This is one of the other minimalist horror movies I mentioned when I was talking about The Screaming Skull. It's not a horror film that will challenge you or open up new trends or concepts. It's actually very much in the same league as The Witches' Mountain, except this movie is significantly less mysterious. I think it captures the essence of what we, or at least I, get nostalgic over when we think of the Halloween of our childhoods. Halloween is harmless fun, never truly scary--but if it's good, it's not cynical enough to not try to be scary. The Dungeon of Harrow, I think, is the sort of horror movie that would have had me giggling in my seat if I'd watched it as a kid on Halloween. That is the source of its perfection.
Aaron Fallon is an upper-middle-class gentlemen on an ocean voyage. When his ship runs aground on an island, he and the Captain are the only survivors. We learn quickly that the island is the property of a maddened, murderous nobleman, who has hallucinations of a photo-negative Satan and constantly murmurs "Yes...yes...the wine...it was the wine." He is called the Count de Sade, because of course he is. Fallon and the Captain earn the ire of the Count when the latter believes the Captain to be a pirate. However, he tolerates Fallon's presence, even though Fallon is one of those poor beggars without a proper title of peerage. Slowly, Fallon learns the truth of the intensity of the Count's cruelty, as he abuses his maids Ann and Cassandra as well as butler Mantis. He hides the Captain's survival to Fallon so that he can continue torturing him. At the root of all this is the fact that the Count's dead wife really isn't dead--she's an insane leper, chained up in the castle dungeons. The same dungeons that the Count traps Fallon in...
Dungeon of Harrow is very much an "old world" horror movie. More melodramatic and theatrical than cinematic, it focuses on satisfying a series of Victorian horror beats and establishing the twisted psyches of its characters. It's claustrophobic, constantly--it's jarring to see the openness of the island after having spent most of the movie in cramped ship cabins or stifling stone chambers. All of the old stuff is here: the spooky castle, the torture dungeons. Leprosy. Aristocrats whose "good breeding" and decadence have unhinged them. The Devil. Creepy islands. And of course, camp. Lots and lots of excellent 1960s camp.
Not camp for the point of humor, of course--camp for the point of ACTING. The ACTING in this movie is some of the best I've seen, and I primarily intend to spotlight the Count here. He's tan and plays the same sort of gay that Louis XVI had going for him in A Clockwork Blue. You know the kind. He actually calls someone a "blithering idiot," in addition to getting to say things like, "I'm afraid that the town of Bath is losing its social significance these days." But camp is not all he has to offer. Yes, as hard as it may be to believe, there are round characters in this movie. The Count is undeniably evil, but at the same time, he has some redeeming traits. His hatred of pirates is due to the fact that it was a pirate attack that caused Ann the maid to become mute. This implies that he is protective of her--even though he spends most of his time in the movie torturing her. Plus, it's easy to read his evil as essentially being misguided grief over his isolation and his wife's disfigurement.
Despite the movie's unrelenting seriousness, the camp does make things more fun than anything else. If it had been produced in any other decade, and had maybe a bit more money behind it, it would have been a much darker movie. (After all, the Countess de Sade's madness causes her to believe every night is her wedding night, and that every man is her husband. And so you can imagine what sort of horror they're aiming for when she has Fallon in her clutches...) But because it hits the most stereotypical of horror tropes, and insists on doing so every chance it gets, it's a look back into the past. A lot of trash films are reminiscent of pulps--this one calls back to Gothic novels. I don't know the mechanisms behind the appreciation of this wizened media, but for me, this stuff sings. There's a bizarre comfort in it, even if I prefer focusing on the possibilities of the future than what is already history. But then, you can't watch the movies of the future, can you?At least--not yet!
Anyway. Visually, tonally, thematically, and structurally, The Dungeon of Harrow is a minimalist Halloween masterwork. It's another one that's available on YouTube, too!
I'd like to close by mentioning that director Pat Boyette made another movie in the same year as Dungeon. Obsessees of lost media like myself will be familiar with The Weird Ones, a sexploitation/monster flick which appears to star the greatest creature effects in history. The Weird Ones was supposedly lost in a garage fire some years ago, but we're all holding out for the chance that one of the film's distributors, or maybe a member of the cast or crew, still has a private print tucked away somewhere. Please, if you have any leads--don't hesitate to get in touch with me!
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