SPIRITS OF THE DEAD 1968
When I first experienced Spirits of the Dead, I fell into an altered state of consciousness, a door opening to another kind of poetic and haunting beauty that would come to define horror in the 1960s—the era when darkness found its lyricism, and fear was woven through with elegance, dreamlike dread, and a poignant gaze into the human soul’s shadows in vivid color. This was a time when horror shed classical fright, timeless, a primal kind of fear, one that relies on mood, silhouette, and suggestion for something more baroque: a sensibility that was simultaneously unsettling and exquisitely atmospheric, a symphony of surreal visions and psychological torment whispered through a colorful prism.
I am irresistibly pulled by Spirit of the Dead’s intricate psychological depths and its exploration of human darkness rather than any straightforward ghost story. Instead, Spirits of the Dead draws you into a haunting elegy of the human psyche, carved into three distinct yet interconnected vignettes. Each segment—Metzengerstein, William Wilson, and Toby Dammit- unfolds a complex meditation on obsession, self-destruction, and the inescapable shadows within.
In Metzengerstein, the Countess Frédérique’s obsession consumes her like a wildfire that devours the soul’s landscape, her decadent yearning collapsing into ruin. In William Wilson, the doppelgänger is a spectral conscience, a psychic torment doubling the soul in ruin at the heart of the story’s cruelty until self-annihilation becomes inevitable. Toby Dammit plunges into the fragmented delirium of a shattered mind, where reality and hallucination twist together in a dance of doom, with all psychological shadows and internal specters stalking the tale’s damned fallen idol.
I want to wander deeper into each segment’s extraordinary imagery: and believe me I’ll be paying careful attention to construct a visual narrative to help me convey Spirit of the Dead’s psychological twists and turns tracing how the film’s distorted characters embody the corrosive weight of guilt, desire, and madness; the black stallion as a symbol of unchecked passion and fatal destiny; the mirrored double reflecting the fracturing of identity; the cityscape of Rome turned surreal stage for a descent into oblivion.
So, plan on reading my journey at The Last Drive In soon as I wander deeper into these phantasmal realms, reading Spirits of the Dead as a dark requiem for the fractured human condition, a confrontation with the ghostly forces of desire, guilt, and decay that haunt us all from within.
In the Company of Ghosts: Exploring Death’s Liminal Realm in Spirits of the Dead
Spirits of the Dead (1968) feels like a haunting journey through three of Edgar Allan Poe’s most eerie imaginings. It is a triptych of Poe’s uncanny tales seen through the visionary eyes of three masterful European directors: Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Each segment feels like stepping into a vivid dream, where reality blurs with the spectral worlds that breathe in the air of existential dread, moral decay, and the strange, unsettling beauty found in the darker corners of the mind.
Known in France as Histoires extraordinaires and in Italy as Tre passi nel delirio, Spirits of the Dead is a seamless blend of Poe’s classic dark Gothic sensibilities and the boldly poetic art-house aesthetics of European cinema. It is not an ordinary horror film; it’s a mysterious dance between shadow and light, sanity and madness. Each vignette is a vivid, otherworldly brushstroke on the canvas of fear and fascination that Poe so masterfully conjured.
Spirits of the Dead brings together Vadim’s lush Gothic decadence, Malle’s cold psychological precision, and Fellini’s feverish surrealism, merging their distinct signatures into a hallucinatory anthology where visual excess, existential torment, and playful nightmare gather in a single flame within a single cinematic vision.
The first vignette, Metzengerstein, directed by Roger Vadim, immerses you in a tale steeped in old-world decadence, doomed aristocracy, and fatal obsession. Jane Fonda having electrified cinema screens that same year as the eternally iconic Barbarella, practically rocketed from outer space straight into Poe’s Gothic hall of mirrors, trading her ray gun for a riding crop, but losing none of that star-power spark, She commands the screen as the cruel, self-indulgent Countess Frédérique de Metzengerstein, whose icy detachment unravels into madness with her volatile affection for her cousin, Baron Wilhelm (Peter Fonda). Countess Frédérique, aloof, spoiled, and icy until her cool exterior starts to crack and give way to chaos.
Her dangerous obsession becomes a catalyst for doom, captured in the eerie arrival of a spectral black horse, a symbol of guilt and retribution. The horse stalks the characters and the edges of the story in a way that transcends the natural world, like fate itself.
Vadim’s segment thrums with lush, baroque cinematography by Claude Renoir, (Blood and Roses 1960, Barbarella 1968, The Horsement 1971, French Connection II 1975, The Spy Who Loved Me 1977) draping the narrative in dramatic shadows, rich velvety colors, like were wandering through a painting where every brushstroke echoes the inescapable grip of fate.
The story’s roots lie in Poe’s tale of the same name, an early Gothic masterpiece that explores themes of inherited sin and supernatural vengeance, whispering through the film. Yet, Vadim’s adaptation is bathed in a kind of extravagant grand theatricality, and gives us a world that’s beautiful, corrupt, and teetering on the edge of collapse, mirroring the countess’s moral decay and decadent indulgence. This decadence is vividly portrayed through scenes that exude a sense of uninhibited excess and dark, sensual power. Fonda’s character, Countess Frédérique, reigns over her vast estate with a cruel and self-indulgent spirit. The imagery of hedonism comes alive in her lavish surroundings, where she lives free of restraint, reveling in orgies and commanding her servants with icy detachment.
A striking element of this baroque excess is how she interacts with her leopard, an exotic and dangerous symbol of her wild and untamed nature. The leopard lounges in opulent settings, perfectly at ease amidst her drinking deeply of pleasure, underscoring Frédérique’s dominion over both people and beasts. The scenes include orgiastic gatherings rich in sensuality and excess, where Fonda’s character fully embraces her sexuality, cool, commanding, and unapologetically corrupt. The costuming– revealing and luxurious– amplifies this portrait of a woman enthroned in her own cruel pleasures.
Two key scenes in the Metzengerstein segment of Spirits of the Dead stand out for vividly capturing its Gothic atmosphere and supernatural tension.
The first is when Countess Frédérique becomes trapped in a forest snare and is rescued by her cousin, Baron Wilhelm. This moment sparks her obsessive and destructive infatuation with him, an obsession that turns deadly when Wilhelm rejects her because of her debauchery. This scene sets the stage for her vengeful wrath and the unraveling of her sanity, anchoring the narrative in the toxic dynamics of literally a consuming fire and rejection.
The second crucial scene unfolds after Baron Wilhelm perishes in a stable fire set by Frédérique’s orders. The mysterious, wild black horse, implied to be supernatural, escapes the fire and finds its way to Metzengerstein Castle. Frédérique’s fixation on taming this horse mirrors her growing obsession with her surrendering to desire, power, and control. The eerie discovery of a damaged tapestry depicting a horse identical to this spectral beast deepens the story’s sense of ancestral curse and fate. The haunting climax comes during a thunderstorm when Frédérique, mounted on the horse, is swept away into a fiery blaze caused by lightning, with a sense of eerie inevitability, symbolizing her ultimate downfall, consumed by the very forces she sought to command.
Moving from Gothic excess to psychic torment, we shift gears from the lush and decadent to something more chilling and psychological. Louis Malle takes us deep inside the mind of a man trapped by his own cruelty and guilt.
Malle’s William Wilson delves into the ritual of inhumanity and the haunting conscience embodied by a doppelgänger. Alain Delon is honestly hypnotic as the titular William Wilson, a man consumed by corruption and menace, whose shadowy double relentlessly thwarts his darkest impulses. Wilson can not escape the part of himself that is a higher reach of his nature.
The tension reaches its climax with a chilling duel that symbolizes the final eclipse of Wilson’s better self, a poignant allegory of self-destruction and lost redemption. The duel that feels less like a fight and more like Wilson’s last chance for salvation slipping away. Brigitte Bardot turns up as Giuseppina, infusing the whole thing with a kind of smoldering energy; she’s mysterious and sharp, adding a glamorous, sensual darkness to the mood.
Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography employs cold, harsh lighting and tight framing that accentuates the film’s claustrophobic and oppressive fictional air, framing the narrative within a hall of mirrors that distorts identity and morality, making spaces feel like fragmented hallways or mirrored chambers where the self is endlessly duplicated and distorted. This visual motif deepens the sense of psychological horror and the supernatural battle within Wilson’s soul.
Delli Colli, the renowned Italian cinematographer, shot Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti westerns: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, with whom he made twelve movies, including Mamma Roma (1962). He worked with Fellini, Polanski, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and Roberto Benigni on Life Is Beautiful (1997), for which he won a David di Donatello Award for Best Cinematography.
This segment draws directly from Poe’s story, William Wilson, a profound meditation on identity, duplicity, and the eternal struggle between good and evil within the self. You’re left questioning where the real William Wilson begins, and whether he ever stood a chance against himself.
The final story, Toby Dammit, is Federico Fellini at his wildest and surreal. The anthology culminates in Fellini’s macabre fantasia of nightmarish decadence. A mirage of the mind that feels both dazzling and sinister.
Terence Stamp gives a mesmerizing performance as Toby, a burnt-out, washed-up British actor wandering through a delirious, phantasmal, carnival-like Rome, haunted by ghosts and temptations that never seem to let up. Stamp’s performance captures the tormented exhaustion of a man lost in the hollow, glittering world of fame and the sweet abyss of seduction. His restless energy and haunted demeanor reflect Toby’s inner disintegration, dragging you into his spiraling nightmare of artistic torment and existential despair.
This segment transcends Poe’s original inspiration, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” by conjuring a whirl of fractured beauty, a montage of fame’s hollowness, temptation, and the inescapable grip of the devil, or perhaps the demon of inner immaturity, and self-sabotage manifested hauntingly as a childlike figure. Fellini turns it into something stranger and deeper, where the devil isn’t horns-and-brimstone, but a bizarre little girl with golden hair and a bouncing ball—creepy, innocent, and inexplicably powerful.
Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography and Fabrizio Clerici’s art direction construct a vivid dreamscape where the boundaries between reality and illusion dissolve into a hallucinatory fever. The visuals, shot by Rotunno and designed by Clerici, are pure nightmare logic: flashing neon, endless tunnels, surreal parties, a carnival of living caricatures, their faces painted by excess, their garments aflame with impossible fashion. A masquerade of beautiful monstrosities, swaddled in fabrics that burn with surreal bravado. All blur together until you can’t tell if Toby’s lost in a dream or losing his mind for real.
Nino Rota’s score pulses beneath the delirium, augmenting the sequence’s hypnotic disorientation. His music throbs through it all, making the whole experience feel like it’s drifting between heaven, hell, and high art.
Key moments: The frantic high-speed Ferrari race through the neon-lit streets of Rome is unforgettable. It metaphorically expresses Toby’s reckless ride toward doom, speeding headlong toward his own ruin, with no control over where he’s headed—or should I say beheaded?
Toby speeds recklessly through distorted, shadowy tunnels and eerie empty highways that feel like the twisted corridors of his own fractured psyche. The scene pulses with frenetic energy, capturing Toby’s spiraling descent into chaos and self-destruction. The dazzling, almost hallucinatory visuals combined with Nino Rota’s driving score create a nightmarish carnival ride that feels both thrilling and terrifying as Toby hurls headlong toward his doom.
Through these vividly surreal metaphors—the phantom city, the child-devil, the high-speed race, and the beheading—Fellini captures Toby Dammit’s existential despair, fame’s hollow seduction, and the tragic consequences of a life consumed by decadence and inner turmoil. This powerful segment becomes a hallucinatory allegory of self-annihilation wrapped in the grotesque splendor of a nightmare. The neon-lit cityscapes, endless tunnels, and bizarre, carnival-like parties form a phantasmagoric dreamscape where nothing is quite stable or certain.
The supernatural showdowns with the ‘devil’ and the final shocking moment when Toby pays his price with the chilling loss of his head serve as a blunt metaphor for the ultimate price of his decadent lifestyle: the climax is a literal severing that symbolizes the loss of identity, sanity, and life itself. This vivid, macabre image serves as a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of excess, fame, and inner demons dominating Toby’s fate and underscores the segment’s allegorical critique of celebrity culture and existential despair.
Under Fellini’s vision, the story becomes an almost hypnotic warning about how easy it is to get lost chasing illusions, haunted by demons both real and imagined. Through his feverish lens, Fellini transforms Poe’s original cautionary tale into a potent blend of surrealism, a bold, visionary exploration of fame’s emptiness, human frailty, and artistic torment.
One of the most striking metaphors in Fellini’s Toby Dammit is the creepy golden-haired demon child with the bouncing ball. Unlike traditional images of evil, this innocent yet sinister child symbolizes the seductive yet destructive temptations that haunt Toby internally. This unsettling, haunting presence represents the grip of the devil not as an external force but as an intimate demon of decay that Toby cannot escape.
The little blonde girl in Toby Dammit is widely acknowledged as a surreal echo and clear homage to Mario Bava’s iconic spectral child in Kill, Baby, Kill (1966).
In Bava’s film, the ghost of Melissa Graps terrorizes the village. The figure is a Victorian-dressed little girl (actually a boy actor) whose slow-motion bouncing ball and knowing, malevolent smile similarly haunts the story with an eerie, disturbing way of showing up everywhere all at once, drifting into every space, like smoke seeking every crack and crevice—a haunting face at the window, or crouching in Bava’s colorful darkness.
Both figures embody a disturbing blend of a heart unstained by shadow and a serpent in the garden, untouched purity and sheer menace, innocence and evil, serving as spectral symbols of supernatural dread and subconscious fears that linger and unsettle throughout their respective films. This motif of the sinister child becomes a powerful visual metaphor for the uncanny and the intrusion of otherworldly forces into everyday reality.
Fellini himself admired Bava’s film and imagery, and after seeing Spirits of the Dead, Bava commented that Toby Dammit used “the same ideas as in my film, exactly the same!” He recounted mentioning this to Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, who just shrugged with a smile, saying, “Well, you know how Federico is…”
When you take all three stories together, Spirits of the Dead really feels like wandering through a gallery of dreams, each one a window into Poe’s twisted imagination, yet each shaped and colored by the directors’ unique styles. It’s more than just a trio of horror tales; to me, it’s like stepping inside a living piece of art where the familiar Gothic darkness morphs into something almost lyrical. Every segment catches a slightly different part of human nature, our longing, our fears, the secret shadows we don’t talk about, and lets them bounce and refract in strange, beautiful ways.
Together, these three vignettes were forged in the fires of a poetic exploration of the uncanny, bound by Poe’s dark imagination and the distinctive cinematic artistry of their directors. All three ghostly or eerie stories invite us into surreal realms where light and shadow, color and space, and symbolic imagery all work together to evoke feelings of dislocation, dread, and otherness.
Spirits of the Dead is not merely a collection of tales but an immersive experience where Gothic horror is transmuted into a visual language that voices a haunting lamenting, each story a prism refracting the shadowed facets of desire, identity, and doom. The imagery is just astonishing. Between cinematographers — Claude Renoir’s lush, decadent colors, Tonino Delli Colli’s chilly, psychological starkness, and Giuseppe Rotunno, each crafts distinct visual palettes that heighten the film’s dreamlike quality; feverish, surreal landscapes, you’re constantly tossed between psychological landscapes, opulence, ruin, and the uncanny.
The ensemble cast is a dream team: Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, and Terence Stamp, they’re all magnetic, each one owning their piece of this haunted world of these ethereal narratives with performances that balance intensity and subtlety, embodying Poe’s tortured characters with haunting realism.
Ultimately, Spirits of the Dead becomes a kind of waking nightmare, a vivid, strangely beautiful, oneiric reflection on fear, longing, the unknown spaces in our minds, the supernatural, and the psyche that remains haunted. It’s a cinematic reverie where the boundaries of reality waver and the specters of the human soul emerge in their full, unsettling glory.
