Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body is a gorgeously stylized gothic ghost story, replete with kinky sex, fiery passions, and coldblooded murder.

The Whip and the Body is a gothic horror fantasy that finds Bava at the peak of his visual prowess.

Shot in delirious color and accomplished with lush style, this is a ghost story wracked with guilt, sadism, and mad passions, and yet it never completely tips its hand.

The Whip and the Body often plays more like soap opera than supernatural thriller -- Dark Shadows would have worked as a title for this, too -- but it’s the eerie atmospherics, not the plot particulars, that take center stage.