Barbara Steele

Terror-Creatures from the Grave

In turn-of-the-century Central Europe, lawyer Albert Kovaks is summoned to a small village to draw up a new will for Dr. Hauff but finds upon his arrival that the doctor died mysteriously a year before. Kovaks also learns that Hauff had interests in the occult and had contacted 12th-century "scourge-spreaders" buried in the grounds of the villa now occupied by his wife, Cleo, and his daughter, Corinne. Meanwhile, several neighbors meet horrible deaths, and Kovaks, suspecting the involvement of supernatural powers, asks his employer, Morgan, to come to the villa. Sores begin to appear on Morgan the night of his arrival, and the terrible truth is revealed: Morgan and Cleo were secret lovers who conspired with the dead neighbors to murder Hauff. With his dying breath, the doctor had summoned the medieval "terror-creatures" to avenge his death, and they now inflict their curse of doom on the last of the murderers. Corinne and Kovacs, who have fallen in love, are immunized from the plague by a sudden rain and escape the doctor's wrath. An attorney arrives at a castle to settle the estate of its recently deceased owner. The owner's widow and daughter claim that the late lord could summon the souls of ancient plague victims, and that his spirit roams the castle. Soon, occupants of the castle begin to die in gruesome, violent ways when the dead lord and plague victims return to exact revenge.