June 25: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Italian horror! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Dino Buzzati’s I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers) is a collection of nineteen short stories in which a variety of protagonists interact with the unknown and death, often with the ending left up to the reader. One of the stories, Sette piani (The Seventh Floor) was made into a movie in 1967, while is based on Eppure bussano alla porta (Yet They Knock On the Door). In all, thirty-three movies and shows were made from the author’s work.

On a stormy night — is there a better evening for Italian horror? — the top of London’s high society of the 1920s gets stuck in the mud and forced to turn to a mansion in the darkness. Uriat (Luciano Pigozzi, a fixture in the films of director and writer Antonio Margheriti) explains to them that while they are in his home, they may use the powers of his mother (Marianne Leibl), a woman who can communicate with the dead. Yet she can do even more. She’s able to tell the dark secrets of every one of them, which includes violence, deception and — shudder, it’s 1969 in an Italian genre movie — a sapphic affair.

But they aren’t the only ones filled with sin, as Uriat and his mother were once charged with two murders, which conveniently may have been committed by one of the elite in their humble abode.

Shot on sets from other films, cinematographer Riccardo Pallottini achieved the look of the seance scene by being suspended upside down from the ceiling. With camera in hand, he was slowly dropped down as he bent over backward to raise the camera and capture each conspirator’s face.

Those characters include Archibald Barrett (Giuliano Raffaelli), a real estate baron who hasn’t exactly made his money ethically, aided by his lawyer Ben Taylor (Joachim Fuchsberger). Ben’s wife Vivian (Marianne Koch) has always come in second to her husband’s career, which is why she secretly shares a mistress — Elizabeth (Helga Anders) — with both Barrett and his business manager Alfred Sinclair (Claudio Camaso).

Set in a decades shuttered hunting lodged stuffed — pardon the pun — with taxidermied wild animals, the noose tightens around each person as this film goes from a dark night haunted house film to one of near-apocalyptic intensity. That’s what happens when a medium tells you, “An invincible monster will devour you all. That monster is your conscience.”

Thanks to Castle of Blood and The Long Hair of Death, Margheriti — known in the U.S. as Anthony Dawson — was a known gothic horror quality. This just works for me, as it has a wild look thanks to all the leftover sets the director found while shooting at Carlo Ponti’s studio. This is also the most that Pigozzi ever got to do in a movie, as he’s as close as this has to a hero instead of a henchman or the hero’s older friend. The score of Carlo Savina (Lisa and the Devil) helps this achieve more, as well.

If you thought that this movie wouldn’t involve Margheriti’s skill with shooting miniatures, have no fear. He’s saving it for the end.

Actors picked for success in the German market playing English people in an Italian horror film based on an English literary genre. Ah, I love movies.