I Vampiri
I Vampiri is a 1957 film from Italy, directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava, running 79 minutes. reelscum files it under euro-gothic.
- Year
- 1957 · 1950s films
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 79 min
- Director
- Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (31/100)
- Also known as
- Evil's Commandment · The Vampires · The Devil's Commandment
Defined in the glossary: Euro-gothic
Freda walked off Italy's first sound horror; Bava finished it. The whole euro-gothic shelf starts here.
The first Italian sound-era horror feature, and the reason the ones that followed hid behind fake English names: it flopped so badly at home that producers decided their own audience would not pay to be frightened in Italian. A duchess in modern Paris keeps a borrowed young face by draining the blood of murdered girls, Bathory relocated to the Seine. Riccardo Freda bet the money men he could shoot the thing in under two weeks, then walked off with it unfinished, and his cinematographer Mario Bava quietly completed it and staged the in-camera ageing effect that is the one image anyone still remembers. Creaky, slow, and the seed the entire euro-gothic shelf grew from.
Trailer
The numbers
Nobody has rated this yet. Be the first to make a claim you'll have to defend.
Your call
Where to watch
No legal stream, rental or purchase that we could find in the usual regions. For films this obscure that is common, and availability changes, so it is worth checking again later.
Discuss with AI
Open a chatbot with a question about this film already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, plot detail, or where to find a copy.
The cycle in depth
- Fantaterror: the Spanish horror boom, 1968 to 1976
Two cuts of every film, one for the censor in Madrid and one for the drive-in. Democracy killed the trick in two years.
Filed alongside
The Whip and the Body
Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.
The House That Dripped Blood
Four Robert Bloch stories, Cushing and Lee on hand, and barely a drop of the title's blood.
Planet of the Vampires
Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.
The Awful Dr. Orlof
Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors
The film that invented the Amicus anthology, dealt out as tarot on a train.
Daughters of Darkness
Delphine Seyrig as Bathory in an empty Ostend hotel. Genuinely elegant.
Hercules in the Haunted World
Bava shoots Hades in gel colours. Looks like nothing else in the cycle.
Castle of Blood
Barbara Steele in a haunted house on a bet. Better than it sounds.
The Vampire Lovers
Hammer clocks that the censors have loosened and sends Ingrid Pitt to make the most of it.
Vampyros Lesbos
Franco's most watchable. The soundtrack outlived the film by decades.
Black Sabbath
Three stories, one Karloff. The Wurdulak segment is the best thing Bava shot.
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.