Scream of the Demon Lover

Criticism

• 

  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.