Film / Castle Freak (1995)

Castle Freak is a 1995 horror movie directed by Stuart Gordon, the director of Re-Animator and From Beyond and starring two of the lead actors from the both of them, Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton.

John Reilly (Combs) has inherited a castle in Italy, where he moves in with his wife, Susan (Crampton), and blind daughter, Rebecca. As time passes, strange happenings occur in the castle, and it becomes clear to John that there’s someone — or something — living in the castle with them. And it’s not friendly.

Loosely based on the H. P. Lovecraft short story, The Outsider.

A remake was released in 2020.

---

Tropes found in Castle Freak include:

• Actor Allusion: Movie posters prominently feature the fact that Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, who played opposite each other in both Reanimator and From Beyond, play the husband and wife here.
• Abusive Parents: Duchess Orsino put her five year old son Giorgio in a small room and subjected him to daily beatings, torture and even a penectomy in revenge for Giorgio's father leaving her for her sister.
• Adaptational Dumbass: Whereas the narrator of The Outsider is shown to have an understanding of his surroundings and to have some degree of literary knowledge, Giorgio is an animalistic monster with no capacity for anything except violence.
• Adaptation Title Change: The movie is based on the Lovecraft novel The Outsider (1926).
• Adaptational Villainy: While the narrator of The Outsider is certainly frightening in appearance, there's nothing to say that he would have hurt anybody, as the party guests fled when they saw him. Giorgio, however, is a feral monster.
• The Alcoholic: John is a recovering one, though he relapses after his suicide attempt.
• Amoral Attorney: Played with. Gianetti seems wholly unconcerned with much beyond getting his case done and isn't altogether worried that John may well have killed a local prostitute - in fact, he offers to hide the prostitute's incriminating handbag from the cops for an increase in his fee. But when he sees Sylvanna's ravaged corpse along with his own sister, the maid, beaten to death, he tries to throttle John on the spot.
• Antagonist Title: The titular castle freak is the monstrous creature stalking the castle.
• Anti-Villain: There's a few subtle implications that Giorgio just wants to feel loved, but he doesn't understand how. For example he watches John orally copulating the prostitute and, when he gets her alone, attempts to seduce her, offering her a wine bottle. He sexually assaults her only after she uses the wine bottle to defend herself from him, and then tries to mimic what he saw John do - unfortunately, using his teeth.
• Asshole Victim: In the opening scene, the Duchess whips Giorgio so badly she gets a heart attack and dies.
• The Atoner: John badly wants to make up for the death of his son JJ and the blinding of his daughter Rebecca, caused by an accident when he was driving drunk.
• Attempted Rape: in the climax Giorgio grabs up the half-dressed Rebecca, carries her off to his dungeon, chains her up, licks her neck and attempts to take her bra off before he is interrupted by her parents.
• Ax-Crazy: Giorgio only knows how to interact with others through violence.
• Bedsheet Ghost: Kind of. Giorgio covers himself up in a bedsheet, and John initially mistakes him for JJ's ghost.
• Blind and the Beast: Subverted; Rebecca, being blind, cannot see the titular monster Giorgio's hideous appearance when they meet face to face, and mistakes him for her mother, prattling on about her feelings to him as he waits on her attentively. Given his utterly horrific backstory this could be an opportunity for a face turn, but instead of a rapport built between them Rebecca is repulsed by the feral and completely insane Giorgio's true nature, as he grabs her up and carries her off to his dungeon to rape her.
• Blind Mistake: as she is changing for bed, Rebecca mistakes Giorgio for her mother, and prattles on about her feelings as the monster waits on her attentively, even taking Rebecca's shirt when she hands it to him.
• Body Horror: The castle freak is facially disfigured, gray-skinned, horribly emaciated, covered in whipping scars, and is missing his penis. He adds to the extent of his deformities while escaping by breaking off his own thumb.
• Big Bad; Giorgio D'Orsino, a deformed madman terrorizing a castle's residents.
• Bittersweet Ending: John is dead, but he's saved his family from Giorgio by taking him with him, and Susan has apparently forgiven him for the accident that killed JJ and blinded Rebecca.
• Byronic Hero: John is a recovering alcoholic whose alcoholism resulted in a car crash that ended in the death of his son and his daughter being blinded, and even on the wagon, he's still an irresponsible parent, despite his half-hearted attempts to be a better person.
• Cassandra Truth: Rebecca tries to tell both her parents that someone else in the castle, though John is quicker to believe her.
• Cat Scare: played with, a literal cat example. Rebecca hears something sinister moving about, she follows the noise, away from the safety of her father's protection, down into the depths of the castle - and then the sound turns out to be the resident cat. But then the cat leads her down to where Giorgio is hiding, allowing him to observe her for the first time. She hears more strange noises and concludes this time there's a strange person in the house, but her father calls her away and nobody believes her and she is unable to establish the truth.
• Chain Pain: Giorgio uses his chains as weapons in his fight with John.
• Darker and Edgier: While Stuart Gordon is most well-known for darkly humorous Lovecraft adaptations, Castle Freak is visibly lacking in any of the sardonic humor of Re-Animator or the campiness of From Beyond, and plays its mature themes completely seriously. It’s also this compared to most other Full Moon Pictures productions.
• Disability Superpower: Rebecca's blindness has granted her hearing sharper than that of ordinary people; she hears the resident cat walking around while her father, next to her, hears nothing.
• Disposable Sex Worker: The prostitute that John has sex with, and that Giorgio brutally murders.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Duchess takes out her rage towards her husband for running away with her sister on Giorgio, who was their child, by locking him in a small room in the castle and only going in to torture him.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Played for Drama when Susan undoes her bra to pull Giorgio away from Rebecca, then stabs him with the knife she has hidden.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The Duchess Orsino turns her son into a toy to vent her anger and hatred on for forty two years, torturing him constantly. But it's said she cared for her cats and regularly doted on them.
• Fanservice:
  • The prostitute wears a super Stripperific outfit, even considering her occupation.
  • Right before the climax Rebecca takes off her shirt, nominally to go to bed, so Giorgio can chase her around in her bra for the rest of the movie.
• Fingore: To break free of his cuffs, the castle freak tears off his own thumb.
• Freudian Excuse: The castle freak has a surprisingly valid one: his mother was ashamed of his existence, and as such, kept him chained up in a small room, only coming in to either to feed him or to torture him. As such, he doesn't have any concept of social interaction aside from what he'd known his entire life. He makes the life of the titular character of the story Castle Freak is based on look cheerful!
• Full-Frontal Assault: With the exception of the bedsheet, Giorgio is completely naked. The one thing missing, however, is his penis, though he does still have an intact scrotum.
• Gorn: This is, after all, a Stuart Gordon adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story.
• Henpecked Husband: Susan nags John about his inadequacy as a father.
• The Hero Dies: John throws himself off a tall walkway so he can drag the villain down with him.
• Heroic Sacrifice: John fights Giorgio to the death, allowing Susan and Rebecca to escape. He jumps off the roof, taking the castle freak with him.
• Inspector Javert: The local police chief believes John is a murderer and goes after him for it. Turns out he has a personal reason, as the prostitute Sylvanna that John supposedly killed was his lover whom he has a son with, and he has every reason to believe John is the killer in pursuing him.
• It Can Think: While largely animalistic in behavior otherwise, Giorgio shows a primitive intelligence, such as hiding in a bedsheet in a room with furniture that's covered in bedsheets, using the bedsheet to cover up his disfigurements, dragging both the hooker and Rebecca to his cell and chaining them up, and even seems to acknowledge Rebecca's blindness at one point.
• Karma Houdini: The Duchess lives to an ancient old age unrepentantly torturing her son for forty-two years on end. The movie opens with her abusing Giorgio, before waltzing up to bed and dying quietly of old age.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Inverted. The Duchess' one redeeming quality is that she adores and dotes on her cats, but beyond that she's as wicked as it gets.
• Limited Social Circle: only a few Italians have any lines and they are all closely connected - the lawyer is the brother of the castle's maid, the prostitute is the baby mama of the investigating cop (and also mistress of the lawyer)! - John (and hence his family) is related to Giorgio and the Duchess.
• Macguffin: the water Rebecca needs to take her headache medicine becomes the excuse needed for each of her watchers (including her mother) to go off on their own one by one and be attacked by Giorgio, so she'll be alone when he finds her.
• Manly Tears: John breaks into them when he sees what he thinks is JJ's photo on Giorgio's grave in the crypt.
• My Beloved Smother: Susan is so overprotective and smothering of Rebecca that she is expected not to take even a few steps away from her parents and Susan won't even let Rebecca roll the car window down for fear of her catching cold. Justified, given the family's backstory.
• Never My Fault: Susan tears down John with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, claiming that he never owns up to his wrongs.
• Obliviously Evil: Giorgio doesn't seem to comprehend that he's done any wrong.
• The Peeping Tom: Giorgio approaches women this way. He secretly watches John having aex with the prostitute before approaching her, and creeps into the unseeing Rebecca's room twice, once when she's asleep in bed and, the next night, when she is undressing for bed.
• Police Are Useless: Forte refuses to search the castle when John tries to tell him there's someone else in there, believing him to have smashed the mirror himself. Once he starts interrogating him, he refuses to let him go until he gives him the answers he wants to hear, and refuses to take his family out of the castle. At the very least, he could have saved his own men if he'd just humored him.
• Police Brutality: John takes a beating after telling the cop interrogating him that he "fucked" the cop's baby mama but didn't kill her.
• Precision F-Strike: While being interrogated, John lets one loose. He then receives a blow to the head with Forte's baton.
  John: I didn't kill her, I fucked her, okay?
• Psychopathic Manchild:
  • Due to his only human interaction in years having been the abuse he received from his mother, Giorgio doesn't realize that he's doing anything wrong when he commits murder and eventually sexual assault. He just observed John having sex with the prostitute, and as such, thought that it was perfectly okay for him to make advances on her the way he did.
  • The Duchess was implied to be a higher-functioning, gender-flipped version. The housekeeper said that she always demanded that she get what she wants, and was prone to violent tantrums when she didn't.
• Rage Against the Reflection: Once he escapes from his prison, Giorgio sees himself in a mirror, which he promptly smashes.
• Really Gets Around: Sylvanna Lucci, the hooker, is said to have screwed most of the town, including John's lawyer, Gianetti.
• Reality Has No Subtitles: the phone conversation between John's lawyer and his maid, in which the latter lets it be known she's found the prostitute's handbag inside the castle, is unsubtitled and only a family photo found in the handbag cues the audience in to what is going on.
• Redemption Equals Death: John, who was responsible for the death of JJ and spent the majority of the movie being a jerkass and not owning up to his history, earns his wife's forgiveness by saving her and Rebecca from Giorgio. Saving them, in this case, entails a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Stalker with a Crush: Once Giorgio learns of Rebecca's presence in the castle he sneaks up to her bedroom while she's sleeping and pulls her covers off so he can have a look at her.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Giorgio, despite being an emaciated monster dragging a rattling chain, is shockingly good at appearing and vanishing like a freaking ninja.
• Taking You with Me: Unable to defeat Giorgio one on one, and with no other way to save his family, John attaches himself to Giorgio's chain and throws himself off the castle to drag Giorgio to his death.
• Tap on the Head: the cops guarding Rebecca are butchered, but Susan merely has her head smacked against the doorframe by Giorgio, knocking her unconscious just long enough for the castle freak to share an intimate moment with her daughter and carry her away, after which Susan is back up again and ready to pursue without any lasting negative consequences.
• Tragic Monster: The castle freak lived such a traumatic childhood, literally closed off from every other being but himself and his monstrous mother, and as such, has absolutely no idea how to peacefully interact with other living creatures.
• Trailers Always Spoil: the film's trailer spoils everything except Giorgio's death.
• True Beauty Is on the Inside: horrifyingly subverted. As Rebecca undresses for bed, she utters a little monologue (intended for her mother, who has left the room) proclaiming that having been blinded is not so bad because, when she gets a boyfriend one day, it will automatically be a special relationship, because each partner will have to judge the other by inner character rather than superficial traits like physical beauty (or lack of disability). Sadly for Rebecca, her audience is not Susan but the feral and completely insane Giorgio, and he promptly attacks her, carrying her off into the basement to rape her.
• Villainous Breakdown: Not that Giorgio has much composure to lose, but when he finds his mother's whip, he flips out and starts using it to smash everything in sight.
• Weirdness Censor: when John finds the broken mirror he decides the wood must have warped and broken the glass spontaneously. The cops decide the family is faking the whole thing and don't bother to search the castle for intruders.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Poor Giorgio. You just can’t help but feel sorry for the guy, with the miserable life he lived. Arguably, John did him a favor by killing him.
• You Have to Believe Me!: Rebecca tries to convince her parents that someone else is in the castle with them. This later applies to John, as well, although he initially thinks that the castle is haunted by JJ's ghost, and still later tries to convince Rebecca and Susan that he didn't kill the housekeeper and the hooker.