'The Whip and The Body' (1963) – Mario Bava.

It could be argued that one of mood maestro, Mario Bava's most visually sumptuous and preternaturally perverse horror confections is the deliciously deviant, Ernesto Gastaldi scripted Sado-Gothic classic 'The Whip and The Body'. A sublimely sensual nightmare wherein towering terror titan, Christopher Lee, is at his sinisterly stern best as the beastly, eminently degenerated son, Kurt Menliff. Hoping to reclaim patrimonial rights, Kurt's doomy return to shadow-slaked Castle Menliff, reignites the dangerously incandescent passions of his dusky-haired ex-paramour, Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), unhappily wed to pallid brother, Christian (Tony Kendall). Kurt's seething malevolence heralds lashings of lurid terror trysts, murderous familial discords, grisly deaths, and macabre masochistic ministrations from beyond the grave! Maestro, Mario Bava's ghostly Gothic Giallo is a beautifully illuminated, scintillatingly sinister phantasmagoria crowned with an exquisite performance from tormented sultry siren, Daliah Lavi. A stylish, criminally underrated 60s Euro-shocker, and certainly no less haunting than, Jack Clayton's 'The Innocents' (1961) or Roger Corman's similarly necromantic 'The Tomb of Ligeia' (1964).