In the eighteenth century in a Scottish village, Martha Gunt is burned at the stake for witchcraft. One century later, another woman with the same name meets the same fate, but Maciste descends into hell to get to the bottom of the curse. Freda, no stranger to Gothic work, rather than doing a remake of Guido Brignone’s 1925 film of the same title made a daring mix of genres, moving into B-movie terrain: the story even employs flashbacks as a ploy for recycling scenes from previous Maciste films produced by Donati and Carpentieri. “A rambling plot and a film made with very little means: and yet there is no mistaking Freda’s sure hand! For example, the alternation of Vira Silenti’s terror with the attack on the castle is in the same league as the wonderful finale of Aquila nera (and not just because they use the same castle near Lake Bracciano). The film’s horror aesthetic contains some genre clichés (for example, the zoom shot inside the tavern), but it is marked by the sense of sin that was characteristic of Freda’s work. […] Freda makes the Castellana Caves, where most of the film was shot, look like the Inferno imagined by Doré.”

Steve Della Casa, Marco Giusti, Il grande libro di Ercole. Il cinema mitologico in Italia, Edizioni Sebinae – Csc/Cineteca Nazionale, Roma 2013