The Whip and the Body

Bava and Christopher Lee make a gothic romance about sadomasochism that the censors somehow underestimated. A cruel nobleman returns to the family castle, is murdered, and continues to visit the woman who both feared and desired him, and the film never resolves whether he is ghost or delusion.

Lee is magnetic as the whip-wielding aristocrat, and Bava shoots the coastal castle in his usual gel-lit reds and blues. The eroticism was strong enough that the film was cut everywhere on release.

One of the most perverse films of the gothic cycle, and one of its most beautiful.