Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Night of the Werewolf

On this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe return to the world of Spanish horror with another Paul Naschy movie: 1981’s “Night of the Werewolf.” This time, Naschy’s tragic werewolf character Count Waldemar Daninsky goes up against vampire Countess Elizabeth Báthory! (originally published 07/14/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema rewind. This is Rob
Lamb and hey, you might be wondering what is this
doing on a Monday. You guys usually don't rerun Weird
House Cinema episodes all that often. Well, look, this is
what's happening. We're doing a switch up here with our
Monday lineup. For the past few years we've been featuring
listener mails every Monday, but on an experimental basis, we're

(00:28):
going to try going back to what we used to do,
which was to let the mail bag accumulate a bit
more and then do a full length listener mail episode
like every month or so. So for the time being,
as an experiment on Mondays, we're going to feature vaults
and probably going to lean more heavily on Weird House
Cinema rewinds. The most important point we want to make here, though,

(00:51):
is that listener mail is not going away. We're still
going to be reading it on the air, just on
a less frequent basis, so keep writing in. In fact,
this is more to the point. Give us lots of
listener mails to choose from, so you can always reach
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
All right, now back to the business at hand, though, Yes,

(01:13):
we're about to dive into a past episode of Weird
House Cinema. This is Night of the were Wolf, a
nineteen eighty one Paul Nashy movie. And if you've been
listening to me on the show for a while, you
know I've become something of a Paul Nashy fan. I
really enjoyed this one. And if you haven't listened to it,
or if you haven't listened to it in a while,

(01:33):
I hope you enjoyed this episode as well. It originally
published on July fourteenth, twenty twenty three.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Hey you, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. In
today's movie on Weird House Cinema is the nineteen eighty
one or maybe nineteen eighty. I saw some dispute about
that Spanish horror film Night of the Werewolf, also known
as Return of the Wolfman, also known as Maybe some
other titles too, directed by Paul Nashi, written by Paul Nashi,

(02:18):
starring Paul Nashi, The creative trifecta previously accomplished by such
luminaries as Orson Wells and Edward D. Wood Junior. Now,
if you have been listening to Weird House for a while,
you will probably recognize that name. You know that we
have covered several Paul nashi movies in the past, and
the one we're talking about today is part of a saga,

(02:39):
a Paul Nashy saga of a recurring character. It is
one of his many, many Valdemar movies, and this time
the character Valdemar returns from beyond the grave to engage
wolf mode overdrive adjacent to a necro vivified Countess Bathory,
and by the end of the movie he will either
do evil or stop or maybe both, but probably not neither.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
That's right, That's right. I mean, this is a you
know what you're getting into with this film, and you
know there are a lot a lot of the beats
are the same compared to other films that Paul Nashey
did or films unrelated, mostly to Paul Maashey. We've discussed
already a couple of fun facts. You mentioned that. Yeah,
he's the he's the director, he's the writer. He's also

(03:23):
the star. Though I will say he only plays one
role in this film. Other films he plays multiple roles
on top of that. But the Blu Rays set that
I have that this came out of has some great
notes in it by Nashi scholar Myriklepinsky, and he points
out that since Nashi was directing as well as acting

(03:45):
and was wearing heavy were wolf makeup in some of
the scenes, there were times where he was directing the
movie in full were wolf makeup, which must have been
a sight.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
I would love to see set photos of that, like
is he in the chair with the bullhorn in the
wolf man makeup?

Speaker 1 (04:01):
One would hope.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Now we should clarify. I think this comes up whenever
we talk about a were wolf movie. What were wolf
morph are we dealing with in this film? Your two
basic categories are the more canine, long snout werewolf that
often is paired with a more quadrupedal posture or at
least a more hunched posture. Or you've on the other hand,

(04:24):
you've got the more humanoid shaped wolf man, sort of
the Lawn Cheney junior version that has a human shaped
head just covered in hair with fangs. In this movie,
we're dealing with the latter no long snouts to be seen.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Yeah, and it's a look that I think a lot
of films got away from for a while, especially in
the wake of an American Wolf in London. You know,
everything got snouty and there's this feeling that, oh, the
classic wolf man look was just done and we shouldn't
go back to that. But I don't know that. I
think we're coming back around to realizing that a classic

(04:59):
wolf man, if done well, looks amazing. One example of
this recently is the excellent Werewolf by Night special from Marvel.
This this is tremendous. It has a werewolf in it,
and it is a classic wolf man look and it's
done really well.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
Haven't seen it, so I can't comment.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
It's worth checking out, Yeah, but put it on your
list for Halloween. It's like, it's less than an hour.
It's fine.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
But Okay, So, Rob, I know you are much deeper
in the Paul Nashy canon and the Valdemar verse than
I am. So can you explain where and how this
movie fits into the overall Valdemar saga.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Okay, so this is with some caveats. The ninth Cinematic
Adventure of Colt Valdemir Dninsky. For our part, we previously
watched the third movie in the saga, nineteen seventies Assignment Terror,
and we've also watched the unrelated Nashy film Horror Rises
from the Tomb from seventy two. So Dninsky the character

(05:59):
first appears in nineteen sixty eight's The Mark of the Wolfman,
which Nashi wrote, and originally he was just going to
be the writer on that one, and they were going
to get Lon Cheney Junior to play the part, but
Lon Chaney Junior was too sick to travel at that
point in his life, so Nashi jumped in and acted
as well. Dninsky's final appearance in a Nashy directed picture

(06:21):
was nineteen eighty three's The Beast and the Magic Sword,
the tenth Daniski film, though two more films of other
lesser directors would also utilize the character with Nashi in
the role, and nash the only Nashi only wrote one
of those, still, Knight of the Werewolf, which we're talking
about here. Eighty or eighty one was the first Doninski

(06:42):
film in like five years now. An interesting caveat here
to putting a fine number on the Voldemart Dninski Films
is that nineteen sixty eight Knights of the wolf Man
is often referred to as the second Dninski film, but
it either wasn't actually made or finished, or might not

(07:04):
have ever existed to begin with. If it did exist,
it's considered a lost film because even Nashi did not
see it. Nash alone seemed to insist it that he
had actually filmed scenes for this in Paris. I think
the story was that the director died in a car
crash and the film was never picked up from the
processing lab and then was eventually probably destroyed. But no
one has ever seen it, and that's assuming it was

(07:26):
finished at all, so it's uncertain what's going on there.
It's also been theorized that perhaps Nash she kind of
embellished it early in his career when he didn't have
that many credentials. So I don't know. I don't know
where the truth lies on that.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Oh, Like I have a girlfriend, but she lives in Canada.
Like I already made a movie but it was never released.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, I made a wear We'll film a second wearer
of film, but it was in Paris, And I don't know.
They haven't done anything with the footage, which you know,
I guess was the safe there was no IMDb back
in those days.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
Well, interesting that he would go on to make a
movie of the same name later on that's well, almost
exactly the same name, but with singular instead of plural
Night versus Knights.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah. Now, I haven't seen all of the Dninsky films.
I've only seen really a handful of these, but it's
important to note that all of them are essentially stand alone.
You don't have to watch these in order. Each one
seems to reinvent Dninsky's origin story to fit the plot
as needed. So sometimes his origin is very modern. Other

(08:30):
times his origin is, in the case of this film,
is situated in the past. For instance, the previous film
to this one nineteen seventy five is The were Wolf
and the Yetti, which I've seen. It's a pretty fun one,
but Dninsky transforms into a were wolf in that one
because a pair of Tibetan were wolf women capture him
while he's on an excursion in Tibet.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
So you're saying they're all stand alone, and in many
ways they sort of recapitulate some of the same plot
elements and and reimagine the origin each time. So it
might be more apt to compare Valdemar Doninsky to a
character like Dracula that is in many movies but gets
but most of those movies stand alone, as opposed to

(09:14):
thinking of it as a continuity or a cannon.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
Absolutely Dracula of Frankenstein. All those characters were very much
characters that inspired Paul Nashy, and therefore that they're part
of the DNA of this character that he created.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
So the two Dninsky movies we've seen, it's interesting because
the Dninsky elements in them have a lot in common,
but the movies overall are very different. Assignment Terror was
a I call it like a sort of a gonzo
mashup of the classic universal monsters. The premise was that

(09:48):
aliens want to conquer Earth, and they do so by
rounding up Frankenstein, Dracula, Doninsky is a wolf man I
think a mummy too, and some other critters, and they're like,
we're going to use these monsters to attack earthlings and
get them. I don't know, I guess to surrender to us.
I remember the vibe of that movie was a very wild,

(10:09):
chaotic and science fiction, though the Dninsky element in particular
felt almost a little out of place. It was more
of this kind of like tragic gothic horror love story
that was just one little wedge of that whole pie.
You could tell me if you disagree with my characterization
in a second, but I'm gonna say this movie is

(10:29):
very different than Assignment Terror in that it feels more
like they were trying to go for sort of like
what some of the Hammer horror movies of the seventies were,
like kind of a sexy escapade in the Carpathian Mountains.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, I know, I agree with that. Assignment Terror also
came out at a time where it's like Spanish cinema
wasn't really ready to fully embrace the horror. But then
horror is embraced throughout the nineteen seventies, and at this
point Paul nashe's setting out to make a just a
gothic horror film. You don't have to have a spy
story in there.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Oh yeah, there were spies too, weren't there.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
There was a boring spy story and Assignment Terror that yeah,
amid all the monsters, you only remember the monsters. Those
were the best scenes.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
I remember it being funny that the that the Frankenstein
monster was like the really bad monster. Like, of all
you could sort of rank the monsters in terms of
morality in that movie, and frank was one of the worst.
He was like the sort of the enforcer droid who
was doing all the hits for the bad aliens, which
seemed like a strange thing because the Frankenstein character from

(11:34):
the novel is so conflicted and tragic.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, but you had. You ultimately had a good tear
down battle between the were wolf and the Frankenstein monsters,
so it is worth it, all right. Well, the elevator
pitch on this one is pretty simple. It's werewolf versus vampire.
More specifically, it's Dninsky versus Bathory.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
So it's Elizabeth Bathory as a vampire.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yes, let's hear probably not all of the trailer audio,
but let's hear just a little bit of that trailer audio.

(12:23):
Estimata young pretend if your accomdition a bad to do

(12:47):
you a us.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
All right?

Speaker 1 (13:04):
Well, if you're wondering where you can watch this film,
you can stream it a few different ways. Sometimes it's
available under the title The Craving. That was one of
its American release titles. Though the best streaming option is
probably shout Factory TV, since Shout Factory also put this
film out on a glorious blue ray set part of
their excellent Paul Nashi collection. Part one and two are out.

(13:27):
I own both of them. I hope we're getting a
part three as well. There's plenty more stuff for them
to throw on a disk. This particular set Part one
collects Knight of the Werewolf, Vengeance of the Zombies, Horror
Rises from the Tomb, which is another favorite of mine,
Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, and Human Beasts. All right, well,
let's get into the cast here. Starting at the top, obviously,

(13:49):
we have Paul Nashi, who's playing Valdemar Doninski in this.
He also wrote it, he directed it. He lived nineteen
thirty four through two thousand and nine. The Spanish horror
icon The Lawncha Jr. Of Madrid. As a young man,
he grew upon a cinematic diet of universal monster pictures,
and after a brief foray into architecture school, he got

(14:09):
into weightlifting and then into acting, writing, and eventually directing.
He ranked up more than one hundred acting credits, fifty
two writing credits, twenty three directing credits. Not all of
his work is horror. He appeared in and worked on crime, comedy,
war western movies as well, but it's his horror films
that continue to resonate and have earned him recognition internationally.

(14:32):
There's a lot to dissect in a Nashi film and
in a Nashi performance. You know, there are these themes
of tragic gothic melodrama, often laid on really thick, and
this courses through his films. But at least in my opinion,
amid the budget and time constraints and the elements of
exploitation cinema, they're all over these pictures. I feel like

(14:52):
Paul Nashey's passion shines through, especially in his monsters and
his outsider characters, which is one of the prime reasons
I think his films continue to resonate. And it wasn't
just you know, fantastic monstrous and supernatural outsider characters that
interested in interest Nashi as well. I was reading about this.
I didn't know about this until a research for this picture,

(15:13):
but apparently after meeting a trans woman at a Madrid
gay club, he was inspired to write and then also
acted in a supporting role in a film that would
Become nineteen seventy seven's Al Transsexual, which I've not seen,
but it's apparently a really compassionate and shockingly non exploitive picture.
It's a cabaret romance drama with a lot of music

(15:35):
in it, intercut with documentary testimonials from a Spanish trans
woman about transidentity. I've read that the story itself isn't
the best, but the film serves as kind of a
time capsule for the Madrid LGBTQ club scene of Madrid
at the time. Oh interesting, But in general, like Nashi
could really bust out these scripts. I was reading that

(15:58):
like Harror Rises from the Tomb, he wrote in like
a day and a half, like that was his deadline
to get a script in and he's like, thank goodness
for amphetamines, because I got it done. But like in
nineteen seventy two alone, he wrote and starred in seven movies,
and then he eventually started directing as well in seventy
six with the film Inquisition.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
His seventy two sounds kind of like Roger Corman's nineteen
fifty seven or something.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
Yeah, prime year.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
Well, as an actor, there is always something I do
enjoy about Paul Nashy, But in this movie in particular,
I noticed he's kind of he's a one track lover
down a two way lane. He brings a lot of
passion of the wolf. Yes, But also I did want
to note that Rachel watching part of the movie over
my shoulder here. It was during one of the brooding

(16:46):
human mode scenes. She was like, is this a Matt
Berry character? And I had to say, ooh, yes, a
little bit, a little bit.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah, Yeah, it's pretty much the case. I could see
this kind of character fitting in really well on Dark Place.
There's a certain over seriousness to everything.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
But I find it interesting that it seems like he's
doing all these different things, but he's always trying to
write a tragic, supernatural love story and then in the
end he always gets like a stake or a dagger
to the heart and that's the end of it, but
in a kind of like bittersweet resolution of the curse.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Yeah. There's actually a wonderful quote from Paul Nashi in
the booklet that comes with the Paul Nashi Collection, Volume one.
He said of this film quote, it contains all the
coordinates of my own life fitting together like the pieces
of a jigsaw. Puzzle, the claustrophobic castle, the gothic tombs,
the ill fated love affair, the menace of the undead,

(17:49):
the ostracism of someone who is despised for being different,
and the all pervading shadow of death. All these elements
go to make up my personality and my work. So
I think that's the thing. It's like these like He's However,
it comes together in Paul Nashy's head and then comes
out in his work like it's personal for him. You know,

(18:11):
they're cranking these pictures out, you know it's about you know,
their limited budget, limited time, but for him it's still
personal when it comes to characters like Voldemar Doninsky.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah, So to maybe revise a bit the comparison to
Hammer horror, like that he's sort of trying to make
something along the lines of those like lusty seventies Hammer films.
It's kind of in that mode, but it is at
the same time a little bit less professional, Like it's
a little bit sloppier, but it's also far more like

(18:44):
of a passion project. You can tell it's less of
a less of a business product and more of like
this guy is pouring his heart and soul in.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Yeah, and this was also worth It's worth pointing out
this was at a time where the horror world in
general was kind of moving on into Lasher territory, like
Gothic horror wasn't really like at the forefront anymore. All Right,
So that's Paul Nashey, that's our werewolf. But we also
need our vampire. We need our Countess Elizabeth Bathory. And

(19:14):
she is played in this film by Julius Sally. Now
her dates run now, I couldn't find any birthdate for her.
I think she's still around. She's retired at this point.
But she is a Spanish ballerina turned actor and producer
that was active from nineteen seventy two through nineteen eighty five.
She got her acting start in the nineteen seventy three
war movie La Gorilla starring Francisco Rebaal. He was in

(19:40):
that three D movie we watched. He played.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
Treasure of the Four Crowns.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Is that for this The Four Crowns? Yes? Yes, yeah,
he was the guy who shows up painted blue. He's
the strong man with the heart problems.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
Oh yeah, our tragic hulk. Yes.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
She only had a big part in that, and she
was a lit credited in that is Lepoca, which apparently
loosely translates to the white Girl. She's also credited as
Lopoka on her next small role in Armando dios Ario's
Demon witch Child from seventy five, and she worked with
that director again on his other film released in seventy five,

(20:18):
Night of the Seagulls. That's his fourth and final Blind
Dead movie. We watched one of the blind Dead movies
previously on Weird House. But then in seventy six, she
had a supporting role in Leon Kolimowski's The People Who
Owned the Dark, which featured Paul Nashy in a very
small role. I believe they met at a cast party
for this film, and afterwards the two would work together
on thirteen films, with Sally serving as producer on six

(20:41):
of those. Apparently, while traveling in Japan for ballet, she
made connections with Japanese film producers and these connections would
prove vital for various productions that they would work on together.
So if Paul Nashy is the dark Count of Spanish horror,
then I think Julia Sally may well be considered the
dark countess. Their films together include seventy sevens So multiple

(21:04):
films in seventy seven, Inquisition Death of a Delinquent and
Commando Chiki Death of a President in seventy eight, The
Frenchman's Garden seventy nine, Madrid Al Desnudo nineteen eighties, The
Beast Carnival slash Human Beasts, as well as a movie
called The Cantabrians nineteen eighty one s Night of the Werewolf.

(21:25):
Of course, eighty three is The Beast and the Magic Sore.
That's a Dninski film set in Japan with Japanese actors.
Nineteen eighty four is the Last Kamikazi, nineteen eighty four's
Miamiko El Vaga Bundo This is a Paul nashi written
and directed family movie, and then nineteen eighty five's Operation Mantis,

(21:46):
apparently a disastrous film that nobody liked and did not
make any money. But it's a really wacky spy comedy
that has been compared to like, you know, wacky on
like The Naked Gun kind of level not work. And
this was their final collaboration in her final film project.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
I did not know Paul Nashy had made a family film.
I'm kind of curious to see what that is, Like.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
I know, like I say, we know him best certainly
outside of outside of his time period and outside of
Spain for these horror films, but he made and or
was involved in various genres.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
Like it's hard for me to imagine him making a
film that does not end with the silver dagger in
the heart.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
Right or some sort of blood coming out of his
mouth at some point.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
But as for Julius Sally, I love her in this Countess.
Bathory is a frequent subject in horror movies, especially more
sort of erotically aligned horror projects, because it's at base level,
it's an excuse to bathe the woman in blood, or
have a woman in a bathtub full of blood, or
have someone hanging over a bathtub with blood. And it's

(22:54):
certainly possible, you know that in this picture too, Like
that could be it, That could be the sole reason
and for having her in the movie. But I think
Sally gives this character like a great physical presence. You know,
she's a beautiful actor, certainly, but she has these like
really piercing eyes, this kind of like smoldering intensity, and
her costuming is also very on point, helping her to

(23:17):
further mirror illustrations of the historic Bathory, who she already
kind of resembles. And it also kind of helps give
her this lean or ravenous energy that makes her feel
like this pale, deathly hunger burning within the folds of
her dark garments.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
I think that's well said. Yes, she is absolutely like
pulsing with Bathorian energy in this film. It's a very
convincing performance. No, I thought maybe we should mention here,
of course, the fact that she is playing a real
historical figure. That's kind of a strange twist on this.
I don't know a lot about Elizabeth Bathory, so I

(23:52):
can't do a full history lesson here, but just in
case you don't know, this is a real historical figure,
a Hungarian countess who lived from fifty sixty to sixteen fourteen,
and she was accused, tried, and convicted of like an
unseene number of murders hundreds. So she is often identified
as one of the most prolific serial killers in history.

(24:14):
And though I don't have the requisite historical knowledge to
judge on this issue, I think it's worth flagging that
I have read some modern writers have doubts about whether
she was actually guilty or whether she was the target
of some kind of I don't know, persecution or witch hunt.
At the very least, it seems that a lot, if
not all, of the evidence used against her was either

(24:34):
hearsay or confessions extracted under torture, neither of which would
be considered a legitimate form of evidence in any good
judicial proceeding today. But it also looks like some people
think there might have been solid physical evidence as well.
I don't know, so I didn't have time to look
deeply into this question for today's Weird House, but if
you want somebody exploring this in more depth, I am

(24:56):
almost certain that our colleagues Holly and Tracy at Stuff
you missed in history class have one or more good
episodes on this.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
They might even have one on Polish count Voldemono Doninsky.
I'm looking forward to that as well.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
Wait, I don't know if you're pulling my leg.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
I think this is a character right, Yeah, yeah, okay, okay,
but no, this is all a good point, you know. Yeah,
Bathory is based on a historic figure, and yeah, my
understanding as well is that there's legitimate reason to doubt
that she actually did all of these things. Maybe some
of these things. Who knows, but certainly there were those

(25:33):
that benefited politically from these accusations being leveled at her. Also,
I'm going to just go ahead and say that she's
she did not become a vampire. I think we can
go ahead and put that to rest.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
See, you just reveal your closed mind in this.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
All right? Well, we got some some more actors to
to to run through. Here we have Erica. Erica is
one of the would be witches in this film. She's
the head would be witch, played by Sylvia Aguilar, dates unknown,
leader of three college friends who aspire to have satanic
powers and become masters over life and death. She's the

(26:20):
most devoted to the three, and, as we quickly see,
is ruthless in her pursuit of dark powers. She'd previously
worked with Nashy on his seventy nine film The Traveler,
in which nash plays the devil, and the same year
she had a small part in Jaguar Lives, an action
movie starring kickboxer Joe Lewis, Christopher Lee, Donald, pleasants, Barbara

(26:40):
Bach and John Houston, and she was also in various
Spanish b movies.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Now, I don't know if I would agree with your
characterization of these three friends all wanting to have satanic powers.
Erica clearly wants to have satanic powers, but the other two,
especially what's her name, Karen, she is protesting that she's
just a scientist. Now, what exactly field of science is
she studying? I think we can explore that later. That

(27:07):
is a rather strange question as approached by the movie.
But I'm going to say mixed motivations in this group
of three friends.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of a Piranha mandar,
where one person's quest to end a deadly multi generational
curse is another person's vacation. Same thing here, one person's
quest to resurrect a dead vampire queen and an acquire
dark powers. It's just another person's excuse to get out

(27:38):
of room for a few days.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Right, So Erica wants to become the queen of Hell,
Karen just wants to do science about raising the dead.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
And Karen is played by Azosina Hernandez, who lived nineteen
sixty through twenty nineteen. Yeah, I think I agree with you.
I think she's a good, good girl who falls in
with a bad crowd of ultimately aspiring satanic witch is.
She's also our romantic female lead. Hernandez acted in various
Spanish sex comedies and horror films, including Nashi's nineteen eighty

(28:08):
film The Beast Carnival aka Human Beasts.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
So this is our character who Yeah, as you say,
she falls into a tragic, doomed love story with Valdemar,
except they left out the love story. Did you notice that,
It's like it got cut from the film, the whole
thing with them falling in love.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
Yeah. I mean you almost don't need it, just like
trust this it happened. I mean it's spawl nashy.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
I mean, I meit that literally, like it feels like
a scene got cut.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There are a number of places, like
you point out, where it feels like, wait, who are
these characters? Why are they here? It seems like there
should be some connective material.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
And I did see. I didn't have time to watch it,
but on the DVD there was there was something about
deleted scenes, and I was like, oh, okay, yeah, that
would make sense all right now.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
The remaining of the three friends is Barbara. Barbara is
played by Pilar i'll Cone born nineteen fifty two. This
was her debut, but she went on to play other
are often uncredited roles. Two notable uncredited roles in nineteen
eighty two, she's a victim in the Spanish horror movie Pieces,
and she plays one of Fulsa Doom's slave girls in

(29:15):
Conan the Barbarian. There's an English language interview with her
at the Conan Completest website where she talks about the
shoot and identifies which extra she is. She says, quote,
if you pay attention, I stand out from the other girls.
I'm first seen topless with some sort of helmet on
my head, looking kind of stoned drugged. Then I rise
to go towards Conan, who wounds me with his sword

(29:37):
at belly level, killing me on the spot.

Speaker 3 (29:39):
Okay, she knows how to sell her role.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, yeah, all right. There's another character that's important to
the plot, and that's Merkeaa. She is a scarred woman.
We find out she has a tragic backstory involving accusations
of witchcraft. Played by Beatrice el Rita dates unknown as well,
Spanish actor of the seven and eighties who worked as
a costume designer and stylist on Spanish films in the nineties.

(30:04):
Her other films include nineteen seventy one's necro Fagus, which
I've not seen but has bloodsucking lizard men in it.
Seventy two is called the Vampire in nineteen eighty six's
Blood Hunt. All right, this is a bit part, but
a familiar face shows up as Sando the Bandit. It's
Lewis Barbou, who lived nineteen twenty seven three two thousand
and one, familiar face in Spanish cinema of this time period.

(30:27):
Former circus performer turned actor with a knack for heavies
and villains. You might remember him from or from Amando
Dia Sorio's Return of the Blind Dead, which we talked about,
as well as the Laurelized Grasp, which we also talked
about on Weird House. He played a major role in
that one. In this one, he's just a bit parts.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
He's like a nasty bandit who attacks nasty Rose.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah. Yeah, he's got I mean, like I say, it's
that classic heavy face, all right. The makeup on this
one was Angel Lewis di Diego, responsible for the werewolf
makeup in particular, which I think is pretty top notch.
In this film. I thought the werewolf make up look good.
I think they had a higher budget on this one
than some previous Doninski films. And then Antonio Molina has

(31:08):
effects credit. This is a familiar name from Spanish productions
the special effects on them from the mid sixties through today.
Like he's still involved in pictures that often big Western
pictures that are shooting in Spain. All right, And finally
note on the music here. The music credit on this
film is just the cam Espana Library, but it pulls

(31:29):
in some awesome tracks. So it pulls in tracks from
other movies. It doesn't have its own original score. The
opening track is the most notable example. It is an
exuberant Italio disco track that I personally first heard in
a DJ mix by DJ Boba Fat for the Death
Waltz record Company several years back, and I didn't know
what it was for the longest. I just knew that

(31:50):
I liked it, and it pops up early in this movie.
It's a splendid track titled too Risky a Day for
a Regatta. Stelvio Capriana aka Viastell, who lived nineteen thirty
seven through twenty eighteen, an Italian composer behind the scores
of such movies as nineteen seventy one's Bay of Blood,

(32:11):
eighty two's Pieces Piranha to the Spawning, plus a load
of other B movies. This track is from his score
for the nineteen seventy seven Jaws ripoff Tentacles, which I
believe may have also recycled some elements from an earlier
score he did. Tentacles benefited from a solid cast John Houston,
Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, and Henry Fonda, and it seems

(32:35):
to have made money, but it does not have a
reputation for being good. Even Michael Weldon's main comment about
it is just about how stupendously boring the octopus scenes are.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
I was looking up stills from this because I found,
wait a minute, there's a seventy seven Jaws rip off
about an octopus called the Tentacles or in Italian Tentacoli,
and I haven't seen this, so I'm like, oh, I've
got to see it. I'm looking at stills and they're
just all close ups of people's faces under blaring direct sunlight,

(33:07):
so it's like they had not discovered Magic Hour yet.
And I was like, where's the where's the octopus, where's
the speculative elopment. It just it did not look appealing.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
At some point, we need to do a proper Jobs ripoff.
There's so many, so there's so many of them, there's
got to be one that hits the sweet spot, you know.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
I have watched a lot of bad Shark movies in
my life, but it's strange. I find a lot of
the early Jaws ripoffs, like the ones that came directly
in its wake and were usually about some other type
of animal but followed the same plot arc as Jaws,
A lot of those are just like not very fun
for some reason.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's kind of
the problems about a cash grab, right, Sometimes that really
is all it is. Sometimes there's nobody's personal vision wrapped
up in the project. One more note on the music here.
In the Blu Ray material, Lipinski writes that Neo Morriconi
was originally promoted as being the guy doing the score

(34:07):
before the film was released, but obviously that didn't come
to pass. Still, they apparently use some Morricone tracks sprinkled
throughout the film. There's another Capriani track in there, and
also it features some of the work of Carlo Rusticelli,
who scored Mario Baba's nineteen sixty four film Blood and
Black Lace.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
Well, too Risky. A Day for Regatta is an excellent track.
It's kind of a yeah, I guess at Tello disco
would be the correct term. I was thinking of it
as a funk rock track, like euro funk rock. It
has this great walk down bassline, but it has harpsichord
music just jingling in the background, while it's sort of
rock electric rock instruments in the front.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Let's hear it, Sayceman, all right, I love it. I
love it. Well, now that we're all revved up, let's
get into the plot of Night of the Werewolf.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
All right, we get a title. It says Hungary XVII century.
I guess that's sixteenth century, and an establishing shot of
a stone castle on a hillside, and there are soldiers
with long pole axes and red cross tunics walking alongside
an elegant woman in a wine colored dress as she
passes through the castle gates. And they're marching with her

(35:23):
as if escorting a prisoner. But could this beautiful and
regal lady really be in such a position? Is she
a prisoner? Well, they pass by an ominous scene. There
is a muscled man in a red executioner's hood and
a crowd of onlookers. A bearded man on a scaffold
lashed to an X shaped cross. Wait a minute, that
bearded man, he looks familiar. We'll come back to him.

(35:45):
In the foreground, there is a podium facing a row
of seated nobles and judges. And then the soldiers march
the woman up to the podium and she takes her place.
And there's like a steward who unrolls a scroll and
begins to read. To the crowd. He says, Countess Elizabeth
Bathory Nadasdi. And then of course, people who know they're
morbid history, they hear that name, they go, ah, Elizabeth Bathory.

(36:08):
Now they understand why she's being held Prisoner Stewart says.
This high court presided by the Supreme Judge of the Realm,
Lord Theodosius de Zulo, and the Noble Governor, Georgy Thurzo.
And here we get a cutaway to these guys, and
as soon as we get close ups on the nobleman,
I get the feeling like these old perverts are way
too excited about the prospect of punishing this woman.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
And I can't help but feel like that. We're supposed
to feel that to some extent. You know, even though
Bathory is going to be set up is the main
villain of the piece, it's still, you know, we're gonna
have that sort of built in sympathy for the outsider
and the persecuted.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
Yeah, so, so they say so the stewart says that
it finds you guilty of the execrable crimes of witchcraft, vamporism,
and pacts with the devil. I'm like, are those the crimes?
Is murder not good enough anymore?

Speaker 1 (37:00):
That's like a lower court in these days.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
Yeah. Hence you are to be sentenced to be immured
in your chambers and to stay there forever until the
hour of your death. Your servants named some servants will
be tortured and burned at the stake. That's what he says.
And I was like, is that how they would say
it even in the sixteenth century, like they will be tortured.
I think there would be more euphemistic somehow.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
Now, quick quick question, did you do the dub or
the subtitles on.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
These the subtitles?

Speaker 1 (37:32):
Okay, yeah, I did the subtitles as well. That is
never a problem with doing a dub on a Nashi film,
because it's my understanding that Nashi is almost always dubbed anyway,
even if you're listening to it in the original language. Okay,
but continue the sentence.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
Continued, Okay, Okay, it goes on. He names a bunch
of other co conspirators. Your cousin Moses Otvos will be hanged,
and the rest of your criminal accomplices Darvula, Barsony and
Torco will be beheaded. And then oh, then Bathory herself.
She has some things to say in a witchy whisper.

(38:05):
As the camera slowly zooms in on her face. She says,
progeny of bastards, I will return, I will rise from
my ashes, and your world will turn into hell.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
We had, of course, a similar scene in Perana Mandir
as well, and also in a horror Rises from the Tomb.
You'd think that if you're if you're, if you're trying
and executing warlocks and witches, you need to stop giving
them this chance to publicly curse everybody. It's just gonna
bite you in the butt.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
It always does, and I always think they can beat it.
They're like, look, if we bury them in like two
separate places. There is no way people will ever come
along later and reunite their corpses.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yeah, or in this case, they're like, we grounded her
for life, Like she's not going to be a problem anymore,
trust me, she's not allowed to come out of her ring.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
Yeah. So the creepy nobles are whispering to themselves. They're like,
that woman is a monster. She practiced cannibalism, drank blood,
and sold her soul to the devil. But I was like, wait,
wasn't that already established in the charges they just heard.
I guess the cannibalism is new information, but they say
that thousands were murdered. Ah, but here's something new. One

(39:14):
of the nobles then points to the guy tied to
the X shaped cross, and what do you know, that
looks a lot like Paul Nashy. That is Paul Nashy.
But he is very bummed out. He is just in
a bad place in the scene.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, I mean not just that he's gonna be executed,
but like his heart has been broken. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
Now, as a funny note, I did his tunic has
a design on it that'll play into the plot later on,
And it was reminding me of something I couldn't put
my finger on. And then when I finally realized what
it was, it was hilarious because it reminded me of
the Major League Baseball logo. It's like that it was
just like a diagonal slash with like the blue and
the red.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah. I'm glad you pointed this out, because when I
was watching it, I was like, something feels off. I
don't know what it is, but I don't like something
about this coat of arms, even though like clearly it's
supposed to be some sort of coat of arms that
I guess it's the Dninsky coat of arms. And you know,
I guess the color scheme matches up with some of
the Polish and Hungarian coat of arms that you see.
But yeah, it now that you pointed out, Yeah, major.

Speaker 3 (40:15):
League Bithball, I think his costume deserved a better coat
of arms. Yeah, like maybe they could have just done
it like black and red or something.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Yeah, anyway, so the nobles say that you know him,
that's Valdemar Doninski. He's a Polish noble and he has
served her faithfully, which probably means he's done a lot
of bad stuff. But one of them says, you know,
he carries the pentagon sign on his chest, and I
was thinking at first that they were referring to the
baseball symbol, but no, I think they're talking about how

(40:44):
he has like a scar on his chest in the
shape of a pentagon, like the polygon.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Now I don't remember if they actually discussed this much,
but we see it later, and my understanding was that, like,
this is the mark that Bathory gave him and cursed
with lecanthropy and so and made him of course your servant.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
I think that's right. So the nobles say she dominated
him with her satanic trickery and used him in her
evil revenges. So he's been convicted as well. The steward
is reading out the charges against him, says, quote, it
is proved that in full moon and turned into a
gigantic wolf, you devoured hundreds of innocent souls. Thus your

(41:28):
face will be covered with the mask of shame, and
your black heart will be pierced by the sacred cross
wrought with silver from the Bayer to Chalice. And now
Paul Nashy, he looks really bummed, but actually this is
kind of a relief to him. I think he sort
of looks up at God, I guess, and says, now
my spirit will finally be able to rest in peace.

(41:50):
So it seems like actually he's not even mad about it.
He's like, finally they're going to just do the silver
thing in my heart and everything will be okay.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
Bring on the mask of shame then.

Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah, So they behead one of the murder servants and
then they go up to Voldemar with the mask of shame,
and I gotta say it is it is a quite
shameful mask. It looks like an iron Ewok.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah, I got kind of notes of a bat off
of it. But but you know, it's the mask of shame, Joe.
It's not the mask of looking really cool, though. I
guess it does look cooler than some actual historic masks
of shame that you find that tend to just look
a little bit more goofy fair point.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
So they hammer the silver dagger into his heart and
that's I guess that's it for Voldemar. He will never
rise again.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
He's wearing the mask. The blood comes out of the
mouth of the mask.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
And here's where we get the song. Is this the
the Regatta song?

Speaker 1 (42:41):
Yeah, boom boom, yeah, boom boom boom boom boom.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
Groovy bassline, some some horns blasting, and then the the
harpsichord at the same time.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
Now, I think I had to look at two different
versions of the credits because I think on the the
the the American opening credits, there are there's like a
long stretch where there are no credits over the mask.
It's just music and bloody mask of shame. But in
the you look back at the original Spanish credits and
like there are credits rolling over that. So if that

(43:13):
looks weird in the international versions of it, that's just
the international version.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Then we cut to modern day and I know this
is a Spanish movie, but this first scene in the
modern era, it is just so in line with the
archetype of the first scene you get where you meet
the protagonists in an Italian horror movie of the seventies.
So let me describe it and maybe you'll know what

(43:38):
I mean. We're somewhere in Rome in the modern era.
Four hip young people are hanging out on a blanket
in the grass by a pool somewhere. It's two men,
two women. The women are beautiful, the men are skeezy jerks, bikinis,
dudes in swim briefs, gold jewelry. There is a ratan

(43:59):
te tray on which there is an ice bucket and
a chord of scotch, and they're mixing scotch with schwepes
over ice in fancy crystal pattern lowball glasses. And then
there is a pack. The camera is close on a
pack of Lark brand cigarettes lying between them and the grass,
next to an ash tray with like thirty cigarette butts
in it. It looks like it's like noon, so like

(44:21):
high sun beating down on them. At least we zoom out.
At least two more packs of cigarettes become visible within
a five foot radius of the original. A portable radio
is blasting some kind of song that has like it's
like candy sweet pop love song harmonies, but also what
sounds like prog rock guitar. Then the women hanging out

(44:42):
here are talking about a friend of theirs named Erica,
who is about to head to Transylvania to explore quote
the mysteries. They say, it's like going back in time.
And then the two dudes are like, your friend is
stupid who still believes in ghosts and black magic in
this day and age. And then the other guy's like, hey,
remember when she got drunk and started talking about how

(45:04):
she could communicate with the spirit of a dead Hungarian countess. Preposterous.
And then one of the ladies is like, hey, stop
insulting our friend. We are scientists. And then the dudes
are like, scientists, but you're women. You're beautiful, you can't
be scientists. You should stop being interested in things that
end with ology. And then the women shoved the dudes

(45:26):
into the pool, and the dudes appear to yell something
offensive at the women, for which there were no subtitles.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Now give this film credit, though. They shove these these
really annoying dudes into the pool and you never see
them again.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
You never see them again. They're just done with those guys.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
Yeah, I'm so glad they didn't come on the trip.
I mean, if they'd come on the trip, they would die,
to be sure, and there would be some sort of
Catharsis in that. But I'm glad they stayed stayed in Rome.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
I agree. I was when we met them. I was like, oh, no,
we just are these guys going to be around the
whole movie? But nope, shoved in the pool. They yell
some kind of insult, not even bothered to subtitle it,
and then we're gone. Now the whole thing about the
two women from the scene being scientists, I was a
little iffy on that because from what they're saying, whatever

(46:18):
field of science these two people are studying seems to
involve magic and necromancy and maybe not even like studying it,
but like practicing it. So I'm confused what science this is.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
This is the kind of science that is backed up
in ads for shady products, Like scientists agree, Well, it's
it's it's it's these folks.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
Maybe of the more pseudo variety. Okay, So there's another
scene we cut to where there's like an old professor
and a young woman and they're having tea discussing Countess Bathory.
This lady is the Erica that the other people were
talking about behind her back in the previous scene, and
the professor is in possession. In this he's got a

(47:02):
gold medallion with a pentagram goat head on it and
it says Astroth And he says, you know, this medallion
belonged to Countess Bathory, and according to legend, if the
blood of a young woman is spilled on the ashes
of the countess and the medallion ritual is used to
invoke Astaroth. Then Elizabeth Bathory is going to return from

(47:24):
the grave. And Erica says, you know, Karen, Barbara and
I and Karen and Barbara where the women and the
other scene. The three of us, We've researched old libraries,
ruined castles, monasteries and all kinds of documents. And the
professor is like, I know you were my best students.
I'm proud of your dedication, though at the same time

(47:46):
it does kind of sound like he's just trying to
get her to stop talking about Elizabeth Bathory. Yeah, but
he's like, you know, nobody knows where Bathory's remains are,
so we cannot continue our studies on this. But then
Erica revealed she does know. She discovered the location of
Bathory's ashes, as well as of Voldemar Doninski and her

(48:08):
cousin Otvos. They're all hiding in a castle somewhere in
the Carpathian Mountains, and she says, and we will go there.
And what exactly is the outcome they're looking for unclear
at this point, but.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
I think we know I think we know what Erica
anyway has in store.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
Right, Because so Erica wants to raise she asked the
professor if she can take the medallion with her when
she goes to the Carpathian Mountains, and he gets very angry.
So he's like, hey, I am a respected academic. I'm
not somebody who engages in necromancy. So whatever his research
project is, it is not explicitly raising the dead. Maybe
it's like learning how to raise the dead, but not

(48:47):
doing it.

Speaker 1 (48:49):
It's like, I, yes, I do own the historic Astaroth
medallion that will raise Count's Bathory from the grave, but
I'm not into this stuff. Shouldn't be into this stuff.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
Yeah, yeah, this is just for historical interest. It's not
because I'm into it. But Erica starts seeing visions of
a face in the flames of the fireplace. Maybe it's

(49:21):
Bathory's face, I don't remember, and she says, you know,
it's been a long time since I fully embraced Satanism,
but I've been talking to Elizabeth Bathory a lot, talking
to her spirit, really getting to know her, and she
got a raw deal. So here's what I'm gonna do.
I'm gonna take Karen and Barbara with me to the
castle and I'm going to kill them and use their
blood to raise the Countess from the dead, and then

(49:43):
we will enter a world of infinite power. And it
doesn't matter that you won't give me the medallion, because
I'm going to kill you and take it. And then
she strangles him with gold Mardy grubides and as this
is happening, we cut away to a painting on the wall.
I think this is supposed to be a paint of
Paul Nashy and it I'm gonna say it's not a

(50:04):
great likeness. It looks more like acid test John Ham
with like a beard and long hair. But it's when
it zooms out you see the other portraits on the wall.
This again he's this is the guy who's like, I
will not do necromancy. The paintings on his wall are
Paul Nashy, Vlad the Impaler, and Bathory.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, he really brought this on himself, but.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
Okay, Erica has the medallion.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
Now.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
Next scene, we get a couple of guys in a
cemetery somewhere in the middle of the night, and they
are arguing about whether it is a good idea to
engage in grave robbery. There's like a sort of a stammering,
rustic character who isn't so sure about the propriety of
stealing dead bodies. And then there is a rotund, wealthy
man in a tuxedo of sorts, I guess it's more

(50:49):
kind of a old fashioned tuxedoish looking thing. He's gesticulating
with a skull top cane in his hand. It's got
like a silver skull on top. And he seems to
have hired the other guy, and he's offering these smooth
assurances that what they're doing is super cool, all above board.
His story is they're gonna, you know, they're going to

(51:10):
recover some priceless artifacts and donate them to the museum
in Budapest. Oh and as they're wandering around arguing, we
keep hearing this distant, booming, animalistic shriek, like one of
the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, just bellowing in the night.
Did you notice this too?

Speaker 1 (51:26):
What was going on? I didn't notice this, but it
makes sense given the way that they present the region
surrounding the castle, like this is a bad area. This
is like raven lof territory. The only people who initially
seem to be in this area are like grave robbers, bandits,
and folks who are generally up to no good. That
begins to shift a little bit, but at least initially

(51:48):
like this is a bad land full of bad folk.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Yes, like literally everyone in this geographic area will violently
attack you on site.

Speaker 1 (51:58):
But these two, these two are also kind of fun.
Like I could have followed them around for a little
bit more. I could see, like this the basic comic
mechanisms in play here.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
Oh yeah, yeah, this was good. It was a good dynamic.
So they go down into this underground crypt. They find
the grave of Count Valdemar Doninsky, and the grave digger
reads the inscription, which is just effusive promises of vicious
supernatural revenge against anyone who disturbs these remains, and tuxedo
guys like, all right, let's get a move on. Open

(52:28):
it up, so they, you know, they take the stone
cover off the vault and there's Paul Nashi still in
his iron Ewok mask, with a silver dagger poking out
of his chest. The tuxedo guy greedily removes the dagger
and then bam, it is instant lightning strikes and Valdemar's
eyes start darting around behind the slits in his mask.

(52:50):
This shot I thought was very scary.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
Yeah, yeah, this is pretty good. And of course this
also lines up with past Dninsky resurrection scene an assignment terror.
It's done because what they get the body of Doninski
and they perform an autopsy on it and remove a
silver bullet from his heart. I think something along those lines.
So the silver's in there, but the silver doesn't really

(53:14):
kill Doninski, doesn't kill a super powerful where wolf. It
just like turns them off. It puts them in this
state of unlife, but that can easily be reversed.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
It puts him in energy saver mode.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
Yeah, oh what do you know?

Speaker 3 (53:30):
These grave diggers picked the wrong neck to do this
because it's a full moon. So wolf mode just instantly activates.
He's growling and grabbing them by the neck with his claws.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
Blood dripping. Yeah, they're gone.

Speaker 3 (53:43):
Yep, Okay. So then Karen, Barbara and Erica they are
just already at the Carpathian Mountains. They're there. They rent
a car from a local guy. They drive up to
the mountains where they have been warned that bandits will
kill without hesitating and the devil rules overall. On the way,
they do get attacked by horrible, violent local bandits, but

(54:04):
they are saved when a figure in black with a
crossbow shoots all three bandits with crossbow bolts. And they
don't really seem to have the kind of questions you
would expect about this. They just like get back into
the car and drive on to their destination.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
I love too how the crossbow user here just fires
them off in rapid order, so it's like it's a
it's like a machine gun crossbow apparently.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
Yeah, yeah, you think it would take more reloading time.
But maybe he had three crossbows ready.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
That's right. We don't really see. He could have just
a whole bushel of loaded crossbows on the ready.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
So they go up to this castle. What's up at
the castle, Well, there's just sort of like loose bulk
skeletons everywhere, and so like you know, rats are running
in and out of rib cages, skeletons with swords poken
out of them, and there are rotting skeletons hanging by
the neck in hallways. The implication is that they've been
like that for hundreds of years. I don't know, if
that would work.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
I mean, I've we see this sort of castle in
every Spanish horror movie from this time period, and honestly,
you know, if one day I get the opportunity to
go to Spain and experience the culture and the history,
part of me is going to be a little upset
if none of these castles look like this.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
Where are all the skeletons? Yes, But eventually Erica and
Barbara they go down into the crypt and they find
Valdemar Doninsky's grave, and they find Tuxedo Guy's Skullkane earlier.
One of them points out, hey, that is a silver
top that could be useful, and then they go down
the hall to find the bathory crypt. Meanwhile, Karen gets scared.

(55:37):
She gets startled by another woman in the castle who
she just kind of runs into, who has burns on
her face. This is mere Kaya, the character who is
sort of a tragic character. And then Karen stumbles outside.
She gets startled because she sees Valdemar standing up in
a like a window or a gateway, pointing a crossbow
at her, and then she falls backward and faints, falls

(56:00):
into a hole.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
I have to say, Valdemar in these scenes, he looks
like he looks great. He looks like like a medieval vigilante,
a medieval superhero or something. Here.

Speaker 3 (56:10):
Yes, he's got black clothes with gold trim on the
tunic and the Baseball symbol on his chest, with a
big dagger and a crossbow. He looks cool. But you know,
it's Paul Nashy cool, which is a different kind of
cool than like Tom Cruise cool. But here's one of
those moments. I mean, there have been a couple already

(56:30):
that I didn't really explain, but here's one of those moments.
I think I alluded to this earlier in this episode,
but there are a bunch of moments in the movie
where it really feels like something is missing. We just
suddenly jump ahead to the middle of another scene, and
what happens here is suddenly the other to raise the
dead ologists Erica and Barbara are having dinner with Paul Nashy.

(56:54):
They're like sitting at a table with him, and he's
being a gracious host. It felt to me like something
got cut. Karen is recuperating from her fall in a bed.
The servant mir Kaya hides a crucifix under her pillow
and Paul Nashy is just you know, he's entertaining his guests.
He's like, you know, you're welcome to stay here. Oh,
by the way, drink this special local infusion, maybe with

(57:15):
Transylvanian herbs. I thought this was going to turn them
into wolves or something, but it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
Now he's just looking after me and just knows it's
a good like diuretic or something. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
But later, Erica and Barbara are hanging out and they're
talking about their host's identity and Erica, she is the
evil one of the three, but she's also the best
scholar of the three, I think. So she has figured
out this guy that's Valdemar. Our host is Valdemar Doninski,
the wolf Man, and she knows because of the baseball logo,
and she explains a legend that I think the way

(57:48):
she says it is his curse can only be broken
if a woman who loves him enough to die for
him stabs him in the heart with a silver dagger.
And I was just thinking, wait, isn't that exact same
legend in Assignment Terror?

Speaker 1 (58:03):
That's it. Yeah, it's the exact way that that it's
described to us, and exactly the way it plays out
in that movie as well.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
So he's trying to create a pattern with the Voldemar character.
It's like Dracula. It's you know, they're rules that persist
across different Dracula media, even if the story is totally different.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
Yeah, though I'm off the top of my head, I
can't remember how the Werewolf and the Yetti ended on
that front. I did watch it while I had COVID,
so I was a little out of it. But yeah,
it may end the same way as well. But yeah,
lots of things are different, but you know, your Coredeninsky
lore more or less is the same.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
I think it's a good move building out the lore
that way. But so Barbara's freaked out, like, oh, we're
at the Wolfman's castle. You know, we got to get
out of here. But Erica says, don't worry. There's no
way he can hurt us because this cane I found
in the crypt has a silver top, and bullets can
be made out of that silver.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
Where where are they going to make both?

Speaker 3 (58:57):
Aren't you skipping a few steps? Also, do you have
an that could shoot those bullets?

Speaker 1 (59:01):
Yeah? There's a crossbow around Yeah. Yeah, So I don't see.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
Yeah, it seems like they're they're skipping over a few
stops on the road to feeling totally safe from wear
wolf troubles. Meanwhile, we see Doninsky getting it. He he
does wear wolf trouble elsewhere. He goes into wolf mode
and goes out to eat some people in the grounds
around the castle. He gets into barn mischief.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Yeah, there are multiple scenes of him going out and
murdering and in general. Though even though we've we see
a lot of bandits and we see a lot of
grave robbers, Doninsky's finding people to kill that just don't
seem to necessarily be up to mischief. They just seem
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 3 (59:44):
There's a lot of people all camping around his castle,
so it's it's bandit country full of horrible, nasty, violent
bandits and grave robbers and thieves, but also people just
backpacking through the country.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
I guess you know, they didn't have the all trails
at back there, so you didn't have the little icons
that would pop up. It's like, okay, bandits, grave robbers,
and wear wolves on this one, and maybe we should
go for something a little closer into town.

Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
There have been eighty two were wolf attacks in this
location in the past month. Yeah, now, I think later,
I don't know if it's that night some other time.
Doninsky is shown talking to Mirkaya, the servant with the burns,
and they discuss some things about their new guests. First
of all, they say Karen is the chosen one. I
don't know what that means yet, And they say Erica

(01:00:31):
is evil. You gotta be careful about her. But then
Doninsky is like, but she is beautiful. It's like Valdemar,
you should know better.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
But this is he gets into trouble like this every time. Yeah,
remember that last girlfriend you had, that was Elizabeth Bathory.
She got you executed and also she turned you into
a were wolf. Come on, so Erica.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
Later she's talking to the grave of Countess Bathory, and
there's one part that made me laugh. The line was
she says, Elizabeth, the big day is near, so they're
building up to the time when she can be resurrected.
I think. But here's the part where again it feels
like something is just missing. Suddenly, Karen. The last time

(01:01:16):
we saw her, she's like recovering from her fall in bed.
Now suddenly she's up and about and she and Doninski
are already in a relationship. They're like walking around the
castle together having a deep heart to heart conversation and
they're kissing, and it feels like, Okay, there should have
been a scene where they're like first meeting and falling

(01:01:36):
in love, but we don't see any of that. It's
just now they're in love.

Speaker 1 (01:01:39):
Yeah. Yeah, it does feel like like we skipped over
some steps there, but here we are full blown love story.
She is the chosen one. Yeah, and by that, where
I think to understand, that means that she loves him
enough to potentially kill him with.

Speaker 3 (01:01:53):
The silver dagger, with the silver yeah. Oh, and Erica
is like staring at them with just know them in
her eyes.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
She's jealous, Yeah, because I mean it's true love. I
mean people ask, you know what he's love and it's
been a universal human question for so long, But I
mean this movie answers it. It is do you love
someone enough to stab them through the heart and destroy
them when they're a werewolf? That's that's the litmus test
right there.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
I don't know if these are lessons that can be
applied to your daily life in a way.

Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
I hope not.

Speaker 3 (01:02:25):
Oh, but we also love we learn about the mere
Kaya backstory. Everybody loves Valdemar b so Erica loves Valdemar
or I don't know about loves him. She's jealous at least.
Karen loves Valdemar, and mir Kaya also loves Valdemar, but
she's like, you know, oh no, Karen, you're the chosen one.
You can love him. I'll just be sad. But her

(01:02:46):
backstory is that she was accused of witchcraft and burned
at the stake, but then a storm came and extinguished
the fire, so she was able to escape and Valdemar
took her in. And I was a little confused about
the timeline here, like did this happen since he was
brought back from the dead a few days.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
Ago, he would have to be right. This would have
had to have happened in nineteen eighty Yeah, in rural Europe.
So yeah. Otherwise they're skipping over some other stuff, like
well how did she come back to life?

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
So later there's a full moon, and then we get
our first Paul Nashy wolf transformation scene. We've already seen
him as a wolf man going out and biting people,
but now we actually get to see him change and
the transformation it's full of it's you know, it's the
passion of the wolf. The transformation is painful. It fills
him with not just physical pain, but moral and emotional anguish.

(01:03:47):
He seems to be trying his best to resist it,
to fight it off, but he can't. He breaks and
throws a lot of furnishings in his house as he's changing.
And the physical transformation, I would say, is primarily achieved
to be a step wise migration of his beard up
across his face.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
Yeah. Yeah, The the aspects of this transformation are very
much in line with your classic wolf man effects and
I think have to be judged within that context. But
I but I do. I do think the ultimate look
that we get, the ultimate werewolf makeup, looks really solid
and Nashi's performance, the emotion he pours into the transformation

(01:04:26):
is so good.

Speaker 3 (01:04:27):
I apologize if this is a question that I've already asked,
maybe when we were covering Assignment Terror. I don't remember,
But I wonder if one or the other werewolf design
better lends itself to the tragedy of the werewolf story.
Like so both American werewolf in London and this this
story both have like a tragic werewolf where you feel

(01:04:48):
sad for him, But American werewolf has the more dog
form quadrupedal, long snout. This one is the you know,
the the classic one Janey human style head up on,
you know, bipedal. Which one do you think goes more
for the sadness of the werewolf condition?

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. I mean,
one would be tempted to think, well, the one that
looks more human, maybe he leans into more of a
human understanding of the monster, and therefore the snouted were
wolves lean more monstrous. But I don't think it's necessarily
the case, because you know, I think you feel a
lot of sympathy for the beast in American Werewolf in London.

(01:05:28):
So hard to say. I will say this though, I
think that for the most part, the traditional wolfman has
been easier to integrate physically into a scene, whereas if
you have an elaborate snouted beast, the practical effect may
be difficult to integrate. And then by the time you're
getting to see gi stuff, well obviously they're going to

(01:05:49):
be integration problems there as well.

Speaker 3 (01:05:51):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I guess the more human form
wolf man can do human relationship posture, like can help
somebody or something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
Yeah, and you can, I guess you can also make
a strong argument for even though we're talking about a
lot of were wolf makeup, the actor is still able
to emote through the makeup, through that costume and embody
that character in a way that might be more difficult
or even impossible with other forms of effects that are
gonna be necessary for your full snout boy wear wolf.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
Yeah. Okay, So anyway, in the scene there's a transformation.
But once wolf mode is fully throttled up, like he
menaces Karen for a second, it's like, oh, no, is
he gonna attack his beloved? But no, Just when he's
about to, Mirkaya shows up to save the day. She
holds out a silver cross and holds it in his face,
and this seems to kind of shame him out of

(01:06:43):
eating his new girlfriend. Instead, he jumps through a window,
runs around outside until he finds a guy camping a
camper cooking a pot of something over a fire, and
he attacks. Then he also goes to a village and
just attacks more people. He like bite it's a lady
who's getting water out of a well and then kind
of casually drops her in a watering trough and runs away.

(01:07:06):
And I'll say Doninsky is a very efficient werewolf. Like
most attacks, there are some exceptions, like earlier in the
movie there's one part where he like attacks a lady
and then like carries her away, But in most attacks,
he just like bites somebody and then bolts, like he
grabs their arms, bite the neck, show the blood on
his teeth to the camera. They gleam, that gleams in
the moonlight for a second, and then he drops the

(01:07:28):
human and runs away. The whole thing is about eight seconds.

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
Yeah, I mean it's almost like it's he's he's he's
shameful over it. You know. It's like the beast overcomes
in and in and in satisfying this thirst, this hunger
for just a second. Like it's also enough for him
to sort of wake up a little bit and like
drop what he's doing and move on.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
I am probably being overly generous in that analysis.

Speaker 3 (01:07:54):
No, No, I think that makes sense. Yeah, he's like, uh,
there's a little bit of human Dninsky still operative in
there that can be like, oh, what have I done?
And then he runs away, but then he does it
again because he's a wolf. So while he's out, Mirkaia
fills Karen in on some lure. She explains, I don't know,
so sort of the backstory, and then she's like, by

(01:08:16):
the way, remember your scientist friends who you came here with. Yeah,
let's hope they're dead, because if not, they're vampires now.
And if you see them again, use this silver cross
shaped dagger to protect yourself from them. And you know what,
Merkaiah's instincts or right on the money. So Erica has
done exactly what she told the professor she was going

(01:08:37):
to do. She hypnotizes Barbara, kills her, uses her blood
to rehydrate Elizabeth Bathory like like drips her blood down
on her, and the rehydration scene has a pretty cool
looking effect where the blood like drips onto the statue
of Bathory on the grave and it starts sort of
dissolving the stone and releasing puffs of steam, and Erica's

(01:08:59):
looking around and frantically she's like, oh, dude, I did it.
What's up now? And the lid lifts off the vault
and Bathory wakes up and she has a very creepy outfit.
I like the costuming in the scene. It's a black
dress with gold trim, kind of like Doninsky's black outfit
with gold trim, and it has this two lobed bonnet.

(01:09:20):
I don't know what you call that. It's a bonnet
that has two humps instead of one.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
Yeah, I don't know what it's called either. The bonnet.

Speaker 3 (01:09:27):
It's good. It's got the gold trim, the black veil,
and no messing around it all. She just grabs Erica
vamps her. Okay, here's one vampire servant. It's a neck bite.
And then she also raises one of her other servants
from the dead. But unlike Valdemar and the Countess, this
guy is fully decayed. He's a zombie.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
Yeah, this would be Outvos that she's revived as like
a blind dead as zombie like. He's crumbling and skeletal,
but also pretty bulky like obviously he's intended to be
the heavy of the outfit. And at this point in
the film, I'm like, oh man, it's on now, because
Bathory not only has Bathory revived and resurrected, but now
she has a crew, she has AVOs here, she's got

(01:10:12):
vampire ladies, a number of them, and seemingly she's going
to recruit even more so now she is already a
force to contend with.

Speaker 3 (01:10:20):
No, there was a part somewhere around here that made
me laugh out loud. It's the scene where Paul Nashy
comes home after a hard night of wolfing out. You
remember he staggers in the door and he's exhausted and
covered in blood, and Karen's waiting there and embraces him.
It just seems like it's been a hard day's night.

(01:10:40):
But then there's a scene where Bathory has her first
like she has the minions assembled. They're all standing there
information in front of her crypt. They're ready to take orders.
And now both of the former dead rasiologists are wearing
vampire queen dresses like they're now all in black dresses
like bath three. And I was thinking, wait, where did

(01:11:02):
they get the new costumes? Did they pack these vampire
queen dresses when they came to Transylvania Or does Countess
Bathory have a community wardrobe for new vampires to source from.

Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
Oh, I mean, I guess she has wardrobe because she
can't have her new minions running around in like trendy
T shirts that they bought in Rome. No, no, no,
they need they need to look the part. They're representing
a brand, now.

Speaker 3 (01:11:27):
That's right. So they are in uniform and Bathory says
to them, we need Paul Nashy's power. She says, quote
Voldemar must serve me again. We need his strength, his
thirst for death, his invulnerability. I won't have all my
power back until the Great Ritual Night. Then our Lord
Satan will answer my call and the Kingdom of Darkness

(01:11:48):
will come to earth. Until then, the werewolf must be
under my command. So there are basically two factions operating.
Now You've got like Valdemar, Karen, and Mirkaya on one side,
and then bath and all her minions on the other.
But they are all in the same building, which is interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
Well yeah, well there's this I don't know if this
occurs now or later, but there's this whole like subplot,
the research plot, where they take off, the vampires take off,
and then they steal some coffins from somebody or they
get delivered. Yet they relocate, but then meanwhile Doninsky's researching
and then finally he's like, oh, they didn't relocate, they're

(01:12:27):
in the same castle, so I was a little confused
on how that came together.

Speaker 3 (01:12:31):
Yeah, I didn't quite understand that either, but for now
they're definitely in the same place, and the Blood Countess
she sends vampire Erica out to vampamir Kaya because she's like,
we got to take away from his side. So you know,
Erica does that. She vamps the mer Kaya and then
bathes in her blood. But then Valdemar and Karen find

(01:12:51):
evidence of this, and then suddenly we cut there again.
There's like some very like jumpy editing. We cut suddenly
to these do eating with Voldemar and Karen in this
very brown room.

Speaker 1 (01:13:05):
Yeah, yeah, out of nowhere, suddenly they seem to be
academics that that Valdemar has called up or something, or
they're just paying a house visit. They're like, hey, Valdemar,
let's let's talk. What's what's going on?

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
And that's what you think, Yeah, that's what you think.
At first, they're sharing news of the surrounding towns and countryside.
They're like werewolves and vampires are killing everybody and draining
their blood. So I think we are to understand now
that like Bathorys vampires have been operating in the area
for a while, but that clearly would mean we've cut
forward in time because they just rose. One of the

(01:13:39):
guys is, well, they're like, you've got to use garlic
to protect yourself. One guy recommends putting garlic in your
in one's rectum, and then the other one scolds him
for being crude and saying that. But they do say, hey,
the vampires are women, and then Doninsky's like, oh, I
know what that means. That's Bathories people. So while at

(01:13:59):
first it seems like these guys might be professors or
clerics of some kind, what do you know, they're also
just thieves. They want a burglarize. They want to burglarized
Valdemar's castle. Bad idea, guys. But before they get the chance,
they're hanging out in a barn somewhere outside. I think
this is the barn where everybody gets attacked. It's the
barn of Mischief, and they're hanging out there and two

(01:14:20):
of Bathory's vamp women, like Treadmill glide into the room
surrounded by unholy mist.

Speaker 1 (01:14:27):
It's a cool looking vamp glide scene. I love it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
Now here's a history of cinema question. This is used
in a lot of films where like the vampire is shot,
you know, you see above from above their feet, they're
shot from the waist up or something, and they move
towards you clearly without walking, like their legs are not moving,
and suggesting that maybe they're floating an inch above the
floor or something. What was the first movie to do that?

(01:14:52):
Where does the glide convention come from?

Speaker 1 (01:14:55):
That's a great question, I would venture to guess. Not here,
I'm assuming where is it from somewhere? But yeah, I
don't know if this is a product of like the
Hammer era, or if this goes all the way back
to the thirties or what. Off the top of my head,
I can't think of the earliest example that I've seen.

Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
I don't recall it happening in any of the universal
vampire movies, but I.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
Feel like it's a definite Hammer play, though I think
I've seen it in Hammer films before.

Speaker 3 (01:15:22):
Another place where it feels like we suddenly jump ahead.
We cut straight from the vamp ladies looming in the
midst to Valdemar and Karen finishing graves for the two
thief guys talking about how yeah, we had to put
steaks in him and cut their heads off to make
sure they wouldn't come back. But Valdemar goes on to say,
you know what, Okay, so we know what's happening. Now
Bathory's back, She's going to want to kill you, Karen,

(01:15:43):
So tonight you've got to lock yourself in your room
and keep this cross next to you, the silver Dagger here. Now,
Karen at this point asks an extremely sensible question, the
one I was thinking about. She's like, why don't we
just go down in the crips like they're down there
in the same building we are, Why don't we go
down and destroy them? But Valdemar has an answer. I

(01:16:03):
guess this makes sense. He says, I'm not strong enough yet,
can't do it until the full moon comes.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's only in the werewolf
form that he's gonna have any chance of standing up
to Bathory and her minions. And I think you could
probably add on top of that, it's like this apparentlyss
castle is apparently huge, and it's it's it's dungeons and
its cripts are extensive, so we're not sure even exactly
where they might be down there, and they've got to

(01:16:28):
they've got to spend all their time just cleaning up.
They would be vampires. Yeah, they surrounding countryside and burying
their dead.

Speaker 3 (01:16:36):
I guess that's true. So that night there are vampire
attacks on both Karen and Valdemar, but Karen really comes through.
She saves the day. So vampire Barbara attacks her, but
she fights her off with the Silver Cross dagger, and
then Barbara emits a lot of smoke, but I couldn't
tell if she was actually like destroyed as a vampire
or just kind of incapacitated. I'm not sure. But then

(01:16:58):
another one of the vamps, this was Erica, comes into
Valdemar's room and starts to hypnotize him, starts kissing him.
She's ready to bite, but then Karen busts in with
the Silver Cross and rescues him.

Speaker 1 (01:17:09):
Is this a scene with the mirror over the bed.

Speaker 3 (01:17:12):
Yes, the vampire has no reflection.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
Yeah. Yeah, so in the forefront it's Valdemar and the
vampire embracing and kissing, but then in the mirror behind him,
he's like he's like kissing an invisible woman. Yeah that's great.

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
So now Valdemar and Karen. I guess he's changed his
mind about going down to the crips. He tries to
go on offense, goes down there, he fights the Otvos zombie.
That's over pretty quick.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
Yeah, yeah, he makes pretty short work about Vos. I
was kind of hoping for a more drawn out battle
between those two, but he knows what he's doing, takes
him out in no time.

Speaker 3 (01:17:45):
But the vamps aren't there. They have now relocated. And
then a terrible twist happens. Bathori herself sneaks into Karen's
room at night and she manages to get around the
defense the security system of the Silver Deack by covering
it up with a cloth. Didn't think of that.

Speaker 1 (01:18:04):
Then she does it. She does it telekinetically, I think too.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
She's like whoaow, yeah, and she covers it up with
the cloth and then she vamps Karen, or partially vamps her.
So maybe you can help explain what you thought was
going on here. So her plan is to re recruit
Valdemar to her service, and she's using Karen to do that.
So she bites Karen, but then the next day Karen

(01:18:27):
seems fine during the daytime, what's going on? She like,
she does have an ominous look in her eye, and
then we see Bathory returning again the next night to
bite to bite Karen once again. So I think the
vamping here is coming in installments, unlike the previous ones
were just like one bite and now you're a vampire.

Speaker 1 (01:18:46):
Yeah, I think maybe like the willing evil soul that
only takes one dose. But yeah, you know, kay, if
you're Karen. Karen's a good girl, so it's gonna take
take a little more finets, you know, like a little
this night, a little the next night, and kind of
work up to that that full vampire transformation.

Speaker 3 (01:19:03):
Now, there was one part here that was really funny,
and I was hoping it was going in a certain direction,
but it just it turned out to be a dream sequence.
But Valdemar is, he's hanging out, and he I think
imagines Bathory saying like praying to Satan or to some
other like evil demon saying, my evil Lord, send ninety

(01:19:24):
nine black cats.

Speaker 1 (01:19:28):
Yeah, I'm glad we did not get ninety nine black cats.

Speaker 3 (01:19:31):
My brain was immediately going ninety nine black cats, ninety nine,
fries ninety nine, Tacos ninety nine pies.

Speaker 1 (01:19:37):
Yeah, I don't know. I was just thinking of the animals.
I don't want to see that many animals in one
shot in a film of this of this genre in
time period.

Speaker 3 (01:19:44):
But so anyway, we're building up to a final confrontation.
So it's the night of the full moon, which means
Valdemar will finally be at full power for wolf mode
to defeat Bathory. But this is also going to be
the night that Bathory can do the ritual to achieve
her full power and then she would defeat him. But
also while he's in wolf mode, he's going to be

(01:20:05):
a bloodthirsty monster, so Karen can't be around, so she'll
have to hide from him and protect herself. And then
but then after he explains all this and leaves, Karen
like admires her neck bites in the mirror, but she
still has a reflection, so I think she is half
vamped here. Her will has been partially transformed to evil,

(01:20:27):
so she seems like, ah, yes, my neck bites, that
is good. I will betray him. And she's serving Bathory's commands,
but she can still go out in daytime and she
still shows up in a mirror, which actually this seems
like an ideal conversation. She's kind of a day walker here,
but like an evil day walker. So wouldn't Bathory want
to keep servants in this state so that you know

(01:20:48):
they can do all this instead of making them full vampires.

Speaker 1 (01:20:51):
Well, I guess it's it's a tenuous state, and I
think we see evidence of that, you know, like she's
she's not fully one side or the other, so we
don't know which way way it's going to go. But
also Bathory doesn't know one hundred percent which way she's
going to go.

Speaker 3 (01:21:05):
Well, Karen's doing doing what she's told for now, like
she knocks out Valdemar with a silver cane. He wakes
up later, he figures out what's going on that that
she has been half vampired, and then he goes to
the Vampire Layer, which he knows where it is now.
For some reason, I don't remember how he discovers that.
It's like by looking at maps.

Speaker 1 (01:21:24):
I think something occurred during the research portion of the film. Yeah,
and he was like, oh, I know, I know where
it is, and it's it's just downstairs.

Speaker 3 (01:21:31):
So we get some stakings of the Lesser Vamps, a
were wolf transformation and then plenty of werewolf versus vampire wrestling.
It's a big it's a big wrestling match. At the end,
more vampires are inadvertently staked when the Wolfman tosses them
into wooden crates that explode on impact.

Speaker 1 (01:21:49):
One in particular of these was a really quality kill.
I really like this. This is a cool effect.

Speaker 3 (01:21:54):
Bathory tries to force him to obey, you know, there's
a do as I command you kind of moment, and
he doesn't. He snarls and drools instead. The Wolfman cannot
be tamed, so they keep on fighting. There's wrestling, there's
some telekinesis I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:22:09):
Yeah. There's a great scene where she does like a
telekinetic coffin torpedo attack against Doninsky, where she makes a
coffin fly at him and it shatters against him. That
was really nice. So yeah, it seems like an evenly
matched battle for the most part, because Doninsky is strong
and fierce and has teeth. But she has teeth too,
Plus she has these kind of like force powers she's

(01:22:29):
able to bust out. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:31):
So eventually though, he gets the upper hand and he
bites Bathory and then crams her in her coffin, and
then the bites on Karen's neck magically disappear, and then
Bathory speed rots and emids smoke and Karen is okay.
Now it seems she has healed from her half vampire state.
But unfortunately, just as he warned, wolf Mode Voldemar can't

(01:22:54):
be stopped. He attacks her, and then Karen, just like
the legend foretold, she stabs him in the heart with
the silver dagger. I don't know if it's in the heart,
actually it looks more like it's in the stomach. But
she frees him from his curse, but he already bit her,
so I think she's done for as well. And it's
the classic sad ending that I think it ended almost
exactly like this in the other Nashi movie we saw

(01:23:16):
where they both die, but now his spirit is free,
the curse has been lifted, and it's and it's sad,
and we get the classic post mortem regression to human
morph of the werewolf, and Karen crawls to his side
to die. It is tragic, but I have to say
that I liked this, so I wouldn't want to change it.
But the sense of sadness and tragedy is strongly undercut

(01:23:38):
by the fact that it cuts straight back to the
funk theme from Tentacles, and the screen says, end, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
That that funk theme from Tentacles too risky a day
for Regatta. It's both times it's used in the film.
It is at once out of place and a little
bit jarring, but also perfect, like I wouldn't go back,
can replace it with anything, It's just it's a wonderful track.

Speaker 3 (01:24:03):
So many horror films, especially your generation of postmodern horror films,
have explored the question of who would win in a
fight between a vampire and a were wolf. This movie
sort of answers, well, the werewolf will win, but in
the end, love conquers all, Love defeats even the wolf.

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
Yeah, I guess in many ways, like the werewolf is
the more passionate and emotional end of the monster spectrum,
and the vampire is like is the cold hunger you know,
So you would want the wolf to win out over
the bat in this scenario, I don't know. For some reason,
it feels closer to the human experience and more empowering

(01:24:44):
of like noble human elements.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
When I say the vampire is somewhere between lawful and
neutral evil, and the werewolf is somewhere between chaotic evil
and chaotic neutral.

Speaker 1 (01:24:58):
Yeah, I would agree with that with all that. Yeah,
like if you were to flip either of them to good,
you'd still want to be with the werewolf over the vampire,
because the vampire is just always going to have something
less trustworthy about them. I don't know, it seems like
vampire versus werewolf movies that I can think of, like,
it's always the case the werewolf is the more sympathetic side.

(01:25:18):
You're going to side with the lichens over the vamps.
If there is an example of the opposite out there,
let us know. I would like to hear about that
as well. Well.

Speaker 3 (01:25:28):
It's because the werewolf is still partially human, I think,
and the vampire is not.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Yeah, And also the vampire is more strongly undead, whereas
the werewolf is still you know, it's more within the
realm of supernatural mammal at that point.

Speaker 3 (01:25:43):
And the more I think about it, there's a pretty
straightforward moral difference in the kind of like violence they do,
which is that the vampire is a is directly intentionally
predatorially evil, is just doing harm to other people consciously
on purpose, whereas the werewolf seems to be like it
has lost its mind in a way, like it doesn't

(01:26:04):
know what it's doing.

Speaker 1 (01:26:05):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's it exactly now that you
mention it. The vampire is premeditated. Yeah, and we see
that with these characters. Like at the very beginning, Doninsky's like,
I don't know, I guess I'm gonna die. I don't know,
I've really thought through it. I'm just heartbroken, whereas Bathory
is like I will come back, i will raise an
army of the dead, I'll have my vengeance, and we'll
bring on a new age of darkness.

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
Now, I've got another question about this story. It's clear
in this version of the story, the historical understanding of
Bathory is that she was guilty of all the murders,
like she was a horrible serial killer. I wonder if
the other historical interpretation could make an interesting movie, like
she was innocent and wrongly convicted but then comes back
from the grave.

Speaker 1 (01:26:45):
Yeah, I'm up for it. I'm up for any kind
of novel Bathory film. I don't think there are a
lot of them that are really novel. As I mentioned earlier,
I think this one really might be more of an outlier,
and that it puts more thought into the treatment. All right, well,
there you have it. Night of the Werewolf from nineteen
eighty one, pretty solid Nashy film. I think if you've
never seen a Nashy picture, this one's a pretty good

(01:27:07):
introduction to the sort of stuff you get. And it
also you know, it's not for children by any stretch
of the imagination, but it's also not too scandalous. So
I recommend this one, and I recommend the Paul Nashi
Collections Part one and two. Just a reminder to everyone
out there, we are primarily a science podcast, real science,

(01:27:28):
not just the necromancy stuff, so occasionally it comes up
with core episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener Mail
on Monday's short form Artifactor, Monster Effect on Wednesdays. But
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about weird films on Weird House Cinema. If you
want a full list of the movies we've covered over
the years, you can go to letterboxed dot com. That's
l E T T E r bo x D dot com.

(01:27:50):
Our username is weird House and we have a list there.
You can fire them all up, you can organize them
by decade and genre and what have you. It's a
lot of fun and I also blog about these episodes
at some to music dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:28:01):
Here's thanks to our excellent audio producer, Jjposway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow Yourmind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:28:22):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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