The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

• Director Emilio P. Miraglia helmed only two gialli in his career — this and 'The Red Queen Kills Seven Times' (1972) — sharing screenwriter Fabio Pittorru, composer Bruno Nicolai, and lead actress Marina Malfatti on both. He never directed another film afterward.
• The film's UK release, distributed by Miracle Films in 1973, was retitled 'The Night She Rose from the Tomb' — not the fabricated title 'Night of the Strangler' (that's an unrelated 1972 American blaxploitation film with no connection to this movie).
• The Cunningham castle's exteriors and interiors were shot at the real Villa Da Porto Colleoni (Castello di Thiene) in Italy's Veneto region, standing in for the story's English countryside setting, with studio work done at Safa Palatino in Rome.
• Bruno Nicolai's score paired jarring orchestral cues and off-kilter jazz with wordless vocals from singer Edda Dell'Orso, the same voice famous for her collaborations with Ennio Morricone.
• The film got a proper cult reappraisal in the 2000s when NoShame Films released it in a 2-disc DVD set alongside 'The Red Queen Kills Seven Times,' including a career-spanning interview with co-star Erika Blanc.

Alan's psychological unraveling isn't just personal trauma — it's the film's central metaphor for aristocratic decline. Every attempt to exercise patriarchal control over the women around him spirals into paranoia and violence, suggesting the giallo killer-nobleman archetype is really a death rattle of inherited wealth confronting its own irrelevance.

Evelyn may never have existed as Alan remembers her. The flashbacks are framed through Alan's unstable perspective, and every character describes her differently. The reading: Evelyn is a convenient fiction Alan constructed to justify his homicidal urges, and the conspiracy merely exploits a madness that was already self-inflicted.

The film's final twist reveals the plot as inheritance fraud, but the ghostly apparitions contain details no conspirator could have fabricated — Evelyn's specific movements, her voice. This supports a reading where the supernatural is real but irrelevant: the living were always going to destroy each other over money regardless of what the dead wanted.

Alan Cunningham, a wealthy aristocrat with a pathological fixation on his dead wife Evelyn, lures red-haired women to his decaying estate for ritualistic torture sessions that end in murder. When he marries Gladys, a blonde stranger who seems to offer escape from his spiral, the bodies keep dropping and Evelyn's ghost starts materializing in the crypt. But nothing in this giallo-adjacent gothic is accidental. Family members, servants, and new wives are all running cons, and the supernatural is just cover for a very human conspiracy to drive Alan insane and seize his fortune.