CURSE OF THE DEVIL

In medieval times, the nobleman Irineus Daninsky engages in a duel to the death with the evil Barna Bathory, whose wife Elizabeth Bathory runs a cult of Satanic worshippers. Irineus beheads Barna, then has his army round up the Countess and all of her followers. He has them all put to death, but not before the Countess puts a curse on the Daninsky bloodline.

Hundreds of years later, the wealthy Count Waldemar Daninsky (a descendant of Irineus) kills a wolf on his grounds. The animal transforms back into a Gypsy upon death, and Waldemar finds himself cursed by the local Gypsy witch who is angry that he killed one of her band. The witch summons Satan (a thin, uncredited actor in a head-to-toe black leotard) who participates in a nocturnal orgy with some of the nubile gypsy girls in the woods. The witch then orders a young, beautiful Gypsy girl named Ilona to seduce Daninsky and then, while he is sleeping, to bite him with the skull of a werewolf which she smuggles into the Count's mansion.

When she presses the skull's fangs into his skin, Waldemar is doomed to become a werewolf himself on Walpurgis Night (April 30). Without a doubt, this is the most original of all of Waldemar's various "origins" in the series. The gypsy then flees from Waldemar's mansion into the woods, where strangely she is decapitated by an axe-wielding escapee from a mental hospital for which the local police have been searching.

Meanwhile, an aged surveyor Laszlo Wilowa rents a cabin on Waldemar's estate, and moves in with his blind wife and his two beautiful young daughters, Marie and Kinga. Waldemar falls in love with the chaste Kinga and they make love, but Waldemar also winds up in bed with her sister Marie who is a bit of a nymphomaniac. While they are making love, Waldemar transforms and tears Marie to shreds. He later returns to the cabin and violently kills both Laszlo and his blind wife, leaving Kinga an orphan. Later, as Waldemar tries to comfort Kinga, she informs him that she is pregnant with his baby.

Maritza tells Kinga that Waldemar is a monster, and that only she is pure enough to be able to release him from his curse by killing him. Even though Kinga knows now that Waldemar murdered her entire family, she still loves him because he is the father of her unborn child.

The townspeople learn that it is Waldemar who has been killing all the locals (they had thought that the escaped axe murderer was doing it), and to punish them for keeping Waldemar's secret, they kill both the butler and the nanny. Waldemar manages to murder the local police inspector before being stabbed to death by Kinga with a silver dagger plunged into his heart.

An epilogue shows an older Kinga visiting Waldemar's grave years later with their son accompanying her. As they leave the graveyard, the full moon illuminates them and the boy's hand is shown covered with hair.

Waldemar is stabbed through the heart with a silver dagger by Kinga, ending his curse. Years later, Kinga visits his grave with their son, whose hairy hand hints the curse lives on.

The ending brings a tragic resolution to Waldemar’s doomed existence, as the person who loves him must also destroy him to end the bloodline curse. The final shot of the son’s hairy hand suggests the supernatural affliction is destined to continue, hinting at the inescapable cycle of the Daninsky legacy.