I Vampiri

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.