VCI rings for "doom service" with their last stay at the "Horror Hotel" on the limited edition Blu-ray of CITY OF THE DEAD.

Despite the concern of her boyfriend Bill (Tom Naylor, ROCK YOU SINNERS) and the skepticism of her brother Dick (South African singer Dennis Lotis, THE SWORD OF SHERWOOD FOREST), New England college student Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson, STUDS LONIGAN) decides to write her final term paper on witchcraft and is in need of a place off the beaten track to do some authentic research. Her history professor Alan Driscoll (Christopher Lee, HORROR EXPRESS) recommends that she visit his birth town of Whitewood where witch Elizabeth Selwyn was burnt at the stake in the seventeenth century after cursing the town and its descendants. Checking into the Raven's Inn operated by Mrs. Newless (Patricia Jessel, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM), Nan observes that the perpetually fog-shrouded town seems frozen in time and is warned by the blind Reverend Russell (Norman MacOwan, X THE UNKNOWN) whose church no longer has a flock that the town has given itself over to evil. The only friendly face Nan meets is Russell's granddaughter Patricia (Betta St. John, CORRIDORS OF BLOOD) who has recently returned to Whitewood following her mother's death and has taken over the parish antiques shop. Reading a rare book on witchcraft loaned to her by Patricia, Nan learns that witches mock the rituals of the church on Candlemas Eve and sacrifice a virgin at the stroke of the thirteenth hour that very night. When Nan fails to return home after her break, Dick and Bill discover that Nan disappeared from the Raven's Inn two weeks before. They discover that they are not the only ones looking for Nan when Patricia contacts them after finding Driscoll unhelpful. Dick and Bill follow Patricia back to Whitewood to investigate, unaware that she has been marked for sacrifice on the upcoming Witches Sabbath not only for what she knows but also as a descendent of one of Elizabeth Selwyn's accusers.

Although produced by a company known as Vulcan Films, this Milton Subotsky/Max J. Rosenberg production is regarded as the first Amicus production and it may still indeed be the best of them. The storyline that in some ways mirrors Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO which was released the same month – while also anticipating Dario Argento's INFERNO with its apparent heroine motivated by an old tome to explore a damned place – and none of the plot developments are really surprising at all since we have already seen Jessel as the witch in the prologue along with her still "living" acolyte Jethro Keane (Valentine Dyall, THE HAUNTING) and Lee comes so strong that it would more surprising if he did not show up among the coven of thirteen. The film's magic is all in the atmosphere starting with an atmosphere-drenched prologue that recalls the opening of Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY which was released in Italy earlier the same year and may or may not have influenced the filmmakers since it was not released in the US until 1961 and the UK until 1968. The fog-shrouded Whitewood is a marvelous Shepperton Studio sound stage set in which the facades of buildings and lurking villagers recede into the pitch black backdrop regardless of the time of day, and cinematographer Desmond Dickinson (THEATER OF DEATH) emphasizes the depth of wide angle and menacing close-ups along with some prowling camerawork. Although little blood is spilled onscreen, the violence is surprisingly vicious for the period. The script is credited to George Baxt (THE SHADOW OF THE CAT), although Subotsky claims to have reworked it. Douglas Gamley (THE BEAST MUST DIE) provides one of his best Amicus scores made up of orchestral stings and Latin choir. The film was television director John Llewellyn Moxey's feature debut. While his subsequent feature ventures – including the English version of the Edgar Wallace film CIRCUS OF FEAR which was simultaneously shot in German – would be few, Moxey's move to the United States would net him such memorable genre credits as the Kolchak TV movie THE NIGHT STALKER and the memorable Aaron Spelling made-for-TV horrors THE HOUSE THAT WOULD NOT DIE and HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS along with NO PLACE TO HIDE, THE STRANGE AND DEADLY OCCURRENCE, and DESIRE: THE VAMPIRE amidst plenty of episodic series credits.

Released theatrically in the United States in a slightly shortened version titled HORROR HOTEL by Trans Lux (ADIOS GRINGO), CITY OF THE DEAD was a PD bargain bin favorite with a number of editions sourced from Sinister Cinema's 16mm transfer before Elite Entertainment put out a laserdisc in 1995. They also had to contend with a 16mm print of the American version but matted it to 1.85:1. Elite issued the same transfer on non-anamorphic DVD in 1999 followed by a Roan Group DVD in 2000 that added an interview with Lee. VCI came to the rescue in 2001with a DVD of the UK version featuring an interview with Moxey, followed by a 2005 anamorphic 1.66:1 widescreen version with a pair of commentaries by Lee and Moxey along with interviews with Lee, Moxey, and Stevenson. Unfortunately, VCI's initial Blu-ray release was a disappointment in line with a lot of their flawed ventures in the format. The interlaced 1080i60 VC-1encode was cropped to 1.78:1 – although the shortened US version would have been projected at that ratio – and the monochrome image was not so much black and white as grey and white. The bitrate of the encode was lower than standard to fit two encodes on the disc with the feature audio and a new commentary track by Bruce G. Hallenback on one and the other two commentaries on the other (suggesting that perhaps VCI was using a hobbyist Blu-ray authoring program that restricted the maximum number of audio tracks to two), along with a horrid-looking SD fullscreen copy of the HORROR HOTEL version and the video interviews. Arrow bettered this edition in the UK by utilizing a superior 4K restoration from the Cohen Film Collection and adding a new commentary by Jonathan Rigby to the Moxey and Lee ones as well as an HD transfer of the HORROR HOTEL version as an extra. With their rights expiring, VCI has decided to give CITY OF THE DEAD one more go with a "limited edition" but they have not attempted to utilize the 4K restoration by Cohen Media that was provided to Arrow Video for its Region B edition. The encode is now 1080p24 MPEG-4 but the aspect ratio remains 1.78:1 and the image while the blacks and the whites still lean towards the grey, making this essentially just a better encode of the same source. The LPCM 2.0 mono track has some intermittent sibilance issues but is acceptable and the optional English SDH subtitles pointed out that the witch did not go the obvious route of making her assumed name an anagram and spelling it "Newless" as confirmed by the end credits.