may be wearing the mask to conceal his identity as missing master criminal Harry Lime, on the grounds that some sort of disfiguring mark would be too obvious / straightforward – we at least now have a number of suspects to work through.

Lime, of course, is also the name of the post-war profiteer in Graham Greene's story memorably brought to the screen by Carol Reed, with that Anton Karas zither score and Lime / Orson Welles's speech about cuckoo clocks and the Borgias; there was also a TV series around the time of the film in which he was reinvented as a detective hero.

Whether intentionally or otherwise Ray and Lolita are vaguely reminscent of characters from Weimar German films such as Asphalt, to recall the era of the first Wallace craze within Germany – one swiftly ended by the Nazis – and the way in which the novels and these films, though now coming across as naïve, harmless kitschy reminders of a more innocent-seeming age, were often shocking and controversial enough in their day.

Lolita's song, entitled “Night and Fog on the Thames,” has some interesting connotations here, in suggesting not only the danger of the area as presumably intended by its authors but also the phrase used by the Nazis when they arranged the “night and fog” disappearances of those they deemed undesirable.

Two other shock moments of note here the dispatching of an unfortunate policeman who happens upon the Frog's gang in the middle of a robbery and the way in which the Frog silences an over-noisy female prisoner. In the first, we don't get any POV shots of the attack as we might get in a later film, nor the actual the moment when throat is slit, but do get a surprisingly graphic hands clutching throat shot. In the second the Frog unexpectedly whips out a submachine gun and somewhat needlessly drills the woman full of holes to shut her up for good.

Away from Fuchsberger and Arent two other krimi regulars making their debut genre appearance are Fritz Rasp and Dieter Eppler, the latter also a familiar face from a number of straight horror productions of the time such as The Head and Castle of the Walking Dead.

Coincidentally or otherwise, Castle was also directed by Fellowship of the Frog helmsman Harald Reinl, who would go on to direct a further half-dozen Edgar Wallace entries, making him the second-most prolific director in the series after Alfred Vohrer.

With most of the camera set ups, angles and movements functional and the editing classical, the Expressionistic aspects of the film come primarily through elements within the frame, as this street or that interior is made darker and more dangerous looking or a light source 'just happens' to cast some suggestive pattern; the one time Reinl does break out some Third Man-esque Dutch angles is when a fist-fight breaks out, with this being a scene that also features some more dynamic camerawork and editing.

Willy Mattes's jazzy score is pleasing if comparatively lacking in the quirky qualities.that would came to the fore in later films.

Der Fälscher von London / The Forger of London

Released in 1961, this was the seventh Edgar Wallace krimi overall and the third of five to be directed by Harald Reinl, here working with his then-wife Karin Dor for the second time in the series.

Based upon Wallace's 1927 novel The Forger, it's an unusual piece in that it begins with a marriage – that of Dor's heroine Jane Leith to Peter Clifton – and then proceeds to suggest that Peter may well hereditarily insane with schizophrenia and amnesia, and the titular Forger of London to boot, before moving onto more familiar territory as Inspector Burke of the Yard proceeds to conduct his investigations along the lines that the mounting evidence against his friend – including the facts that he was known to have passed one of the forged notes, is an expert lithographer and is discovered by Jane in a secret room late one night working a printing press – is just that little bit too cut and dried...


We open at the Derby, with Edwardian class distinctions in full effect

Director Harald Reinl's Fritz Lang obsession is again apparent both in the wonderfully expressionistic mise en scène and the Mabuse-like plot machinations that ensue, ultimately revolving around a heard but not seen “acousmetric” figure behind the crimes who issues orders and counsel to his many minions from a room behind a one-way mirror, Blomberg.

Burke also fits into a Langian framework somewhat, being something of an ambiguous Scotland Yard man whose tactics, like those of like his counterparts in Lang's Dr Mabuse der Spieler and Spione, do not seem particularly different from those of his quarry at times, while another departure from the krimi norm circa 1961 raises the spectre of corruption within the ranks of the Yard itself.






Three views from Blomberg's lair

Indeed, with a bit more Door with the Seven Locks-style mad science on display one could almost imagine the film working as a Dr Mabuse entry, a point perhaps not lost on production company Rialto's rivals CCC who would release Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse, directed by Paul May and featuring several krimi film regulars including Klaus Kinski and Werner Peters, two years later. (As a throwaway speculation, we might also wonder whether May adopted his surname in reference to Joe May, one of the founding fathers of German popular cinema and the man who gave Lang an important early break.)


The obligatory Home Counties ancestral pile

Another thing worth noting is the way The Forger of London deals with psychological themes, especially when at one point modern art is deployed in an ambiguous 1940s Hollywood meets Nazi entartete kunst manner, hinting at a character's badness. (Within Lang's Scarlet Street, Edward G. Robinson's character Chris Cross, encouraged to embark on a life of crime by the woman he obsesses over, paints in a distinctly modern, non representational style, though there is a distinct irony if we consider Lang and Robinson's Jewish heritages – Robinson's given surname, which he reduced to his middle initial in the often racist Hollywood of the time, was Goldenberger – and the actor's own interest in abstract art and progressive politics.)




When the woman looks

Beyond the Langian references, the film is pretty much business as usual, with an effective Martin Bottcher score; reasonably well integrated if still obvious library footage; atmospheric use of location and studio sets; stock players like Eddi Arent performing their stock characters with customary aplomb, and that general sense of a group of filmmakers who knew where to fine tune their formula to keep things fresh and interesting and where to leave well alone.


A blade in the dark


The Joyless Street, 35 years and one war later

If there's an element of “what's in a name” emerging throughout this piece – Blomberg or Mabuse, the world of Wallace or Lang – it's perhaps best to conclude by indicating that, regardless of where else you might place it, The Forger of London belongs in the 'worth seeing' group of krimis.

Die Weisse Spinne / The White Spider

When her husband Richard dies in a car accident Muriel Irvine (Karin Dor) is surprised to learn that she is the beneficiary of a larger than expected insurance policy he had taken out only days before, £50,000 rather than £5,000. (Remember that this was back when having £50,000 meant you were actually worth something.)

It offers the prospect of wiping out Richard's debts to exclusive Soho bridge club and secret gambling den Club 55 and of leaving her with a tidy sum besides.

Unfortunately the Anglo Insurance Company suspect foul play – especially since Muriel only identified her husband's horribly burnt remains from his distinctive white glass spider good luck charm – and are reluctant to pay up. Indeed, having had several similar occurences recently, they even pass on details of the case to the police.

Inspector Dawson goes to Club 55 to investigate and is found floating in the Thames the next morning, prompting Scotland Yard's bosses to call in world-famous criminologist Conway from Australia to investigate further.

Worse follows as Mrs Irvine discovers that Richard also owed family lawyer Mr Summerfield money. It is a small sum, but still more than she can afford after paying for the funeral.


Who is behind the conspiracy?

Happily Summerfield, however, agrees to fight the case in exchange for a percentage of the insurance money and also finds Mrs Irvine a job working for a charitable foundation he is connected with. Its mission, as it so happens, is helping ex-convicts settle back into society. Two such cases, with no love lost for one another and old scores to settle, are ex-Dartmoor men Ralph Hubbard (Joachim Fuchsberger) and “Kiddie” Phillips (Horst Frank), released after stretches for extortion and armed robbery respectively.

As the story unfolds we learn that Club 55 has an even more sinister business, performing murders for hire. A multitude of questions emerge.

Who is behind the operation?

Who commissioned Richard Irvine's murder?

What are the relationships between the insurance company, the club and the foundation?

Is Richard still alive, having done something of a Double Face with his car and another's body?

Who, if anyone, can the viewer trust?

And, in more meta terms, when is a krimi not a krimi?

The broader use of the term would, after all, imply any crime film, after the origin of the term
and subgenre in taschenkrimi – i.e. pocket crime novel. The narrower use of it would however apply specifically to adaptations of Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. This puts Die Weisse Spinne / The White Spider in an in-between position: it’s a krimi by criterion A, but not by criterion B. To compound matters, it's by neither Rialto nor CCC.


The curse of the pan-and-scan strikes again

It looks as if the film's producers Arca-Winston wanted to get onto the Wallace bandwagon, but couldn't find an actual Wallace property not already taken by Rialto or CCC and thus settled on something in the same style by Louis Wiener Wilton, before setting about recruiting as many of the Rialto team as they could, including director Harald Reinl, his actress wife Karin Dor and, of course, perpetual Scotland Yard man Joachim Fuchsberger.

Behind the Wallace-esque pseudonym of Albert Tanner hides frequent krimi screenwriter Trygve Larsen, also known as Egon Eis. Intriguingly Eis had actually scripted a 1931 adaptation of Wallace’s The Squeaker before returning to the author 30 years later with The Fellowship of the Frog, The Red Circle and others for Rialto as Larsen.

Though they didn't get Eddi Arent for the comic relief role English-born Chris Howland makes an agreeable substitute, while the one-two-three of Horst Frank, Dieter Eppler and Werner Peters more than compensates for Klaus Kinski's absence.

The lack of a Siegfried Schurenberg style Sir John figure can be explained away by what is arguably the film's key departure from formula: the relegation of Scotland Yard to a subsidiary role, with Conway intriguingly presented as a Mabuse-like figure in a way that serves to highlight his affinities with the criminal mastermind behind the white spider murders and which seems intended to make you wonder just how far the murderous web might actually stretch.




The mise-en-scene positions us with Fuchsberger and Dor, lessening the sense of ambiguity

Unfortunately it's a conceit that doesn't quite come off, for the simple reason that we're likely to immediately reason that Fuchsberger's Hubbard is in actuality Conway and very definitely one of the good guys. Putting it another way, the filmmakers' willingness to experiment and to alienate their audience doesn't go that far – or far enough for their (white spider's) strategem to work.

Instead, the vague pretence that Fuchsberger is a bad guy overcomplicates and overextends the narrative while lessening our point of enagagement with it, especially since we're already working through something similar in relation to Dor's character.

It works better in her case because of the basic ground rules of this universe: an upstanding Scotland Yard man can always be trusted, whereas a woman may be an ingenue in peril, a treacherous spider woman, a combination of the two or even something else.

Far better, one thus suspects, had Reinl presented Conway and his nemesis to us as two sides of the same coin but let us know the former face of it from the outset – an approach, moreover, that would have been more consistent with his hero Lang if we think of Spione and the Weimer era Mabuse films.

Everything else – Peter Thomas's crime-jazz score; Frank's menacing professional killer with his unsettling preference for referring to himself in the third person; the talismanic, mythical qualities afforded Soho and Dartmoor; the anachronistic neo-expressionist German backlot vision of London; the surveillance technology etc. – is in perfect accord with the krimi formula, such that you would probably attribute the film to Wallace senior and Rialto if you missed the opening credits and ignored the absence of the ende joke.

Though compromised by a panned and scanned, badly dubbed VHS-rip with choppy sound, this ersatz Wallace is worth a look for the krimi completist. Others, however, would be better served by the real thing.

Lang / Reinl / Argento - some observations on The Invisible Dr Mabuse

Metropol(e|is)

The theatre featured in German-set The Invisible Dr Mabuse is called the Metropole, allowing Reinl to allude to Lang's Metropolis. On the Argento side of things the re-opened cinema in the Berlin-set Demons is also the Metropole.





This Metropole is currently showing what is described as an “operetta,” set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, though it also involves ballet and “Grand Guignol”, the latter again being explictly referred to within the diegesis.

Here it is worth remembering here how the (Italian) Grand Guignol was an important influence on the development of the horror films of Bava, Freda and company, whilst the French Revolutionary setting allows for a connection to Trauma specifically, through the “moving guillotine” and credit sequence / nursery room imagery.


Compare to the divas in Argento's Opera and Phantom of the Opera


His master's voice – the shadowy but not invisible Dr Mabuse

The star / diva of the show has attracted the attentions of an invisible admirer. While he sneaks into her dressing room to better observe her, significantly he declines to speak or identify him presence. This silence helps establish that he is almost certainly not Mabuse, whose defining qualities, as per Michel Chion's notion of the acousmetre, are the voice we hear coupled with the face and mouth we do not see.

It also distinguishes him from Argento's phantoms of Opera and ... the Opera, where the acousmetric qualities of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience are once more foregrounded.


Bobo / Haghi / Mabuse

Among Mabuse's underlings is a clown, Bobo, who seems to function as a way for Reinl to allude to Lang's Spione, whose master spy, Haghi, is a Mabuse in all but name with his plethora of identities and disguises.


Codename EDGAR

The director also has fun when the FBI agent makes contact with the local agents, whose cover is as an opticians – i.e. precisely something concerned with vision; extending to the investigator hero's ability to see through illusion to reality – and identifies himself by (mis)reading the letters off the chart, as EDGAR, as in Wallace.

Curiously the pseudo-scientific explanation behind the film's invisibility device does not seem all that removed from the James Bond film Die Another Day, reminding us of the long pre-history of Bond and the often unacknowledged traditions going all the way back to Fantômas ("who is Fantômas?") and beyond that Bond, Mabuse and countless others tap into.

Die Schlangengrube und das Pende / Castle of the Walking Dead

The obvious question that you might have is why discuss a German horror film in a blog whose masthead proclaims it to be “about the Italian giallo and director Dario Argento in particular". While I am unsure if I can provide a completely satisfactory justification, here are a few points.

First, a case might be made for the film's director, Harald Reinl, as perhaps one of the most important yet unaknowledged figures in Eurocult as a whole, who made important contributions to the western and krimi in particular and, through them, helped lay many of the foundations for the likes of Leone's spaghetti westerns and Argento's gialli.

Second, while Argento has often proclaimed himself more influenced by Lang than Hitchcock, Reinl made his indebtedness to his countryman explicit throughout his ouevre which includes two Dr Mabuse films and a two-part version of Die Nibelungen.

Third, Castle of the Walking Dead itself is heavily indebted to Italian gothics such as Bava's Black Sunday, Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women and Margheriti's Castle of Blood.

In sum, then, we have a film-maker and a film that intersects with our area of interest in a number of ways.


A storyteller's naive, yet macabre representation of Regula's demise


Mont Elise examines a Bosch-inspired mural

In truth, however, the most important thing is that Die Schlangengrube und das Pende - i.e. the Pit and the Pendulum, though the faithfulness of the film as a Poe adaptation is signalled by the way the English version here describes the short story as a novel - is simply too good a film to ignore, its many virtues coming through even on the Aikman Archive's quite frankly horrible looking Castle of the Walking Dead DVD.

The film opens with an overt nod to Black Sunday as Christopher Lee's Count Regula has a spiked metal mask placed on his face and is sentenced to be quartered for his heinous crimes, too horrible to really describe (at least in this version). He does not seem unduly concerned, however, and instead proclaims that he will have his revenge on the Von Marienberg and Brabant families.

Thirty-five years later Lex Barker's square-jawed hero Roger Mont Elise arrives in town, seeking the whereabouts of Regula's castle and receiving a distinct lack of assistance from the locals in time-honoured gothic horror tradition.

Nevertheless, Roger and a bluff priest manage to determine the location of the castle and even get a coachman, however reluctantly, to take them there.

As the journey continues they take on board Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor) and her maid Babette, whose own coach has broken down, before things take a distinct turn for the grotesque, with the trees of the mist-enshrouded forest being liberally festooned with human bodies and body parts.

Neither this nor the terrified coachman's demise is sufficient to faze Mont Elise, however, leading him, von Brabant and company directly into the awaiting Regula's trap. For – quelle surprise – Mont Elise is actually a von Marienberg and Brabant the 13th virgin the undead Regula needs to complete the ritual interrupted 35 years before...








A selection of images justifying The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism and Pit and the Pendulum AKAs for the film

While the film is a collection of cliché moments and the top-billed Lee largely confined to the opening and closing moments, the production design and visuals are truly astonishing even here, making one wonder what it must have been like on the big screen. Interested parties are advised to seek out the new German DVD for an approximation; those who already have the likes of Aikman Archive's version will know that it is a film that warrants a double-dip.

The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle

Lucius Clark has just learned that he is to be made a peer of the realm for services to Queen and Country. His joy is short lived, however, as a masked avenger visits and informs that his life will be made into a living hell until he divulges the whereabouts of some stolen diamonds.

With the avenger murdering one of Clark's servants – and branding a letter M into the dead man's forehead – Scotland Yard, in the form of Inspector Jeff Mitchell and his sidekick Watson (sic), are called in to investigate, their arrival coinciding with those of Lucius's journalist niece, Claridge (Karin Dor), and a rival reporter.

To further complicate things Claridge is about to turn 21, and thereby come into a sizeable inheritance. If Lucius cannot present her with the money then, according to her lawyer Tromby – a sinister figure who has plans of his own – the peerage will be forfeit.

Unfortunately for Lucius when he attempts to send one of his servants to sell some freshly cut gems – butler Anthony is actually a gem-cutter; albeit one whose obsessive desire to prevent his precious masterpieces leaving led to jail and disrepute – to his contacts at the Old Scavenger Inn, the strangler is waiting and decapitates the man, then sends his head back in a hatbox.

The only clue to his identity is that he is missing a finger, but this is not much help when just about everyone except the nine-fingered Lucius habitually wears gloves...




The M allows the seemingly Lang-obsessed Reinl the opportunity to pay hommage to his master, Fritz Lang; Reinl also directed a couple of Dr Mabuse films and a two-part version of Der Nibelungen.

Directed by frequent series contributor Harald Reinl from Bryan Edgar rather than Edgar Wallace source material, this 1963 krimi is slightly disadvantaged by the general absence of familiar genre faces – only Reinl's then-wife Dor is really immediately recognisable – but nevertheless otherwise delivers the goods with that reassuring combination of convoluted mystery, quirky characterisation; askew view of London, England; stalwart Scotland Yard investigator; damsel in distress; femme fatale; plentiful red herrings; an old dark house replete with secret passages and hidden chambers, and so on.






Black glove action

Though there is an emphasis on black gloves throughout, their function is a narrative rather than fetish one – whodunnit; who is the nine-fingered man? This in turn indicates a key difference between the typical krimi and giallo, with psychoanalytic approaches fundamentally less appropriate here, where to decapitate is just a convenient murder method, with the strangler also happily using a gun, a knife and even a diamond cutter where convenient, and a cigar – a box of which are used by Lucius in his attempt to transfer the stones – really just a cigar.

This is not, however, to discount that the preponderance of foundlings and illegitimate children and general concern with origins in Edgar Wallace's oeuvre as a whole could be unconsciously related to his own biographical circumstances, nor that in imitating his father's style Bryan Edgar Wallace also perhaps mimicked these subtexts.






The pragmatic Strangler really uses whatever is to hand, including some proto menacing with power tools

Oskar Sala's score is more experimental than those provided by regular krimi composers Martin Bottcher and Peter Thomas elsewhere, foregoing jazzy themes in favour of the weird tonalities of his mixture-trautonium, a synthesiser-type electronic instrument. As with Hitchcock's The Birds, on which Sala also worked around the same time, it is questionable how far one would want to listen to it in its own right but in the context of the film it certainly adds an extra unnerving edge to the proceedings.

The US DVD from Alpha is difficult to recommend, on account of a a washed out, pan and scan and probably cut presentation, evidently prepared for the American market by the reference to a “station wagon” rather than the more British / English term “estate car”.