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I tend not to love Italian horror, since a great deal of it is frequently incomprehensible to me, at least in terms of plot. That’s different for the older Italian horror, though, and a movie like Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra) is a case of an Italian filmmaker doing something in the more Gothic style. Gothic horror is always a lot of fun. It’s overblown and weird and dramatic to a fault. It also has great costuming and sets and is gorgeous to look at. That’s certainly the case here.
I thought, for a very long time, that the name of this movie was Mill of the Stone Woman, meaning a singular gorgon-like creature. It’s not, though. The reference is to a collection of moving statues held in an old windmill. Hans van Arnhim (Pierre Brice), heads to a remote Dutch island to do research on a story about the mill in question. Once an actual grain mill, it has been turned into an art installation by a sculptor named Gregorious Wahl (Herbert A.E. Bohme). The machinery of the mill now acts as a carousel, displaying the sculptures.
Arnhim stays with the Wahl in his attic. Because of this, he encounters Wahl’s daughter Elfie (Scilla Gabel), who is ailing. Arnhim has feelings for her immediately despite his relationship with Liselotte (Dany Carrel), who visits him at the mill and faints at the sight of the rather macabre display of sculptures.
Things heat up when Wahl informs Hans that his daughter suffers from a rare illness that could kill her suddenly with a terrible shock. His relationship with Liselotte re-established, Hans tries to break things off with Elfie, who becomes hysterical and collapses from the strain. He carries her to her bedroom, where lesions appear on her face and she suddenly dies.
This is where things get really interesting. Hans has what appears to be a complete break from reality. He has visions of Elfie in the attic with him, hears her playing the piano downstairs and eventually finds her body in a tomb in a nearby graveyard. He also sees a woman tied to a chair in the mill. All of this is written off as hallucination when Elfie herself appears completely alive.
So what is really going on? What’s going on is not something rare in the case of movies of this sort. Wahl and his assistant Dr. Loren Bohlem (Wolfgang Priess) have been keeping Elfie alive through blood transfusions. True to horror movie rules, these transfusions naturally take all of the blood of the victims, leaving Wahl with the problematic corpses of his victims. What he’s actually doing with the corpses is not going to be a shock if you’ve watched a single movie before. It’s straight out of House of Wax. All of Wahl’s sculptures are actually his victims encased in wax. What this means is Hans’s weird hallucinogenic break with reality was no such thing—the woman he saw was Annelore (Liana Orfei), a local model and singer.
Mill of the Stone Women is not a film that is going to blaze any trails when it comes to the actual plot. In fact, aside from all of this being about restoring his daughter to health, a lot of what happens here really is straight out of House of Wax, including the bulk of the ending (which also has a clear nod to the original Frankenstein). A mad scientist working to save his daughter from something dreadful is also, honestly not that rare, either. Eyes Without a Face from the same year, and released months earlier in Europe, followed that same basic idea.
What we lack in originality, though, we make up in terms of style. Mill of the Stone Women is gorgeous to look at, a film that revels in its Gothic story and appearance. Costuming is sumptuous and the sets are gorgeous from start to finish. Even though the plot feels a bit retreaded and obvious—there are no surprises here—it’s beautiful to look at on the way.
Honestly, I still think Mill of the Stone Woman is a cooler title, but in terms of something that offers spectacle for its entire running time, you could do a lot worse than this.
Why to watch Mill of the Stone Women: Weird science in the best of ways.
Why not to watch: The plot is cobbled together from other plots.
