gavin6942 Several people in a house come face to face with a murder mystery -- and one of them is guilty of the crime! This film has no familiar actors, and something of a misleading title (it is not a literal translation of the German). The phrase "haunted castle" clearly implies a horror film and not a detective story, but there is very little horror here.Lothar Mehnert stars as Count Oetsch, and although I know absolutely nothing about him, I was very drawn to his performance. He has a striking look that I think makes for a good stage or screen presence. What else has he done? I do not know, but should seek it out.The film is light on humor, though there is a sequence I will call "the kitchen boy dream" that I found funny. What is it implying? What does it mean? How does it connect to the big story? I have no idea.The Kino DVD contains a book / film comparison and I would recommend this. It shows how radically different the film is in some ways from the book. While the essence is the same, I would almost have to say they are two different creatures altogether.

JohnHowardReid Besides his well-known pieces, film noir master, F.W. Murnau, is also represented on DVD by a minor but nonetheless interesting work, "The Haunted Castle" (1921), made just a year before the director's seminal "Nosferatu". Now available on a truly excellent release, this DVD is not only complete with all the iris ins and iris outs (deleted from the truly execrable print on a rival label), but presented in all the splendor of its original tints.True, the movie itself is rather stagily directed with little use even of pans, let alone tracking shots. Nonetheless, the story is reasonably intriguing. What makes "The Haunted Castle" worth seeing, however, is neither the social fabric of its upper-class setting, the mystery mechanics of the plot, the two briefly surreal dream sequences or even the successfully more naturalistic performances (judged by the general standards prevailing in German cinema in 1921) delivered by most of the players, but the overwhelmingly charismatic presence of Olga Chekhova. That name will mean nothing to 99% of my readers, but from 1930 to around 1950, she was easily in private life the most important movie star in the world. As I say, "The Haunted Castle" is must viewing simply to get a glimpse of the quality that made Olga Chekhova sought after by the most famous (and infamous) men of her time. Mind you, this is only the third of her 139 films as an actress (she also directed one and produced five).As a postscript, in order to prove my theory that many of the information sites on the net are staffed by fools, allow me to point out that the name, Victor Bluetner (listed as an actor in the movie's credits) is an obvious pseudonym. You won't find too many Bluetners in a phone directory. I'd say that the name was derived from "blut" (the German word for blood), plus the common suffix "ner" (as in Wagner). I laughed when I consulted a well-known Spanish site and read in all seriousness, "date of birth: unknown; place of birth: not specified"!

MARIO GAUCI I knew going in this was not a horror film, in spite of the English title: while not uninteresting in itself, it emerges as a very minor Murnau. Little of the director's trademark stylistics are present here; the film does constitute an early use of flashback, as it slowly divulges the events behind a past crime for which the wrong man was accused – but the characters don't exactly set the screen on fire.The Sinister Cinema edition I watched was a mere 56 minutes in length, as opposed to the restored 74-minute version of the film; not surprisingly, the choppy editing (full of phony-looking transitions and an equally pointless establishing shot of the castle used ad nauseam throughout) made the plot somewhat hard to follow – and the lack of detail in the print itself, not to mention the absence of an accompanying music score, didn't help matters either! Even so, the film is worth watching for the unethical way the elderly hero goes about discovering the real identity of his brother's killer and for a couple of brief – if irrelevant – dream sequences, one expressionistic (and which can now be seen as a dry run for NOSFERATU [1922]) and the other surreal. Some years back, Image Entertainment had announced a DVD release of THE HAUNTED CASTLE but, for reasons known only to them, it was summarily cancelled and has yet to appear officially on any digital format.

Nene-2 This very personal movie from Murnau sets the precedent for the author´s most notorious movie: Nosferatu the vampire.Murnau demonstrates his superb command of the camera and the illumination while setting the bases of the expressionism.The suspense distilled in Haunted Castle is well worth a Hitchcock´s movie and the plot is surprisingly complex for a silent.Do make sure that you see it in a winter stormy night