Movie Review: Castle Freak (2020)
Toxic relationships and Lovecraftian horrors collide in a spooky castle.
*Spoilers ahead for Castle Freak (and a few for the original too)
Cast & Crew
Director: Tate Steinsiek
Writer: Kathy Charles
Producer: Barbara Crampton
Cast: Clair Catherine (Rebecca Whateley), Jake Horowitz (John), Kika Magalhaes (The Freak; Lavinia Whateley), Chris Galust(Professor), Emily Sweet (Shelly), Elisha Pratt (Chuck), Genti Kame (Marku), Klodian Hoxha (Doctor), Klodjana Keco (Old Timer)
Soundtrack: Fabio Frizzi
Tate Steinsiek, the director, is an award-winning special effects prosthetics artist who has worked on The Amazing Spider-Man (2008) and Oculus (2013), and has directed The Terrible Tale of Jacquelyn Torne (2017) and Guts (2019), among a few others. It really shows here, because the prosthetics in this movie were really great!
Kathy Charles also wrote the script for Jakob's Wife (2021), which I'm totally adding to my watch list after reading the synopsis.
None of the cast has been in anything I recognize, although I wouldn't say they're obscure as a few do seem to have some amount of following.
What’s the spoiler-free run-down?
Rotten Tomatoes has the most concise synopsis I can find that doesn't give too much away right from the get go, so here ya go!
Terror strikes when a blind woman and her friends travel to a mysterious Albanian castle that harbors dark secrets.
That is, essentially, exactly what happens.
I will also add that this is a remake of the 1995 film Castle Freak directed by Stuart Gordon, and follows a very similar plot. Instead of Italy we are now in Albania, our main character is no longer a man, and there is no teenager in this version (instead of the daughter being blind, instead now our main character was blinded just prior to the main events of the film). Otherwise, as far as I can tell, the story is quite similar, with the hefty addition of Lovecraftian monsters and cults.
Also I did want to warn you that this movie is just full of body horror and general mutilation and some pretty gross puncture/cutting death scenes. So if you decide you want to watch it, keep that in mind. This is 100% not a movie you want any kiddos wandering into, unless you want them to have recurring nightmares well into their 20s.
So… what happened?
We open to a woman praying in a small chapel inside her vast home, a truly beautiful castle in Albania. What I wouldn’t give to live in a castle. I would, however, have to make sure it (1) isn’t haunted or (2) doesn’t have a deformed monstrous person living in the walls. Spoiler alert.
Lavinia, the woman in question, has a creature (the titular Freak) locked away in her basement and she tells it that it's fate is now in God's hands. Which is honestly just rude. She then engages in self flagellation, or ritual whipping, which goes too far and she dies of her injuries. The Freak leaves its small room and finds her body and, in a fit of what looks like either rage or grief, beats her body into a bloody mess. This movie doesn't shy away from gore and we're starting off strong.
In an abrupt change of scenery, we arrive at a nightclub! Rebecca, our protagonist, walks inside and finds her friends (these people are barely named, two I didn't even know until I read the cast list and the others are Shelly and a guy they only refer to as Professor… cool bro…) and her boyfriend John, who is getting a little too up close and personal with Shelly. I will say right now, I hated this guy. He is the worst. Established as a serial cheater, he also does way too many drugs and then insists on driving them home from the club. This, as you might expect, has disastrous consequences.
After a car accident that leaves Rebecca blind and John experiencing the appropriate amount of soul-crushing guilt, she discovers that she has inherited an Albanian castle from her recently deceased mother. Lavinia seemed totally sane, I don't think this will go poorly at all. Rebecca was adopted after being surrendered anonymously and always believed that it was because her mother lacked the resources to care for her; finding out that she was in fact very wealthy shocked her and she’s been wondering why she was abandoned ever since.
Rebecca and John (inexplicably still together) travel to the castle to sell it and all her newly inherited possessions so that they can “get back on their feet”. We don't know when they lost their footing, although I'd imagine things are unstable what with John causing her to lose her sight and all that. Not to mention all the cheating. I truly hate this man.
We are introduced to Marku, who appears to be their realtor and also a long-standing friend of the family. He explains to John that Lavinia died by suicide, and quite gruesomely at that, and John asks him not to mention the details to Rebecca as she’s already been through such a shock. That's perhaps the nicest thing we see him do in the entire movie. Marku likes Rebecca and shows her around the grounds, gently asking if she'd not rather stay and live there than sell everything off. She is quite set on it, though, despite her wishes to know who here mother was and why she couldn't keep her.
The movie starts to get weird the moment they spend the first night in the house. Rebecca is hearing things, and seeing visions in her dreams of her mother. She somehow knows, for example, that the robe she found in the closet is red, despite being unable to see. She also knows exactly how her mother died, despite having not been told, because she sees in in her dreams.
She starts hearing something moving through the walls and tries to follow it but runs into a statue — it falls and would have crushed her if she was not saved by the Freak. John finds her on the floor in front of the wall and ignores her insistence that there is something else living in the castle with them, as he has begun to think she is paranoid and going crazy. He’s desperate to sell the place and counting down the hours before all their buddies from the club show up to help them move some stuff around.
John and Rebecca, despite their arguments about the castle and Rebecca’s increasing paranoia (and the fact that John is still on drugs despite what he did to Rebecca), are beginning to rekindle their relationship. This doesn’t last long but we do get a really cute scene where she decides to try to make breakfast for the both of them. She’s nice and trying her best, and I really liked her during this movie. Everyone else not so much.
Their not very close group of friends arrive off the plane and are shocked by the castle, as I assume anyone would be. Shelly is still flirting unabashedly with John and, unfortunately, he’s flirting back. I hate him a lot. At this point there were like 30 minutes left and he only got worse.
Rebecca finds an old book in her mother’s wardrobe and shows it to Professor, as John refuses to help her read it and she knows he’s deeply interested in the occult. Professor becomes completely absorbed, explaining that it is the Necronomicon and lays out rituals used to summon the Old Ones. A major clue to any viewer who knows any Lovecraftian lore, the appearance of this book told me that shit was finally about to get weirder.
John, meanwhile, brings the rest of the group into the village to try to sell some of their things. No one will buy from them, claiming the house and the family that lived in it is cursed and evil, and that Rebecca is the spawn of evil. Undeterred, he keeps trying until he realizes that Marku is not a realtor, nor did he ever post a listing for the house. John doesn't know this but Marku is also currently trapped in the caverns below the house, a prisoner of the Freak, after he tried to break in for unknown nefarious reasons. He’d clearly had ulterior motives from the beginning but we’re still not sure exactly what’s going on with him and Lavinia’s legacy.
Returning to the castle, disappointed and angry, John and the ridiculous clubbing friends get drunk and high and break all of Rebecca’s established house rules. Rebecca has brought Professor to see where she found the book so John and his buddies have free reign over this wing of the castle. He sleeps with Shelly, predictably, but in a surprising twist she is murdered by the Freak during the act and she then pretends to be her to finish the deed. I guess it's lonely living in the walls of a castle. John doesn’t realize what’s happened because he’s handcuffed to the bed and blindfolded — he's rescued by the two unnamed friends and they find Shelly’s body. The three then go on a rampage, trying to find the Freak and seemingly willing to kill anything that gets in their way. Drugs are a helluva thing kids.
Rebecca and Professor have found a passageway, right where Rebecca almost died earlier in the movie, and are now behind the walls. They find evidence of the Freak and also proof that the Freak is in fact Rebecca’s twin. Apparently Lavinia’s father was a devout follower of the Old Ones and, in a ritual possession, impregnated his daughter. The resulting twins were intended to, together, summon the Old Ones onto this plane of existence to rule the world once again. Lavinia refused to let this happen and she sent Rebecca away to prevent the dreaded prophecy but Marku found Rebecca after Lavinia’s death — so now here we are.
Professor going down the rabbit hole a little too eagerly now and at this point things weren't looking good for Rebecca.
John and his two buddies find Marku and the Freak, and his unnamed friends are killed surprisingly quickly. RIP. Marku reveals his grand plan (to summon the Old Ones, as you might imagine) and they run into Rebecca, Professor, and the Freak. John tries to kill the Freak but Rebecca stops him, protecting her sister, so he tries to kill her too. In the most satisfying scene in the movie, John dies. It's great and I cheered. The sisters, with Professor following close behind, come outside to a ritual clearing and look up at the sky. Saying the right words, fulfilling the prophecy, they summon the Old Ones into this plane through what looks to be a disgusting and excruciating ritual, and the villagers below the castle look up in horror as we see a writhing tentacled figure appear from behind the clouds.
Fin.
There’s also a post-credits scene where Professor, surprisingly still alive, returns to Miskatonic University and is greeted as Henry Armitage (a Lovecraft character who is actually the head librarian at the University, and now in possession of the Necronomicon). He sees a man sitting with his mentor and greets him as “West”, indicating to the viewer that this man is Herbert West (main character of Re-Animator, one of the original Castle Freak director’s most famous films). I do love a good sequel reboot set-up.
Thoughts?
This movie was honestly hard to write about because a lot happens that is difficult to explain without going minute detail, which is not very interesting to read. It’s especially hard to write about people whose names you never officially learn and who you just don’t care about. The writers spent too much time attempting to build tension in the middle before the friends show up and most of the relationship tension between John and Rebecca just didn’t land. I became too overwhelmed by my dislike for John to give any thought to the creepy noises and visions Rebecca was experiencing, and his presence really took away from the movie as a whole.
Once the friends showed up the plot moved along much quicker, as there were now more people for the Freak to kill, so I would have preferred if they’d been there from the beginning. If I’m meant to care about people’s deaths, I should probably have spent time getting to know them!
The Lovecraftian horror was cool because not many movies really jump into the deep end of his version of end of the world “coming of the Old Ones” stories. Pulling in Yog-Sothoth and directly drawing from H.P. Lovecraft’s lore was really cool and now gives the director the opportunity to do more with H.P. Lovecraft’s many stories. I thought I sensed sequels in the making and upon a little research it seems that the studio who produced Castle Freak, Full Moon Productions, is doing just that. They followed up this film by working on a Lovecraftian series titled Miskatonic U, which focused on the iconic Lovecraftian university. The first film is titled The Resonator: Miskatonic U and was released in 2021. I, for one, am definitely going to check it out. Hopefully the pacing is better than Castle Freak.
Technical Quality: 3/5
The prosthetics on the Freak were good, the kills were good (and rather satisfying, as I really hated some of these guys), and honestly the CGI at the end with Yog-Sothoth was solid as well. I just didn’t think the characters were likable, and a lot of that came down to the script itself.
Just the Vibes: 2.5/5
It was fine. Not, ultimately, my kind of horror despite my love of creepy castles and Lovecraftian elements. I truly dislike body horror, and this movie had a ton of that. I also had an issue with the gratuitous nudity that this had in spades. It didn’t really add anything to the plot and felt like it was thrown in there for the audience and, later, for the added horror. It’s not a movie I’d recommend, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to dissuade you from watching it either.
Things I enjoyed this week:
My parents visited so we’ve been enjoying some great cheese, salami, olives, and a healthy serving of wine and tequila. Not mixed, of course, we’re not monsters. We also had grilled pizza with sausage and bacon, which I can’t recommend highly enough. My basil is prolific right now, and one of my plants is extremely fragrant, so my entire kitchen smells like an Italian herb garden. I also got some work dresses and pants from ThredUp, which is an online thrift store that delivers to your house! Not sponsored, just a fan. I’m also playing Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds on my phone; they’ve got a full interactive MMORPG mobile game with beautiful art and fun quests, so that’s been how I spend my down time recently.
Ciao ✌️
Lauren