The Whip and the Body
The Whip and the Body is a 1963 film from Italy and France, directed by Mario Bava, running 85 minutes. reelscum files it under euro-gothic.
- Year
- 1963 · 1960s films
- Runtime
- 85 min
- Director
- Mario Bava
- Updated
- 30 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (31/100)
- Also known as
- Night Is the Phantom · What? · The Whip and the Flesh · What†
Defined in the glossary: Euro-gothic
Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.
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.
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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.
On these lists
- Euro-gothic for the giallo graduate
The graduate course after the giallo: cobwebbed castles and a dead woman who will not stay buried, lit by Bava like nobody since.
Filed alongside
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.
The Awful Dr. Orlof
Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.
Planet of the Vampires
Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.
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.
Black Sabbath
Three stories, one Karloff. The Wurdulak segment is the best thing Bava shot.
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.
The Blood Spattered Bride
Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.