Nightmare Castle

Barbara Steel does a fantastic job playing the duel rolls of Muriel and her sister Jenny in this classic Gothic tale of love, cheating and betrayal.

Our story begins in a dreary castle where Muriel is speaking with her husband Steven in his lab. An older lady who is a servant in the lab come in the lab to let Steve know that her must leave right away for trip by horse and buggy as someone is need of his assistance. When it appears that Steven has left for a few days, Muriel and the house keeper David continue to have an affair. We soon learn that Steven leaving was just a set up.

Steve returns to find Muriel and David locked in a moment of passion. Steve strikes David on the head, disfiguring his face. We soon find David and Muriel chained to the wall in the castle basement being bull whipped in the chest and face! Steven vows to stop at nothing to torture them before killing them.






To finish David and Muriel once and for all, Steven bounds Muriel's hands to the headboard of the bed. Steve traps David with a chair who's straps look like those used on an electric chair. Steven drops hot wax or acid on Muriel's stomach. The pain is so intense she passes out. Steven grabs David and pushes him on to Muriel. Then, Steve pulls a switch and electrocutes David and Muriel. Blood curdling screams rip thru the scene as the bed and the adulteress couple light up the bed room until they both die!

After both David and Muriel are fried to a crisp, Steven takes her body back to his lab to drain blood from her body to use in an experiment that will make the old female servant young again. He disposes of the bodies by having them cut into small pieces and placed into a pot as base for a plant.

Enter Muriel's crazy sister Jenny. Steven marries Jenny with hopes of forcing Jenny back to a sanitarium and gaining control over all of the money and other assets that were left to her by Muriel. Muriel never liked her sister and never intended to leave her anything. However, before her death, Muriel wrote

Steven out of their will and instead left everything to Jenny. Muriel and David have returned in the mean time however. They have chosen to haunt and torture David, Jenny and the house maid for the pain David and Muriel went through when being tortured.

Nightmare Castle was made in 1964 and released in 1965. Around this time standards in movie ratings were changing and and this allowed the director and writers for this film to push the envelope a little and lay the groundwork for other gore fest that followed in their footsteps.