Ancient Fantasies presents
Hercules in the Haunted World (1961)

Director - Mario Bava
 

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Plot
Commentary
Facts and Fancies from the Notebooks of Edison J. Nello
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

Hercules returns home to find his lover, Deianira, in a state of quiet dementia. He consults Medea the Oracle who tells him to journey to Hades and return with a magical stone that will cure her. But King Lico, who has put the lady love under the spell, has other ideas, including raising the dead as Vampires.

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Commentary

Hercules in the Haunted World ranks high in the Sword and Sandal genre of movies.

Reg Park (Hercules and the Captive Women) returns as the shiny hero in another non-campy acting effort, but what makes this film is the work of the great Italian director - Mario Bava.

Bava paints Hercules in a psychedelic style before there even was such a thing, and though this is a poor public domain film print, the colors and surreal imagery overwhelm the senses and take the viewer on a true Trip down a royal mythological road.

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

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Facts and Fancies
from the Notebooks of Edison J. Nello

"It's all here – the gelatin coated colors, the surrealistic surreality, the hallucinatoriness of violent beauty and the endlessly enthralling females contrasted by horrifyingly foul monsters.

Oh, the sheer widescreen epicness of it all!

In Hercules in the Haunted World, the filmic he-man/god confronts his own Virgil - Italian master director Mario Bava. and together they dutifully descend into Hell. Hades. It's the netherworld of ghostly shadows, or if you are of a particular gloom and doom mentality – the very center of the earth and universe.

In this 1961 cinematic triumph, the Son of Zeus swims in a celluloid eternal spectral river of the dead and departed, drying himself in a lunatic landscape of darkness and insanity, trapped in yet another mythic nightmare, one that he must journey through in order to save his love above, his beautiful paramour caught in a sinister spell of unspeakable evil otherness.

Yes, the souls of the deceased will rise from their tombs, not however, as heavenly saved, but as Vampirically damned. Face to face with a momentous manifesto of malevolence, Hercules once again unchains himself from his humbling earthbound humanity and embraces his divine muscle-bound nature against the vast horrors of inner and outer reality

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Cast & Production Credits

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For information on Hercules...

Watch Ingmar Ozu-Bresson's experimental film meditation on Hercules - Herculin/Feminin (only on Alameda TV Ch. 31).