Miss Eleonore, the Housekeeper (Helga Line) is a hidden villainess in the 1963 Italian horror film, "The Blancheville Monster". It is a sort of second rate rendition of Edgar Allan Poe's, "The Fall of the House of Usher".
Young Miss Emily Blancheville returns home at her country estate from her studies at the university with her two American buddies, Alice Taylor (Iran Eory) and John Taylor (Vanni Materassi). She finds that her father Count Blancheville has died in a fire, and her brother Roderic (Gerard Tichy) is in charge of the estate. All of the old servants have been let go, and Roderic has hired a whole new batch of them, including Miss Eleonore, the ice cold sinister housekeeper, a suspicious Doctor LaRouche (Leo Anchoriz), and Alistair, the Butler (Paco Moran).
Eleonore is dressed very conservatively all in black, and seems to possess a station way above her ranks.
Emily and her friends hear howling at the dinner table, but Roderic claims it is probably the peasants dog. After dinner, LaRouche and Eleonore have a heated argument, and she tells him that it is his mess, and he'll have to figure a way out. LaRouche gets angry with her, and Eleonore warns him if he doesn't be careful it will all be over for the two of them.
Alice keeps hearing howling in the middle of the night. She does some investigating. She walks up to the tower and finds Eleonore about to give a man a shot with a syringe. She runs down the stairs and faints into her brothers arms.
The next morning, Emily is told that her father is not dead, just horribly mutilated from a fire. He is living secluded in one of the castle's isolated towers. Her brother explains that their father has gone mad due to a curse etched onto a family gravestone. It predicts the end of the Blancheville family if one of the daughters lives past her twenty-first birthday. Emily's birthday happens to be coming up in the next five days. She is told that the father escaped later that night, and that he was seen by the towns folk in the woods.
That night the disfigured father returned to Emily's bedside, where he used some form of hypnotism to lure her to her own tomb. The monster tells her to enter her tomb and end her life. However, Alistair the Butler comes and the monster is frightened away. Emily faints and she is found by Roderic and the Butler.
The next morning Emily is unable to remember anything of the previous night. However, Alice notices that her slippers and nightgown had mud on them. Alice then finds a book on hypnotism and magnetism in the doctors bag. After telling John, the two of them to suspect something is not right. That same night, Emily is again sleepwalking and is caught by John and Alice. They wake her up, and she screams that she doesn't want to die.
The next day, LaRouche dispells that the curiosity that book on hypnotism was just a little hobby for him. On a walk outside, a large boulder is thrown from the top of the tower toward them and almost hits them.
That night, Emily wakes up from a terrible dream to find Eleonore standing over her with a sedative for her to take. She demands for Emily to drink it, and Alice runs in and accuses her of trying to poison her. She responds by drinking the glass herself, proving that it was harmless.
While riding in the woods, John finds Alistair covered up in the leaves dead. Later he observes Emily walking in the middle of the night in her nightgown again. He follows her out to her tomb, and is hit over the head with a wooden stake by the monster. The monster then ran after Emily and caught her as she fainted again.
On the morning of Emily's birthday, the cook discovers that Emily is dead in her bed, and then Eleonore is notified that John has been badly hurt. The party buries Emily in the families tomb on her birthday, fulfilling the family ritual, and supposedly breaking the curse. However, as the members pay their last respects, she is really not dead. She shouts at them, but can't be heard because she was given a drug to make her appear dead. Her tomb is sealed shut and therefore, she is seemingly buried alive. By the time the drug wears off, everyone is long gone and out of ear shot from her cries.
We then see Eleonore enter the room of John Taylor who is in his bed. She pulls out a dagger and approaches the bed about to stab her victim. However, she then lowers the blade. The scarface monster appears in the shadows, and demands why she couldn't kill him. She responded that it doesn't matter anymore, since Emily has been eliminated. He told her that he must die, because he may know who hit him over the head. The monster ends up strangling Eleonore, because she didn't follow the plan.
He then is about to kill John, but his mask is pulled off, revealing that he is the brother Roderic. He explained that he had to kill Emily because of the curse. The doctor came in with a gun and told Roderic that he could no longer accuse his father for the crimes he committed. Roderic throug the dagger at the doctor and jumped out of the castle window. The doctor chased after him in the woods. When he got to the family crypt, Emily appeared to him and he backed up thinking he had seen a ghost, and fell into the well where he died.
It turns out, that Emily had been rescued by Alice who heard her cries, and then when Roderic showed up, she decided to get even with her brother.
In the last scene, we see Emily and John sitting in a carriage across from Alice and the doctor. It appears two marriages would be taking place.
Trivia[]
- Helga Line appeared as Taneal in the 1964 Peplum film, "Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon".
- Helga Line appeared as Aspasia in the 1964 Italian peplum film "The Revolt of the Seven".
- Helga Line appeared as Solange in the 1965 Italian horror film "Nightmare Castle".
- Helga Line appeared as Inge/Trude in the 1966 Italian crime film "Kriminal".
- Helga Line appeared as Hilde in the 1966 Italian Eurospy film "Special Mission Lady Chaplin".
- Helga Line appeared as Gloria in the 1967 Italian action film "Mister-X".
- Helga Line appeared as Mara Gitan in the 1968 French thriller "Il March Di Kriminal".
- Helga Line appeared as Marlene Schulman in the 1970 film, "Churchill's Leopards".
- Helga Line appeared as Matilde in the 1971 film, "Long Live Robin Hood".
- Helga Line appeared as Maybelle in the 1971 Spaghetti Western "Raise Your Hands, Dead Man, You're Under Arrest".
- Helga Line appeared as Mabille De Lancre in the 1973 film, "Horror Rises from the Tomb".
- Helga Line appeared as Sara in the 1973 sci-fi film "Santo vs Doctor Death".
- Helga Line appeared as Lorelei in the 1974 film, "The Lorelay's Grasp".
- Helga Line appared as Zanufer in the 1975 Spanish horror film, "The Mummy's Revenge".