Kovaks, a notary's apprentice, goes to the Hauff mansion to draft a will. There he discovers to his amazement that Hieronymus Hauff, the author of the letter that invited him to draft the document, has already been dead for a year. Strangely, the witnesses to the man's death also begin to die under mysterious circumstances.
Massimo Pupillo (The Scarlet Executioner, Lady Morgan's Revenge) makes a sublime debut with this 5 Tombs for a Medium, a horror film with obvious Gothic overtones, accentuated by elegant black and white, which envelops the entire film in a ghostly fog and dark, eerie atmosphere.
Hieronymus Hauff's recording heard on the Dictaphone by Kovaks plunges us into a pleasantly terrifying dimension in which horror involves all the senses: "Hieronymus Hauff. Research results of October 20. I also made contact with them today. I learned. The plague decimated them, the stench of corpses fouls the air, continually the wagons of the monks carried the corpses to the mass graves. The survivors, desperately clinging to life, were haunted by the squeaking of those wagons, the sinister, piercing squeak. By now there was no hope. The anointers had polluted the waters, the unclean anointers were punished by cutting off a hand and then hanging. They buried them here, in the garden".
These phrases, amalgamated with macabre music interrupted from time to time by creaks, noises and the moans of the living dead that cannot be seen but can be heard, give way to strong images that invade the sense of sight: purulent sores and severed hands of the anointers that begin to move, cruel murders and suicides. 5 Tombs for a Medium is considered one of the best Italian Gothics (boasting the presence of the beautiful Barbara Steele) in terms of script, execution, music and good performances.
