The Awful Dr. Orlof
The Awful Dr. Orlof is a 1962 film from France and Spain, directed by Jesús Franco, running 90 minutes. reelscum files it under euro-gothic.
- Year
- 1962 · 1960s films
- Runtime
- 90 min
- Director
- Jesús Franco
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (33/100)
- Also known as
- L'horrible Docteur Orlof · The Demon Doctor
Defined in the glossary: Euro-gothic
Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.
Jess Franco's international breakthrough, and the film every other Franco film is a variation on. A mad surgeon and his blind, disfigured henchman abduct women from the nightclubs of a foggy nineteenth-century city to graft their skin onto his scarred daughter, in a plot borrowed wholesale from Eyes Without a Face and made considerably sleazier. It made real money across Europe and effectively launched the Spanish horror industry along with Franco's two-hundred-film career. This is him at his most disciplined, before the zooms and the fog took over completely, and it still looks handsome. Start here if you want to understand where the man came from.
Trailer
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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.
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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
Planet of the Vampires
Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.
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.
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.
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.
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 Blood Spattered Bride
Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.
The Grapes of Death
Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.