Planet of the Vampires
Planet of the Vampires is a 1965 film from Spain and Italy, directed by Mario Bava, running 88 minutes. reelscum files it under euro-gothic.
- Year
- 1965 · 1960s films
- Runtime
- 88 min
- Director
- Mario Bava
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (33/100)
- Also known as
- Demon Planet · Planet of Blood · Space Mutants · Terror in Space · The Haunted Planet · The Haunted World
Defined in the glossary: Euro-gothic
Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.
Bava shoots a haunted house in orbit: two crews answer a distress signal and land on a fog-drowned world where the dead get back up and walk, wearing the same black leather the living do. He built the entire planet from dry ice, coloured gels and a couple of papier-mache boulders, and it looks like nothing else in 1965 science fiction. The derelict alien wreck with the giant fossilised pilot went straight into Alien a decade later, a debt Dan O'Bannon never bothered denying.
The whole world is fog, plastic and two rocks. You will believe every frame of it.
Trailer
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Where to watch
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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 Awful Dr. Orlof
Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.
The House That Dripped Blood
Four Robert Bloch stories, Cushing and Lee on hand, and barely a drop of the title's blood.
The Whip and the Body
Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.
I Vampiri
Freda walked off Italy's first sound horror; Bava finished it. The whole euro-gothic shelf starts here.
Daughters of Darkness
Delphine Seyrig as Bathory in an empty Ostend hotel. Genuinely elegant.
Castle of Blood
Barbara Steele in a haunted house on a bet. Better than it sounds.
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors
The film that invented the Amicus anthology, dealt out as tarot on a train.
99 Women
Franco doing the formula early, with Mercedes McCambridge as the warden.
Alucarda
The most hysterical nunsploitation film ever made. A convent, two possessed girls, and constant screaming.
The Grapes of Death
Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.
Kill, Baby... Kill!
A ghost child with a white ball. Fellini and Scorsese both stole from it.