The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave: The Gothic-Giallo Hybrid

By 1971 the Italian gothic was dead and the Italian giallo was printing money. The gothic cycle that Mario Bava had launched with Black Sunday in 1960 — crypts, candelabra, a beautiful dead woman with a grievance — had exhausted its audience, and the razor thrillers had taken the shelf space. So Emilio Miraglia did the obvious commercial thing, which nobody else had quite done properly: he made both films at once.

La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba is a gothic from the neck up and a giallo from the wallet down. It has the castle, the crypt, the red-haired revenant and the mad lord. It also has an inheritance, a set of financially interested relatives and the absolute conviction that the supernatural is something people manufacture when there is property involved.

The lord

Anthony Steffen plays Lord Alan Cunningham, recently out of an asylum, tormented by the memory of his dead wife Evelyn, who was red-haired and unfaithful. His response to this grief is to bring red-haired women to his estate, and the film establishes within its first reel that Alan is a murderer and a lunatic. That is a bold opening position: the protagonist is guilty, we know it, and there are eighty minutes to go.

Steffen was a spaghetti-western star — Django the Bastard and a long run of hard-faced gunmen — and he brings the wrong energy in a way that ends up working. He plays Alan as a blank, an aristocratic slab with nothing behind the eyes. A better actor would have found the pain and made the film a tragedy. Steffen’s opacity keeps Alan as an object, a thing being acted upon, which turns out to be exactly what the plot requires.

Around him Miraglia assembles the good stuff. Marina Malfatti as Gladys, the new wife, playing serenity with a faint sense of rehearsal. Umberto Raho, that immaculate character face, as the family retainer. Giacomo Rossi Stuart as the doctor. And Erika Blanc, who gets the film’s most famous sequence — an act performed emerging from a coffin, staged for Alan’s benefit at a private party — which is the whole picture in miniature. A dead woman rising, for money, on request.

Erika Blanc is worth a paragraph on her own, because she is the best thing in the film and the reference books tend to reduce her to the coffin. Blanc had already been the possessed child’s medium in Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill! in 1966, which means she had spent five years being the person Italian horror hired when a scene needed someone to perform the supernatural convincingly. Miraglia casts her as a woman paid to perform the supernatural, and the joke is so precise it cannot be accidental. She plays the number with a professional’s boredom underneath the presentation, and if you watch her eyes rather than the choreography you can see her checking the room’s reaction. She knows what she is selling. Everyone in this castle knows what they are selling.

The ancestor is not Bava

Everyone reaches for Bava when they discuss this film, and Bava is in it — the crypt lighting, the fog, the whole visual grammar of The Whip and the Body, which is the direct stylistic parent. But the plot’s real ancestors are English and American.

Start with Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier’s dead first wife, the second wife who cannot compete with a woman who is not there, the house that belongs to the deceased — that is the engine of Miraglia’s film, transposed to a man’s psychology. Then Poe’s “Ligeia”, the dead beloved who will not stay dead and who reasserts herself through a living woman’s body, filmed by Roger Corman as The Tomb of Ligeia in 1964 with a red-haired revenant of its own. Corman’s Poe cycle is where this material was last commercially viable, and Miraglia has clearly studied it.

What he adds is the audit. Corman’s Poe films are about the past as a psychological condition; the horror is that grief has physical force. Miraglia’s film is about the past as an asset class. Somebody in that castle stands to gain, and the film’s whole method is to let you feel the gothic’s authentic dread while quietly keeping the ledger open in the corner of the frame.

That fusion is the reason this film sits at an interesting junction. The Italian gothic said the dead return. The giallo said the living scheme. Miraglia says the dead return because the living scheme, which is a genuinely nasty idea and one the English ghost story had been circling since M. R. James.

Bruno Nicolai, and the crypt

Bruno Nicolai wrote the score, and Nicolai is the great underrated name of this cycle — Morricone’s long-time conductor and orchestrator, with a substantial body of his own work that gets attributed to his more famous colleague roughly once a month.

His approach here is to score the castle as a memory rather than a threat. The main theme has a swaying, waltz-adjacent quality, something you might have danced to once, and it recurs at the moments the film is at its most frankly supernatural. The effect is to make the haunting nostalgic. Alan is not being frightened; he is being invited backwards. That is a substantially cleverer musical reading of the material than the film’s reputation as a piece of lurid trash would lead you to expect, and it is Nicolai, more than Miraglia, who supplies the picture’s melancholy.

The crypt photography deserves its praise. Miraglia lights the tomb sequences with an old-fashioned, theatrical, source-motivated look — a lantern, a shaft, the rest gone — and the choice is doing something specific for the plot. A crypt lit like a stage is a crypt where things can be arranged out of shot. Compare it with the modernist daylight Luigi Bazzoni was working in that same year, where visibility itself became the horror. Miraglia’s darkness is not atmosphere. It is stage machinery.

There is one more structural oddity worth naming, because it is unusual for the period. The film gives you its monster in reel one and then asks you to spend the rest of the running time worrying about him. Alan is a murderer, and the plot’s suspense depends on you not wanting him destroyed — which is a strange thing to ask of an audience, and Miraglia gets away with it through sheer momentum. The trick works because the film keeps introducing people who are worse. Every new arrival at the castle is more calculating than the man with the corpses, and by the final act your sympathies have been walked, step by step, to a place you would not have agreed to go directly.

The case against

The film is silly. I say that with affection and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The English aristocracy on display was assembled from postcards, the estate’s geography rearranges itself between scenes, and there is a run of business involving foxes kept on the grounds that arrives from nowhere and exists to solve a body-disposal problem. The pacing sags badly through a middle act that has to keep Alan occupied while the plot gets its pieces into position.

The gender politics are the cycle’s standard and they are grim: red-haired women exist here to be lured, staged and disposed of, and the film’s interest in them expires with them. Steffen’s blankness, which I have defended, is also just limited acting, and there are stretches where the film needs him to carry a scene and he cannot.

And the double life of the thing costs it. As a gothic it is too cynical to be haunting. As a giallo it is too fog-bound to be tense. Miraglia is playing two hands and neither is quite a winner on its own.

What to watch after

Miraglia made one more film that matters — The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, in 1972, which runs the identical trick with a family curse instead of a dead wife, and is the better-constructed picture. The two are usually sold as a pair and should be watched as one. That is the entire body of work: two gothic-giallo hybrids from a director who spotted a gap in the market, filled it twice, and left.

For the shelf around this, the giallo canon is the map, and Hammer horror and the colourising of the gothic covers what the English were doing with the same crypts at the same time and with considerably more money. For the same year’s version of the money-behind-the-madness plot done straight, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh is the film to pair this with.

Where to watch: restored and looking better than it has any right to. The colour is the point — Miraglia’s reds, and the specific red of the hair, are the film’s entire index system, and a washed-out print makes the plot literally harder to follow.

Spoilers below

Evelyn does not come out of the grave. There is no ghost, there was never going to be a ghost, and the haunting is a production with a cast, a budget and a schedule.

The scheme is the standard one and Miraglia executes it well: Alan’s madness is an asset, his estate is the prize, and a man with a documented psychiatric history who already believes his dead wife is walking is the easiest mark in England. Every apparition is staged. Every unexplained noise has a technician. The people manufacturing the ghost are the people closest to him, and they are doing it because the arithmetic works.

What makes the reveal land harder than it should is the thing I flagged above the line: Alan is guilty. He really did kill those women. So the conspirators are not framing an innocent — they are exploiting a genuine monster, and their calculation is that nobody will look closely at a murderer who dies mad. The film’s grubby brilliance is that its villains have correctly assessed the situation. Alan’s crimes are their cover, and the red-haired women he killed become, retrospectively, part of somebody’s business plan.

Then the reversal, because this is 1971 and Italian thrillers of 1971 do not stop at one. The conspiracy is a partnership, and partnerships hold only as long as the money is distant. Once the estate is within reach the plotters begin subtracting each other, and Miraglia stages the collapse with the same taste for the theatrical that he brought to the crypt.

Nobody is redeemed and nothing is learned. What the film leaves you with is the same insight Bava had already delivered in Blood and Black Lace seven years earlier and that the giallo would keep restating for a decade: the supernatural is a costume that greed puts on when it needs the room cleared. The gothic believed in ghosts. The giallo believed in the people who invent them, and Miraglia’s small, lurid, undervalued film is the exact hinge where one turned into the other.