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: Gothic horror

There’s nothing like a gothic horror film that has a woman in a diaphanous white gown walking through a dark mansion carrying a candelabra. I watched like a hundred of them last year — check the Letterboxd — so when I had to answer this challenge for Unsung Horrors, I had to hunt for something new.

I’m so glad I watched this.

Belial (Lon Chaney Jr.) has goat horns, is an expert at black magic and leads a coven of followers. Andre (John Carradine) is bedridden. They’re brothers and they’ve been fighting one another forever over the money their family has. And yet, they share no scenes in this movie.

Andre keeps warning everyone that his brother is demonic and no one listens, even when his son Paul (Tom Drake) is turned into a werewolf and his daughter Valerie (Dolores Faith) becomes one of Belial’s many nearly nude dancing witches.

Originally known as Night of the Beast or The Widderburn Horror, but released as Blood of the Man Devil, it made it to TV under the title House of the Black Death. Directors Harold Daniels and Reginald LeBorg shot the original footage, but producers wanted to pad it out and make it sexier. That’s when they called Jerry Warren, who hired Katherine Victor to play Lila, the leader of the witches.

So look, this movie is a mess, but it’s filled with fog, witches making oaths to the left hand path, bellydancing, more fog, more witches and lots more half-nude dancing. It’s a cheap movie, not that well-made, but that’s exactly what draws me in, because I wonder what it was like for people to be attacked by this burst of surrealist tomfoolery.

You can watch this on Tubi.