“Riccardo Freda’s masterpiece…the ambience and visual style are totally unique to this specific era of filmmaking and couldn’t possibly be recreated today. Ms. Steele is in her prime and at her best.” – At the Mansion of Madness

In 1962, director Riccardo Freda – responsible for what is arguably Italy’s first horror film, 1957’s I Vampiri, and mentor to future maestro Mario Bava – had a sizable global hit with the macabre Gothic thriller The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock. The following year, Freda reunited with his Hitchcock star Barbara Steele – by now an international icon for her roles in Bava’s Black Sunday, Roger Corman’s The Pit and The Pendulum and Fellini’s 8½ – for the film that can now take its rightful place as one of Italy’s landmark horror thrillers: In turn-of-the-century Scotland, a young wife (Steele) conspires with her lover (American actor/director and future son-in-law of Vittorio De Sica, Peter Baldwin) to murder her wealthy paralyzed surgeon husband. But when the dead spouse’s spirit returns to haunt the couple, it will unleash a nightmare of spectral terror, sudden violence and depraved vengeance.

Simply put, The Ghost re-sets the bar for Italian horror history: Riccardo Freda’s direction is masterful, delivering sophisticated scares – particularly the chilling possession of the estate’s governess (Harriet Medin of Rossellini’s Paisan, Fellini’s 8½, and Bava’s The Whip and The Body) – and ghastly shocks in equal measure. With nods to Shakespeare, Sartre and Clouzot, the cunning screenplay by Freda and Oreste Biancoli (Bicycle Thieves) argues science over faith, embraces paranormal phenomena, and delivers a poetically nihilistic final twist. Cinematographer Raffaele Masciocchi (The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock) employs a rich Technicolor palette that enhances every menacing shadow and vivid blood drip. But it’s Barbara Steele who is most revelatory here: rather than indulge her wildly popular early ‘60s persona, Ms. Steele instead crafts an unnervingly nuanced performance that goes from cold-blooded duplicity to paranoid madness while looking more supernaturally beautiful than ever before.

For over five decades, The Ghost had only existed as tattered 35mm prints and murky transfers. After years of searching, Severin Films located the thought-lost original camera negative in a storage facility near Cinecittà, only to discover the moldy element had suffered significant age-related damage. Severin was able to replace several shots from a positive print courtesy of The Jon Davison Collection at The Academy Film Archive prior to its 4K scan, then – in association with Minerva Pictures – worked closely with Augustus Color of Rome over several months of meticulous digital restoration prior to its Venice Film Festival premiere.