Number 15 — CASTLE FREAK

For the month of October, we’re counting down the best horror movies of 1995! Check back every day for a new entry in the list.

With a name like CASTLE FREAK, you really aren’t expecting an emotionally raw exploration of grief. And yet director Stuart Gordon and company deliver a surprisingly complex group of characters amid their lurid horror film. Considering the origin of the movie—producer Charles Band owned a castle and had art made up for a poster for something called “Castle Freak”—is some real Cannon Film/Roger Corman type reverse engineering around a paper-thin concept, Gordon and the rest would be forgiven for turning in something equally flimsy. And while CASTLE FREAK doesn’t reach the heights of Gordon’s other works, it does possess enough inventive elements to warrant further investigation and discussion.

John Reilly (Jeffrey Combs) has inherited a castle from a long-lost relative in Italy. He arrives with his wife, Susan (Barbara Crampton), and their daughter, Rebecca (Jessica Dollarhide), and is planning on selling the property once everything is inventoried. It’s a welcomed change for the family as they recently experienced a tragedy where John got in a car accident due to drunk driving, killing their son and blinding Rebecca. Things are pretty tense for the Reilly clan and are about to be made much worse when it’s revealed that the castle is home to a deformed man (Jonathan Fuller) that has been tortured all his life and forced to live in horrible, manacled conditions. Soon the titular creature is roaming the castle and bodies start piling up.

Director Stuart Gordon took on the very low budget film for the artistic freedom that producer Charles Band promised. As long as the movie stayed under budget, contained a castle and a freak, Gordon could do whatever he wanted, not worrying about ratings or casting certain people or anything else. Gordon and co-writer Dennis Paoli drew inspiration from various gothic stories and Lovecraftian tales (particularly “The Outsider”) in their rendition of CASTLE FREAK. And while the project was sold on its sensationalist title and images of a deformed madman, few could probably expect that Gordon and company would deliver a movie with so much complexity of characters.

Awful tragedy and grief, particularly in the form of parents losing a child, has always been fodder for horror tales. Whether it’s “The Monkey’s Paw” or Pet Sematary, or a variety of cinematic explorations—DON’T LOOK NOW, THE CHANGELING, ANTICHRIST, HEREDITARY, etc.—the terrible repercussions of outliving your progeny create an ample source of emotional truth to explore. There’s the sadness, of course, but also rage and guilt and so much more that hangs onto survivors like a constant funeral shroud. So it’s a bit surprising that a low budget movie poised for exploitation ends decides to delve into the subject matter so deftly as they do with CASTLE FREAK.

One thing to note is that none of the cast are particularly likable, but they are all sympathetic. We understand why they are acting the way they are acting, whether it’s Susan’s resentment of John or even the Freak’s heinous acts of violence. That never excuses any of the behavior, like when John brings a prostitute home or any of the handful of murders by the Freak, but Gordon, Paoli, and the rest all make us understand why this is happening on a very human level. These are broken people—the Reilly’s, the Freak, even the cop and his bastard son—and such pain breeds further pain for others. It’s not surprising that a film like CASTLE FREAK involves a lot of gore, but it is startling that it also involves a lot of meditation on the phrase “hurt people hurt people.”

There are lots of flaws with CASTLE FREAK: it’s slow in places, it’s problematic in others, it’s not as transgressive as Gordon’s other genre work, etc. But there’s lots to celebrate as well. The cast all does uniform good work, and the movie looks pretty great (especially given its low budget). And while this could’ve been a simple work-for-hire, low budget cash grab moment for Gordon, he and the rest turn CASTLE FREAK into something more substantive. No, it won’t join the higher echelon of those other movies noted above, but it’s still an impressive attempt at looking at how flawed we all our and the ways in which our wounds continue to cause pain for a long time.

All this plus there’s lots of shots of the Freak’s testicles. So. Everyone gets something out of CASTLE FREAK, I suppose.