Bloody Pit of Horror
1965 film by Massimo Pupillo
Bloody Pit of Horror (Italian: Il boia scarlatto - The Crimson Executioner) is a 1965 Gothic horror film. The film, set in Italy, was directed by Domenico Massimo Pupillo and stars Mickey Hargitay, Walter Brandi, Luisa Baratto and Rita Klein. It tells the story of a group of women modeling for a photo shoot at a castle, whose owner takes on the identity of the Crimson Executioner, bent on their deaths.
Plot
A group including writer Rick (Walter Brandi); his publisher, Daniel Parks (Alfredo Rizzo); his secretary, Edith (Luisa Baratto); their photographer, Dermott (Ralph Zucker); and five young models enter a seemingly deserted castle to take photos for a horror photonovel. The castle is actually occupied by a former actor, Travis Anderson (Mickey Hargitay).
Anderson initially desires to send the group away but recognizes Edith (once his fiancée) and changes his mind, but decrees the dungeon as off-limits. The group ignores this warning and proceeds to take photos there anyway. This act angers Anderson, who dons a costume and assumes the identity of the Crimson Executioner, who was executed centuries earlier in an iron maiden for the crime of having a private torture chamber. Anderson eventually kills each group member until only Edith and Rick remain. Anderson succumbs to his own torture devices and dies from the poisoned barbs on the "Lover-of-Death" machine.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3793127. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bloody Pit of Horror” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.