Mark Dery has a new essay — “equal parts philosophical investigation (of memory, time, and museum vitrines) and memoir (mem-noir?)” — up at the Thought Catalog. He says: “Why do passing encounters with the inconsequential lodge themselves in our long-term memory, sometimes forever? What makes seemingly throwaway images get stuck in the hippocampus and stay there, for a lifetime? Castle of the Living Dead (1964) is, by universal consensus, not high art. An especially forgettable example of the spaghetti-gothic thrillers turned out by Italian moviemakers in the ’60s, it’s a low-budget affair, badly dubbed, creaky with clichés, marred by hammy performances. Yet, for all its staginess, the film settled to the bottom of my unconscious the day I saw it, at the age of eight or nine, and has lain there ever since, submerged but still visible, like the drowned death car in Night of the Hunter.”
Castle Of The Living Dead: Time, Embalmed