She Beast (1966 film)

She Beast (1966 film), AKA The She-Beast, The She Beast, She-Beast, Revenge of the Blood Beast, Satan's Sister, Sister of Satan

Summary

"This is horror: Deadlier than Dracula! Wilder than the werewolf! More frightening than Frankenstein!" Transylvanians kill an ugly witch who, 200 years later, possesses a young woman who crashes into the lake in which the witch was drowned, for the purpose of exacting revenge upon the descendants of her persecutors.

Details

Promotional image for She Beast (1966 film)...

• Release Date: 1966
• Country/Language: UK/Italy, English
• Genres/Technical: Horror
• Setting: Transylvania, 1960s
• Runtime: 1 hr 19 min
• Starring: Barbara Steele, John Karlsen, Ian Ogilvy
• Director: Michael Reeves
• Writer: Michael Reeves (as Michael Byron)
• Producer/Production Co: Euro American Pictures, Leigh Production, Europix Consolidated Corp., Paul Maslansky and Michael Reeves
• Trailer: (link)
• IMDB: (link)

Ratings

MPAA Ratings

• Rated: not rated (mild Violence and Adult Content)

Some mild 1960s Italian horror gore, a couple brief and grainy scenes of an angry mob nailing a screaming witch to a dunking stool and drowning her while cheering, and a few relatively tame scenes of the (then) curvy and lovely Barbara Steele in lingerie - maybe outrageous in the 1950s, but mild by modern horror standards, and would probably have rated a PG or even G if it had been rated back in the '80s: probably nothing much to be found here that older kids today couldn't handle unsupervised.

Tentacle Ratings

A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:

• S____ (One Tentacle: Debateably Lovecraftian; has almost no direct connection to Lovecraft's work)

Not particularly "Lovecraftian", tracing more of its ancestry to Dracula and to witch's curse films, but bears some slight resemblance to related films (notably The Haunted Palace (1963 film)), and CoC keepers can perhaps find some material to work with here with some modifications.

Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.

Reviews

Review Links:

• Y.Whateley: "Seems to be a bit of the usual witch's curse plot, with a bit of vampirism and possession thrown in for good measure, with the witch's reign of revenge being enabled in this movie by possession after Barbara Steele's car crashes into the lake the witch was killed in, rather than by the standard reincarnation as an ancestor.

Notes

Comments, Trivia, Dedication

• Trivia: Kind of a standard-issue "witch's curse" film (as seen in Charles Dexter Ward adaptation The Haunted Palace (1963 film)). Barbara Steele is no stranger to this sort of thing, see the (much better-produced and perhaps sleazier) Black Sunday (1960 film) for more; there also seems to be just a dash of Carnival of Souls (1962 film) in this movie's ancestry, along with any of the dozens of earlier witch revenge movies out there (e.g., Brainiac (1962 film)).
• Trivia: The movie is set in Transylvania, a part of Romania. Around the time the film was made, Romania was making noises about breaking away from the Soviet Union's influence. In an homage to this (of sorts), there's a point in the movie where the She Beast murders someone with a sickle, dropping it where it happens to land on a small, mallet-style metal hammer (that's conveniently) lying on the floor - forming a hammer-and-sickle symbol of the USSR; the dialogue is littered with jokes at the expense of the Soviet Union.
• Trivia: Horrified by the unintentionally comical final car chase scene shot by the second unit, director Michael Reeves reluctantly decided to keep it without a cut, not only because it couldn't be re-shot for budget reasons but also because the film's 75-minute running time was short enough as it was.

Associated Mythos Elements

• location: Transylvania
• tome: a witch-hunting diary/handbook appears in some scenes, its title difficult to read in the prints I saw, but it's presumably a fictional work by the equally fictional vampire-hunting Professor Van Helsing, both borrowed from Dracula (fiction)
• character: a descendant of the Van Helsing family, "Count Van Helsing"
• race: Vampire/Witch/Ghost

Keeper Notes

• Not particularly "Lovecraftian", tracing more of its ancestry to Dracula and to witch's curse films, but bears some slight resemblance to related films (notably The Haunted Palace (1963 film)), and is readily adaptable to a Gothic horror based CoC scenario, especially if spiced up with a few added references to the usual Yog-Sothothry (name-dropping Lovecraft creations Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Arkham, etc.)