Riccardo Freda delivers one of the high points of Italian Gothic cinema, continuing in spirit the line started with L’orribile segreto del dr. Hichcock. At the center are the widow Margaret (Barbara Steele) and her lover Charles, accomplices in the doctor’s murder but soon plagued by visions and guilt. Amid ghostly apparitions and hallucinatory sequences, Freda weaves together melodrama and horror, crafting a tale of morbid passions and inescapable guilt. Raffaele Masciocchi’s cinematography heightens the sense of claustrophobia, while the underlying irony reveals the work’s ambiguous and desperate nature.