A young notary is also there, to read the will.

Young Katy is reputed to be a powerful medium so it seems like a good idea to persuade her to contact Reginald Thorne’s spirit. A séance is held. With inconclusive results.

The first body to turn up is that of the castle’s caretaker Patrick. There will be more corpses. It could be that one of the heirs is a murderer, which would make this more of an Old Dark House movie than a gothic horror. But it could of course be a ghost or some other supernatural entity.

There are empty coffins in the Thorne family crypt, coffins that should not be empty. Corpses appear and disappear. Mysterious lights are seen in the crypt.

The castle is vast. The only one who knew all its secrets was Patrick and he’s dead.

The good news is that the law has arrived, in the person of Inspector Martin. He’s confident that he can find the killer. He doesn’t seem to be having much success.

And then the will disappears.

There are some clues that point to what is really going on but no-one notices since the truth is too strange to be believed.

Director Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo offers us most of the standard gothic horror trappings but there’s something missing. To get the gothic atmosphere right it’s necessary to take some trouble to get the lighting right and the framing right and that doesn’t happen here. It all looks a bit too flat, with no real sense of gothic weirdness or menace or creepiness. That might be because the people who made this movie were just not in the top rank as far as Italian genre cinema was concerned and they lacked the skills, and the instincts. This was Caracciolo’s only directing gig and it’s easy enough to see why.

This is also a very low-budget movie and that might be the problem – there may simply not have been enough time and money to allow the necessary effort to be made. This is a cheap movie that unfortunately looks cheap.

A major problem is the music which is very tacky and obvious and makes the movie seem even cheaper.

There are no major names in the cast. The acting isn’t terrible but on the whole it’s rather dull and the lack of even a single charismatic performer is a weakness. The audience isn’t given enough reason to care about the characters.

The most interesting thing about this film is that it’s a reminder that even the most satisfying genres vary in quality. It’s worth seeing some of the lesser movies in order to appreciate more fully just what it was that made the great movies in these genres so great.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with the basic story. In fact it’s perfectly adequate. It’s just that it’s executed without any real style or sense of menace or suspense.

The Seventh Grave is quite simply dull.

This movie is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra Blu-Ray boxed set. The transfer is good and there’s an audio commentary in which Rachael Nisbet struggles valiantly to find positive things to say about the movie. It’s a fine boxed set and if you’re going to buy it (and you should) you might give The Seventh Grave a spin merely out of curiosity but make sure to set your expectations very low.