
When
Wed 7 May – Wed 21 May 2025
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This season pays tribute to gothic horror royalty, Barbara Steele (1937–), a British actress who worked across Europe and the United States and whose name became synonymous with haunted castles, the aura of dry ice, candelabra-clutching women returned from the dead and occult ceremonies. Steele starred in a string of iconic horror films in the 1960s, including Mario Bava’s groundbreaking Black Sunday (1960), Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962), Antonio Margheriti’s The Long Hair of Death (1964) and Castle of Blood (1964), and Camillo Mastrocinque’s An Angel for Satan (1966), becoming famous as the “Queen of All Scream Queens”. Her notoriety was also noted by Federico Fellini, who featured her alongside Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale in 8 ½ (1963).
This long-overdue season includes five of those key films as well as Vernon Sewell’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), in which Steele’s role as a 300-year-old witch with green skin did absolutely nothing to diminish her extraordinary onscreen beauty. After her early, mostly dispiriting work for Rank in Britain, Bava invited Steele to star in his directorial debut and the rest is history. Although her featured roles petered out in the late 1960s, a new generation of filmmakers paid homage to Steele’s legacy by casting her in their early films. These included her striking performance as a fierce prison governess in Jonathan Demme’s “chixploitation” opus, Caged Heat (1974), as well as memorable turns in David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) and Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978).
In the early 1980s, Steele swapped acting for producing, winning an Emmy Award for the epic World War II drama, War and Remembrance (1989), before occasionally returning to acting in films like Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River (2014). She remains one of the true icons of Euro-horror.
About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
