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Scream of the Demon Lover

aka Il castello dalle porte di fuoco; Blood Castle; Ivanna; Killers of the Castle of Blood

Poster of Scream of the Demon Lover

A walking corpse lusts for revenge

  • Photo of Jonathan Rigby

    With Ivanna, [José Luis] Merino and his Italian co-writer Enrico Colombo took the habitual echoes of Rebecca found in Italian horror and resolved them into a lightly disguised adaptation of its 19th century precursor, Jane Eyre. The result is an anomaly in that it not only features a strong female lead who’s a normal woman rather than one of the remorseless she-devils of yore, but also because it balances her with the kind of Byronic hero-villian that—with the notable exception of Christopher Lee’s Kurt Menliff in La frusta e il corpo—had largely been avoided in Italian Gothic. … Unfortunately, the fiery climax fails to work up the excitement it should, and Luigi Malatesta’s tremulous music is hackneyed throughout. Ivanna survives, however, as an elegant envoi to a style that by 1970 had reached its sell-by date.

    Jonathan Rigby, Euro Gothic: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema (Signum Books, 2016)

Selected disc options for Scream of the Demon Lover

Extras
Severin box art
Severin BD-A/US 2023
Retromedia box art
Retromedia DVD-1/US/OOP 2003
Audio Commentary by Rod Barnett and Robert Monell has extra
In the Castle of Blood - Video Essay by Stephen Thrower has extra
Scream Erna Scream! - Interview with Actress Erna Schurer has extra
US Theatrical Trailer with The Velvet Vampire (1971) has extra has extra

Notes

Ultimate Edition

Combine the best digital presentation with a selection of choice extras for the ultimate edition.

Presentation Retromedia DVD 2003
  • Video
    • File 1
      • Codec: MPEG-2
      • Resolution: 480i
      • Overall bit rate: 5.60 Mbps
      • Aspect ratio: 1.55:1 Non-Anamorphic
      • Length:1:37:14.762
      • File size: 3.92 GiB
  • Audio
    • File 1
      • Language: English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
      • Sampling rate: 48 kHz
      • Bit rate: 192 kbps
      • Bit depth: 16-bit
  • Subtitles
    • None
Extras US Theatrical Trailer with The Velvet Vampire (1971) (0:53, 480i) Retromedia DVD