Maniac Mansion (1972)

The Italian-Spanish co-production La mansión de la niebla / Maniac Mansion was the directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Francisco Lara Polop, who had been previously working as a unit production manager for about ten years. He would also produce the Paul Naschy classics The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973) and Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973).

Made at the height of the Spanish horror boom, Maniac Mansion really is quite the fanciful gothic horror film with enough giallo and murder mystery influences to make it appealing to all Eurocult fans.

The fiery intro credit sequence is hypnotic and a nice mood setter, featuring a killer theme and a couple of chilling evil-witch cackles. The beginning of the story is a lot more grounded in reality with a somewhat unremarkable setup involving numerous shady characters, among which are a few familiar faces including Jess Franco regular Alberto Dalbés, before derailing into a foggy nightmare world, where things get a lot more interesting. Initially, you might start feeling better off just reading an Agatha Christie novel instead, but it does start to get good when all of the characters seemingly enter what feels like Silent Hill all of a sudden.

In traditional murder mystery fashion, the movie does introduce quite a few unscrupulous characters, no doubt for the sake of eventually getting them all together in an eerie cozy mansion by a cemetery. I’m usually better at remembering faces than names, and fortunately the faces here are suitably varied, unlike in Sex of the Witch (1973) where some of the characters kind of looked the same. The character archetypes here are easily resolvable too, such as the cold business woman, the widow, the lawyer, the philandering husband, the biker and his girlfriend, the drunk, the strange woman who just sort of came with the house, etc. Possible motives and character relations were a little difficult to keep track of, so the second time through I found that it helped to write down everyone’s name early on.

I’ll admit to having been attracted to its cool movie poster and the fact that Maniac Mansion was most likely going to be a pretty cool gothic horror, which I’m happy to say it is, but I was also looking forward to the presence of Ida Galli aka Evelyn Stewart, so I was happily surprised to see her not being underused and in a role actually quite similar to her role in Spirits of Death (1972). I’m definitely starting to notice an appealing typecast with Galli playing women who aren’t what they appear to be (see Queens of Evil (1970)), while also feeling kind of ghostly and ethereal underneath.

In addition, I underestimated the character of Elsa (Analía Gadé), who went from being one of the weaker and annoying characters to my absolute favorite by the film’s end. She embodies the unstable woman on the brink of insanity cliché, and I like the way she handles it. When she does go crazy, Elsa all of a sudden becomes the strongest character, just slightly surpassing Ida Galli’s witchy red herring. Her screaming scene in the basement is hair-raising and was used as the face model for the terrified woman on the movie poster. Elsa also ends up being one of the more fleshed out characters with a nicely realized backstory that explores her troubled relationship with her husband (Dalbés) and her elderly father (George Rigaud), who had a habit of hooking up with her young college friends, much to Elsa’s dismay.

Unless there’s an alternate version, there’s no nudity to be had in Maniac Mansion (there are love scenes, but the ladies are all so modest with their nudity), but I’m not going to knock it for that, because nude scenes aren’t really necessary, yet they are an added plus.

When the film does make its supernatural transition, the ambiance really thickens, as characters get lost in the fog, with familiar roads seemingly disappearing or rearranging all together. Despite previously separating, everyone loses their way in the fog before mysteriously meeting up in the titular spooky house, which leaves a little to be desired with regards to its exterior, but its interior is marvelous, with the usual old fashioned décor, unsettling occult paintings, and appealing color gels. Weird things begin to happen in the usual gothic horror fashion, characters start getting bumped off by, what seems to be, a ghost witch and her undead chauffeur, and everything climaxes to a reasonable but unlikely explanation.

It bears mentioning that Maniac Mansion is surprisingly creepy. I’m not that big on jump scares, but there’s a decent one here to look out for.

The answer to the mystery isn’t the most satisfying, but the ending itself is saved by Analía Gadé's unhinged performance and her character’s dramatic final act of vengeance (you go, girl!). I love the way she keeps pulling the trigger even after the bullets are all used up.
 
Thanks to the soundtrack, a feminine malevolence pervades the whole thing. Even with a slow startup that makes it a little hard to get into at first, I’ve come to like the way the movie is structured and what many have already pointed out as a Scooby Doo style story. Maniac Mansion is a good representation of the, then, fashionable style of horror films in Europe during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

© At the Mansion of Madness