Bring me the head of Alaric de Marnac!
Separated by a decade, the Alaric de Marnac duology comprises 1973's Horror Rises from the Tomb and 1983's Panic Beats to stand as the only ongoing Paul Naschy character besides the enduring lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. A diabolical pre-Renaissance warlock with vampiric tendencies clearly based - like Naschy's later character Baron Gilles de Lancre from The Devil's Possessed (Leon Klimovsky, 1974) - on the historical 15th century French nobleman, child murderer and reputed practitioner of the black arts Gilles de Rais, Alaric proves as indomitable as his Rome-conquering namesake by triumphing over death by decapitation to return and feast upon the hearts' blood of the living.
Naschy, better known in the family home as Jacinto Molina Alvarez, was by 1972 well established not only as a silver screen horror star (why isn't there a male term for a star of the horror genre? Scream King?) but also as a screenplay writer, having penned the scenarios and scripts for many of his films - and would go on to add directing as a string to his bow later in the decade, beginning with 1977's Inquisition.
When producers of production company Profilmes S.A. - a company formed in 1972 by Jose Antonio Perez Giner and Ricardo Munoz Suay with the intention of making genre movies in the style of Britain's Hammer and Amicus and the States' American International Pictures - asked Naschy for a last-minute story idea for a film and he pitched down the phone a suggestion (doubtless influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by the 1958 Will Cowan-directed Universal flick The Thing That Couldn't Die) for a beheaded sorcerer returning from beyond the grave for revenge, he was asked to pen and deliver the screenplay A.S.A.P. This led to a frantic thirty-six hour period wherein Naschy locked himself away and, fueled by amphetamines, wrote the full script (bar some last minute on set additions and modifications) non-stop without sleep; a situation reminiscent of Patrick McGoohan's completion of the far out finale of enigmatic Sixties psychedelic series The Prisoner, except with speed instead of a bottle of whisky and a ham sandwich. At any rate, Naschy managed to hand in the script in record time, albeit with his wife Elvira worried that he was going to literally die for his art, and the amphetamine and adrenaline fueled phantasmagoria produced a minor classic of its kind. Not that there is really a whole subgenre of 'headless vampiric mediaeval sorcerer returns from the great beyond to wreak revenge' movies or anything; we're talking a pretty niche, non-crowded marketplace here.
Also known as Fear Rises from the Tomb (in the English language trailer), and variously titled Terror Rises from the Tomb, Mark of the Devil IV (on the U.S. video release), Blood Mass for the Devil (original German release), Blood Mass of the Zombies or Revenge of the Zombies (1980 German re-release to cash in on George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead) and L' Amour parmi les monstres / Love Among the Monsters (in, or en France), the story begins with a stentorian voiceover atop a prologue detailing the 15th century crimes and execution of the deadly duo of Alaric de Marnac (Naschy) and his Satanist cohort-cum-concubine Mabille de Lancre (Helga Line) - Naschy always did his bit for recycling; never let a good villain name go to waste.
Guided on an oxen-yoked tumbrel across the Gallic countryside of the fifteenth century to the hanging tree in a picaresque scene, the pair are charged by their accusers with such sundry and diverse offences as necromancy, vampirism, cannibalism and being "leekanthropes" (the dub actor isn't attempting an accent, but that seems very 'Allo 'Allo) by Andre Roland (Victor Alcazar, trading under the name Vic Winner) and Armand de Marnac (Naschy again), the accused warlock's brother. Condemned by the tribunal of Carcassonne, they are beheaded - but not before cursing Andre and Armand and all their descendants. That just might come back later..
We quickly, in the brief span of the credits, cross oceans of time to the present day of early 1970s Paris - with some nice establishing shots of the Arc de Triomphe just so we're sure where we are both chronologically and geographically - we meet Seventies-vintage de Marnac Hugo(Naschy again, again) visiting his artist and possibly space cowboy and gangster of love friend Maurice (Alcazar/Winner, also in a dual role as his own descendant) with the good news that Maurice's girlfriend Paula (Cristina Suriani) is back in town from Germany. Maurice, however, fails to be cheered up from his nightmare-assisted artistic funk when Paula suggests that they, along with Hugo and his lady friend Sylvia (Betsabe Ruiz) attend a seance and cries off, leaving the lovely ladies to attend the spiritualist session with grumpy sceptic (or skeptic?) Hugo. The evening's entertainment goes slightly awry when the proceedings become more phantasmagorical than expected, with the unquiet dead head of Alaric manifesting muttering portents about the cloister and the monastery on the Marnac estate where his caput and corpus lie respectively; something simultaneously experienced by Maurice who by the time the gang get home has painted the sorcerer holding Hugo's severed head.
The merry band decide to take a road trip out to Hugo's ancestral home, the portentously named Villa d Sade, to check out the legend but on driving up through the snowy mountains they find their waylaid by a band of brigands who wreck the vehicle before Hugo negotiates the purchase of a replacement from Govar (Ramon Centenero), the leader of a vigilante gang who dispatch rough mountain justice to the thieves. Arriving at his villa - actually Naschy's family's estate ("I only hope the chalet my father built is still habitable". as his character says) - they are greeted by the caretaker Gaston (Juan Cazalilla) and his two beautiful daughters, Elvira (the absolutely luminous Emma Cohen) and Chantal (Maria Jose Cantudo), and the next morning they decide to make a search of the estate's grounds for the fabled Marnac treasure. Maurice, guided by voices, makes a find when he uncovers a buried casket inscribed with the legend "My sustenance will be the human heart - red, palpitating and ignoble. 1454.", which obviously bodes not well. The chest contains the head (it's a wooden chest, so it's biologically possible, see) of the baleful wizard, who exerts his hypnotic influence first on a would-be robber (Naschy regular Luis Ciges) - making him hack the faithful Gaston to bits with a sickle - before depositing the magician's noggin in a crypt contained within the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the estate; he then kills Chantal, cutting her throat and carving out her heart in a nicely grisly slasher-like scene, before spiriting Paula away into the depths of the labyrinth.
Alaric's living head possesses Paula who gains the powers of persuasion via diaphanous nightgown to tempt and lure Maurice in a scene reminiscent of the vampiric Genevieve's manifestations in Werewolf Shadow, and the pair join the sickle-wielding robber as his thralls to open the coffins of de Marnac's body and the remains of Mabille who is promptly resurrected using the sacrificial blood of Sylvia, and thereby getting the girlfriend out of the way and opening the way for Hugo and Elvia, bringing our evil couple back together. Causing the corpses of Gaston, Chantal and the other victims to rise from the lake like Marshmen or Haemovores and lay siege to the house like like Romero zombies, the de Marnac and de Lancre power couple unleash a reign of terror. The Night of the Living Dead comparisons are also apt in terms of bleakness as our assumed hero Hugo is blasted in the back by a possessed shotgun-wielding Maurice and left to die by the lakeside, leaving Elvira as the last human standing against the hordes of the undead.
Filmed in the wintery February of 1972, released in Spain in April 1973 and getting a U.S. release direct to television in 1974 through Avco Embassy, Horror Rises from the Tomb is a heady (ha!) mix of black magic, vampirism and zombie apocalypse - a facet played up by its German distributor - that's sure to sate the palate of any connoisseur of Hammer-esque Gothic horror.
