Mill of the Stone Women

REVIEW
The same year that Mario Bava directed Black Sunday, the film that has become the quintessential Italian black-and-white gothic horror film of the era, director Giorgio Ferroni delivered the film that would arguably be the first significant color representative of the Italian horror genre, Mill of the Stone Women (1960). Given an American theatrical release at the time, the film has gone on to become one of the most fondly recalled Euro-horror endeavors four decades later, but only now is the film being properly seen in its full Technicolor glory (many people have only seen the film courtesy of black-and-white television transfers). Mondo Macabro, a label devoted to unearthing the world’s most important genre productions neglected over the years, has released a sumptuous new DVD of Mill, beautifully restored from the original negative. The film’s colorful visual style can now be fully appreciated, and the results are an eye-popping delight for anyone with a fondness for 1960s European genre cinema. Set in Holland, Mill finds journalist Hans (Pierre Brice) traveling to a small village to locate Professor Wahl, an eccentric local artist who has created a creepy carousel of lifelike female figures that stiffly cavort around a mechanical track. Within the professor’s castle, Hans also encounters Wahl’s beautiful daughter Elfi, and the two initiate a romance…but it turns out Elfi is quite a sick girl, and the steps that the professor and his henchman, Dr. Bolem, take to improve her condition are unhealthily related to the macabre carousel. The plot of Mill is pretty standard gothic horror fare, and the film’s measured pacing might also prove problematic for those weaned solely on contemporary genre productions, but Ferroni really pulls out all the stops for the film’s sinister climax, and Mill of the Stone Women ultimately emerges as a must-see for Euro-horror devotees.