#mark of the devil

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: witch

[hotvintagepoll]

Who is the hottest old horror hottie?

Count Christian von Meruh (Udo Kier)

Irina Dubrovna (Simone Simon)

Voting ended onNov 7, 2025

Propaganda

Count Christian von Meruh (Mark of the Devil)—Young Udo Kier. Doesn’t get much hotter than that. And he’s playing a sexually repressed but morally virtuous witch hunter who stands in opposition to the exploitative witch hunter taking advantage of the young and beautiful women of the town. We’re rooting for him to sin and to win and to look sexy while doing it (he can do only some of these things but the ones he does he does really really well).

Irina Dubrovna (Cat People)—Simone Simon’s big eyes and little nose make me INSANE!! Normally I don’t want people this cute in such a carnal way, but given that the horror in Cat People is unabashed female sexuality, I think it makes sense. Irena is both terrified of and inexplicably drawn to the darkness (read: horniness) inside her, and watching her grapple with that danger is captivating. I’m just saying, if my gorgeous wife was going to turn into a panther if we fucked, I’d start learning about how to care for & befriend big cats instead of flirting with my coworker and being weird about it!! Irena I will get a degree in zoology for you, just give me a chance

This is round 1 of the bracket. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support for your favorite horror hottie. The poll will last three days.

Questions about the bracket? Send me an ask here.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Irina:

I watched Cat People for Halloween season last year, and was so enchanted by its strange warm sadness, deep chiaroscuro lighting, and sweet lonely Simone Simon with her softly glittering eyes! She plays Irena, a Serbian émigré to New York City who lives alone in a big old townhouse she got cheap because you can hear the lions in the zoo, hums to herself in the dark, and longs for closeness with others yet fears that if she sleeps with a man, an ancestral curse will overtake her and she'll turn into a panther and kill him. Why we do love coded queer readings! (Which have only become more prominent for this film in the years since.) Originally intended to just be a sexy scary little B-movie creature feature, French director Jacques Tourneur together with his cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who would later make the also darkly beautiful Out of the Past together, instead filmed Cat People like a Criterion Collection-worthy noir (as it has since become) and suffused it all with a spooky melancholic elegance, highlighted nowhere as much as the way they frame Irena's eyes glimmering in the dark. She haunts me! Affectionate!

Hot serbian woman is betrayed by everyone she ever loved or trusted and turns into a big cat to murder them all.

She’s beautiful! she’s mysterious! she’s a literal cat! she’s gay(?) she has so much charisma one cannot help but fall in love with her, but she will never love them back because of her big dark feline secret. and she always has this little half-smile on her face like she knows something you don’t which is SO hot. she lures you into a false sense of security and then pounces

She’s so sexy men can’t stay away from her but kiss her and she’ll rip your head off (and she’s right to do so). The original is a story of female desire, agency and the dangers of xenophobia.

Very sexy of her turning into a panther to claw the man who forcibly kissed her to death.

No additional propaganda was submitted for Count Christian.

[fanofspooky]

Horror movies from around the world:

GERMANY

[borgialucrezia]

[talesfromthecrypts]

Udo Kier as Count Christian von Meruh in Mark of the Devil

[gotankgo]

Mark of the Devil (1970) ——

[lazzarella]

“I like torture. Torture is photogenic. If you make horror movies, you always have to think what’s photogenic and what’s not. If you stay home with the candlelight and you read a book, Rilke, or whatever, or Sigmund Freud, it’s boring. But if you watch Udo Kier in a horror film and people are hunting me and trying to kill me, and there’s my love interest with big breasts and beautiful hair, and I believe in her and they kill me at the end, that’s more interesting. We’re talking about films here. We’re not talking about writing stories. Like Rilke said, “When the leaves are blowing, you have to write letters.” So it’s not that. We’re talking about filmmaking, and filmmaking is a visual thing. It’s photographs that move.”

—Udo Kier talking about Mark of the Devil with AV Club in 2011

RIP, Udo Kier <3

[germ-t-ripper]

26OCT25 Stoked to pick up collector's edition 4K UHD of THE DEVIL'S MARK (1970) on sale from Vinegar Syndrome.