Paul Naschy steps into the eighties with the outrageously gory ghost story PANIC BEATS, on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

When architect Paul Marnac (Naschy) learns that his wealthy wife Genevieve (Julia Saly, NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF) is suffering from a serious heart condition, they decide a restful stay in the country is what the doctor ordered; however, their destination is his ancestral home in the inhospitable mountainous region of Perrouze where they are nearly carjacked by local thugs. Paul's housekeeper Mabile (Lola Gaos, TRISTANA) frightens her niece Julie (telenovela star Pat Ondiviela) with stories of the exploits of Paul's ancestor Aleric de Marnac (also Naschy) who murdered his unfaithful wife and three of their five children before turning to black magic and devil worship. Julie in turn tells Genevieve that the knight's ghost turns up every one hundred years to murder the latest Marnac bride. Soon Genevieve starts experience nightmarish visions of walking corpses and a mace-swinging skeletal knight in a suit of armor. Of course, this is all a plot by Paul and Juliet to get their hands on his wife's wealth, but complications soon set in with Mabile's suspicions, Paul's insistent big city mistress Mareille (Silvia Miró), and the matter of the family curse which may be all too real.

As Paul Naschy's Waldemar Daninsky character went through a variety of incarnations with little continuity between entries, PANIC BEATS puts another spin on his HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB villain Aleric de Marnac based on the historical figure of Gilles de Rais who also inspired the literary figure Bluebeard. HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB was a particularly savage Spanish horror film for the period but PANIC BEATS is wildly gory while couching its setpieces in more traditionally gothic horror trappings than the earlier film with rattling chains, skeletal apparitions, suits of armor coming to life, and a couple decomposing walking dead corpses that bring to mind CREEPSHOW more so than the zombies of the earlier film. However sadistic and brutal Marnac is said to be, it is the living human characters that are most vile, from greedy Paul to utterly ruthless "black widow" Julie who Paul mistakenly believes to be his equal ("even monsters need love") but takes charge in the climax and ultimately earns her fate. Whereas cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa favored backlight and diffusion in his Naschy films like EL CAMINANTE, HUMAN BEASTS, and NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF, Julio Burgos – who assisted Francisco Sanchez on a number of Spanish horror films of the seventies – goes for a crisper look that remains atmospheric compared to some of Naschy's later works like LICANTROPO. The uncredited score features some CAM library cues and synthesizer cues along the lines of HOWL OF THE DEVIL (which Mondo Macabro will also be putting out soon).

Never dubbed into English and only released on Spanish-langauge VHS stateside, PANIC BEATS got its first English-friendly release through Mondo Macabro in 2005 with an anamorphic widescreen that was good for the time apart from the distortion of saturated reds inherent in NTSC making the credits unreadable. Their new 4K restoration from the original camera negative is quite a thing to behold. The photography of Julio Burgos (HOWL OF THE DEVIL) no longer looks like it was intentionally diffused, and lens flare remains in some shots without distracting. The greater resolution reveals small details like Marnac's mustache just visible when he lifts his visor in the prologue, some art direction touches like the stone of Marnac's tomb, and the wet, decomposing corpses that appear in the climax are now recognizable as being made up to look like dead characters rather than random apparitions. The LPCM 2.0 Spanish mono track is surprising in moments in which atmosphere like twittering birds in the first countryside scenes possess a sense of space and distance in the mix that one would not expect of a low budget Spanish horror film. Mondo Macabro's Blu-ray presentation runs over a minute longer than their DVD edition because it contains exit music that was faded out on the earlier transfer.

The film is accompanied by a new audio commentary by Rod Barnett and Troy Guinn of Naschycast in which they note the Spanish criticism that Naschy's earlier films were excessively violent and suggest that Spanish horror had not only caught up with Naschy by the eighties in terms of excess but that PANIC BEATS goes even farther. They also note the difficulty that Naschy was having during this period in making the type of old fashioned horror film he wanted to make and how the bitterness seemed to creep into his characters increasingly, Naschy's and Saly's production partnership, and his other interesting credits around this period. They also note the parallels with HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB and how Naschy subverts them here, as well as suggesting that Naschy drawing from Gustavo Adolfo Becquer as a story source here may have meant he was still embittered over being removed from CROSS OF THE DEVIL and replaced with British director John Gilling (PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES).