'Exciting -- morbid -- perverse -- ambiguous -- enigmatic -- more fascinating than ever -- Barbara Steele!"

So speaks the narrator of the British trailer included on the superior new DVD ($20) of one of Steele's last Gothic vehicles, "Nightmare Castle." The 1965 Italian chiller was released by the tireless movie lovers at Severin Films, the recently launched boo-tique label for connoisseurs of "Euro-cult" horror cinema.

The British-born Steele -- sometimes described as the ultimate sex symbol for necrophiliacs, so often was she cast as a vengeful undead witch or ghost -- was a stylish, headstrong, beautiful but eccentric-looking actress. With her raven hair, saucer eyes and almost vampiric overbite, she was the mysterious dark side of the moon to such brighter 1960s fashion icons as Audrey Hepburn.

Steele seemed ideally suited for tales set in the swinging Pop Art, avant-garde and jet-set subcultures of the 1960s that she actually inhabited. (Fellini cast her in "8 1/2.")

Instead, she found minor fame and major cult stardom in a series of mostly Italian Gothic scare stories, beginning with Mario Bava's masterpiece, "Black Sunday" (1960), a movie that typed Steele as surely as the 1931 "Dracula" pigeonholed Bela Lugosi. Such titles as "The Ghost," "The She-Beast" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" (with Vincent Price) followed. Now 71, Steele still works occasionally.

One of the last black-and-white horror movies, director Mario Caiano's "Nightmare Castle" casts Steele as a wicked, adulteress countess who is imprisoned, tortured and murdered by her mad-scientist husband (Paul Muller). "Even by killing me, you can't free yourself from my hatred!" vows the countess during one of the fetishistic torture scenes. (In one, the doctor binds his wife to a bed, kisses and caresses her, then drips acid onto her.) Steele also plays the countess' look-alike blonde stepsister.

"Nightmare Castle" leaves the violence behind (for a while) to become an atmospheric ghost story. When the dead countess reappears, she resembles the ghost girls of "The Ring" and other recent Japanese horror movies, with half her pale face covered by a curtain of black hair and the other half dominated by an unforgiving staring eye.

"Nightmare Castle" is especially worth seeing on this disc. It looks much better than the unauthorized DVD versions released by other companies in the past (usually under an alternate title, "The Faceless Monster"). What really elevates the Severin disc is a fascinating bonus half-hour interview with Steele. The candid actress discusses the dissatisfaction of her early days as a British model and starlet, and her rejection of Hollywood.

She literally fled the set of the Elvis Presley movie "Flaming Star" (1960), which might have made her a star, after five days of shooting. (She was replaced by another Barbara, Eden.) She has nothing but kind words for Presley, but says she hated the American studio style of moviemaking.

"I was too much of a hedonist -- I got bewitched by Italy," she says.