30 Years Ago, An Underrated Gothic Horror Showed Us The Future

Considering the oeuvre of Stuart Gordon, “restraint” is rarely a word that comes to mind. From the bloody extremes of Re-Animator to the farcical comedy of Stuck, Gordon was the master of, as Roger Ebert put it when reviewing Dolls, “glorious exercises in bad taste, wretched excess, and blood-soaked horrors.”

If Ebert was unconvinced by the “more elegant, civilized, artistic and clever” Dolls, it did lay the groundwork for a movie that gels Gordon’s bloody best with his unerring desire to understand who we are, deep down, which pervades all his films—even if often obscured by buckets of blood. That film, which turns 30 this month, is the direct-to-video classic Castle Freak.

Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1926 short story, The Outsider (commonly regarded as the author’s best), Castle Freak is a deceptive, almost cunning, horror. A decade on from Re-Animator’s blood-drenched set, Castle Freak reunites Gordon with writer Dennis Paoli and Re-Animator stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. The film’s first moments have you believe Castle Freak will be yet another bloody creature feature as we’re introduced to the Duchess d’Orsino (Helen Stirling) and her imprisonment and abuse of her son, the titular “Freak,” Giorgio (played with curious elegance by Jonathan Fuller). It will be that. Thumbs will be chewed off, women’s shirts torn asunder, and bodies mutilated.

“But it’s a different movie with a different tone,” Jeffrey Combs tells me over a call in September. “It’s a very serious, melancholy, dark movie.”

That contrast solidifies when we’re introduced to the Reilly family soon after. John (Combs) discovers he’s related to the duchess upon her demise and is the sole inheritor of what appears from their approaching car to be a fairytale palace. He transplants his wife, Susan (Crampton), and daughter, Rebecca (Jessica Dollarhide), from the US to facilitate the property’s liquidation but also to reset following an accident that blinded Rebecca and slaughtered her brother, JJ (Alessandro Sebastian Satta), while an inebriated John was at the wheel. As John inventories the castle and tries, noticeably briefly, to rekindle his marriage, a sinister presence hovers over them, slithering from the castle’s secret avenues, only to invariably linger on Rebecca.

“A little known fact about Castle Freak is that it’s entirely handheld,” Combs tells Inverse. “It was actually Stuart’s choice to do that, to save time. But it gives it this subtle hover, as if the creature is watching all the time.”

It lends Castle Freak a creeping dread that focuses less on its supposed monster than the morality drama playing out within the Reilly family. Far from a new start, the castle becomes an echo chamber for the family’s grief and guilt. As child-like cries ring through the walls at night and Rebecca reports someone else is in the castle, John begins to obsessively believe his son has come to reside in the castle. Its sheer scale — reportedly more than 150 rooms — only magnifies the distance that has opened between Susan and an increasingly erratic John, as well as the cavernous loneliness of their daughter.

Gordon used the same castle, which belonged to producer Charles Band, to film his underrated Pit and the Pendulum four years earlier, but Castle Freak arguably makes more of it. Its walls are a character unto themselves, adding, Combs says, “lots of depth, texture, and scads of production value.” But they are also a prison, first for the “Freak” to escape and later to confine John with his addictions — to which his mounting self-absorption allows scant resistance.

This reversal is not entirely new for the time — most will recognize Beauty and the Beast’s epithet: “What makes a monster and what makes a man?” But in 2025, it remains one of Castle Freak’s most enduring aspects. If the castle is a lingering relic of a mostly-defunct duchy, its physical decay is reflected in the “Freak,” where Lovecraft’s “leering, abhorrent travesty on human shape” is captured in vivid and bloody visage. Yet, Castle Freak suggests, he remains a product of his upbringing; almost blameless even as his bloody nature becomes apparent. What excuse can John — whose issues started long before JJ’s demise — offer? As we familiarize ourselves with Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, another in a lengthening line of movies offering sympathy for classic horror creatures, Castle Freak begins to feel decades ahead of its time.

Let’s be real, though, this is a ‘90s horror B-movie and Castle Freak lives up to that categorisation. But it also earns its sense of tragedy, driven by far greater depth in both storytelling and performance than that moniker suggests at a glance — not least in the contrast between Combs and Fuller. The former is a simmering, haunted performance that boils over in moments of dangerous and wide-eyed indulgence and layered, yet deeply-human, cruelty; the other a naked hunger driven more by curiosity and ignorance of a world outside a cell.

“That’s the kernel of the movie I really like the most: the idea that the beast — the freak — and I are Yin and Yang,” Combs says. “It’s almost like I’m battling myself, which is a psychological thing we all do, in a way: beating down the beast that’s actually inside you.”

Castle Freak has plenty for fans of Gordon’s earlier work. There are subtle shades of Re-Animator’s carnage, of From Beyond’s ribaldry, laced into another collaboration with Combs and Crampton. Yet, it is also a distillation of Gordon at his most humanistic and sympathetic that is arguably more at home among the horror of 2025 than 1995 — a character-driven exploration of real-life fears and horror which, throughout its 90-minute runtime, always seem to eclipse the naked, hideous creature prowling the corridors.

“It’s a smart little movie,” Combs concludes. “It’s cruel, it’s graphic, but I think it’s beautiful.”

Castle Freak is available to stream on TUBI.