What happens when a film entertains us? Perhaps by being entertained we fulfill a contract we've entered into with the film. Perhaps we approve of the story it tells because it's one we already know. Or perhaps it's just that we make it to the end. These are the three models of entertainment proposed by Antonio Margheriti (a.k.a. "Anthony Dawson") in Castle of Blood (La danza macabra, 1964).

In 19th century England, a journalist, Alan Foster (George Riviere), bets Sir Thomas Blackwood ten pounds that he can survive a night in Blackwood's haunted castle. Inside the castle, Alan meets Blackwood's sister, Elisabeth (Barbara Steele), who instantly falls in love with him; she claims, however, to have been dead for ten years. Alan also meets Dr.Carmus, a scientist and metaphysician, who explains that each year, those who died inside the castle return to reenact their last moments. The castle's ghosts clamor threateningly for Alan's blood, which they need to keep returning to life. Alan manages to stay out of their clutches, but while leaving, he's killed by the sharp edge of the castle gate, slamming into his body, apparently by accident.

Spooky and depressing, filmed in gauzy black-and-white, Castle of Blood is effective enough as a Gothic horror film but more impressive as an object lesson in cinema. It stages the longing for diversion, the viewer's estrangement from the present, and the disillusionment that comes when the diversion is no longer diverting. Throughout much of Castle of Blood, the melancholy Alan is the trapped spectator of events taking place "in a different dimension"—skits of passion and violence (a multiple murder in a bed, successive visitors to the house being killed by a vampire) that resemble scenes in a horror movie. This becomes anguishing, and he calls out, in effect, for the film to stop: "I beg you, let me out. I can't watch." The truth is that he doesn't want it to stop. As Dr. Carmus reminds him: "No one is holding you here. You wanted to witness this, Foster." Paralyzed by his own desire for the narrative, with its display of beautiful women and violent death, Alan experiences it as anguish.

Margheriti's film holds up Alan as a mirror for its spectator: the film viewer, too, really wants to be terrified, is kept by this desire in the theater even though s/he avowedly wants to leave. (Margheriti also implicitly acknowledges that staying is a waste of time: if we consider the "film" Alan is condemned to watch to be banal, what can we say about the film we're watching, the one about Alan watching that film?) The wager Alan makes with Blackwood stands for the contract between the film and the viewer. It serves as the formality that allows the story to begin and as the guarantee that it will have an end (if Alan can survive till dawn, he wins). The viewer, too, wagers: "As a member of the audience," Geoffrey O'Brien writes in The Phantom Empire, "you had made a bet that you could spend a whole ninety minutes in this movie."

Despite the time limit O'Brien alludes to, a spirit of untimeliness presides over Castle of Blood. At the beginning, Alan enters a tavern where, already, a story is being told, Edgar Allan Poe's "Berenice" (narrated by its author, who is visiting Lord Blackwood in England). Alan's wager allows him to become the hero of a new story, but, unfortunately, he arrives late even for his own story. Yet how can we explain the feeling that more than 40 minutes into Castle of Blood, we're still waiting for the film to start? Alan's quest, his encounters with Elisabeth and the other characters, all give us the impression that nothing has happened yet, that we're still waiting for something to happen. Could it be that the story that Castle of Blood tells is simply the story of this waiting? Even at the end, the film acknowledges that the story still needs to be told, still awaits its author: "When I finally write this story," Poe concludes, "I'm afraid they'll say it's—unbelievable."

Margheriti went still further in his refusal of narrative closure by remaking Castle of Blood in 1970 as Web of the Spider (Nella stretta morsa del ragno). Which version of the story is better? The general preference for the earlier film no doubt reflects, in part, the cult for Barbara Steele (although Michele Mercier, who takes Steele's role in the remake, also has her adherents, including the editor of a long-defunct fanzine who declared her his favorite actress). Castle of Blood is more striking, more frenzied, but Web of the Spider must be given the edge because its repetitive nature as a remake better fulfills the theoretical implications of the story. One wishes that Margheriti had gone on remaking Castle of Blood once every six years and that this year we could thus look forward to the sixth remake of the film. But maybe once was enough to prove the point. The unnecessary remake is another, perhaps the most logical and terrifying, of the models of entertainment Margheriti proposes.

The real, punctual time in which these movies are thrown up and torn down is like the time Alan describes in Castle of Blood, when Elisabeth asks what's been happening outside the world of the castle. "Well, there's nothing new. People are born, and others die every day. Business seems as usual. In fact, the world goes on. It remains the same. You haven't missed anything while you've stayed here in your own world." Within the house, illusions proliferate; outside it, there is nothing but the banality and triviality of "business" and anonymous birth and death, things not worth narrating (even though Alan, a journalist, presumably earns a living from describing them).

The limits of the house are the limits of the narrative: the ghostly inhabitants can't leave it, or else they will evaporate; they need this closed space, just as the story these ghosts enact needs the formality of a beginning and an ending. Which is to say, the story needs the viewer, because the viewer brings time along—real, linear time, the time of the world, that marks things with beginnings and endings. "Your life is today, but mine is the past," Elisabeth tells Alan. The linear narrative of the ghost story starts when Alan enters the house and ends at dawn, when he tries to leave it and is killed; but its situations are, on the other hand, cyclical, like the danza macabra that gives the film its Italian title: the past jostles the present, becomes indistinguishable from it; characters appear, confusingly, alternately inside and outside the cycle of repetitions—slipping in and out of the consciousness that they are already dead.

The "castle of blood"—as film and as setting—is nothing but the logical form of any narrative: the story itself only reveals the form as fatal and terminal, reminds us that once a story starts, it must reach its end (death) unless we abandon it. In other words, Castle of Blood isn't telling us anything we don't already know. So, why doesn't Alan leave the house? This is the same as asking: Why doesn't the viewer walk out of the movie? (Today, when few people have the opportunity to see Castle of Blood except on video, to pose this question requires an imaginative leap into the position of the spectator in a movie theater. Hitting the STOP button on a remote isn't at all the equivalent of walking out of a theater. For one thing, video makes it too easy for us to turn away from or suspend the film, so that to watch it requires of the video viewer merely persistence, rather than the passivity, or rapture, demanded of the cinema viewer and embodied by Alan.) Alan's decision to remain in the house till the end is subject to different interepretations, but one of them clearly stands out as inescapable: he stays so that he can die. In this, he is, as always, faithful to the logic of viewership: we all give our lives to the entertainments we take up with. As the ghosts tell Alan as they pursue him through the castle: "Your blood means our life. Through you, we will live."