Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Hail Satan

Co-directed by Antonio Margheriti and Sergio Corbucci (yes, the same man who made Super Fuzz), this was originally going to be directed by Sergio’s brother Bruno. Due to a scheduling conflict, Margheriti came in and Sergio did one scene to keep things moving.

Producer Giovanni Addessi had commissioned Sergio to create a film that would reuse the medieval sets from The Monk of Monza. Meanwhile, even though she had done Fellini’s 8 1/2 and wanted to not be seen as strictly a horror actress, assistant director Ruggero Deodato talked Barbara Steele into being in this film.

After he meets Edgar Allan Poe, reporter Alan Foster (Georges Rivière) says that all of the author’s books came not from reality but instead his imagination. ord Thomas Blackwood (Umberto Raho) asks if he’d like to see the supernatural and invites him to spend the night in his castle. Moments after he arrives, he learns that Elisabeth (Steele) gets one night a year to spend with someone. Tonight is that night. They make love and as he lies his head on her chest, she says, “My heart doesn’t beat – it hasn’t for ten years. I’m dead.”

They aren’t alone. Her sister Julia (Margarete Robsahm) is also there and seems angry that Alan and Elisabeth have fallen in love. The past is revealed to Foster that Elisabeth was once married and fell in love with a stable boy before being killed. And Julia’s jealousy is not for Alan, but the fact that she’s been in love with Elisabeth all this time. Oh yes — if Alan doesn’t escape, his blood will be used in a dark occult ritual to bring every ghost back from the dead and into our world.

This was released in Italy as Danse Macabre and even has a French version where Steele’s character appears nude. It’s not her, but instead actress Sylvia Sorrente.

Margheriti decided to remake this seven years later as Web of the Spider with Klaus Kinski as Poe, Michèle Mercier as Elisabeth and Anthony Franciosa as Alan. He would later say that he was “stupid to remake it” and that “the color cinematography destroyed everything: the atmosphere, the tension.”