Malpertuis

• Adapted from Belgian writer Jean Ray's 1943 gothic novel, in which a dying Rosicrucian occultist named Cassave captures the fading gods of Olympus and imprisons them inside the skins of ordinary Flemish citizens in a crumbling Ghent house, the household holding what's left of Zeus, Apollo, Prometheus, Vulcan and the Gorgon Medusa.
• Susan Hampshire plays five separate roles across the film, including the Gorgon Euryale, the Fury Alecto (as 'Alice'), and Jan's love-interest Nancy plus the framing-device Charlotte, doubling that pays off the final twist about identity and the house.
• Orson Welles took the role of the bedridden uncle Cassavius and performs the entire part flat on his back, never leaving the bed across his scenes, the second time he'd played a role entirely from a bed after his own 1962 Kafka adaptation The Trial.
• It screened in competition at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d'Or, but distributor United Artists submitted a re-edited, dubbed version cut down to roughly 100 minutes rather than director Harry Kuemel's preferred two-hour cut.
• For American release the film was retitled The Legend of Doom House, marketed misleadingly as a straight horror picture, and a longer Flemish director's cut roughly 20 minutes longer than the UA version surfaced in 1973.
• The cast spans multiple film cultures, mixing Welles and Hampshire with French stars Michel Bouquet and Jean-Pierre Cassel and French pop singer Sylvie Vartan, who appears as the cabaret seductress Bets.

The whole estate is a taxidermy parlor for the divine. Cassavius didn't kill the gods, he preserved them, sewing fading immortals into human shells so they keep performing mortality in his halls. Every stiff gesture and dead-eyed stare from the household reads as a creature wearing a borrowed body it no longer fits.

Euryale's red hair and fixed green stare aren't just menace, they're the film's thesis on looking. Jan keeps approaching the one thing that destroys the man who sees it clearly, and his attraction is the trap the house was built to spring. The romance is the snare.

The asylum framing turns the mansion into a closed loop. If Jan invented Malpertuis from his cell, then the gods are projections of a mind that can't tell wife from Gorgon, and the final wink that maybe it wasn't a dream refuses to free him. Either the myth is real or the madness is total, and the film won't let you pick the comforting one.

A sailor named Jan stumbles back to land and wakes inside Malpertuis, the sprawling Ghent mansion his dying uncle Cassavius rules from a four-poster bed. The will is a trap: the fortune only pays out to heirs who never leave. But the household is no family. Behind every shopkeeper, every shuffling servant, every too-still woman are the last Greek gods, their power spent, their divinity stitched into stolen human skin. Jan circles the red-haired Euryale, unaware her green eyes turn men to stone. The house wants its myth back, and Jan is the key.