The Virgin of Nuremberg

• Shot in just three weeks, right after director Antonio Margheriti (credited as Anthony Dawson) wrapped Castle of Blood — reusing that film's castle sets and crew to keep the budget down.
• Christopher Lee is criminally underused here, playing Erich, the horribly scarred manservant — a small supporting role, and his voice was entirely dubbed by another actor for release.
• Based on the Italian pulp paperback La vergine di Norimberga, part of the trashy "KKK" novel series that blended Gothic horror with erotica.
• The film was banned outright in Australia in 1964.
• The German release actually cut the WWII flashback scenes that explain the killer's real, Nazi-era backstory, and renamed the German characters for that market.

The Nazi-flashback twist reframes the whole haunted-castle setup: the real monster isn't medieval superstition, it's 20th-century wartime cruelty wearing a medieval mask — the film arguing that horror like this didn't end with the Inquisition, it just changed uniforms.

Erich's devotion to the hooded killer, calling him "mein herr," plays as more than fear — his scars and loyalty read like guilt, a servant complicit in covering up the castle's buried wartime secret rather than just another red herring.

Mary functions less like a horror-movie bride and more like a witness dragged into a decades-old cover-up — the haunted-castle trappings smuggling in a story about a family, and by extension a country, unwilling to look straight at its own wartime past.

Newlywed Mary Hunter arrives at her husband Max's Gothic family castle in Nuremberg expecting a honeymoon and finds a torture museum instead — the family's ancestral history built around a legendary tyrant called The Executioner and his signature device, the Iron Maiden nicknamed "the Virgin of Nuremberg." When women start turning up dead, skewered on the museum's antique spikes, suspicion falls on the distant Max and on Erich, his scarred manservant (played by Christopher Lee), as a scarlet-hooded figure stalks the castle halls at night posing as the long-dead Executioner. The twist pulls the rug out from under the medieval-curse setup: the man under the hood isn't a ghost of Inquisition-era cruelty, he's a disfigured survivor of something much more recent, mutilated during World War II and re-enacting torture on anyone he can catch. It's Gothic Iron Maiden dread welded to a wartime gut-punch, and the swerve still catches people off guard.