The Mansion of Madness

6/22/2025

**_Surrealistic sanatorium of lunacy_** In southern France, 1845, a journalist returns to his home country (Arthur Hansel) to visit an asylum that, reportedly, uses revolutionary techniques to treat the mentally ill. The head doctor (Claudio Brook) gives him a tour of his vast institution, but will he make it out alive and sane? A Mexican production shot in the summer of 1971, “The Mansion of Madness” is also known as “Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon,” based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It combines the Star Trek episode “Whom God’s Destroy”—which was also no doubt inspired by the same Poe yarn (albeit unofficially)—and mixes it with a standard story set-up of Hammer and AIP horror flicks (a visitor arrives at a remote mansion or castle and learns the horrors thereof, à la Jonathan