Scream of the Demon Lover (1970)

A walking corpse lusts for revenge

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)

Extras	Severin BD-A/US 2023	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

Severin’s Blu-ray is included in the “Danza Macabra Volume One: The Italian Gothic Collection” box set with The Monster of the Opera (1964), The Seventh Grave (1965) and Lady Frankenstein (1971).
Retromedia’s “Special Letter-Boxed Edition” DVD includes liner notes by Mirek Lipinski. It is also available in the “Euro Fiends from Beyond the Grave” box set (without liner notes) with The Faceless Monster (1965), Satanik (1968) and Fangs of the Living Dead (1969).

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