Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak (1995) began with something of a Godardian maxim. Producer and Full Moon Features (née Full Moon Entertainment) empresario Charles Band told Gordon that all he needed was “a castle and a freak” to make the film. Band supplied the castle, a family property in Italy that had been used to shoot The Pit and the Pendulum four years earlier, and Gordon supplied the freak, tapping the actor Jonathan Fuller, with whom he’d already worked with on The Pit and the Pendulum, to don special FX makeup by Optic Nerve and skulk around a 12th century dungeon. Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton starred alongside Fuller, having been recruited from Gordon’s previous Lovecraft adaptations Re-animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986). For the story, Gordon brought in his long-time collaborator Dennis Paoli to flesh out the script and the titular Freak’s origins. In a 1995 issue of Fangoria magazine, Gordon and Paoli acknowledged that Castle Freak drew from the Lovecraft short story “The Outsider,” which describes a figure who leaves a decaying castle after years of isolation, and eventually confronts his contorted, ghoulish body in a mirror. Though not a direct adaptation of the story, Castle Freak is about the hideousness of life.
In the film, John Reilly (Combs) arrives in Italy with his wife, Susan (Crampton), and their blind teenage daughter, Rebecca (Jessica Dollarhide), to claim a castle he recently inherited from an unknown relative. The castle, long the domain of the Duchess Orsini, has a morbid past and the locals, Reilly’s estate manager and house keeper included, all believe that the cries of the Duchess’s son Giorgio, who died under mysterious circumstances, can still be heard across its environs. But Giorgio, we learn, is still alive. He’s been chained in the castle dungeon, disfigured from his mother’s cruel abuse. Long the site of Giorgio’s torture, the castle quickly becomes the locus of John’s too.
A recovering alcoholic who killed his five-year-old son and blinded Rebecca in a drunk driving accident, John is shouldering grief, sobriety, and his wife’s hatred on very shaky psychological ground. When Giorgio breaks free from his manacles—after eating a cat and snapping off his own thumb in the process—he lurks around the castle, causing trouble that ranges from property damage to cannibalism. John, who everyone thinks is fucked up enough to do just about anything, gets blamed for all of it. He then precedes to lose what tenuous grip he has on the situation while trying to prove his family and the authorities wrong, delivering Band’s request twofold and making the castle home to more than one freak.
Castle Freak screens tonight, December 3, at Nitehawk Williamsburg as part of the series “The Anniversary Party.”
