EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blancheville Monster was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 1, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. It also aired on September 9, 1967; June 15, 1968 and September 27, 1969.

Released in Italy as Horror, this film’s script by Gianni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci was said to be based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Sure, there are some parts of The Fall of the House of Usher, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains and Some Words with a Mummy, but it’s as much a true Poe as the films of Roger Corman.

It was directed by Alberto De Martino who I celebrate for so many of his remake remix rip-off movies like OK Connery, The Antichrist and Holocaust 2000. Outside of those movies, he also made the wild giallo cop movie hybrid Strange Shadows In an Empty Room. It won’t sell you on this movie if I told you that he said that it was “a little film of no importance.”

Emilie De Blancheville (Ombretta Colli, who would one day become the President of Milan) has returned to her family’s ancestral home only to learn that everything has changed. Her father, Count Blancheville, has become disfigured, gone mad and has locked himself in a tower. Her brother Rodéric (Gérard Tichy) has taken over the home and rules over his servants with an iron fist after, well, all the old help has been killed. And now, the Count is loose and sure that if his daughter is killed before his 21st birthday, the curse on the Blancheville family will end. And oh yes — there’s also a cold and evil housekeeper known as Miss Eleonore played by Helga Liné.

What follows are soap opera romances, thunder and lighting, drama and the kind of murder that goes on in Italian gothic horror movies that are frequently air on my television screen.

AIP sold this to American TV, so if you watched horror shows from the 60s to the 80s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen this. Do you think that Edgar Allen Poe ever was like. “Why are they using my name again?”