Red Queen Kills Seven Times

• The film's interiors were shot at Centro Safa Palatino studio in Rome, with extensive location work in West Germany — Würzburg, Weikersheim Castle, Öhringen, and Neuenstein — standing in for the Wildenbrück family's Bavarian castle grounds.
• Star Barbara Bouchet was everywhere in Italian genre cinema in 1972: the same year she played Kitty here, she also starred in Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, making her one of the year's defining giallo faces.
• The film has circulated under several alternate titles over the decades, including Blood Feast, Feast of Flesh, and The Corpse Which Didn't Want to Die.
• Director Emilio Miraglia made only two gialli in his brief directing career (1967-1972) — this and 1971's The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave — and Red Queen Kills Seven Times was his final film before he stopped directing; he died in 1982.
• The film got a proper rediscovery in 2017, when Arrow Video paired it with The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave in a limited-edition Blu-ray box set featuring new 2K restorations from the original camera negatives.

The Black Queen/Red Queen legend turns out to be dressing on an entirely human, money-motivated crime: Franziska — the cousin everyone trusts to cover for the family — is the real killer, staging 'curse' murders to make herself sole heir. The Gothic supernatural frame is a red herring over a grubby inheritance plot, which is Miraglia's real trick across both his gothic-gialli.

The fashion house setting isn't incidental: the film reads as a critique of an industry that consumes women and displays them as objects. The killer's crimson gown and theatrical staging turn each murder into a fashion shoot, suggesting the violence is the industry's logical endpoint.

Because it's Franziska — the one person everyone trusts to protect the family's secrets — who turns out to be the killer, the film quietly argues that loyalty in the Wildenbrück bloodline is a performance masking self-interest. Every character positioned as Kitty's protector (Franziska, and eventually Herbert) is really protecting an inheritance angle instead.

Sisters Kitty and Evelyn Wildenbrück grow up under a family curse: an old legend of a Black Queen and a Red Queen, two sisters who turned on each other, with the murdered Red Queen rising from the grave every hundred years to kill seven people before finishing off her sister. In 1972 — the year the curse is due to repeat — Kitty accidentally strikes down Evelyn during a fight. Their cousin Franziska quietly covers it up, telling the family Evelyn moved to America. Soon a figure in a scarlet cloak starts killing people connected to the Springe fashion house where Kitty now works as a photographer, and police start circling Kitty and her married lover Martin. The twist: Kitty only stunned Evelyn (who, unknown to Kitty, wasn't even her biological sister — she'd been adopted specifically as a second "sister" to try to short-circuit the curse). It's Franziska who actually finished Evelyn off, and she's the one staging the "Red Queen" murders to make herself the sole heir to the family fortune — a scheme her husband Herbert only turns on when his conscience, and his gun, catch up with him.