Mario Bava is one of the great Italian directors. His reputation lies in singlehandedly creating the Italian horror film as we know it today, all expressionistic loveliness and an abhorrence for logic. In a time when his other genre-happy countrymen were peddling pepla perpetually, Bava put out the double supernatural whammy of Black Sunday and Black Sabbath – paving the way for others’ genre masterpieces such as Suspiria and The Beyond. He even directed the first giallo picture, by some definitions of the term, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, then shattered the subgenre ahead of schedule with Twitch of the Death Nerve (or whatever title you prefer) – paving the way, eventually and more lamentably, for Friday the 13th and its progeny.
But Bava’s biography extends further into the past than that. For the whole of the ‘50s he was among Italy’s most sought-after cinematographers, even lending his talents and class to the inaugural Hercules pictures, Hercules and Hercules Unchained. In color film, Bava was known for his bold, vibrant mixture of hues, creating wholly realized yet unrealistic worlds. As the man who is, then, also mightily responsible for how the peplum subgenre turned out, it is appropriate that Bava try his hand at directing one, during the interim between Black Sunday and Black Sabbath.
Even with Black Sunday being Bava’s only true horror picture to date, it was so revolutionary that the young director was already known for such material. He brings a similar sensibility to Hercules in the Haunted World, creating something as close to a peplum-horror hybrid as you’re likely to see. This second Reg Park Hercules – which concerns the titular he-man’s descent into the Netherworld – is the fullest possible realization of the peplum’s fantastical element, that which separates these sword-and-sandals from self-serious cousins like Spartacus.
Hercules in the Haunted World is an interesting experiment, a full test-drive for the maxim that any genre can yield at least one genuinely good film. I and others will cite Haunted World as the very BEST peplum, despite its liberties taken with certain genre elements. Hercules remains as shirtless and pectoral-y as ever, but this is not a beefcake fest, nor a simple parade of human flesh awaiting the invention of mainstream pornography. Oh sure, the peplum framework is there, uninvolvingly iffy story and all, but in the pure realm of “style over substance,” Hercules in the Haunted World is a fascinating film – more fun by far to behold than to contemplate.
Things are at their most interesting when the scenario lets Bava run hog-wild with surrealism. Conversing, they’re least interesting when it’s business as usual, simply introductory scenes of Hercules randomly smacking around bandits and arbitrarily performing Feats of Strength. Given Reg Park plays the Herc as a serene, almost Buddhist fellow, behold his pal Theseus (George Ardisson), who rather man-whores it out and cuckolds others with an enthusiasm that’d flabbergast even James Bond. Hercules just laughs such vices off, a hearty chortle associated with the immortal.
Hercules is still married to Deianiera (Leonora Ruffo), which I guess my typing fingers are okay with. The designated “good girl” grows to be of less and less value to the peplum, meaning Deianiera is now reduced almost literally to the level of a prop. She suffers from what we nowadays would call a mental illness, standing motionlessly and silent and otherwise looking pretty. The former, appetitive Hercules would love such a docile mate. This Hercules wants to restore his wife’s former scintillating personality. But in ancient Greece, one doesn’t merely cure psychological damage through sofa sessions, or any of that fruitiness. Nope, they had a much more extreme solution back then: Go to Hell! Deianiera is a victim of the gods’ capricious whims, not her own ill humors, and her salvation lies in the following:
Get the Stone of Power.
Which is located deep in Tartarus.
To get there you must first get the Golden Apple.
Which is found in the Garden of the Hesperides.
In the Kingdom of the Dead.
Across the Sea of Mourning.
Which is accessed with a different magical stone.
After entering the Konami code.
That sounds like plenty to keep Herc occupied for one entry. How do you even jump to such a conclusion? Well, it’s all a setup by the standard corrupt king – of the Kingdom Chiaiaiaiaiaiaia, as far as I can tell – King Lico…played by…wait for it…Christopher Lee!!! Lee, the greatest living horror icon, Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, Lord Summerisle, Francisco Scaramanga, Saurumon…sigh, Count Dooku, teaming with a master of Italian spookery! Such a combo can only also be found in The Whip and the Body. Let no foul words ever be spoken of Sir Christopher Lee, though it pains me to say his King Lico is perhaps Lee’s most underwhelming performance. A large part of that is no one’s fault but the state of Italian filmmaking, which demands dubbing at all times. It is inexcusable that the English dubbers (who’ve nothing to do with Bava or Lee, mind you) give Lico a high-pitched, nasally voice – or at least, high-pitched and nasally compared to Lee’s commanding tones.
Anyway, Lee is here, in all his awesomeness, necromancing the shit out of everything. His scheme, such as it can be parsed out, is simply to send Hercules to Hell, pure and simple. (None of the complexities of The Revenge of Hercules for this un!) Why? Because it’s every ancient villain’s greatest dream to kill Hercules. No ulterior motive, simply that. And all Lico did was to get Deianiera all catatonic-like himself…maybe, at it becomes unclear just how involved the gods are in all of this. See, even in simplicity, the peplum cannot help but confuse.
Actually, Lico is a clever enough Lord of the Dark Arts to not directly tell Hercules all he must do. Rather, Hercules learns some of this on his own, by visiting the oracle Medea (Gaia Germani). There’s nothing imparted here the Herc couldn’t’ve learned via some simpler means, but that’s not the point. The point is Bava wanted to stage a mesmerizing prophecy scene, complete with lighting and mask and eerie fires, all visually pumped to XI (i.e. 11). He’s starting to unnerve his audience in a most wonderful way!
Hercules sets on his way, collecting up Theseus so he has someone to dialogue with whilst in Hades. Road trips are so boring alone. That’s not enough, by the non-Bava-esque tone of so many damn pepla, which demand corny and ineffective comic. That necessitates Herc takes a third hero displaced from his own mythological timeline – Telemachus (Franco Giacobini). Meant to be “funny,” Telemachus is a whiny, voice-cracking little snot, an intended counter to the heroes’ stoicism, and I hate him. This trio’s relationship is mighty odd, anyway, as Hercules has first met Telemachus in the act of getting cuckolded by Theseus – which Telemachus seems awfully glad with. Take my wife, please! It’s Italy, man, though it’s hard to parse out any message here except adultery = good.
Quest started, what’s that first level mentioned above? Getting a magic stone. This is obtained from some big, big man called Sunis, the requisite Battle With a Giant that Bava must quickly speed through, to get to the good stuff. We’ll do likewise.
Then sailing the Sea of Mourning, it becomes morning. The skies light up in psychedelic colors most intentional, another way Haunted World is unlike The Revenge of Hercules. Like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, enough unexplainable strangeness on the high seas is enough to, somehow, transport the group to their next stage…
[Referencing my listing above…]
The Kingdom of the Dead.
Here is truly where my scant screen shots tell more of the story than any write-up could. The Hesperides arrive, cursed quasi-dead women, in the midst of a cavernous and colorful Netherworld. Bava has a way with stretching his budgets towards the phantasmagorical. They outline how Hercules must retrieve the Golden Apple, which is at the top of some Hometree as though imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. In the middle of a great, raging storm. The specifics aren’t important, as it’s just a way to give context to the next set of nightmare imagery. It’s all so much fogginess and eeriness and sound and fury, a perfect amalgamation of Hammer Horror influences with sword-and-sandal idiocy and a certain nascent Italian flair for the macabre.
While Hercules does this, Theseus and Telemachus simply snooze casually in some infernal catacomb. Some use they are! It turns out there was damned well no reason to bring these sods along; they just make more work for Herc, those jerks. And now, for no reason except it’s awesome, a patently unconvincing (yet still impressive and lovely-to-behold) rock monster golem what-have-you creature descends upon the dozing doofuses. “Procrusteus,” I think its name is, as though it matters.
Hercules, possessing the Golden Apple in all its papier maché glory, returns to fight off Rocky the only way Hercules knows how: by lifting and throwing it. This works, and it’s even the specific combination of weird metaphysical conditions necessary to open up the gates straight to Hades – Yeah, we weren’t even in Hell yet! This movie is about to go off the hook!
Meanwhile, thanks be to all the deities on Olympus, Telmachus is sent back to their ship to “guard the Apple.” Having wigged out like Jerry Lewis in response to the Rock Monster, his usefulness to this film is at an end. Too bad Bava doesn’t murder him.
Hell itself, Pluto’s domain, is a marvel of Dantean imagery – which is totally appropriate, as Hercules in the Haunted World thus becomes the latest in a millennium-long Italian tradition of literalizing the afterlife. And sure, some of this stuff originated in Homer and Virgil, but some of Bava’s ideas – such as men-turned-trees who weep and bleed when their branches are severed – are pure Dante! The whole of this nether-region feels like “Inferno,” and even the expected lava pits are impressively portrayed. This is streets ahead of the usual “gas bombs in the background” filmmaking former Herculeses have “boasted.”
In a moment of ghastliness you’d find in no other peplum, Hercules fashions a rope out of the bleeding trees, allowing for as much blood and violence as 1961 Italy will allow. He and Theseus traverse this ill-got line towards the Stone of Power, their ultimate goal, when –
Theseus tumbles into the boiling mire of death below. Goodie, so he’s dead!
…Not so fast! Theseus awakes in some antechamber, greeted by a strangely mortal-seeming woman (Ida Galli). She assures him that neither of them are shades, but real, though says no more about herself (which’ll have some dire consequences). Now, Theseus would pork anything with legs in the best of times, that horndog, and he’s suddenly confronted with the movie’s most attractive woman after spending a week in Hell with freaking Hercules! It’s no wonder Theseus falls for the gal, and offers to rescue her from this pit of damnation.
So, surprisingly early in the picture, all three heroes sail from Cocytus with a prize of some sort: Hercules with his Stone of Power, Theseus with a broad, and Telemachus with a Golden Apple he has no use for. Why’s he still hording that thing?! The woman questions this herself, and forces Telemachus to hurl it back into Styx once the winds of Pluto threaten to capsize them. This done, the god’s rage subsides, and all return to the Kingdom Chiaiaiaiaiaiaiawhatever.
Deianeira is back to her usual blandly romantic self, and all seems complete. Not if Licos can help it, as he quickly refashions a new scheme now the original plot seems to be resolved ahead of schedule. He prays to the Gods of Darkness, like a man running for mayor of Chicago, to grant him a boon of immortality – which he shall then receive by ceremonially drinking Deianeira’s blood when “the Great Dragon devours the Moon” (i.e. during a lunar eclipse). I dunno why Deianeira specifically should be the key to this, but it justifies a late-stage scene of sacrifice and occultism which feels like a bastard child of Lee’s Dracula movies. So I’ll allow it.
Meanwhile, Hercules needs more to do than simply acting all googly-eyed with Deianeira for an entire Third Act. Pluto’s rage has not ebbed, but worsened, with the whole terrestrial population of Greece descending into sudden madness (off screen). It’s Hell on Earth, dialogue states, and I really wish Bava could’ve drummed up some more budget and depicted this.
Anyway, Hercules blames himself for this latest season of curses. He oughtn’t to. It’s Theseus’ fault, as we learn the identity of that anonymous lay he went to Hell for: Persephone! The Devil’s wife! Theseus has cuckolded the wrong guy this time, I tell you what! So fixing this mess is up to Theseus…he must give up his “deep love” and allow Persephone return to her comfy Underworld. Hercules, after much hemming and hawing, even tells Theseus so much. But Theseus will have no part of it! Despite all evidence to his unpleasable hypersexuality, his satyriasis, Theseus claims he’s found the woman of his dreams, the one he wants to grow old with, or at least spend the next week and change with. She just happens to be Satan’s spouse.
Thus the two former friends tussle with each other, in a moment which does nothing to quell feelings that this entire genre is irredeemably homoerotic. If a peplum could ever convey genuine emotion, this might mean something to us. Sadly, they cannot, and Bava is himself more concerned with delivering hellish fearscapes than fashioning a character piece. So instead, Hercules just clonks Theseus unconscious, then Persephone announces on her own that she’s strolling back on over to Hell. Which puts an end to the land’s devilish suffering, we’re told, as invisible at its ebb as at its height.
Which leaves Hercules with nothing more to concern himself with now except rescuing Deianeira from Lico, who’s busy carrying her oft-motionless form through these really neat-looking underground graveyards. Even without Hell at his disposal, Bava fashions a lovely little City of the Dead for his finale, and is able to make the usual climactic shenanigans into something totally different.
Usually, these things end with great, epic battles. None of that here, though Hercules still gets his solo fight against countless hordes of minions. But instead of faceless soldiers (with souls), Hercules here squares against Lico’s unending zombie followers – which makes all the difference.
The fight’s logistics are familiar. But while no one could get excited about Hercules slaughtering innumerable mortals who never stood a chance against him, there is some interest in him dueling an unknown quantity such as pre-Romero zombies. And all the light and fog and spookiness, all those wonderful Bava touches, they serve to make this more than a simple action sequence.
Then Hercules crushes Lico with a large stone, as is his wont. Lico vanishes into flame and nothingness, and all is well. And Theseus never even seems to care that Persephone, the presumed “love of his life,” is gone. Goes to show you how little this whole mess really mattered to him, as he goes right back to humping Telemachus’ wife as Telemachus watches, as Hercules lets out a final guffaw, as if to say “Oh that Theseus!” All this due to Haunted World’s oddball assumption that cuckoldry is “funny.”
And to assure us that he, mighty Hercules, need not worry about Theseus’ scattershot seed spreading, Herc informs Deianeira as follows: “As long as Theseus steals other men’s girls, I have nothing to worry about.” What sort of logic is that?! Even worse, that’s the film’s closing line!
Consensus is pretty agreed that Hercules in the Haunted World is not just the best Hercules movie, but the best peplum full stop. If it is so (and I feel it is), it is a very atypical example of the genre. That is perhaps why it works the best; Hercules in the Haunted World is at its best when resembling a totally different form, the horror film. This at least goes to show that the tonally-vacant peplum package could sustain experiments into other forms of filmmaking. This is perhaps the most bold experiment in the entire movement, as most of Bava’s cohorts were more content to deliver bland variations on Hercules, with a few setting changes. Hell, we even see the same old sets as in the other pepla, the same catacombs and cityscapes, yet they’re all redressed by Bava to give off a completely different emotional and spatial effect. It’s no wonder that Bava, again alone amongst his peplum pals, was able to rise out of the subgenre’s ashes and forge his own path.
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Well, we’ve peaked. The only thing for Hercules to do now, even this early in his franchise run, is to bite the hemlock, go the purely populist route, and sell out. That means it’s crossover time, time to join forces with another popular peplum series. In order to discuss, then, this seventh Hercules, we must first examine that alternate franchise – no small feat. So for now we briefly leave Hercules’ Herculean hearth, and head into Maciste’s Macistean maw.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Hercules (1958)
• No. 2 Hercules Unchained (1959)
• No. 3 The Revenge of Hercules (1960)
• No. 4 Hercules vs. the Hydra (1960)
• No. 5 Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis (1961)
• No. 7 Maciste Against Hercules in the Vale of Woe (1961)
• No. 8 Ulysses vs. Hercules (1962)
• No. 9 The Fury of Hercules (1962)
• No. 10 Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1963)
• No. 12 Hercules in the Land of Darkness (1964)
• No. 16 Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon (1964)
• No. 17 Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus (1964)
• No. 18 Hercules and the Princess of Troy (1965)
• No. 19 Hercules the Avenger (1965)
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