Italian Gothic Horror Films,

1970–1979
 Also by RobeRto CuRtI
And FRom mCFARlAnd

Riccardo Freda: The Life and Works

of a Born Filmmaker (2017)
Tonino Valerii: The Films (2016)
Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957–1969 (2015)
Italian Crime Filmography, 1968–1980 (2013)
Italian Gothic Horror
Films, 1970–1979
RobeRto CuRtI

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina
 ISBN (softcover) 978-1-4766-6469-9
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-2960-5

lIbRARy oF ConGRess CAtAloGuInG dAtA ARe AvAIlAble

bRItIsH lIbRARy CAtAloGuInG dAtA ARe AvAIlAble

© 2017 Roberto Curti. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: Poster art featuring Ida Galli in

Un bianco vestito per Marialé (1972; illustration by tino Avelli)

Printed in the united states of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
 table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
A Note on the Entries 5
Abbreviations 7

Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970–1979

1970 9
Balsamus l’uomo di Satana 9 • Il delitto del diavolo—Favola thrilling a.k.a.
Le regine 14 • Ombre roventi 17 • Il rosso segno della follia 19 • Thomas …
gli indemoniati 23
1971 27
Un gioco per Eveline 27 • …Hanno cambiato faccia 29 • Lady
Frankenstein 32 • Nella stretta morsa del ragno 37 • La notte che Evelyn
uscì dalla tomba 40 • La notte dei dannati 43 • Qualcosa striscia nel
buio 45 • Il sesso del diavolo—Trittico 48
1972 50
L’amante del demonio 50 • Baron Blood a.k.a. Gli orrori del castello di
Norimberga 53 • Un bianco vestito per Marialé 57 • Byleth (il demone
dell’incesto) 60 • La dama rossa uccide sette volte 62 • Estratto dagli
archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea 65 • Frankenstein ’80 69 •
La morte scende leggera 71 • La notte dei diavoli 74 • Tutti i colori
del buio 77
1973 80
Flesh for Frankenstein a.k.a. Il mostro è in tavola, barone … Frankenstein 80 •
Lisa e il diavolo 84 • La morte ha sorriso all’assassino 90 • La morte negli
occhi del gatto 93 • Il plenilunio delle vergini 96 • Il prato macchiato
di rosso 99 • Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento… 102 • Il sesso
della strega 104
1974 106
Le amanti del mostro 106 • L’assassino ha riservato nove poltrone 109 •
Il bacio 113 • Blood for Dracula a.k.a. Dracula cerca sangue di vergine e …
morì di sete!!! 116 • Un fiocco nero per Deborah 119 • Mania 121 •
La mano che nutre la morte 124 • Nuda per Satana 126 • Il profumo
della signora in nero 129 • Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette 134

v
vi table of Contents

1975 138
Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco ovvero: Dracula in Brianza 138 •
Frankenstein all’italiana—Prendimi, straziami, che brucio di passion! 141 •
Il medaglione insanguinato (Perché?!) 144 • Le orme 146 • La pelle sotto
gli artigli 150 • La sanguisuga conduce la danza 154
1976 157
La casa dalle finestre che ridono 157 • La lupa mannara 163 • Un sussurro
nel buio 166
1977 169
Anima persa 169 • Sette note in nero 172 • Shock 177 • Suspiria 180 •
Tutti defunti … tranne i morti 187
1978 190
Enfantasme 190 • L’osceno desiderio—Le pene nel ventre 192 • Pensione
paura 196
1979 201
Buio omega 201 • Dottor Jekyll e gentile signora 205 • Malabimba 208 •
Sensività 211 • Le strelle nel fosso 214

Appendix: Italian Gothic on the Small Screen 219

Bibliography 231
Index 235
 Acknowledgments

my most sincere thanks go to the following, who in one way or another

contributed to the making of this book: mark thompson Ashworth, lucas
balbo, Francesco barilli, José Antonio diego bogajo, nigel à brassard, da-
vide Cavaciocchi, Francesco Cesari, Alessio di Rocco, Philip dittman,
steve Fenton, Ramón Freixas, ernesto Gastaldi, mario and Roderick Gauci,
troy Howarth, Peter Jilmstad, dorothy Koval, Frank lafond, tommaso la
selva, stefano lecchini, tom lisanti, Antonio mayans, Paolo mereghetti,
domenico monetti, Antonio José navarro, Kaya Özkaracalar, Alberto Pez-
zotta, Jonathan Rigby, bernard seray, luca servini, Carme tierz, Pete
tombs, donato totaro, david C. tucker, and Gary vanisian.
to my beloved Cri.

vii
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
the history of Italian Gothic horror cin-
ema in the 1970s is one of dissipation and con-
tamination. the main characteristics that
made the films produced in the early 1960s a
tight and rigidly circumscribed subgenre were
diluted, hybridized and contaminated by out-
side influences, resulting in much looser
boundaries and in a variety of approaches
to the Gothic canon. As a consequence, the
genre’s identity became much more volatile
and multi-faceted, a transformation that
somehow mirrored the increasingly chaotic
state of the national film industry as a whole.
the main factor was sex, which by then
had become a vital ingredient in popular cin-
ema. In the previous decade, Gothic had been
characterized by the reliance on suggestive
eroticism and mild nudity: think of the allu-
sions to lesbianism featured in La cripta e l’in-
cubo (1964, Camillo mastrocinque) and
Danza macabra (1964, Antonio margheriti),
or barbara steele’s bubble bath in 5 tombe per
un medium (1965, massimo Pupillo), just to
name a few. After 1968, the relaxation of cen-
sorship gave way to female nudity and simu-
lated sex on the big screen, and not just there.
In fact, one of the most consistent influences
on 1970s Italian Gothic came in the form of
the adults-only comics that flooded the news-
stands and pushed the limits of what could be
shown to the general public in terms of
nudity, perversion and violence. the appear-
ance of film magazines and photonovels with
an erotic content, such as Cinesex, which
hosted more explicit photo versions of se-
1
quences that had been partially tampered
with by the censors, highlighted the common
practice of shooting more risqué material for
the sex scenes.
sexuality turned into the main attraction
in stories that reworked Gothic stereotypes
in a patently erotic way. movies like La notte
dei dannati (1971), Il plenilunio delle vergini
(1973), Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Tre-
cento… (1973) and Nuda per Satana (1974)
spiced their tales of witches and vampires with
ample sexuality. these sexploitation flicks
were mainly low-budget affairs, shot in real
locations like the Piccolomini castle in balso-
rano, and featured leading men from the pre-
vious decade, now burdened by the passing
of time, such as Pierre brice and mark damon,
as well as other has-beens (mickey Hargitay,
Joseph Cotten or Rossano brazzi…) and re-
current character actors such as Paul muller,
luciano Pigozzi, and Gordon mitchell. last
but not least, the place of the genre’s diva par
excellence, barbara steele, was taken by a
plethora of starlets—from Rosalba neri to
Patrizia viotti, from Camille Keaton to Rita
Calderoni—who obliged the distributors’
needs for exposed female flesh. the results
were artistically forgettable and commercially
marginal at the time of their release: even
more than in the previous decade, such prod-
ucts were often put together hastily, and in-
tended for independent or regional distribu-
tion; some, like Lady Frankenstein (1971),
L’amante del demonio (1972) or Terror! Il
castello delle donne maledette (1974), were pro-
2 Introduction
duced and/or directed by American expatri-
ates, such as mel Welles and dick Randall,
and devised for foreign markets. their main
commercial attractive was the abundant erotic
component: evocative titles, provocative
posters and especially the “forbidden to mi-
nors” (v.m.18) rating, which became some
sort of a “quality mark” to boast for maximum
effect.
Another concurring factor in the muta-
tion of Italian Gothic was the rise of the giallo,
resulting in a number of crossovers that bor-
rowed the black-gloved killers and creative
murder scenes from dario Argento’s films and
transplanted them into typical Gothic scenar-
ios, and even played on the alleged supernat-
ural nature of the murderer. As a consequence,
the line between giallo and Gothic is often
blurred, as the hyperviolent thrillers made
during the decade often encompassed
elements from the Gothic, and vice versa.
other different threads that found their way
Italian fotobusta for La notte dei dannati (1971), a Gothic film characterized by strong erotic elements.
within the boundaries of Gothic were the pe-
riod melodrama (see Il bacio, 1974) and the
spoof (Frankenstein all’italiana, 1975), the lat-
ter revived by the success of mel brooks’
Young Frankenstein (1974).
the 1970s saw the return to the genre of
such specialists as Riccardo Freda, mario bava
and Antonio margheriti, with varied results.
Freda’s only Gothic movie of the decade, the
disappointing Estratto dagli archivi segreti
della polizia di una capitale europea (1972),
was followed by a long hiatus, even though
the director kept working on a number of un-
filmed projects, some of them pertaining to
the genre; his return behind the camera took
place after eight years, with his final film Mur-
der Obsession, shot in 1980 but released in
1981. bava’s output was more consistent and
varied, from the ghost story-cum-thriller hy-
brid Il rosso segno della follia (a.k.a. Un hacha
para la luna de miel, filmed in 1969 but re-
leased in 1970) to the more conventional
 Introduction
Baron Blood (1972) and the ambitious Lisa e
il diavolo (1973), the latter destined to a sad
fate which led to its release in a heavily ma-
nipulated form as La casa dell’esorcismo
(1975). margheriti opted to remake his best
work in the genre, Danza macabra, in color
and with an international cast, with Nella
stretta morsa del ragno (1971), and helmed a
Gothic/giallo hybrid, La morte negli occhi del
gatto (1973). His name was also associated to
a couple of grotesque horror films shot in Italy
by Paul morrissey, Flesh for Frankenstein
(1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974): margher-
iti was credited as the sole director in the Ital-
ian prints, under his a.k.a. Anthony m. daw-
son.
unlike in television, where the genre
flourished thanks to such enormously suc-
cessful works as the mini-series Il segno del co-
mando (1971), the place for classical Gothic on
the big screen was marginal. the success of The
Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) caused pro-
ducers and filmmakers to jump on the band-
wagon. the sad destiny of Lisa e il diavolo, re-
edited and altered in order to become some
sort of The Exorcist rip-off, illustrates the
mocking decadence of Italian Gothic, absorbed
and overwhelmed by its smarter twin, the de-
monic thread. Films such as L’anticristo (1974,
Alberto de martino), L’ossessa (1974; mario
Gariazzo), Un urlo dalle tenebre (1975, elo Pan-
nacciò, Franco lo Cascio) leapfrogged the im-
agery that nourished Il plenilunio delle vergini
and Nuda per Satana, further underlining its
commercial obsolescence. the elements that
pertained to the Gothic, wherever they
emerged—such as the theme of the double,
which brings together the bedeviled Ippolita
(Carla Gravina) to her ancestress witch in
L’anticristo—were few and far between, and
distorted by the context; the stories drew from
contemporaneous American horror cinema,
and bastardized their sources, piling up the
elements of excess, such as blasphemous sex-
uality. A notable exception was massimo dal-
lamano’s Il medaglione insanguinato (Perché?!)
3
(1975), actually a Gothic yarn in disguise, which
displayed another, offbeat influence: the tear-
jerkers centered on unhappy child figures,
which in turn hinted at another issue, the
feared dissolution of bourgeois family, shaken
by the disintegration of the Catholic moral
and the violent rebellion of the sons against
the fathers and society, from the 1968 student
protests to the rise of armed terrorism.
such a frantic agglomeration of diverse
influences was a method common to other
short-lived threads that were born and took
turns frantically from the mid 1970s onward,
each more bizarre and daring than the other:
the nazi-erotic cycle, the cannibal movie, the
short-lived thread on bestiality inspired by
borowczyk’s La bête (a case in point is luigi
Russo’s La bella e la bestia, 1977) or the up-
coming zombie movie (Zombi 2, 1979, lucio
Fulci). It was the consequence of the unstop-
pable endogenous mutation of Italian popular
cinema, caused by a number of factors that
involved production, distribution, even laws,
not forgetting a social and political tissue
which was undergoing shocking traumas,
from the rise of the ultra-leftist “movement
of 1977” to the kidnapping and killing of pre-
mier Aldo moro. but it was also a desperate
attempt to squeeze as much profit as possible
from the ongoing crisis that plagued the na-
tional movie industry.
Gothic films, like the other genre fare
produced in the country in the current and
past decades, were mostly aimed at the so-
called seconda visione (second-run) and terza
visione (third run) theaters. these were lower
quality auditoriums, located in the provinces
and in small towns, characterized by lower
ticket costs (even a fifth or the standard fare)
and frequented by unassuming male audi-
ences. overall, the second and third-run ex-
perience was quite different from that in a
prima visione theater. Audiences came and
went during the projection, accompanied the
scenes with comments and jokes, and filled
the auditorium with clouds of smoke, since,
4 Introduction
unlike in first-run theaters, smoking was al-
lowed. they hardly cared about the movie it-
self, but went for the experience—whether it
be watching beautiful ladies take off their
clothes, gunslingers shooting dead hordes of
enemies, or masked killers dispatching their
victims in gruesome ways. Seconda and terza
visione theaters had been the recipient for the
enduring success of genre cinema: they would
change the bill daily, and grant a longer com-
mercial life to movies which would be still
around years after their making. by the end
of the decade these theaters were gradually
converting to hardcore, the safest choice to
face the continuing loss of moviegoers, most
of whom had found a much more satisfying
alternative in television, after the rise of com-
mercial broadcasters.
the non-stop quest for excess on screen,
either violent or erotic (or both), drained the
Gothic of its primary function and meaning.
two ways were open for producers and film-
makers who kept investing in the genre: on
the one hand the emphasis on blood and gore
(see Buio omega, 1979, Aristide massaccesi),
on the other, yielding to hardcore porn (see
Malabimba, 1979). In both cases, the recycling
of the Gothic elements would lead to a com-
pletely different terrain. the genre’s ambiguity
disappeared, replaced by the parade of attrac-
tions that had become the films’ only reasons
for existence. Gothic in its primordial essence
could not survive, because it was still tied to
formal and thematic elements that were by
now outdated.
still, during the 1970s there were also
works and filmmakers that reinvented the
genre and its peculiarities in a stimulating
way. such were the political rereadings of the
Gothic myths: Corrado Farina’s feature film
debut …Hanno cambiato faccia (1971) was an
original reinvention of Nosferatu set in the
present and with an anti-capitalistic message;
the bizarre Il prato macchiato di rosso (1973,
Riccardo Ghione) similarly employed vam-
pirism as a metaphor for the haute bour-
geoisie’s domination of the lower classes. even
more surprising were several peculiar addi-
tions to the so-called “female Gothic” canon.
these latter works transported the Gothic
staples to the present day and focused on the
uneasiness of the female figure in contempo-
rary society, by depicting mentally unstable
women at the center of arcane conspiracies
(either imagined or real). the results were
among the most interesting approximations
to Gothic made during the decade: Il profumo
della signora in nero (1974, Francesco barilli)
and Le orme (1975, luigi bazzoni). In a way,
this was also the case with such atypical works
as Ombre roventi (1970, mario Caiano), Un
fiocco nero per Deborah (1974, marcello An-
drei) and Sette note in nero (1977, lucio Fulci),
with their peculiar mixture of modern-day
Gothic and parapsychological thriller that ex-
plored the period’s interest in the occult and
the paranormal, a trait that hinted at the
growing tendency toward disengagement
(also political) and escapism.
but the decade also spawned original ef-
forts from other major talents. With his early
films, Pupi Avati paved the way for a peculiar
brand of Gothic, deeply rooted in Italian
folklore, which blossomed into one of the
genre’s true masterpieces of the decade, La
casa dalle finestre che ridono (1976). on the
other hand, dario Argento moved from the
giallo to the supernatural horror story with
Suspiria (1977), an extraordinary example of
what can be called Italian neo-Gothic, fol-
lowed three years later by Inferno (1980).
However, by the end of the decade the
genre was gasping for air as audiences were
rapidly diminishing, television being a pow-
erful competitor, and other subgenres were
rapidly surfacing and declining. In the 1980s,
the face of Italian Gothic would change all
over again, and dramatically so.
 A note on the entries
this volume lists the films produced and
released in Italy between 1970 and 1979 that
in my view can be defined as “Gothic.” (For
an analysis of the term and its implications,
see Roberto Curti, Italian Gothic Horror Films,
1957–1969, pages 3–9.)
I have included borderline examples of
gialli which feature a strong emphasis on the
supernatural and other Gothic elements (such
as emilio miraglia’s La notte che Evelyn uscì
dalla tomba, 1971, and La dama rossa uccide
sette volte, 1972) as well as works that rein-
vented the genre’s staples such as those
mentioned in the introduction. on the other
hand, I decided to leave out most of the Ex-
orcist-inspired films for the reasons explained
above.
entries include Italian co-productions
with other european countries, such as enzo
G. Castellari’s Sensività (a.k.a. Diabla, 1979),
filmed in spain. on the other hand, I did not
include films which featured an Italian par-
ticipation but are actually majoritarian foreign
co-productions helmed by foreign directors,
such as Ivanna (1970, José luis merino), La
mansión de la niebla (1972, Francisco lara
Polop) or Ceremonia sangrienta (1973, Jorge
Grau): despite the presence of Italian cast and
crew members, these cannot be considered as
proper “Italian Gothic films.” I opted to list
the two Italian/French co-productions Paul
morrissey shot in Italy, Flesh for Frankenstein
and Blood for Dracula, because of the vexed
question of Antonio margheriti’s actual con-
tribution to both films and the peculiar vicis-
5
situdes they underwent. last but not least, I
added an appendix that covers the Gothic
made-for-tv films and mini-series produced
during the decade and up to the early 1980s.
I would like to stress my choice of dating
an entry according to its release date instead
of its filming (which in a couple of occa-
sions—namely bava’s Il rosso segno della follia
and Avati’s Balsamus l’uomo di Satana—
would have dated the movie back to the pre-
vious decade) or its submission to the board
of censors, because in my view a movie never
actually comes alive until it is received by an
audience.
each entry features as complete a crew
and cast list as possible, based on the film’s
opening and closing credits. uncredited
extras are also listed, and whenever possible
I tried to note when a cast member does not
actually appear in the movie: this was often
the case for C.s.C. graduates—one of the typ-
ical scams of Italian productions, as a law in
force until 1975 granted tax benefits to those
Italian films that had two former C.s.C. stu-
dents among cast and crew members. Please
note that in some occasions the Italian crew
and cast members adopted english pseudo-
nyms: whenever possible, I included the par-
ticipants’ real names after their Anglo-saxon
aliases. Also featured are data regarding pro-
duction details, locations, running time, visa
number, release dates, box-office grosses, al-
ternate titles; a brief synopsis; and an essay on
the film, often with the inclusion of little-
known or never-before-seen data regarding
6 A note on the entries
production history and assorted trivia. Home
video releases are also listed, with preference
given to english-friendly blu-Rays and
dvds.
the entries are listed under their original
Italian title, followed by the english title in
brackets and italics (if there was no english
language release, a literal translation is in-
cluded, but not set in italics). the information
bits provided throughout the text are the
result of thorough research from a variety of
sources such as academic texts and essays and
other assorted material (interviews with film-
makers and actors, newspaper articles and re-
views, ministerial papers). Whenever possible,
I located and consulted the films’ original
scripts kept at the luigi Chiarini library of the
Centro sperimentale di Cinematografia in
Rome, as well as the Public Cinematographic
Register at the sIAe offices in Rome, which
provided the shooting dates for a number of
titles. As for locations, a valuable resource
was the website www.davinotti.com, which fea-
tures remarkable investigation work on the
matter.
 Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the credits list for each entry
Crew
AC: Assistant camera; ACo: Cos-
tume assistant; ACon: Assistant continu-
ity; Ad: Assistant director; Ae: Assistant
editor; Amu: Assistant makeup; APd:
Production design assistant; Artd: Art di-
rector; Asd: Assistant set designer; b:
boom man; C: Camera; Chel: Chief/Head
electrician; CHoR: Choreographer; Co:
Costumes; Con: Continuity; d: directed
by; diald: dialogue coach / dialogue di-
rector; doP: director of photography;
dubd: dubbing director; e: editor; el:
electrician; GA: Gaffer; Hair: Hairdresser;
KG: Key grip; lt: lighting technician; m:
music; mA: master of arms; mix: sound
mixer; mu: makeup; oe: optical effects;
Pd: Production designer; Prm: Property
manager; s: story; 2ndAd: 2nd Assistant
7
director; sC: screenplay; sd: set decora-
tion; se: special effects; so: sound; soe:
special sound effects; sP: still photogra-
pher; ss: script supervisor / script girl;
W: Wardrobe / seamstress.
Production
Adm: Administrator; AP: Associate
producer; eP: executive producer; Gm:
General manager; PA: Production assis-
tant; PAcc: Production Accountant; PCo:
Production Coordinator; Pm: Produc-
tion manager; PRod: Produced by; Ps:
Production supervisor; Pse: Production
secretary; PseA: Production secretary
assistant; um: unit manager; uP: unit
publicist.
This page intentionally left blank
 Italian Gothic Horror Films,
170–17
The films are listed alphabetically within each year.
Notes are given at the end of each entry.
1970
Balsamus l’uomo di Satana (Balsamus
the Man of Satan)
D: Pupi Avati. S: Pupi Avati; SC: Enzo
Leonardo, Giorgio Celli, Pupi Avati; DOP: Franco
Delli Colli (Technicolor, Techniscope); M:
Amedeo Tommasi (Ed. S.P.A.); E: Enzo Micarelli;
CO: Silvana Bigi; SD: Claudio Giambanco; Col-
laborator to direction: Enzo Leonardo; AD:
Alberto Bartolani; C: Roberto Brega; AC: Gianni
Modica Canfarelli; MU: Gianni Amadei; AMU:
Alfonso Cioffi; Hair: Italia Marini; AE: Carlo
Broglio, Massimiliano Cingola; SO: Franco Grop-
pioni; B: Giulio Viggiani; SS: Maria Luisa Merci.
Cast: Bob Tonelli [Ariano Nanetti] (Balsamus),
Greta Vaillant [Greta Vayan] (Lorenza), Giulio
Pizzirani (Ottavio), Gianni Cavina (Alliata), Pina
Borione (Pasqua), Antonio Avati (Dorillo), Lola
Bonora (Somnambulist), Andrea Matteuzzi (Mr.
Menopausa), Ines Ciaschetti (Mrs. Menopausa),
Fanny Bertelli (Mrs. Rapisardi), Giacomo Vecchi
(Mr. Rapisardi), Franca Alboni (Rapisardi’s
daughter), Libero Grandi (Publicist), Franco San-
giovanni (Publicist), Gilberto Fiorini (Truck
Driver), Luciana Negrini (Virgin), Odoardo Bar-
toloni (The General), Marino Carpano, Mario De
Rosa, Valentino Macchi (Man without an arm);
uncredited: Elsa Schiassi (Publicist). PROD:
Marino Carpano for Magic Films (Bologna);
PM: Umberto Borsato; PS: Giorgio Caputo; PSe:
Steno Tonelli. Country: Italy. Filmed on location
near Bologna and at Incir-De Paolis (Rome). Run-
ning time: 8 minutes (m. 261). Visa n. 55382
(1.24.170); Rating: V.M.14. Release date: 1.28.170;

Distribution: I.F.C. Domestic gross: 34,000,000 lire.
Also known as: Balsamus, l’homme de Satan
(France).
Lots of people show up at a dilapidated villa
in the hills, inhabited by the self-described healer
and “miracle man” Balsamus, and ask him to per-
form miracles. Balsamus, a dwarf who believes
he is the reincarnation of the Count of Cagliostro,
is surrounded by a court of relatives and sycophants,
who exploit his delusions for their own profit and
organize complicated collective rituals, which Bal-
samus enthusiastically performs. When a couple of
elderly parents ask Balsamus to deflower their
teenage daughter, it’s his right-hand man Ottavio
who performs the deed. In fact, Balsamus is impo-
tent, and his wife Lorenza (who lives in the villa
with her retarded brother and her greedy mother
Pasqua) goes to bed with whoever is handy, includ-
ing Balsamus’ henchman Alliata, and writes their
names in a big “guest book.” The healer’s acolytes
plan an advertising campaign to improve upon
their earnings, but suddenly Balsamus starts mak-
ing real miracles. He magically causes a man to
shoot himself, then summons Pasqua (whom he
had inadvertedly poisoned) from the realm of the
dead. But when Lorenza asks him to perform his
conjugal duties and reveals to him the existence
of the “guest book,” Balsamus cannot stand the
humiliation and kills himself in front of all his fol-
lowers.
Born in Bologna, on November 3, 138,
Giuseppe “Pupi” Avati was always a dreamer. In
the difficult World War II years, living as an evac-
10 1970: Balsamus
uee in the mountain village of Sasso Marconi,
dreaming was the only way to see a light amid the
fear, pain and destruction that characterized his
childhood, whether it be listening to the fairytales
and frightening stories told by villagers in the cold
winter nights, or devising a bright future for him-
self.
Avati’s first true passion was jazz—the
music of freedom, that accompanied the Allies’
liberation of Northern Italy from the Nazis and
the return to life, Pupi’s adolescence in post–
War Bologna, the first dates and blossoming ro-
mances. “My dream was to become a great jazz
clarinetist,” he recalled, and that dream seemed
to come true in 15, when the 21-year-old Pupi
joined the Doctor Dixie Jazz Band, a prestigious
jazz and Dixieland combo based in his home-
town. For over three years he felt like walking
in the clouds.
One day, though, it was time for an abrupt
awakening. “A new member joined our orchestra,
a short balding guy named Lucio Dalla. At first I
wasn’t much worried, because he seemed quite a
modest musician to me. But then he displayed a
flexibility, a predisposition, a brilliance that were
totally unexpected: he silenced me, and pushed
me in a corner. At one point I even thought of
killing him, throwing him down the Sagrada Fa-
milia in Barcelona, because he stepped between
me and my dream.”1 Lucio Dalla went on to be-
come one of Italy’s most famous and talented pop
singer/songwriters, and even pursued an idiosyn-
cratic acting career. As for Pupi, he put his clarinet
in the drawer and took a job at the local frozen
foods factory, Findus. “Those were the worst four
years of my life,” he later commented.
Eventually the dream resurfaced in another
form. In hindsight, it is just apt that Avati got
bitten by the film bug when watching for the first
time Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (163), a movie about
a dreamer that begins with a dream. His first
steps in the motion picture business were not
encouraging, though: the four weeks spent as
Piero Vivarelli’s assistant on the set of Satanik
(168) were so disappointing that Avati later
claimed that he had at least learned how not to
make a movie.
Balsamus l’uomo di Satana, which later the
director labeled as “proudly provincial,” was a
family effort. Avati wrote the script with his
friends Enzo Leonardo and Giorgio Celli (the
latter a well-known ethologist, entomologist and
writer who had been part of the neo-avantgardist
Gruppo 63 and had written a number of mystery
novels), and had his brother Antonio play a role
in the film. What is more, he surrounded
himself with acquaintances, assembling a group
of players who would become a sort of stock
company on which he leant throughout his sub-
sequent work in the 170s. Many familiar faces
of Avati’s cinema appear here for the first time,
from the cross-eyed Giulio Pizzirani to the bum-
bling Gianni Cavina (both stage actors in their
film debut), whereas Balsamus’ ravenous and
vulgar mother-in-law is played by Pina Borione,
who would later portray Buono Legnani’s
bedridden sister in La casa dalle finestre che ri-
dono.
To say that the film had an unlikely lead
would be quite an understatement: the dimini-
tive Bob Tonelli (real name Ariano Nanetti,
12–186) was not even a professional actor,
but a local entrepreneur. Avati met him through
his a.d. Alberto Bartolani, since the script fea-
tured a small role for a dwarf, but when Tonelli
told him that he could raise one billion lire, Avati
thought he was crazy. Then, one month later,
still unable to gather the money to finance his
film debut, the director decided to call Tonelli
back. “Listen,” he said, “I had a dream. I dreamt
that you were the protagonist of my film, Bal-
samus.”
Actually, Avati’s first choice for the role was
the prestigious stage thesp Alberto Lionello, but
due to financial issues he had to abandon the idea.
His offer was a desperate move, in the hope that
Tonelli be able to collect the money he had prom-
ised. Forty-eight hours later, Tonelli showed up
with a mysterious albino, a local entrepreneur
whom he introduced as “Mister X”2: the albino
promptly signed cheques for 160 million lire,
without any contract. Avati had finally the money
to make the movie, and his lead too; the fact that
as a result Balsamus would have to be turned into
a dwarf was not an issue.3 Tonelli would become
one of Avati’s regulars, playing in no less than
twelve features between 168 and 184, and his
son Steno (who acted as production secretary on
Balsamus) would be a constant presence on
Avati’s sets as well.
The movie was shot in four or five weeks,
mostly around Bologna. Despite the conspicuous
budget, the debuting director’s lack of experience
resulted in a number of compromises during
shooting. “On the first day, when they saw me at
work, the crew members realized I simply could
not make the film on my own. In fact Franco Delli
Colli told me: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make the movie
 1970: Balsamus 11

for ya!’ From that moment on, I felt limited by my
incompetence throughout the whole shooting,
and even in check from a technical point of view:
we always ended up doing the opposite of what I
would do.”4 The director would later evoke his first
steps as a filmmaker in an ironic way, in the TV
mini-series Cinema!!! (17).
Again, it is fitting that Avati’s first features
were “written and filmed following the stream
of consciousness, leaving cinematic rationality
aside at the search of something more, perhaps
too much, but something new nonetheless.”5
The director has always been very severe toward
his early work: “I have never watched those
movies again,” he once claimed. “However …
back then I considered them my only opportu-
nity of having the chance to say everything I
wanted to say, do or imagine. As I was shooting
a scene, in that scene there had to be all my cin-
ema…. There was the fear of not being noticed,
not challenging enough what cinema had been
so far, not having enough disruptive force.”6 And
indeed, Balsamus has all the shortcomings of a
film debut whose attempts at saying something
different often turn up awkward and obscure.
The choice of the 18th century adventurer
Giuseppe Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro, as the
inspiration for the film’s story7 is in tune with
Avati’s interest in the occult, which formed the
basis of some of the director’s most inspired
work in the Fantastic genre, such as Zeder
(183), L’arcano incantatore (16) and the TV
mini-series Voci notturne (15, Fabrizio Lau-
renti) which he scripted. “At that time I was fas-
cinated by books about the paranormal, the al-
chemical, that peculiar genre which was well
explained in the book The Morning of the Ma-
gicians…. At the same time, there was a rural
matrix, which had a lot to do with the grotesque
and with a vision of life that resulted from my
first five years as an evacuee…. I thought of
everything in terms of unreality and I thought
that the task of movies was to project on the
screen what has little to do with reality: to me,
on-screen reality was everything that stood out
of the borders of reason.”8

Pupi Avati (fourth from left) and Giulio Pizzirani (second from right) during the filming of Balsamus
l’uomo di Satana, in 1968. The film was released only in 1970 (courtesy Luca Servini).
12 1970: Balsamus
The script, according to the director, was a
painstaking effort, “with in-depth linguistic, lex- empathy and disgust. It is linked with satire and
ical and historical research. We put everything
we could in it and more, in the illusion of being
appreciated by who knows who or where. Which
did not happen.” As unripe and pretentious as
it may be, the result already encompasses all the
themes of Avati’s subsequent body of work: the
attraction toward the bizarre, the obsession with
religion and superstition, the black humor, the
horrific undertones.
Despite a subtitle that evokes the Prince
of Darkness, added in the attempt at making
it more suitable to the general audience, Bal-
samus l’uomo di Satana is not a horror movie.
It embodies elements of comedy, with an insis-
tence on regional types, but its main feature is
the grotesque. Originally referring to the extrav-
agant art found in Ancient Rome and later
copied by the end of the 15th century, the term
encompasses all things strange, ugly, unpleasant,
even disgusting, and in art and literature it sug-
The Italian poster for Balsamus l’uomo di Satana tried to
pass it off as a standard sexy horror film.
gests an uneasy blend of discomfort and pity,
it often borders on the monstrous, conveying
opposite feelings in the viewer—all elements
that make it, in the words of Thomas Mann, a
“genuine antibourgeois style.”10
The film’s approach to the grotesque is best
exemplified by the depiction of the protagonist.
Bob Tonelli plays a figure of idiot savant that has
few equals in cinema history: Avati’s sympathy
toward his main character echoes Tod Brown-
ing’s depiction of circus freaks, and in addition
to that the director counterparts Balsamus’ bliss-
ful obliviousness to reality with the intrigue and
squalor that surrounds him. Even though he is
exploited and ridiculed, he remains the only
pure figure in the movie. On the other hand, his
family and acolytes—who take care of the “mir-
acles,” including the sexual duties he is called on
to perform on nubile girls, since Balsamus is im-
potent—are portrayed as demented caricatures,
from their absurd make-up to their physical ap-
pearance and facial features.
Still, the movie retains a strong
Gothic mood, starting with the theme of
metempsychosis (although played in a
demystifying key) and the central char-
acter of the magician-wizard-healer,
surrounded by a coterie of sycophants
who dress in 18th century clothes, have
their faces painted in blue and green, and
live as if time had frozen. They all look
like ghosts, remnants from a distant past
who play their role for money, and one
of the most original things about such a
genre-defying work is the contrast be-
tween the timeless quality of the scenes
in Balsamus’ villa and the ordinariness
of the present day, embodied by the
people gathering at the healer’s manor—
a nod to the celebrated scene of the pil-
grimage to the sanctuary of “La Ma-
donna del Divino Amore” in Federico
Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (157). Fel-
lini’s cinema is the main source of inspi-
ration—think also of the “ghosts” in La
dolce vita (160) or the overall mood of
Giulietta degli spiriti (165)—for Avati’s
choice of unusual, sometimes weird-
looking bit part actors and extras, and his
reliance on the surreal and absurd,
dreamlike quality that imbues the film.
Here, the dream is focused on the
duality between the past and the present,
 1970: Balsamus
highlighted by the felicitous architectural choice
of the imposing, Oriental-influenced country
villa 11 where the story takes place, and the im-
possible escape from an age seen as ugly and cor-
rupt. Avati’s goal was to depict “the metaphor of
a world that is still influenced by such a blatant
dishonesty,”12 and the relationship between man,
faith and superstition would be the core of many
subsequent works, from the comedy La mazurka
del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone (175,
which reprised the scene of the virgins on a tree)
to the obscure Pagan rites performed by the
“painter of agony” Buono Legnani in La casa
dalle finestre che ridono and the experiments on
the afterlife conducted by the Vatican in Zeder.
The movie’s symbolic universe is filled with
references to esoterism and freemasonry (the
“Grand Orient” is explicitly mentioned), and the
director openly flirts with the Fantastic, by
showing that Balsamus’ powers are ultimately
real: in a surreal moment, a publicist discussing
with Balsamus’ assistants (who inquire on how
to portray the alleged “miracles” in TV ads) ex-
plains that, thanks to the magic of cinema,
everything is possible, and therefore even a fin-
ger can become a gun. He points his index finger
to the temple, makes the sound of a shot, and
falls dead on the floor. Balsamus looks at the
scene with a seraphic, knowing smile. Later on,
in the movie’s eeriest scene, the dwarf sets out
an obscure ritual in the hills near a hut, disap-
pears in the wild and returns with his revived
mother-in-law—a mysterious, white-dressed
revenante that predates those in Zeder.
Here and there Avati adds incongruous,
unexplained elements to the story, such as the
stimulating booth where Balsamus’ wife Lorenza
prepares herself in anticipation for a night of
pleasure with Alliata (Gianni Cavina), a mad
concoction with human arms coming out of its
walls and caressing the woman—a surreal mix-
ture between the notorious corridor scene in
Polanski’s Repulsion (165) and Wilhelm Reich’s
Orgone machine. It is a moment in tune with
the director’s trademark depiction of a bizarre
and perturbing sexuality, which encompasses
elements of bisexuality as well (such as Alliata’s
awkward femme fatale-like moves on Lorenza’s
bed), and is never fully separated from the mon-
strous. It is yet another theme that will cross
deeply Avati’s cinema, from comedy (Bordella,
starring Al Lettieri, Cavina and Christian De
Sica) to horror (La casa dalle finestre che ridono).
Regarding the underplayed yet palpable
13
horrific angle, Avati commented: “The explana-
tion lies only in the desperation of a 30-year-old
kid who draws from all the movies he has seen
and more than anything else wants to do what
has not been done before. Not something that
belongs to him, but something new. And to do
this, he tries to stuff the movie with every type
of suggestion, and ends up weakening it, because
in doing so the final result is damaged.”13 To sum
it up, he pointed out: “Ours was a provocative
cinema, we did not want to communicate some-
thing, but first and foremost to destroy the ex-
isting…. And it was in that period, that the Ital-
ian audience started not to consider our
country’s movies, and distrust the auteurs, be-
cause cinema had stopped being a means of
communication. It had become something dif-
ferent, almost an end in itself because of too
much exuberance.”14
Balsamus l’uomo di Satana was submitted
to the board of censors only in January 170, al-
most two years after its making, and was
released in a minimal number of theaters, with
disastrous commercial results. Given such a title,
and a misleading poster that made moviegoers
believe they were going to watch a horror movie,
audiences responded in outrage, walking out of
theaters and demanding a ticket refund. But it
was nothing compared to the disaster of Avati’s
subsequent picture.
NoTeS
1. Pupi Avati, Sotto le stelle di un film (Trento: Il Margine,
2008).
2. The mysterious businessman was actually Carmine
Domenico Rizzo (116–2006), born in Calabria but a res-
ident of Bologna. See Luca Servini, “Balsamus, l’uomo di
Satana: la grande avventura,” in Ruggero Abramovit, Clau-
dio Bartolini and Luca Servini, Nero Avati. Visioni dal set
(Genoa: Le Mani, 2011), 15.
3. Avati’s director friend Mario Lanfranchi told a
slightly different version: “The script was about a very tall
Cagliostro, who towered over everyone. And Tonelli, who
was notoriously very short, told him: Pupi, I read the script
and I like it … and he changed the story, turning Balsamus
into a dwarf!” Renato Venturelli, “Eroi senza pietà. Inter-
vista a Mario Lanfranchi,” in Renato Venturelli (ed.), Cin-
ema e generi 2010 (Genoa: Le Mani, 2010), 116.
4. Abramovit, Bartolini, and Servini, Nero Avati, 25.
5. Ruggero Abramovit, Claudio Bartolini, Il gotico
padano. Dialogo con Pupi Avati (Genoa: Le Mani, 2010), 114.
6. Ibid., 115.
7. Already the subject of Alvin Rakoff ’s 14 adventure
film starring Orson Welles, Cagliostro would also inspire
another Italian filmmaker with a strong interest in the oc-
cult, Pier Carpi, who wrote a biography of the adventurer
and the script for Daniele Pettinari’s Cagliostro (175) star-
ring Bekim Fehmiu.
14 1970: Il delitto

8. Servini, “Balsamus, l’uomo di Satana: la grande tion, he plays a trick on David, staging his own
avventura,” 17. death in an accident and causing the biker to take
9. Ibid., 20.
10. John R. Clar, The Modern Satiric Grotesque and its refuge in the woods to hide from the police. There,
Traditions (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, David meets three lovely sisters who live in a se-
11), 20–21. cluded house by a lake: Liv, Samantha and Bib-
11. The film was shot inside the so-called Rocchetta iana. Soon the young man is entangled by the
Mattei and in Villa Zambonelli, in the hills near Bologna.
The suggestive Rocchetta Mattei appeared again in the
three women: first he becomes Samantha’s lover,
opening scenes of Tutti defunti … tranne i morti (177) and then he is seduced by Bibiana. And yet he notices
in Cinema!!!, whereas Marco Bellocchio used it for his film that something strange is going on: the sisters per-
Enrico IV (184), based on Luigi Pirandello’s play. form nightly rituals in the woods, and meet a
12. Servini, “Balsamus, l’uomo di Satana: la grande mysterious man late at night. David accompanies
avventura,” 17.
13. Ibid. the ladies to a castle, where a high society party
14. Abramovit, Bartolini, Il gotico padano, 118. is being given to celebrate Liv’s birthday: there, he
makes love with her and decides to stay with the
Il delitto del diavolo—Favola thrilling three women forever. As soon as he announces his
a.k.a. Le regine (Queens of Evil)
D: Tonino Cervi. S: Tonino Cervi,
Benedetto Benedetti; SC: Antonio Troisio,
Raoul Katz, Tonino Cervi; DOP: Sergio
D’Offizi (Eastmancolor); M: Angelo
Francesco Lavagnino (Ed. C.A.M.); E:
Mario Morra; PD: Massimo De Rossi;
MU: Wayne A. Finkelman; CO: Jean
Bouquin; Hair: Rosetta Tommassello;
Wigs: Aldo Coppola; AD: Ilde Muscio; SO:
Alberto Salvatori; AC: Enrico Lucidi; AE:
Alessio Fabretti; W: Carmen Frasoli; SP:
Alberto Pizzi; SS: Marisa Agostini; Mix:
Alberto Bartolomei. Cast: Haydée Politoff
(Liv), Silvia Monti [Silvia Cornacchia]
(Samantha), Ewelyn Stuart [Ida Galli] (Bib-
iana), Raymond Lovelock (David), Gianni
Santuccio (The Devil), Guido Alberti
(Priest), Geraldine Hooper (Party Guest).
PROD: Tonino Cervi, Raoul Katz for Flavia
Cinematografica (Rome), Carlton Film Ex-
port (Paris), Labrador Film (Paris); EP:
Alessandro Jacovoni; PS: Eraclite Corbi;
PSe: Agostino Morbidelli. Country: Italy /
France. Filmed at Castello Chigi in Castel
Fusano. Running time: 5 minutes (m.
2604). Visa n. 57202 (11.14.170); Rating:
V.M.14. Release date: 12.11.170; Distribution:
Regional. Domestic gross: 73,88,000 lire.
Also known as: Les sorcières du bord du lac
(France; 7.26.172), Himon kuningattaret
(Finland; 8.18.172).
A young hippie named David travels
around the countryside on his motorbike.
One night he stops to help a wealthy elderly
gentleman with a flat tire. The man is ac-
tually the Devil: out of spite toward the
young man, whose ideals and lack of the Striking Italian locandina for Il delitto del diavolo (1970),
sense of sin make him oblivious to tempta- with the alternate release title Le regine. Art by De Rossi.
 1970: Il delitto
intention to give up to his ideals, they viciously
kill him. Then, the Devil sends the three witches
away to lure new victims…
“You look like a tramp!!” “That’s the way I
wanna look!” goes a revealing dialogue exchange
in Il delitto del diavolo. The fact that it is the
Devil speaking, deploring a young man’s long
hair, sets the tone for Tonino Cervi’s film, a po-
litical macabre fairytale (as the subtitle points
out) that imbues Gothic stereotypes with patent
symbolical meanings, in the light of the gener-
ational earthquake that was 168.
Once a revolutionary agent, an agitator of
Creation’s equilibrium, here the Prince of Dark-
ness stands for the status quo: a reactionary
force—best exemplified by Gianni Santuccio’s
incarnation, a cigar-chomping Commendatore
figure complete with grey blazer jacket and Rolls
Royce—that proselytizes for marriage (but not
monogamy: it is the façade that counts) and lust,
in contrast with the revolutionary peace-and-
love ideals (“So you too are one of those who are
against everything?” “I’m just a free man”) em-
bodied by the Christ-like hippie played by Ray
Lovelock, whose purity and contempt for soci-
ety’s materialistic values make him the ideal
prey for the Devil’s work. “Nowadays is possible
with a little effort to find yourself, let’s say, a
good position,” the Great Tempter nonchalantly
insinuates: it is the same kind of attitude Com-
mendator Nosferatu has toward his employee in
Corrado Farina’s …Hanno cambiato faccia. Both
films ultimately deal with a corruption, which
in Il delitto del diavolo is tinged with a reflection
on the end of the age of Aquarius: hence the Ital-
ian title, literally “The Devil’s Murder,” where
the victim is a whole generation’s hope.
A handful of years earlier, the story of a
bargain with the Devil was the pretext for a
bashing of the younger generations (Katarsis,
163, Nello Vegezzi), depicted as violent and
spineless punks. Here the view of youth culture
is openly sympathetic, but disenchanted: David
is a survivor, a rare bird in a world that has
quickly forgotten kindness and comprehension.
He is the only one who stops to help a man on
a lonely country road, and soon afterwards he
is spitefully labeled as “lousy scum” by a couple
of passing-by truckers who are not too distant,
sociologically speaking, from the anonymous
gunner that shot down Captain America and
Billy at the end of Easy Rider (16, Dennis Hop-
per).
David is pure, but doomed to defeat all the
15
same, since he has “nothing to offer in place of
the society” as his opponent spitefully observes.
In the end, the Devil and his acolytes bury him
and move on to lure other victims before the
new ideals influence the whole world. “Persuade
them, trap them, keep them thinking in your di-
rection, create useless necessities for them…”
As in Aldo Lado’s disturbing political thriller La
corta notte delle bambole di vetro (171), the rul-
ing class is depicted as a horrific entity that
struggles to choke rebellion and individualism.
Il delitto del diavolo was Tonino Cervi’s sec-
ond film after the successful Western Oggi a me
… domani a te! (168, co-written by Dario Ar-
gento). Born in 12, Cervi (the son of the
renowned actor Gino Cervi) had started out as
a producer, including, among other things, an
aborted adaptation of Diabolik directed by Seth
Holt, before pursuing an offbeat and interesting
career as a director, and Il delitto del diavolo is
no exception. The script—credited to Cervi,
producer Raoul Katz and Antonio Troisio, the
latter responsible for a number of gialli and hor-
ror films in the early 170s—is packed full of
overly didactic dialogue, just in case some in the
audience did not get it. However, what makes
Cervi’s film fascinating is the way Gothic sta-
ples—the Faustian pact, the lonely traveler
(think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story Young
Goodman Brown), the haunted castle, the seduc-
tive witch—are revisited in a pop-juvenile key.
The cobwebs, secret passages and old mansions
are replaced by a trendy ultramodern and col-
orful loft, filled with such details as trees trunks
in the middle of the living room, and decorated
with design objects. On the other hand, the mys-
terious lady of the castle, the belle dame sans
merci, is split into a trio of beautiful witches who
dress fashionably and sport state-of-the-art wigs
and make-up. It is here, much more than in the
standard direction (with the expected overre-
liance on zooms) that lies the film’s fascination.
Sergio D’Offizi’s cinematography and Massimo
De Rossi’s production design are outstanding,
and typical of the Pop Art aesthetics of the time:
see the witches’ gigantic portraits on the walls
of their abode.
The political approach to the subject matter
influences the way the story is told: Il delitto del
diavolo does not attempt to scare the viewer, but,
like Farina’s film, it dwells on the suggestive and
fascinating aspects of the parable it tells. Cervi
piles on the fairy-tale like elements, such as with
the scene of David and the witches having a Pan-
16 1970: Il delitto
tagruelian breakfast, which veers somewhat be-
tween an adult version of a Grimm fairytale (say,
Hansel and Gretel), and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory, with an added sexual in-
nuendo lifted from Tony Richardson’s famous
seduction scene in Tom Jones, as David and the
women gleefully devour multicolored cakes and
juices, accompanied by circular camera move-
ments and the variations of Angelo Lavagnino’s
playfully dumb amusement park tune.
The script even throws in some weird Bib-
lical references: if David is a Christ-like figure,
the trinity of witches perform such miracles as
the multiplication of the fish, in the “fishing
ceremony” scene, and even offer David an apple.
The most bizarre moment is a symbol-ridden
nightmare which climaxes in the sight of a hand
holding a gun, protruding between Haydée
Politoff ’s open legs—an image almost as surreal
as the enormous vagina that engulfs Philippe
Leroy’s character in Femina ridens (16, Piero
Schivazappa).
It is only at the end that the film suddenly
turns into out-and-out horror, as David—who
has just happily abjured to all his ideals—is sur-
rounded and viciously slain by the witches, a
scene mostly told from the victim’s point of view
in a variation of the climax in Riccardo Freda’s
Lo spettro (163). Despite his rebellious attitude,
ultimately David is as weak and doomed as most
of Italian Gothic’s male figures. Another thing
in common with 160s Gothic is the imposing
castle featured in the party scenes: Castle Chigi
at Castel Fusano, seen in Massimo Pupillo’s 5
tombe per un medium and Fernando di Leo’s
gory Gothic giallo, La bestia uccide a sangue
freddo (171).
The discourse on sexuality as the élite’s way
of manipulating the masses is spot-on. “They’re
all losing the pleasure of sinning, I’m afraid,” the
Devil observes, and one of his “persuaders”
adds: “Almost no one believes that sex is sinful.”
Which was definitely not the case with Italian
audiences, given the overwhelming amount of
nudity that was filling the screens, and the cru-
sades of magistrates who kept seizing potentially
“obscene” movies. Despite the story’s erotic po-
tential, Cervi was coherent with his purpose and
did not emphasize nudity and sex, and Il delitto
del diavolo underwent only minor cuts in Italy,
when submitted to the board of censors, in order
to get a V.M.14 rating: a detail of Bibiana’s hand
entering David’s trousers was eliminated and the
final killing was shortened.
As David, Ray Lovelock—then enjoying a
huge success after his role in Plagio (168, Sergio
Capogna), one of Italy’s first films on male bi-
sexuality—played basically the same role as in
Umberto Lenzi’s lukewarm thriller Un posto ide-
ale per uccidere (171), and would reprise the
part of the sympathetic longhair in Jorge Grau’s
harrowing zombie film No profanar el sueño
de los muertos (174), before hardening his own
angelic screen persona with his roles in such
crime films as Milano odia: la polizia non può
sparare (174, Umberto Lenzi), Uomini si nasce
poliziotti si muore (176, Ruggero Deodato) and
Pronto ad uccidere (176, Franco Prosperi)—not
forgetting Armando Crispino’s offbeat giallo,
Macchie solari (175).
Lovelock—who contributes to the score
with two of his trademark Dylan-esque folk
songs—is portrayed as a sexual attraction, as
much as the three “Queens of evil.” Haydée
Politoff (b. 146) was at the peak of her fame:
launched by Eric Rohmer’s La collectionneuse
(167), the Parisian actress started a brief but
fruitful film career in Italy, appearing in a num-
ber of movies which played with her enticing
ingénue image, such as Ugo Liberatore’s exotic
Bora Bora (168), Pasquale Festa Campanile’s
outstanding erotic drama Scacco alla regina
(16) and Giuliano Biagetti’s Interrabang
(16). Soon, however, her popularity waned:
Politoff ’s last screen role was in Gianni Manera’s
low-budget mafia movie Il cappotto di legno, re-
leased in 181 but actually made in 177.
Silvia Monti and Ida Galli are equally se-
ductive as the other witches: Monti (b. 146),
then the lover of FIAT’s president Gianni
Agnelli, had a similarly brief career, spanning
from Fraulein Doktor (16, Alberto Lattuada)
to Finché c’è guerra c’è speranza (174, Alberto
Sordi), in a filmography that included Lucio
Fulci’s Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (171)
and Luigi Bazzoni’s outstanding giallo, Giornata
nera per l’ariete (171). Today she is married to
newspaper mogul Carlo De Benedetti. On the
other hand, Galli (b. 142), had debuted in La
dolce vita, and was a recurring presence in
Italian cinema for over two decades, usually
adopting the a.k.a. Evelyn Stewart, here mis-
spelled in the credits.
The smartest move on the part of Cervi was
the casting of the great stage actor Gianni San-
tuccio (111–18), who occasionally lent his con-
siderable talent and unmistakable voice to the big
and small screen alike. The androgynous, eerie-
 1970: Ombre 17

looking Geraldine Hooper (also in …Hanno the film’s confused storyline as well as its subtle
cambiato faccia) briefly turns up as one of the fascination.
Devil’s agents: in one of Italian cinema’s most Although sometimes misleadingly de-
extravagant and gender-defying casting choices, scribed as a giallo, Caiano’s film features the typ-
she would play Massimo Ricci, Gabriele Lavia’s ical elements of the Gothic tale: a damsel in dis-
transvestite lover in Profondo rosso. tress who travels to a distant country; an obscure
menace which may or may not be of a supernat-
Ombre roventi (Shadow of Illusion) ural nature; a “return of the repressed” symbol-
D: Mario Caiano. S and SC: Enrico Rossetti, ized by the ruins of a mythical and distant past;
Frank [Farouk] Agrama, Mario Caiano; DOP: an ambiguous romantic hero. All this, though,
Enrico [Erico] Menczer (Technicolor, Technis- is transported to a middle-Eastern setting, in
cope); M: Carlo Savina (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Tatiana the luminous landscapes of Egypt, whose mil-
Casini Morigi; PD: Daniele Rizzo; C: Giovanni lenarian civilization acts as the backdrop for the
Ciarlo; MU: Giannetto De Rossi; Hair: Mirella misadventures of Gail, a modern-day version of
Sforza; AD: Furio Maglione; Mix: Gianni D’Am- the Gothic heroine, equally charming but de-
ico; SS: Bona Magrini. Cast: William Berger cidedly more uninhibited, as we learn from an
(Caleb), Daniela Giordano (Gail Bland), Krista early fantasy sequence featuring a lesbian en-
Nell [Doris Kristanel] (Sekhmet), Antonio counter between her and the alluring Sekhmet
Cantafora (Seth), Mirella Pamphili [Pompili], (Krista Nell).
Enzo Maggio, Giancarlo Bastianoni, Carol Lo- However, whereas it is pretty much clear to
bravico (The Witch), Debra Berger (Kidnapped everyone (except for Gail) that the charming
child). PROD: Nino Milano for Liger (Rome), and mysterious Caleb (William Berger) is the
with the participation of Cairo Film Dept. Int. reincarnation of the Egyptian God Osiris, it is
(Egypt); PM: Claudio Colisi Rossi. Coun-
try: Italy. Filmed at Cinecittà Studios
(Rome) and on location in Egypt. Run-
ning time: 5 minutes (m. 254); Visa n.
5583 (4.28.170); Rating: V.M.18. Release
date: 10..170 (?) (Italy); Distribution:
Icar. Domestic gross: 20,525,000 lire.
Fashion model Gail Bland is called
to Cairo by an elusive cosmetics company
named Isis to sign a deal, but upon her
arrival in Egypt she finds herself at the
center of weird events. Gail meets a mys-
terious man named Caleb, who keeps an
ambiguous behavior, and warns her off of
a pair of mysterious siblings. Unable to
leave Cairo, Gail falls prey to a cult of
crazed hippie worshipers of Osiris, who
perform human sacrifice rituals and have
chosen her as their victim…
“I saw the movie again three months
ago … and while I appreciated working
with Mario Caiano, who’s a very good
filmmaker, I have to say that I found the
story to be pretty incomprehensible—I
don’t know why, it must have been
Cairo’s atmosphere! Luckily, since the
film’s about the supernatural and has this
eerie atmosphere, one thinks: ‘Well, it’s
my fault, I just didn’t pay enough atten-
tion!’”1 Daniela Giordano’s thoughts on
Ombre roventi pretty much summarize Italian poster for Ombre roventi (1970). Art by Tino Avelli.
18 1970: Ombre
hard to fathom what is going on for much of the
running time. Ombre roventi is imbued with the
period’s flirtation with the occult and Eastern
religion, and conveys a weird psychedelic feel
throughout, whether it be for the mad hippie
cult led by Antonio Cantafora and Krista Nell
(an equally freaked out middle-Eastern version
of the Manson family) or the many references
to drugs and altered states of mind. The “red-
hot shadows” of the original Italian title might
as well refer to the Egyptian landscapes, or to
the ancient gods looming over the present day:
the theme of the reincarnation of Isis and Osiris
is lifted from the Egyptian book of the dead, and
years later would form the basis for an unfilmed
Riccardo Freda script, La dernière momie d’E-
gypte, written with the famed critic Jacques
Lourcelles.
Judging from the many scenes shot in some
of Egypt’s more stunning locations, Ombre
roventi looks like the kind of production that
benefitted from economic deals aimed at pub-
licizing the African country’s image abroad.
Among the names involved (officially as co-
scriptwriter), one cannot help but notice Farouk
Agrama, a notorious character that served as
producer and even as director on other obscure
Italian co-productions, such as L’amico del
padrino (172) and the gory horror Dawn of the
Mummy (181).2
Caiano embarked on the project right after
his most personal film, the ambitious drama
Love Birds—Una strana voglia d’amare (16),
had turned out a commercial and critical disas-
ter, and had met with some troubles with the
censors too. The director’s recollections shed
some light on this troubled production, origi-
nally to be called Le ombre. “A very mysterious
movie, an adventure from start to finish, a film
whose producers were very strange characters,
never seen before or after, with a general organ-
izer who was just as strange … they had prom-
ised me that there would be a big international
actor in the movie, Stewart Granger I think, but
when we arrived in Cairo we found out that it
wasn’t true at all, and that he didn’t know any-
thing about the movie … by sheer chance,
shooting another film in Cairo 3 there was
William Berger, a good actor and a friend of
mine … and so this Neapolitan organizer got in
touch with him in half an hour and he became
the protagonist of my film … then we came up
with a role for Berger’s daughter, who is the child
who is kidnapped by the cult of Osiris worship-
pers.”4 Berger’s wife, Living Theater actress Carol
Lobravico, joined the cast too, and gave the film’s
most convincing performance as a menacing
sorceress.
Former Miss Italy 166 Daniela Giordano
became the female protagonist in a similar man-
ner, replacing the leading actress, who was fired
after only one day of shooting: according to Ca-
iano the original lead was to be Luciana Paluzzi,
whereas Giordano was adamant it was Gianna
Serra.5 Shooting was not a pleasant experience.
Egypt was currently at war with Israel (the so-
called “War of Attrition”) and when filming in
the desert the crew was escorted by soldiers who
would warn to turn off the lights in case of air
raids and wait until the planes were out of sight6;
on one occasion the cast and crew had to flee
the hotel because of the bombings.
Caiano claimed he never even watched the
finished movie, and only completed a first rough
cut of it. At least, he managed to concoct a pro-
fessional-looking product, if a mess nonetheless,
thanks also to Erico Menczer’s luscious Tech-
niscope cinematography and Carlo Savina’s
Hammond-driven score. Some scenes—such as
Giordano’s escape through a tropical garden,
shot with a dynamic use of hand-held camera—
are quite impressive, and make one regret that
the script was not up to the task. The throwaway,
predictable climax is also a letdown, although the
ending has a pleasant sting in the tail that keeps
the viewer unsure whether the supernatural angle
actually exists or is just part of Gail’s imagination.
The movie had a troubled commercial life.
It was submitted to the board of censors in April
170 (with the title Le ombre roventi), and given
a V.M.18 rating after the producer refused to
perform cuts: the rating was justified mostly by
the use of drugs, a taboo topic at the time (and
one which had caused some trouble to another
film starring Giordano, Mario Bava’s Quante
volte … quella notte, banned by the censors and
released only in 172) rather than by the female
nudity.
A few months after the making of Ombre
roventi, drugs were at the center of a scandal that
involved Berger and Lobravico, and which be-
came one of the vilest and most shameful pages
in the annals of Italian justice. In the night be-
tween August 5 and 6, 170, the police arrested
the two actors (plus seven more people) during
a drug bust in the villa Berger had rented in Pra-
iano, on the Amalfi coast: the police had discov-
ered half a gram of hashish in a snuff box hidden
 1970: Il rosso
in the villa (the actor claimed he did not know
about it). Berger and his wife, who was suffering
from viral hepatitis, were forcibly transferred to
Pozzuoli’s hospital for the criminally insane. Un-
able to cure herself, Lobravico developed acute
peritonitis, but her increasingly critical condi-
tion was ignored by the place’s authorities, until
eventually she underwent a useless surgery, be-
fore being moved to the “incurable disease” di-
vision, where she died on October 14. Berger was
eventually acquitted in March 171. There may
be a chance that the Berger/Lobravico scandal
endangered the movie’s commercial prospects,
as Ombre roventi was released almost clandes-
tinely, and distributed regionally in the country,
with no commercial success.7 Nowadays it is
available in a badly panned-and-scanned English
language copy off a Japanese laserdisc, running
88 minutes, titled Shadow of Illusion. Giordano
is dubbed by Carolynn de Fonseca.
NoTeS
1. Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, 99 donne.
Stelle e stelline del cinema italiano (Milan: MediaWord Pro-
duction, 1), 11.
2. Agrama’s name popped up in the news in the early
2000s because of his association with Italy’s media mogul
and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for alleged
tax frauds, embezzlements and false accountings on the
sale of film rights on behalf of Berlusconi’s private broad-
caster Mediaset which resulted in a trial.
3. La colomba non deve volare (170, Sergio Garrone).
4. Stefano Ippoliti and Matteo Norcini, “Intervista esclu-
siva a Mario Caiano,” Cine70 e dintorni #2, Spring 2002, 22.
5. “The leading actress ought to have been Gianna
Serra, who quarreled with the producer on the very first
day of shooting and took the first plane to Rome; I had
only a small part, but they gave me Gianna’s wig and said
‘From now on, you are the protagonist!’” Gomarasca and
Pulici, 99 donne, 11.
6. “I remember I had a scene with Antonio Cantafora,
a nice guy who received one of my infamous slaps … we
had to shoot a scene in the middle of the desert, sur-
rounded by soldiers…. As you can see, it wasn’t exactly a
relaxed atmosphere; moreover, I was scantily dressed—
and this was another negative factor—and a group of
Egyptian dancers were running around me with burning
torches with sparks falling all over my body and burning
my skin; furthermore, I was worried that my wig would
catch fire…. Antonio, who played my executioner, had to
come by my side, kiss me and then kill me…. Lights, cam-
era, action … and he kissed me for real! ‘Hey, have you
gone crazy? With all the problems we’re having now…!?’
and, pfaff, I slapped him in the face: ‘Are you nuts?’ ‘I might
be nuts, but if you’re not a professional, then…’ So we had
to reshoot the scene, with all these 60 extras … and the di-
rector … well, you can figure it out!” Ibid, 120.
7. To this day, the Italian release date is not certain. Even
though the ANICA volumes date the first public screening
in Italy to April 16, 172, there is record (in the newspaper
1
La Stampa) that the film was being screened in the
Ligurian town of Imperia on July 13, 171. However, pub-
licity material is dated October 170, hinting at a late 170
release. In the absence of certain data, I have chosen to list
the film as a 170 release.
Il rosso segno della follia (Hatchet for the
Honeymoon)
D: Mario Bava. S and SC: Santiago Mon-
cada; DOP: Mario Bava (Eastmancolor); M:
Sante Maria Romitelli, conducted by Luigi Zito
(Ed. RCA); E: Soledad López; PD: Giulia Mafai;
AsstArtD: Giuseppe Aldrovandi; SD: Jesus Maria
Herrero; AsstSD: Gianna Spirito; AD: Lamberto
Bava, Ricardo Walker; 2nd AD: Mario Bianchi;
C: Jaime Deu Casas, Emilio Varriano; AC:
Marcello Anconetani, Gianlorenzo Battaglia,
Avelino Carla; AE: Liliana Serra; CO: Nadia Fab-
riani (Bridal Gowns: Montserrat Riba Vidal, José
María Tresserra); MU: Elisa Aspach [Aspachs],
Piero Mecacci; Hair: Hipólita López, Emilia Za-
chini; SO: Pietro Ortolani; SP: José Adrian,
Giuseppe Parrabano; SS: Marisa Agostini, Pa-
trizia Zulini; Titles: Luigi Biamonte, Miro
Grisanti. Cast: Stephen Forsyth (John Harring-
ton), Dagmar Lassander (Helen Wood), Laura
Betti (Mildred Harrington), Jesús Puente (In-
spector Russell), Femi Benussi (Alice Norton),
Antonia Mas (Louise), Alan Collins [Luciano
Pigozzi] (Vences), Gérard Tichy (Dr. Kalleway),
Verónica Llimerá (Betsy), Pasquale Fortunato
(John Harrington as a boy), José Ignacio Abadaz
[Ignasi Abadal] (Kane), Silvia Lienas (Vicky),
Montserrat Riva (Bride on Train); uncredited:
Guido Barlocci, Bruno Boschetti (Policeman),
Elena De Witt (Model). PROD: Manuel Caño
Sanciriaco and Giuseppe Zaccariello for Pan
Latina Films (Madrid), Mercury Films (Rome),
Películas Ibarra y Cía S.A. (Madrid); AP:
Enzo Ferla; PM: Jaime Fernández Cid; UPM:
Enzo Ferla; APM: Graziano Fabiani, [José]
Pedro Villanueva; PSe: Antonio Angrisano.
Country: Italy / Spain. Filmed at the Balcázar
Studios (Barcelona) and at Villa Parisi, Frascati
(Rome). Running time: 88 minutes (m. 2401).
Visa n. 55164 (12.16.16); Rating: V.M.18.
Release dates: 6.2.170 (Italy); .14.170 (Spain);
2..174 (U.S.A.); Distribution: M.G.M. Domestic
gross: 50,4,000 lire. Also known as: Un’accetta
per la luna di miele (Italy), Un hacha para la
luna de miel (Spain), Hatchet for a Honeymoon
(U.S.—Home video), Blood Brides (U.K.;
12.172); Une hache pour la lune de miel; La baie
sanglante 2 (France); Kalman hääyö (Finland);
20 1970: Il rosso
Hentesbárd (Hungary); Lua de Mel Sangrenta
(Portugal); As noivas da morte (Portugal-Home
video); O sadistis (Greece); Honeymoon (Swe-
den); Red Wedding Night (West Germany).
Haunted by the memory of the violent death
of his mother, mysteriously killed when he was
a child, John Harrington, the young owner of a
fashion house, feels the impulse to kill women
who are about to get married. The victims are ei-
ther customers or mannequins at his fashion
house, such as the young Alice Norton, whom
John kills and burns in the hothouse incinerator.
Harrington is in turn unhappily married to
Mildred, who does not want to give him a divorce:
after the umpteenth argument, he kills her and
miraculously avoids being caught by Inspector
Russell, who suspects John but is not able to
gather enough evidence to indict him. Harrington
falls in love with a model, Helen, but in the mean-
time he is persecuted by Mildred’s ghost, who
does not leave him alone. John escapes a trap set
by the police, and is given an alibi by Helen: pos-
sessed by an unstoppable killing urge, he realizes
that it was he who had killed his own mother, who
was about to get remarried. The police, who had
used Helen as bait, arrest him. John is taken to
an asylum, but Mildred’s ghost keeps haunting
him…
After his 166 masterpiece Operazione
paura, a few years would pass before Mario Bava
returned to the genre that was more congenial
to him. Compared to the director’s early horror
films, production conditions had changed, and
themes and settings were affected by that: in his
Gothics of the late 160s and early 170s Bava
leaned on Spanish or German co-productions,
and shot his movies abroad; the stories were set
in the present day and attempted to convey a
feeling of actuality through various proceedings,
from the choice of music to the actresses’ dress-
ing style. Gothic was no longer suspended in a
vague and indefinite past; on the contrary, it was
heavily characterized geographically and there-
fore immediately recognizable: here, now, at just
a few hours’ flight.
The choice to drop ghosts and other typical
staples of the genre into the contemporary
world, and color them with explicit psychoana-
lytic references, had practical reasons: the past
was not an asset anymore, but a handicap at the
box-office. Period horror movies had lost their
appeal after works such as Rosemary’s Baby
(168, Roman Polanski) showed that anxiety and
evil could proliferate in modern cities. For
someone who, like Bava, looked at the present
with sly disenchantment, it was the occasion to
exercise that ironic vein that remarked his de-
tachment.
A Spanish-Italian co-production shot be-
tween Barcelona and Rome under the work-
ing title Un’accetta per la luna di miele (the same
as the Spanish one, Un hacha para la luna de
miel), it had a rather troubled shooting due to
financial issues. Filming was completed in
October 16,1 and the movie was released in
Italy in June 170, as Il rosso segno della follia
(The Red Sign of Madness), with modest grosses
(only 50 million lire). The critics snubbed it
too: one reviewer commented ironically, “Could
it be that, after all, Mario Bava wanted to make
an anti-divorce film?”2 (Incidentally, the law
on divorce was introduced in Italy in Decem-
ber 170.) Foreign distribution was also mar-
ginal: besides the predictably timely release
in Spain, the film came out in England only
in 173, distributed by Tigon as Blood Brides.
With the title Hatchet for the Honeymoon, it
reached the U.S. the following year through GG
Productions and soon ended up in an Avco-
Embassy TV package; after the company went
bankrupt, it entered the public domain in the
States. The glory days of La maschera del demo-
nio were long gone.
At first glance, Il rosso segno della follia is a
variation on the themes of Psycho (“The story
of the umpteenth loony,” as the director labeled
it with his usual frankness3), with the addition
of references to Bluebeard and its variations
(including Claude Chabrol’s Landru, 162).
Scriptwriter Santiago Moncada likely modeled
the traumatized, impotent necrophile John Har-
rington—played by the Canadian-born Stephen
Forsyth, already seen in Riccardo Freda’s Gen-
oveffa di Brabante (164) and La morte non conta
i dollari (167)—upon Norman Bates. How-
ever, in the film Harrington actually comes
closer to Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (147) and
even more to the protagonist of Luis Buñuel’s
Ensayo de un crimen (155), because of the ironic
self-awareness with which he analyzes his own
pathological state. In addition to that, Mon-
cada seems to draw from Bava’s earlier film-
ography: the setting in an atelier openly re-
calls 6 donne per l’assassino (164). On his part,
the director allowed himself an ironic self-
reference in the scene where Harrington takes
advantage of a TV broadcasting of the episode
I Wurdalak—from I tre volti della paura (163)—
 1970: Il rosso
to justify to the police, who showed up unex-
pectedly at his door, the female screams which
actually belonged to his dying wife: the script
refers generically to a horror movie in which a
girl is chased by a monster.
It is interesting to compare the movie with
the script, titled Un’accetta per la luna di miele,
kept at the Centro Sperimentale di Cine-
matografia’s library in Rome. Credited solely to
Santiago Moncada, it is debatable whether this
is an earlier draft or actually a new version with
Bava’s uncredited rewriting, which according to
his son Lamberto was substantial. However,
there are a number of important differences be-
tween script and film. The screenplay opens with
a bravura subjective sequence shot from protag-
onist John Harrington’s point of view, as the man
explores the various rooms of the fashion house
in his workshop: an idea somehow similar to the
incipit of Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (131), and full of visual tricks (for instance,
a character is seen through Harrington’s thumb
and forefinger as he makes the O.K. sign). It was
likely cut out for practical and budgetary reasons,
but on paper it looks like it was written specif-
ically with the director in mind.
Italian fotobusta for Il rosso segno della follia (1970), featuring Stephen Forsyth (left, credited as “Steve
Forsyth”) and Laura Betti.
21
Bava drastically thinned down the not-so-
exciting thriller plot (whereas the change of set-
ting, with Paris instead of London as described
in the screenplay and despite the characters’
names, was decided by Caño during the film-
ing4). Compared with the script, for instance,
the characters of Vences and Louise—John’s
collaborators in the atelier, who raised Harring-
ton after his mothers’ death and who, Moncada
implies, seem to know his secret—were drasti-
cally cut down; Luciano Pigozzi, who plays
Vences, has only one line in the movie. Some
investigating sequences featuring Inspector Rus-
sell (Jesús Puente) were discarded as well,
namely the discovery of a dead body in a ware-
house, following an anonymous letter sent by
John himself.
Rather than focus on the hatchet murders
and Harrington’s necrophilia (which the movie
also tones down compared with the script), Bava
preferred to dwell on the relationship between
John and his bitchy wife Mildred (Laura Betti).
Surprisingly enough, then, halfway through, Il
rosso segno della follia becomes an out-and-out
ghost story, albeit a rather peculiar one.
Throughout the movie, Harrington is per-
22 1970: Il rosso
secuted by two ghosts. The first is his own self
as a child, a psychoanalytic embodiment of guilt
connected to a revealing flashback borrowed
from Marnie (164, Alfred Hitchcock), as with
every murder the protagonist comes closer to
the source of his childhood trauma—a variation
on the “primary scene” with interesting similar-
ities to both Profondo rosso (175, Dario
Argento) and Murder Obsession (181, Riccardo
Freda).5 The second ghost is the spiritism-
obsessed Mildred, who won’t allow death to part
her from her husband. “I will always be by your
side, whether you like it or not,” the woman says,
and she will keep her promise. In a sardonic re-
versal of ghost story conventions, John is the
only one who cannot see Mildred’s ghost, who
nevertheless appears and interacts with nearly
everybody else, as if she was still alive.
In La frusta e il corpo (163) Bava had fo-
cused on the alternating points of view of
Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) and Christian (Tony
Kendall) to stress the inexplicability of the pres-
ence/absence of Kurt’s ghost—who is visible to
the former and invisible to the latter—and there-
fore emphasize its Fantastic essence, in the sense
codified by Tzvetan Todorov.6 Here the director
uses the same trick in reverse, first by showing
the bewildered John staring at an empty chair
beside him, and then, from a peripheral char-
acter’s point of view, Harrington sitting by his
wife—a seemingly ordinary sight here taking on
a mocking supernatural tone. The Fantastic is
not the exception but the rule: ghosts are every-
where among us and we never realized it.
Indeed, no one even cares about them.
The ghastly lady in black here does not
have Barbara Steele’s seductive grace, but the
plump features, pout and unpleasant laughter of
Laura Betti: an unusual presence in a genre film,
Betti—best known for her roles in Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s films (most memorably as the servant-
turned-saint in Teorema, 168)—is the film’s
most surprising asset, and her affinity with
Bava’s witty sense of humor would result in their
teaming up again for the macabre ronde of
Reazione a catena (171).
Bava scholar Tim Lucas, reporting the ac-
tress’ statements, suggests that the character of
Mildred, absent in the script, was invented by
Bava and Betti “to develop a suitable role for her
to play, and to restructure the existing story
around her presence … in entirely new second
and third acts that owe something to Noël Cow-
ard’s Blithe Spirit… Thus was born the memo-
rable character of Juan’s—now John’s—shrewish
wife Mildred, and thus Moncada’s story was
transformed into a delicious comedia noir
lamenting a murderer’s inability to escape his
‘better half.’”7
And yet, Harrington’s conjugal vicissitudes
and the subsequent appearances/disappearances
of Mildred’s ghost, including the one on the villa
steps where the spectre seems to materialize out
of thin air, are all included in the Rome screen-
play, and therefore cannot be considered the re-
sult of last-minute rewritings. The main differ-
ence is that Mildred is described in the script as
“very beautiful,” suggesting that Bava’s touch was
actually a brilliant, unconventional casting
move, and that Betti was wildly exaggerating
when she claimed that “we would rewrite scenes
together.”8 The Rome script also features John’s
revealing flashbacks, which Lucas hypothesized
were devised and introduced by Bava later on
during filming.
Il rosso segno della follia’s avenging revenante
manifests herself through objects (a book on
spiritism, a handbag), similarly to the ones in
La goccia d’acqua (also from I tre volti della
paura) and Operazione paura; moreover, she im-
poses her presence through the reaffirmation of
the marriage pledge that ties her to her husband
(and murderer). The only power she has is based
on a bond that not even death can terminate.
But there is no love, nor passion, in this embit-
tered and vengeful little woman—who never-
theless, right before her murder, Bava had
showed making herself up before a mirror,
trying to look good and desirable for her hus-
band, and almost pathetic in her irreducible
hope to rekindle his desire—only a stubborn
obstinacy, a wry pique that somehow corre-
sponds to the director’s attitude toward the
genre itself, almost a decade after La maschera
del demonio.
By juxtaposing two different kinds of
ghosts (one from the Id, the other from the af-
terlife), Bava cleverly explores the common
ground that characterizes the crossroads be-
tween the Oedipal-driven giallo and the super-
natural tale. To John’s subjective perception,
both are very real figures: he succeeds in getting
rid of the former, but succumbs to the latter, and
the film’s last image shows the spirit of his lost
childhood looking sadly at his own adult self as
the latter is driven away to (presumably) a men-
tal asylum.
Awareness, to the childlike John—who
 1970: Thomas
plays with toy trains, and has a wife who behaves
more like a mother, even cleaning up burnt toast
for him at breakfast, and with whom he has
never made love—means realizing the impossi-
bility of living in the ordinary world, where he
had somehow managed to conceal himself
under a semblance of normality. In Operazione
paura Giacomo Rossi Stuart’s character chased
a fleeing shadow, only to find himself facing his
own alter ego; here Harrington is his own dark
half, and that boy he sometimes glimpses in the
distance is the remnant of an innocence that was
lost too soon.
Stylistically, Il rosso segno della follia does
not have the exquisiteness of Bava’s previous
horror movies: there are perhaps a couple of
zooms too many in the perfunctory scenes fea-
turing inspector Russell, and the whole police
subplot is filled with throwaway dialogue that
the director did not care much about. But the
sequences focusing on Harrington and his mad-
ness are often outstanding for their sheer inven-
tion and strange poetic tone. An extraordinary
moment comes early in the film when, during
a circular panning shot, Bava makes a smooth
transition from the killer’s private room,
populated with mannequins wearing wedding
dresses, to a séance whose participants seem just
as lifeless as the mannequins themselves—a mo-
ment in tune with one of the director’s favorite
visual themes, the blurring between the animate
and inanimate.
Harrington’s tribulations with Mildred’s
ashes culminate in a beautiful, equally memo-
rable bit where John spreads the woman’s ashes
from a balcony on his villa, with Bava’s camera
designing an exquisite traveling shot from
below, as the man is illuminated by an eerie sun-
set gleam. The murders are inventively designed,
with little bloodshed and a striking use of edit-
ing, distorted visuals and surreal animation (in
a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, Femi Be-
nussi’s face opens in half in an optical effect that
brings to mind 160s Eastern Europe anima-
tion).
Bava (who acted as his own d.o.p., most
likely because of budgetary restraints) even in-
dulges in one of his favorite tricks on the audi-
ence, by cutting from a real train in the opening
murder to a model train, allowing us for a mo-
ment the illusion that the budget was so low as
to force the makers to use a cheap special effect
… and then revealing that the train is actually
one of the toys Harrington is playing with. It’s
23
a visual gag he had tried already in Diabolik,
and which further underlines the director’s de-
tached, playful attitude. The ending seems like
a reference to Fellini’s episode Le tentazioni del
dottor Antonio in the omnibus comedy Boccaccio
’70 (162), where Peppino De Filippo’s charac-
ter—obsessed with the image of Anita Ekberg
on a giant billboard to the point of going crazy—
is taken away to a psychiatric hospital in an am-
bulance. Which, considering the vexed question
of the little ghost in Operazione paura and the
devil taking on a similar appearance in Toby
Dammit, seems just appropriate.
NoTeS
1. See Variety, 2 October 16.
2. Vice, “Il rosso segno della follia,” L’Unità, 26 June,
170.
3. Luigi Cozzi, “Operaszione paura,” Horror #13, De-
cember 170/January 171, 101.
4. As Stephen Forsyth told Tim Lucas, the Paris exteri-
ors, shot by a second unit headed by Lamberto Bava, fea-
tured a double (filmed in long shots) instead of the Cana-
dian actor, who refused to shoot and stayed in his hotel
room, not having been paid for a couple of weeks. Tim
Lucas, Mario Bava—All the Colors of the Dark (Cincinnati
OH: Video Watchdog, 2007), 785. However, very little of
the Paris shooting survives in the movie, and Luc Moullet
suggests that the inclusion of a newspaper’s headline
riddled with misspellings was Bava’s revenge on Caño. Luc
Moullet, “La peur et la stupeur,” Cahiers du Cinéma #486,
December 14, 71.
5. Both Profondo rosso and Murder Obsession actually
had their origin from the same source, a story by Fabio
Piccioni which also provided the basis for Il grido del capri-
corno, an issue of the adults-only comic Oltretomba gigante
(#, February 174, with drawings by José María Bellalta).
See Roberto Curti, Diabolika. Superheroes, Supercriminals
and the Comic Book Universe in Italian Cinema (Parkville
MD: Midnight Marquee Press, 2016), 30.
6. See Curti, Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957–1969, 104.
7. Lucas, Mario Bava–All the Colors of the Dark, 780.
Incidentally, according to the script kept in Rome, John
was not called Juan in the first place.
8. Ibid., 783.
9. Ibid., 784.
Thomas … gli indemoniati (Thomas …
the Demoniacs)
D: Pupi Avati. S: Pupi Avati, Giorgio
Celli, Antonio Avati; SC: Giorgio Celli, Enzo
Leonardo, Pupi Avati; DOP: Toni [Antonio] Sec-
chi (Kodak Eastmancolor); M: Amedeo Tom-
masi (Ed. Sermi Film); E: Enzo Micarelli; PD:
Guidobaldo Grossi; CO: Silvana Bigi; ArtD:
Claudio Giambanco; Collaboration to direction:
Enzo Leonardo; AD: Franco Sangiovanni; C:
Giorgio Regis; AC: Marcello Gallinelli; SP: Paolo
Ferrari; MU: Gianni Amadei, Alfonso Cioffi;
24 1970: Thomas

Mariangela Melato and little Daniele Samory, as the titular ghost child, during a surreal scene of Thomas
… gli indemoniati. Note the empty bottles in the background (courtesy Luca Servini).

Hair: Ettore Tarquini; KG: Vito Capone; ChEl:
Gino Marra; SO: Giancarlo Droghini; AE: Carlo
Broglio; AsstArtD: Alberto Menghini; W: Giulia
Ricchieri; Artistic collaboration: Guglielmo
Volonterio. Cast: Edmund Purdom (Marcus),
Anita Sanders (Giorgia), Bob Tonelli [Ariano
Nanetti] (Bob), Giulio Pizzirani (Pintus), Gianni
Cavina (Adam), Ines Ciaschetti (Laura), Lola
Bonora (Lola), Graziano Giusti (Medium),
Mariangela Melato (Zoe), Andrea Matteuzzi
(The Man on the Train), Pina Borione (Seam-
stress / Manageress), Daniele Samory (Thomas),
Gino Cassani, Fanny Bertelli, Torivio Travaglini,
Vincenzo Busi, Gilberto Fiorini, Claudio Trionfi.
PROD: Cidierre Cinematografica S.A.S. (Bologna).
PM: Gianni Amadei; PS: Giorgio Caputo, Pierluigi
Ciriaci; PSe: Steno Tonelli. PSeA: Gianni De
Cesare. Country: Italy. Filmed on location in
Bologna, Italy. Running time: 2 minutes (m. 2540);
Visa n. 5670 (11.7.170); Rating: all audiences; Re-
lease date: .28.170 (Locarno Film Festival); Dis-
tribution: not released theatrically; Domestic gross:
none.
A provincial stage company is rehearsing a
play written by the lead actor, Marcus, and
centering on an imaginary boy named Thomas.
A medium shows up, and the company sets up
a séance to find out whether the play will be a
success or not. During the séance, a boy named
Thomas shows up. The company leaves to the
city where they will debut, and during the journey
on train they meet a weird man who tells them a
horrific story about another company opening a
play in the same town. On arrival, it is agreed
that each player will keep Thomas for one day,
and then the boy will decide with whom to
stay. Thomas’s presence seems to bring to the
surface each member’s unconscious fears and
desires. Eventually the child chooses the lead ac-
tress Giorgia, whose unfortunate romance with
Marcus had inspired the latter to write the
play, but in the end it all turns out to have been
a collective hallucination, as the séance is still
going on…
Merely eight months after the commercial
débacle of Balsamus l’uomo di Satana, on Sep-
tember , 170, Pupi Avati submitted his second
film to the Italian board of censors. The movie—
written by the director, Giorgio Celli and Enzo
Leonardo, and financed with 110 million lire gra-
 1970: Thomas
ciously provided by their patron, Mister X—
benefitted from the presence of two popular
leads, Edmund Purdom and Anita Sanders (the
star of Tinto Brass’ Nerosubianco, 16) and had
been selected at the prestigious Swiss festival of
Locarno.
Reviewing Thomas … gli indemoniati
after its festival screening in the newspaper
Corriere della Sera, critic Giovanni Grazzini
wrote: “The Bologna-born Pupi Avati, age 32,
confirms in this sophomore feature film that he
has an unusual talent, addressed to celebrate
the glories of magic with picturesque visionary
resources…. Beyond the many Fellini-esque
digressions, Avati’s work is conducted like a
witty fable; certainly less organized and charged
with dramatic meanings than the author would
want, but rich of anxious cues and scenographic
fervor.”1 Paired with the Festival award won by
Bob Tonelli as Best supporting actor, it sounded
like a promising start for the movie, which ob-
tained a visa in November of that year. But
then, disaster struck: no distribution company
picked up the film, which languished in limbo
until the early 10s, when it was shown in ret-
rospectives on the author. As of today it survives
only in bad-quality copies circulating among
collectors and transferred from a private film li-
brary print.
Thomas … gli indemoniati takes a different
approach than Balsamus l’uomo di Satana, leav-
ing comedy aside and opting for a dramatic nar-
rative which is more properly rooted in the Fan-
tastic and the macabre, from the effectively eerie
opening sequence set in a cemetery, where a
strange-looking man (whom we’ll find out is a
medium) wanders around the graves, looking
for some unknown departed to mourn on the
Day of the Dead, so as to appease his own lone-
liness.
Avati builds the film around one of the
Gothic clichés par excellence, the séance—here
conducted by the members of a shabby the-
atrical company who are about to stage a her-
metic avant-garde play and are understandably
worried about the audience’s response—whose
participants end up summoning the ghastly tit-
ular boy. From then on, it has been noted, “the
narration takes place in a non-time, in which
echoes of deeply distant periods can naturally
co-exist.”2 Still, even though the boundaries be-
tween the living and the dead are bound to dis-
solve during the course of the film, the director
is not interested in an ordinary ghost story: the
25
enigmatic Thomas is a key to the characters’
subconscious, and the movie takes on a route
that is openly psychoanalytic.
Curiously, Avati develops themes—marital
crisis, the fear of parenthood, the presence/ab-
sence of an elusive little child—very similar to
another ghost story sui generis made around the
same time, Marcello Avallone’s Un gioco per Eve-
line (171), but his approach to the matter openly
nods, as Grazzini noted, to Federico Fellini’s
universe. What is more, the script encompasses
varied influences, from Mark Twain’s short story
Cannibalism in the Cars (which appears to have
been the blueprint for the eerie story told by the
mysterious man in the train in one of the film’s
best sequences, characterized by a blatant use of
miniatures; incidentally, Avati will make a mas-
terful use of a train as the setting for a suspense-
ful sequence in Zeder) to André Delvaux’s
surreal masterpiece Un soir, un train (168) for
the intricate layers of symbols. The result
benefits greatly from Amedeo Tommasi’s score,
which mixes lounge, jazz and Gothic themes,
and is graced with vocals by Edda Dell’Orso.3 A
renowned jazz pianist and composer, Tommasi
wrote the music for all Avati’s films up to Cin-
ema!!!
That said, Thomas … gli indemoniati is
wildly uneven, and ultimately self-defeating.
The rehearsal scenes exude the kind of metalin-
guistic conceit that was common to so many
works based on (and reflecting upon) the duality
between stage and life, but Avati’s film does not
have the brilliance of, say, The Balcony (163,
Joseph Strick, from Jean Genet’s play). The
director is more at ease with the surreal digres-
sions that form the core of the story, and
uncover the demons that haunt the main char-
acters—the title’s “demoniacs,” “possessed by
their own ghosts and obsessed by the demons
that don’t stop screaming inside their heads.”4
Here, unlike in Balsamus, the director fully em-
braces the Fantastic, as every character comes
face to face with his or her own dreams, or fears,
with the little boy acting as a catalyst and taking
out the monstrous from them, “with a procedure
similar, in a symbolic way, to exorcism.”5 Still,
these scenes give the movie an episodic, me-
chanical quality that detracts from its effective-
ness as a whole.
The elderly seamstress’ (Pina Borione)
obsession with death leads to her visit to a hos-
pice for old actresses, who lie in their white beds
in silence so that one cannot tell whether they
26 1970: Thomas
are alive or dead: it is an uncanny segment
that somehow predates the strength of such
images as the bedridden elderly lady in La casa
dalle finestre che ridono. Then, in the movie’s
most humorous sequence, Bob Tonelli (as
himself) is invited to speak at a conference of
“applied sexology” as an expert on the matter.
Here, Avati explores one of his favorite themes,
grotesque orgiastic sexuality, like he had done
in Balsamus, as the diminutive Bob becomes a
sexual icon for his female audience, who implore
him to make love to them, prompting Tonelli
to utter a memorable tongue-in-cheek line:
“After me the word ‘sadism’ will be replaced by
‘bobism’!”
Like many other Avati efforts, Thomas …
gli indemoniati revolves around a world of
losers, who seemingly find a way to soothe their
malaise only by embracing total withdrawal, and
savoring it with an almost morbid languor: this
theme recurs throughout the director’s work, up
to his most recent efforts such as Un ragazzo
d’oro (2014). Avati’s typical defeatist antiheroes
are embodied by the stage company director,
Pintus (Giulio Pizzirani) and the actor Adam
(Gianni Cavina). The former reveals his morbid
jealousy for Zoe (Mariangela Melato, in her film
debut) in the movie’s most Fellini-esque bit, the
sequence of the field littered with empty bottles
where Pintus digs up marble heads and busts of
Pagan deities. Adam, on the other hand, reveals
his hopeless love for Giorgia, and—the only
one in the group—refuses to keep the boy with
him for one day, thus giving up the chance of
fulfilling his own dreams.
Despite the occasional surreal flashes,
Thomas … gli indemoniati gradually disinte-
grates in heavy, self-reflective monologues char-
acterized by a pretentious literary quality, and
climaxes in the wild scene where the audience
assaults the stage before the play starts, followed
by the surreal moment where Giorgia (Anita
Sanders) and Thomas seem to move from the
stage play to an otherworldly, idyllic dimension
where they are alone and happy together—per-
haps the afterlife, given the presence of a waiter
whose face we saw on one of the graves in the
opening cemetery scene? The circular ending—
was it all a dream, a product of the main char-
acters’ imagination, or a circular time loop that
has them trapped and experiencing the same
events all over again?—does not solve the
enigma, and appears to have been influenced by
the notion of “open text” discussed in Umberto
Eco’s essay Opera aperta (a.k.a. The Open Work,
162). It does indeed fall into the realm of the
Fantastic; but it comes off as frustrating, in a
movie that systematically defies any identifica-
tion or enjoyment on the part of the viewer, and
makes a point of being obscure and heavy with
symbols.
As with Balsamus, Avati was critical to
the point of self-hatred when speaking of his
sophomore film: “Thomas coincided with a
very painful moment in my life. The fact that it
was never distributed has probably a reason. My
brother Antonio did not collaborate on the
script, as he was doing his military service. I
have never watched it again, nor am I tempted
to, since it does not raise any type of curiosity
in me. Balsamus, in some way, had its own
reason for being as a film debut, and in its
ramshackleness it showed our attempt to be
there, to establish ourselves. Whereas Thomas
is a parasitic work, and the fact that it disap-
peared from circulation is a great advantage
in my opinion. To me, Thomas is a very foolish
thing.”6
At 32, after only two films, Pupi Avati
seemed finished as a filmmaker. “I found
myself unemployed for four years because of
those movies…. In those four years, somebody
told me, ‘Look, if you want to keep on doing
this job, you’d better change your name.’”7
Eventually he found work as a scriptwriter on
the Gothic melodrama Il bacio and returned be-
hind the camera with the biting comedy La
mazurka del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone,
starring Ugo Tognazzi and Paolo Villaggio;
this movie resumed the grotesque quality and
the surreal intuitions of his first films in a more
accomplished, commercially apt way, and dis-
played what would become Avati’s trademark
style.
NoTeS
1. Giovanni Grazzini, “Gli Italiani a Locarno,” Corriere
della Sera, October 4, 170.
2. Abramovit, Bartolini, Il gotico padano, 131.
3. The soundtrack, published by the label Gemelli
(GG 10–004), bears the title Thomas, hinting at the possi-
bility that, just as with Balsamus, the subtitle was added
subsequently in order to make the film commercially vi-
able.
4. Abramovit, Bartolini, Il gotico padano, 12.
5. Ibid., 134.
6. Ibid., 130.
7. Servini, “Balsamus, l’uomo di Satana: la grande
avventura,” 32.
 1971: Un gioco
1971
Un gioco per Eveline (A Game for Eveline)
D: Marcello Avallone. S: Marco Guglielmi
[Augusto Guglielmi]; SC: Marco Guglielmi, Ste-
fano Calanchi, Marcello Avallone; DOP: Aldo
Scavarda [uncredited] (Eastmancolor); C:
Enrico Cortese; M: Marcello Giombini; E: Paolo
Lucignani; PD: Amedeo Fago; SD: Giorgio
Bertolini; MU: Giovanna Martino; AMU: Paolo
Franceschi; AD: Michele Brancato; AC: Enzo
Tosi; AE: Lorenzo Costantini; SO: Armando
Nasca; SS: Valerio Monaco. Cast: Erna Schurer
[Emma Costantino] (Nathalie Chateleau), Adri-
ana Bogdan [Adriana Nicolescu] (Minou Gi-
raud), Marco Guglielmi (Philippe Giraud),
Wolfgang Hillinger (Pierre Chateleau), Rita
Calderoni (School Teacher / Housekeeper),
Luisa Delli (German tourist), Stefano Oppedis-
ano, Franco Jemma (Police Inspector), Angelo
Tagliavia (Mechanic), Giorgio Libassi (German
tourist), Simonetta Negri (Eveline). PROD:
Ernesto Di Fresco for Diva Cinematografica;
PM: Sergio Nasca; PS: Michele Macaluso;
PSe: Marisa Gerini. Country: Italy. Filmed in
Mondello (Sicily); Running time: 85 minutes
(m. 2322); Visa n. 5780 (3.18.171); Rating: all
audiences. Release date: 7.16.171; Distribution:
Panta Cinematografica. Domestic gross: 43,833,000
lire.
A young couple on holiday, Pierre and
Nathalie, are having an argument while driving
along the Corsican coast. Pierre insists that they
have a baby, and Nathalie, who is at the wheel,
gets so upset and restless that the car skids off the
road. Since the woman has sprained her ankle,
Pierre asks for help at a nearby villa, owned by
another couple, Minou and Philippe Giraud. Dur-
ing their stay, both guests are made the subject of
explicit advances on the part of the owners, but
the strange foursome is frequently troubled by the
appearance of a little girl—Minou and Philippe’s
little daughter Eveline—whom only Pierre is ap-
parently able to see and hear. As Philippe explains,
the girl died a year and a half prior in a fatal ac-
cident, in an avalanche, with the housekeeper; yet
Minou maintains that Eveline is alive and her
husband keeps her hidden from her. The situation
becomes even weirder after the couple receives a
visit from a schoolteacher who asks news about
the missing girl; Nathalie notices that the woman
is a dead ringer for the housekeeper, and then sees
27
Philippe kissing her. Increasingly obsessed by Eve-
line, and panicked by the sudden appearance of
the child, Pierre shoots at her. The four bury the
little girl’s body, but are interrupted by a police
inspector: however, the grave turns out to be
empty…. At this point, Pierre and Nathalie wake
up in their wrecked car: it was only a dream.
Pierre, wandering around in search of help,
glimpses a villa…
“I wanted to make a somewhat different
kind of cinema, closer to the Fantastic. I wrote
a ‘noir,’ a genre which we did rarely in Italy,
called Un gioco per Eveline. The movie got made,
but nobody believed in it. It was a difficult work,
out of time, even naive by today’s standards.”1
This is how Marcello Avallone recalled his sec-
ond feature film as a director, following his be-
ginnings as a documentarist on TV and his di-
rectorial debut, L’altra faccia del peccato (16),
a mondo produced by Luciano Martino. Aval-
lone’s retrospective definition of Un gioco per
Eveline as a film noir is misleading: it is actually
a ghost story, albeit a sui generis one, with a
number of nods and analogies to Italian Gothics
of the previous decade. The director himself,
when interviewed a few days before shooting
started, pointed out: “The picture’s real protag-
onist is the fear of whatever escapes our senses,
our logic control, the reality that surrounds us
every day. In other words, the fear of the uncon-
scious, the ghosts that each one of us carries in-
side and hides to the others, the fear of our own
conscience.” 2
All this, however, is revisited according to
the typical style and themes in vogue in Italian
post-’68 cinema. At first, the story of a young
couple undergoing a marital crisis seems to be-
long to some bourgeois drama on incommuni-
cability, spiced with nudity and mild eroticism
as was customary in the period. The beautiful
and sunny setting (the story is set in the
Corsican coast, although the film was shot in
Mondello, Sicily3) underlines the impression, as
do the luxurious villa where most of the story
takes place, the pretentious dialogue that the
characters exchange while idling and wandering
around the premises, and the expected mutual
games of seduction and betrayal.
And yet, the plot is littered with the typical
haunted house elements: a couple forced to stay
28 1971: Un giaco
for the night at a strange house whose enigmatic
inhabitants seem to hold a terrible secret; weird
noises and cries in the night; a menacing shadow
projected on the outside walls; a ghastly pres-
ence. Then Avallone introduces the ghost: a little
girl playing with her white ball who looks like a
perfect mixture between Melissa Graps in Op-
erazione paura and the Devil in Fellini’s Toby
Dammit episode in Histoires extraordinaires
Italian locandina for Un gioco per Eveline (1971).
(168), and certainly not a casual choice on the
director’s part. Having been Riccardo Freda’s as-
sistant director on L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hich-
cock (162), Avallone deals with the genre para-
phernalia with effectiveness: the sequence where
Nathalie uncovers a life-size doll under the bed’s
sheets actually replicates to the letter the mo-
ment in L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock when
Barbara Steele found a human skull in her nup-
tial bed.
However, Un gioco per Eveline is more pre-
occupied with the message. The Gothic and su-
pernatural elements remain purely instrumental
and convey a heavy-handed psychoanalytical
significance, in tune with the film’s theme—fear
of parenthood, seen as an indication of the col-
lapse of traditional values. As Avallone ex-
plained, “The story revolves around the concept
that in today’s society family has deeply changed
its appearance compared with the traditional
meaning of the word. In the breakneck and
chaotic rhythm of life that conditions us all …
the place for children becomes more and more
scarce.”4 The four protagonists are specular to
each other, and have openly symbolic traits:
Pierre wants a child while Philippe underwent
vasectomy, Minou is obsessed with motherhood
whereas Nathalie rejects the idea. To them “chil-
dren represent a projection of their own respon-
sibilities, their inhibitions, the waivers they are
forced to make, the constant attempt to escape
reality.”5 The supernatural theme ultimately
doesn’t add up to much other than a general
sense of uneasiness and absurdity, underlined
by the final quotation from Samuel Beckett,
which tops a circular “dream” ending borrowed
straight from Dead of Night (145).
It would have taken a strong script and di-
alogue not to succumb to the story’s utter pre-
tentiousness (leaving aside its debatable per-
spective). Whereas the characters have to deliver
lines such as “Then, no children, it will only be
us two and our mucous membranes!” or “Dress
up, in a woman like you there’s nothing else to
disclose.” Avallone himself admitted that “per-
haps the screenplay was not as rich compared
to what it was trying to say, and the actors were
mediocre.”6 It is a pity, since the direction is wor-
thy of better material, as proven by the effective
bits featuring Eveline’s ghost as well as a number
of suitably stylish moments, with the intriguing
use of circular panning shots during the con-
frontation with the schoolteacher and plenty of
effective camera angles.
 1971: …Hanno
The screenplay was mainly the work of
Marco Guglielmi (126–2005), a dignified sup-
porting actor who occasionally dabbled in script-
writing, and who nevertheless is miscast as the
would-be fascinating Philippe. The cast also in-
cluded the ravishing blonde Emma Costantino,
a.k.a. Erna Schurer, quite popular after her role
in Alberto Cavallone’s succes de scandàle Le sala-
mandre (16). On the other hand, the Roman-
ian Adriana Bogdan was enjoying a short-lived
notoriety after her appearance in the arthouse
cult classic Une soir, un train: the wife of French
director José Varela, and later a friend of Surre-
alist poet Louis Aragon, Bogdan disappeared
into oblivion in the Seventies after only a
handful of movies. The German-born Wolfgang
Hillinger had appeared in films by Bava (Dia-
bolik), Fellini (Fellini—Satyricon), Visconti (La
caduta degli dei), mostly in very small roles: his
main claim to fame had been Silvio Amadio’s
L’isola delle svedesi (168). After Avallone’s film
he disappeared from the radar, briefly reemerg-
ing with a small role in Roberto Benigni’s Award-
winning La vita è bella (17). Renato Polselli’s
muse, Rita Calderoni, turns up in a small part,
donning a platinum blonde wig, as the
enigmatic schoolteacher. According to Schurer,
the movie was financed by “a mafioso…. He
used to pay us by putting the money inside a
newspaper, I remember him coming over in
weekends, carrying these small packages…”7
Filmed in the summer of 16,8 Un gioco
per Eveline was submitted to the board of
censors only two years later: it underwent some
cuts to be secured a “per tutti” (all audiences)
visa, and had a brief and disastrous theatrical
run.10 Avallone was so disappointed that he gave
up movies and returned to television documen-
taries. He would return to directing with 176’s
Cugine mie, an erotic comedy which had lots of
trouble with the Italian censors, and was banned
twice due to its supposedly “obscene” nature. In
the Eighties he delivered a couple of slick, if not
too original, horror films, Spettri (187) and
Maya (18). His last feature films were a thriller,
Last Cut (17), starring John Savage, and the
TV movie Indizio fatale (1).
NoTeS
1. Eugenio Ercolani, “Tra cinema e cavalli: Intervista a
Marcello Avallone,” Fascination Cinema, January 27, 2014.
(www.fascinationcinema.it.)
2. Alberto Ceretto, “Protagonista la paura,” Corriere
d’Informazione, August 1, 16.
2
3. Davide Pulici, “Erna Schurer (Emma Costantino) la
donna volitiva,” in Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici,
Davide (eds.), Le sorelle di Venere 2. Nocturno Dossier #5,
June 2007, 32.
4. Ceretto, “Protagonista la paura.”
5. Ibid.
6. Ercolani, “Tra cinema e cavalli: Intervista a Marcello
Avallone.”
7. Pulici, “Erna Schurer,” 32. According to the actress,
renowned cinematographer Aldo Scavarda (Antonioni’s
L’Avventura) worked uncredited on the film: no director
of photography is listed in the credits, and cameraman
Ernesto Cortese was usually credited as d.o.p.
8. Ceretto, “Protagonista la paura.”
9. The board of censors demanded two bits to be cut,
in the love scene between Philippe and Nathalie.
10. It appears to have had a summer theatrical run in
mid–July 171. The vice film critic on the Turin newspaper
La Stampa called it “an obscure drama,” and wrote: “The
film does not hide its ambitions to stay out of the ordinary,
but it lacks dramatic inspiration and narrative breath.” Vice,
“Il miliardario e la provinciale,” La Stampa, July 18, 171.
…Hanno cambiato faccia (They’ve
Changed Faces)
D: Corrado Farina. S: Corrado Farina; SC:
Giulio Berruti, Corrado Farina; DOP: Aiace
Parolin (Eastmancolor, Telecolor); M: Amedeo
Tommasi; E: Giulio Berruti; PD, CO: Mimmo
Scavia; C: Maurizio Gennaro; AC: Franco Bour-
sier; SO: Alessandro Di Carlo; MU: Manlio Roc-
chetti; W: Enrica Bronzi; AD: Giulio Berruti; SP:
Antonio Casolini; AE: Massimo Latini, Edda
Pascale. Cast: Adolfo Celi (Giovanni Nosferatu),
Geraldine Hooper (Corinna), Giuliano Dis-
perati (Alberto Valle), Francesca Modigliani
(Laura), Rosalba Bongiovanni, Pio Buscaglione,
Salvatore Cantagalli, Giulio Flores Perasso,
Mariella Furgiuele, Luigi Garetto, Guglielmo
Molasso, Wladimiro Nemo, Maria Randisi Sal-
ice, Lorenzo Rapazzini, Claudio Trionfi; uncred-
ited: Amedeo Tommasi, Corrado Farina (Scien-
tist in commercial). PROD: Filmsettanta S.r.l.
(Rome); PM: Carlo Chamblant; PS: Massimo
Alberini, Guido Mattei. Country: Italy. Filmed
in Turin and at Incir-De Paolis Studios (Rome).
Running time: 5 minutes (m. 2605); Visa n.
5734 (03.27.171); Rating: V.M.18. Release date:
07.02.171; Distribution: Garigliano. Domestic
gross: 28,010,000 lire. Also known as: Wettlauf
gegen der Tod (West Germany); Han cambiado
de cara (Spain); La rencarnación del mal
(Spain—home video), Zmiana oblicza (Poland).
Alberto Valle, an employee of the Auto
Avion Motor car factory, is unexpectedly sum-
moned to the villa of the company’s owner, Engi-
neer Giovanni Nosferatu. During the journey to
the mountains, where Nosferatu lives, Alberto
30 1971: …Hanno
meets a young hippie rebel woman, Laura, whom
he feels attracted to. At Nosferatu’s mansion, he
is welcomed by the enigmatic secretary Corinna,
who ends up in bed with him. Much to Valle’s sur-
prise, Nosferatu offers him a chance to become
the company’s president, but Alberto notices that
weird things are going on in the villa: Nosferatu
keeps a register of all newborn babies, whose fu-
ture is programmed from birth. Valle then dis-
covers a crypt in the park, with Nosferatu’s grave
in it: the date of birth is 1801 and there is no date
of death. Overhearing a meeting where Nosferatu
and his employees discuss the launch of a new
product on the market—LSD—Valle discovers
that the Engineer rules his company with a ruth-
less attention to profit. Alberto becomes convinced
that Nosferatu is a vampire: he shoots him and
flees from the villa. Outside, he meets Laura,
who—vampirized by Nosferatu—has turned into
a bourgeois, eager to become part of the system.
Having lost all hope, Valle accepts his fate and re-
turns to the villa, where Nosferatu is waiting for
him.
“In full 20th century, you still believe in
vampires?” “Myths don’t die, they transform …
you have changed face, but keep sucking people’s
blood.” This dialogue exchange between Engi-
neer Giovanni Nosferatu (Adolfo Celi) and his
employee Alberto Valle (Giuliano Disperati)
sums up the allegorical significance of Corrado
Farina’s feature film debut, an original and
thought-provoking variation on the Dracula
myth. Fresh from his experience as assistant di-
rector in Nardo Bonomi’s unreleased psycho-
logical oddity Sortilegio, starring Erna Schurer
and Marco Ferreri, Farina drew from his love
for Gothic and vampire movies, as well as from
his experience as copywriter at the prestigious
Studio Testa, where he had worked from 163 to
168, shooting TV advertisements.
Farina (13–2016) had been struck as he
reached adulthood by a couple of horror films,
Riccardo Freda’s I vampiri (157) and Terence
Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (158)—two radically
different interpretations of the vampire myth—
which pushed him to make a Gothic movie on
his own: the result was his second short film,
one of a number Farina directed between 158
and 163, the 8mm horror parody Il figlio di
Dracula (160), that amiably spoofed the genre.
After the end of his working experience with the
Studio Testa, Farina moved to Rome and started
working on his feature film debut.
When …Hanno cambiato faccia started to
take shape 168 was over, and Italy was in full
turmoil: students protests, workers’ strikes, the
“Hot Autumn” that would lead to a new legal
discipline of hired labor (the Workers’ Statute,
in May 170). Farina’s idea was to adapt the con-
cept of vampirism to the times: if I vampiri cen-
tered on a member of the élite, an aristocrat,
who drained young women’s blood to keep her
beauty, here the vampire exploits the workers
and enslaves the consumers through advertising
and occult persuasion. Moreover, Farina and
co-scriptwriter Giulio Berruti were heavily in-
fluenced by the writings of the German philoso-
pher Herbert Marcuse, whose 164 book One-
Dimensional Man, a critic of both contemporary
capitalism as well as Communist Russia, would
provide the film’s thesis—consumerism as a
form of social control—and its final epigraph:
“Terror, today, is called technology.”
The script, at least in the first act, para-
phrases Dracula with a witty, clever spirit that
results in the reinvention of the novel’s staples.
The story is set in present-day Turin, at a car
factory which blatantly stands in for FIAT (then
owned by the Agnelli family and with Giovanni
Agnelli as chairman), and follows the protago-
nist’s journey (by car, of course) to the vampire’s
castle, which here becomes a luxurious villa in
the Alps.
Farina and Berruti inject some nice atmos-
pheric details (such as Alberto’s stop at a remote
mountain village whose inhabitants are scared
by the mere pronunciation of the name Nosfer-
atu) and come up with plenty of visual and the-
matic ideas. The opening scenes bring to mind
some of Dino Buzzati’s short stories (see Al-
berto’s ascension from his mediocre office on
the 10th floor to the president’s office on the 20th
floor); once at Nosferatu’s mansion, Valle finds
himself surrounded by aural advertisements that
keep popping up at every place and moment,
even when he is taking a shower (an idea re-
cently explored in the Fifteen Million Merits
episode of Charlie Brooker’s brilliant TV series
Black Mirror); the dinner sequence stands out
as a humorous variation on Harker’s dinner at
the Dracula castle, as Alberto is served homog-
enized, flavorless, decidedly unappetizing baby-
like food, not dissimilar to the one eaten by the
astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey (168). “The
stimulus provided by the taste and smell, like
the sexual ones, results in a pleasure for its own
sake, that is a useless waste of energy,” Nosferatu
explains, adding that “productive energy is too
 1971: …Hanno 31

precious to run the risk of wasting

it.” The film’s most impressive in-
vention, however, is the sight of the
Fiat 500 cars patrolling the villa like
guard dogs, a modernized version
of the “children of the night” that
roar instead of howling.
Like I vampiri’s Duchess Du
Grand, Nosferatu has no fangs, but
his methods of vampirization go
way beyond sucking people’s blood.
Valle finds out not only that the En-
gineer actually has the whole élite
(the Church, the Police, the Army,
the Government) in his power, but
that his own life has been pro-
grammed since birth, like that of
every other worker/consumer.
In his unequal struggle against
the vampire, Alberto is confronted
with two female types, apparently
poles apart: the free-living, noncon-
formist Laura, a bare-breasted hip-
pie who claims to be against the sys-
tem, and Nosferatu’s enigmatic,
androgynous secretary Corinna,
whose professional attitude does
not exclude a willingness to engage
in sex with the guests as part of her
duties. Like many other male heroes
in Italian Gothic, Valle is ultimately
weak: he feebly tries to rebel, but Italian poster for …Hanno cambiato faccia (1971).
eventually discovers there is no use
to it. Revolution, and violent opposition—ex- Godard (a bearded man babbles slogans on Rev-
emplified by him shooting Nosferatu—result in olution), Fellini (an elderly clown plays a tuba
a brief, apparent victory, before Power takes on upon a hill and meets his parents), and erotic
a new shape and face. cinema (a debauched Sadean libertine tortures
For all its lively approach to the matter, and whips a couple of female slaves), even in-
…Hanno cambiato faccia stagnates and sags clude a cameo by Farina himself, as a scientist
halfway through: the overtly didactic discourse in white coat who explains the scientific benefits
on consumerism, media manipulation and the of the synthetic drug. The segment is occasion-
sheep-like tendencies of the public is a bit naive ally amusing, but ultimately overlong and
and predictable, and the film becomes repetitive overindulgent.
and verbose in its relentless socio-political The director was rather dismissive toward
agenda, at the expense of the plot. An example the result: “Had it been made with a bigger
is the scene of Nosferatu’s reunion with his em- budget and means, it might have been a cute
ployees—itself a nod to the vampire ball in The little thing … it is sad to see it today, as it is ba-
Fearless Vampire Killers (167)—which explores sically a conceptual movie.”1 The shoestring
Farina’s love/hate relationship with his own past budget is painfully obvious at times: according
as a copywriter, as the Engineer envisions a trio to Farina, the film—produced via a cooperative
of fake b&w commercial TV spots commis- by the director and some friends—cost only 50
sioned to a bespectacled, nervous-looking, million lire.2 It was shot in and around Turin
overly pretentious director, to advertise his new and in the Lanzo Valleys, in the Piedmont Alps,
product, LSD. The ads, spoofing respectively from December 170 to February 171, and
32 1971: Lady
Farina recalled that a line of dialogue was added
specifically to try and make up for the blatant
contrast between the exterior of Nosferatu’s villa
and its interiors: “Since we did not have any
money, we filmed the outdoor scenes at some
friends’ villa outside Turin, whereas the interiors
were shot at another villa, always in Turin: they
have nothing to do with each other, since the in-
side is modern whereas the outside is 18th cen-
tury! (laughs) At a certain point, there’s a line
that we added just to save face, as Giuliano [Dis-
perati] asks, ‘Why is this villa so old outside and
so modern inside?’ and Geraldine [Hooper]
replies, ‘We don’t make any difference between
the present and the past!’ (laughs).”3
The cast was assembled with similar crite-
ria: Giuliano Disperati, the lead, had done a few
interesting films such as Piero Livi’s bandit yarn
Pelle di bandito (16), and the next year he
would even appear in Georges Lautner’s Il était
une fois un flic (172), alongside such popular
names as Alain Delon, Michel Constantin and
Mireille Darc. However, his following career was
hardly noteworthy: he later changed his sur-
name to Esperati, since, according to Farina,
“the word Disperati [author’s note: meaning
‘desperate’ in Italian] seemed a bit ominous…”4
The weird-looking Geraldine Hooper had ap-
peared in Sortilegio and Il delitto del diavolo,
whereas Francesca Modigliani (actually a pseu-
donym: the director did not recall her true
name) was a friend of Disperati’s: “We needed
an easy, nice person, someone who didn’t mind
displaying her breasts on film,” 5 Farina com-
mented ironically.
…Hanno cambiato faccia was given a
V.M.18 rating, officially “for the scenes of sadism
and eroticism” but more likely for its anti–Cap-
italist message; the rating was dropped to a
V.M.14 only in 2011 after some minor cuts. It was
even selected at the Locarno Film Festival, and
was well-received by critics, but performed
poorly at the box-office; over the years, it gath-
ered a growing cult following in its home coun-
try. It was released on DVD in the States in 2014
as They’ve Changed Faces, with a cover that made
it look like a poliziottesco—an understandable
attempt at commercializing such a unique film
to an unsuspecting audience.
Farina went on to make Baba Yaga (173),
an adaptation of Guido Crepax’s comic Valen-
tina starring Isabelle De Funès and Carroll
Baker, which had a troubled development and
turned out a box-office disappointment.6 It re-
mained his last film to date. Farina returned to
television and advertising, before embarking in
a career as a novelist in the 10s. He died in
June 2016.
NoTeS
1. Roberto Curti and Davide Pulici, Corrado Farina
(Milan: Nocturno Libri, 2000), 135.
2. Piero Perona, “I vampiri ‘girano’ sulla collina
torinese,” La Stampa, December 2, 170. Per [Piero Per-
ona], “Vampiri in cooperativa,” La Stampa, December 31,
170.
3. Curti and Pulici, Corrado Farina, 13.
4. Ibid., 138.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. For an in-depth analysis of Baba Yaga, see Curti, Di-
abolika, 136–141.
Lady Frankenstein (Lady Frankenstein)
D: Mel Welles [Ira Meltcher]. S: Dick Ran-
dall; SC: Edward Di Lorenzo [and Mel Welles,
uncredited] [Italian version: S and SC: Umberto
Borsato, Egidio Celso, Aureliano Luppi]; DOP:
Richard Pallotin [Riccardo Pallottini] (Eastman-
color, Metrocolor); M: Alessandro Alessandroni;
E: Cleo Converse [Cleofe Conversi]; ArtD: Fran-
cis Mellon; CO: Maurice Nichols [Marisa
Crimi]; MU: Timothy Parson; Hair: Cass Whyte;
AD: Joseph Pollin [Giuseppe Pollini], Anthony
Bishop [Antonio Casale]; C: Serge Martin [Ser-
gio Martinelli]; AC: Charles Taffan [Carlo
Tafani]; SO: Francis Grappian [Francesco Grop-
pioni]; B: Corey Volpe; SE: Charles Ramboldt
[Carlo Rambaldi]; SS: Farley Merrel. Cast:
Joseph Cotten (Baron Frankenstein), Rosalba
Neri (Tania Frankenstein), Paul Muller (Dr.
Charles Marshall), Peter Whiteman [Riccardo
Pizzuti] (The Creature), Herbert Fux (Tom
Lynch), Mickey Hargitay (Captain Harris), Re-
nata Kashe [Renate Kasché] (Julia Stark), Lor-
enzo Terzon (Peter, Harris’ assistant), Ada Pom-
etti (Farmer’s wife), Andrea Aureli (Jim Turner),
Gianni [John Louis] Loffredo (John), Pietro
[Petar] Martinovitch (Jack Morgan), Herb An-
dress (Harry, the Hunchback), Gualtiero Rispoli
(Simon Burke), Adam Welles (Child); uncred-
ited: Marino Masé (Thomas Stark), Romano
Puppo (Zack). PROD: Mel Welles for Condor
International Productions, Alexia Film (Rome);
PM: Egidio Celso; EP: Harry C. Cushing, Hum-
bert Case [Umberto Borsato], Jules Kenton
[Gioele Centanni]; PM: Frank Fly [Ferruccio
Mosca]; PA: August Dolfis [Augusto Dolfi]; PSe:
Tony Pitt [Antonio Pittalis]. Country: Italy.
Filmed at Incir-De Paolis (Rome). Running time:
 1971: Lady 33

 minutes (m. 2700). Visa n. 5112 (10.18.171); cardo Freda pics. Occasionally Welles—who had
Rating: V.M.18. Release dates: 10.22.171 (Italy); directed his first film in 157—returned behind
10.173 (U.S.A.); Distribution: Alexia (Italy); the camera, though: Un affare tranquillo (164),
New World Pictures (U.S.A.). Domestic gross: a prudish comedy about a brothel based in a
13,683,000 lire. Also known as: A Filha de small fishing village, inspired by Maupassant’s
Frankenstein; A Mulher de Frankenstein (Brazil); story La Maison Tellier and featuring Frank
Furankenshutain: musume no fukushu (Japan). Wolff, was banned by Italian censors; La isla de
Baron Frankenstein and his assistant, Dr. la muerte (167), starring Cameron Mitchell and
Charles Marshall, are working on the creation of filmed in Spain, caused some confusion in fol-
an artificial man. With the help of a slimy body lowing years, as a number of sources kept iden-
snatcher named Lynch and his aides, they get hold tifying Welles as a pseudonym of the German
of the body of a hanged criminal, Jack Morgan. producer, Ernst Ritter von Theumer. Another
Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s daughter Tania—fresh such venture was Lady Frankenstein, a film
with a surgery degree and a fervent supporter of which—like Warren Kiefer’s Il castello dei morti
her father’s theories—has arrived at the castle. vivi (164)—took shape in Italy and was granted
The baron and Marshall transplant Morgan’s Italian nationality, but was actually the brain-
brain into the creature: the experiment succeeds, child of foreigners.
but the brain is damaged. The result
is a creature with criminal instincts
and extraordinary strength; after
murdering the baron, the monster
flees and runs amok across the
countryside. Tania convinces Mar-
shall, who is in love with her, that
the only way to stop the monster is
to create another creature able to de-
stroy it. To do so, Tania plans to
transplant Charles’ brain into the
body of a handsome and strong but
retarded servant named Thomas, to
whom she is attracted. Meanwhile,
Captain Harris, who leads the in-
vestigations and is in love with
Thomas’ sister Julia, becomes very
suspicious of what is going on at the
Frankenstein castle. Eventually,
Thomas faces the monster in a
deadly struggle, and gets the better
of him. Tania and her creature con-
summate their passion while an
angry mob sets fire to the castle…
Having relocated to Rome in
161, after his work with Roger
Corman on such AIP cult epics as
The Undead (157) and The Little
Shop of Horrors (160), actor/direc-
tor Mel Welles was one of the many
Americans who enjoyed a first-
hand taste of the Dolce Vita and
the Golden Age of Cinecittà. In
The outstanding Italian poster for Lady Frankenstein (1971),
Italy, he soon made himself a living enhanced the Gothic content, depicting Rosalba Neri’s character
as voice actor, dubbing foreign lan- as a typical damsel in distress. The manor in the background is
guage films into English, including clearly modeled upon Castle Chigi at Castel Fusano. Art by Lu-
a number of Mario Bava and Ric- ciano Crovato.
34 1971: Lady
As Welles himself recalled, he had been ap-
proached by a rich American expatriate and
Vanderbilt scion by the name of Harry Cooke
Cushing IV (124–2000), who wanted to pro-
duce a movie starring Rosalba Neri, with whom
he was madly in love. A sight for sore eyes, Neri
(born in 13) was one of Italy’s most glamorous
starlets; she had appeared in a number of genre
films (mostly sword-and-sandal and spy flicks)
since the 160s, and her willingness to appear
nude had made her one of the country’s erotic
bombshells, after her roles in such works as Top
Sensation (168, Ottavio Alessi) and Jesús
Franco’s Marquis De Sade’s Justine (168) and 99
Women (168). According to Welles, Cushing
was literally pursuing the actress. “She was turn-
ing him down, everywhere. She couldn’t actually
stand him; Harry was actually quite good-
looking, but he was a pain in the neck because
he had never lived in the real world—and that’s
what she resented about him. He never worked
a day in his life. So here, in my lap, he dropped
the script and the money to do it. What a wind-
fall!” 1
On his part, Welles jumped at the oppor-
tunity. “In this business, when somebody comes
and says, ‘Here’s the money, let’s go do a film,’
that is the greatest thing that can happen to you.
I said okay, and I worked for a few months
trying to put it together, and discovered he did
not own the script.”2 The person who owned
Lady Dracula—a story about a vampire who
worked in a funeral parlor—was former peplum
actor Brad Harris, who wanted to produce the
movie by himself.3 So, Welles had to knock out
an entirely new script with his friend Edward
Di Lorenzo (better known for his work on tele-
vision, on such series as The Wild Wild West,
Space: 1999, and Miami Vice) in three weeks:
Welles and Di Lorenzo possibly took inspiration
from the comic book story For the Love of
Frankenstein, penned by Bill Warren with
pencils and inks by Jack Sparling, and published
in the issue #4 (April 16) of Vampirella mag-
azine.
Welles then teamed up with the Rome-
based producer Dick Randall to assemble a cast
that included Joseph Cotten and Jayne Mans-
field’s widower Mickey Hargitay: around the
same time the former “Crimson Executioner”
was to star in a pair of Renato Polselli’s wildest
concoctions, Delirio caldo and Riti, magie nere
e segrete orge nel Trecento…; after completing
the script, Welles found out that there were
other issues to take care of. “I came back and
made a deal with Skip Steloff of Heritage Films,
because Harry gave me only so much money;
the rest was to come in a letter of credit from
Skip. I got the letter of credit and it had a few …
‘tricky dicky’ things in it, so it wasn’t discount-
able and I was stuck again. By this time, I had
126 people working and the studio booked.”4
Suddenly Welles was short $0,000. What to do
next? “I got on a plane, flew to California, and
went to see Roger Corman.”5
It was Corman’s company New World Pic-
tures that secured the necessary money to make
the movie, and Corman got the rights to the film
in America, in perpetuity. Filming finally started
on March 1, 171. However, the small budget—
under $200,000—was not enough to secure
Joseph Cotten’s services for a long time: as Dick
Randall told Variety, “we rewrote his part, cut-
ting it to two weeks. In the final version, the
monster turns on his creator and crushes him
to death in the fifth reel. Either that or get a less
expensive star.”6
Productively speaking, then, Lady Franken-
stein had little Italian to it, besides the location:
a number of indoor scenes were filmed at the
De Paolis Studios in Rome, which had all sorts
of set pieces that would be re-used from film to
film (the lab props would turn up again in Flesh
for Frankenstein), whereas the castle scenes and
all those featuring Mickey Hargitay (dubbed by
Rod Dana, in order to make up for the actor’s
thick Hungarian accent) were shot at the Pic-
colomini castle in Balsorano, the home of so
many Gothic horror pics of the period. On top
of that, the movie was listed on the Public Cin-
ematographic Register as directed by Aureliano
Luppi.
Overall, the story is even more detached
from the canons of Italian Gothic, and under-
standably so: the film was written by foreigners
and devised for the overseas market, and its nar-
rative models are sensibly different. Lady Frank-
enstein takes inspiration from Hammer’s pro-
ductions, with an encephalitic creature that
recalls the one seen in The Horror of Franken-
stein (170, Jimmy Sangster) and a major em-
phasis on the surgical details of the experiments.
What is more, it also draws from the most
shameful Victorian chronicles: the despicable
Tom Lynch (Herbert Fux, dubbed by Welles
himself in the English language version) is mod-
eled on the notorious Burke and Hare as seen
in John Gilling’s The Flesh and the Fiends (160),
 1971: Lady
and on the “resurrection man” played by Boris
Karloff in The Body Snatcher (145)—characters
that have little or nothing to do with Italian
Gothic. For the rest, Welles and Di Lorenzo
threw in a little bit of mumbo jumbo (as the di-
rector stressed, “The film … satisfied a number
of my own pet peeves about horror films as I
was growing up. One was that those films never
showed you where the light came from when
they performed these very delicate brain oper-
ations. Secondly, they never told you where the
electricity was coming from to make all those
little electric sparks and ladders going up and
down in laboratories”7), and had some fun with
the characterizations. Frankenstein comes off as
a compassionate liberal who is against the death
penalty (which he labels “legalized murder”),
whereas the investigator (a perpetually grinning
Hargitay) is a prudish type who is clearly dis-
gusted at Lynch’s lack of morals.
Nevertheless, Lady Frankenstein imple-
ments a reversal of gender, carving out a leading
role for the female presence, a fact that therefore
links the movie in some way to the typical
themes of Italian horror. Welles later claimed
that he wanted to develop feminist themes, a
purpose which results in Neri delivering such
goofy lines as “I may be a woman, but I’m pri-
marily a doctor,” and in a scene between Tania
and Tom Lynch, where she contemptuously re-
jects his proposal to spend the night together in
payment for his services, which has Herbert Fux
utter a line that curiously recalls one by Claudia
Cardinale in Leone’s C’era una volta il West
(168): “After you can take a bath and everything
will be brand new again.”
Tania comes out as the umpteenth figure
of woman/witch, dominating and lethal. Her
mature and unmanly assistant Charles (Paul
Muller) is so smitten by her (a relationship, one
suspects, echoing the one between Harry Cush-
ing and Neri) that he willingly becomes her
guinea pig, allowing Tania to transplant his
brain into the body of the retarded but hand-
some and virile servant Thomas (“Except for the
brain, he is completely normal,” she observes),
so as to finally love her carnally. Thomas is
smothered in bed during lovemaking, and in
turn the creature strangles Tania while they are
having sex—one presumes, since Thomas’ in-
stinct has prevailed over Charles’ infatuation.
Or perhaps it is just a punishment for Tania’s
hubris?
Ultimately, despite such predictable dia-
35
logue exchanges as “But to create life …
shouldn’t man leave that to God?” “Here on
Earth man is God,” the Shelleyan theodicy be-
comes, more concretely, a matter of sexual ap-
petite, and the transplant of a brain from one
body to another is a way to overcome impo-
tence: indeed, just a couple of years earlier Steno
had directed Il trapianto (16), a satire of Pro-
fessor Barnard’s surgical exploits, transplanted
into the phallocentric universe of the Latin male.
No wonder, then, that the climax features not
only the inevitable purifying fire of the scientist’s
lab, but the cathartic and lethal coitus between
Frankenstein’s daughter and her creature / part-
ner / sex object. The director claimed that “his-
torically … it was the first Gothic horror film
with an explicit sex scene in it,”8which is debat-
able. However, the movie indeed predates Flesh
for Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein for its
concept of the monster as a sex object.
When asked about Lady Frankenstein, Ros-
alba Neri recalled: “For a number of reasons—
not sentimental ones, anyway—I used to go
around with the director, Mel Welles, his wife
and children. Frankly, I don’t think of him as a
great director; on that film there was a talented
cameraman, Riccardo Pallottini, who did every-
thing by himself—those nice lightings, for in-
stance … he used to place the camera, then he
waited for the director; he also solved technical
problems and so forth.” Indeed, the lab scenes
are suitably atmospheric, thanks also to Alessan-
dro Alessandroni’s dramatic score.
Welles was adamant that he wanted to
achieve realistic effects, even at the cost of taking
care of them himself, with a resourcefulness that
had something Italian in it: “In Spain and Italy,
at that time, you couldn’t find a good special ef-
fects man anywhere. The guys I used on Lady
Frankenstein, there was one thing I wanted them
to have ready…. So I kept after them about this
one shot, where Rosalba was supposed to put
the probes into the large beaker with the brain
in it, causing all kinds of sparks to fly out. I kept
telling them, ‘We’re shooting it on Thursday
morning. At 8:00 Thursday morning, I want
everything ready.’ On Wednesday night, they
came to me and said, ‘You can’t shoot it tomor-
row morning.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because we need
more time to get ready, and we need $300 more
to get all the stuff.’ I said, ‘Forget about it.’ I went
out to the government-controlled tobacco store
over there…. I bought half a dozen pinwheels
and I came into the set and told them, ‘Here’s
36 1971: Lady
Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten, left) and Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller) performing a gruesome oper-
ation in a scene from Lady Frankenstein.
what you do: you rig these on a bar across a
beaker within the beaker, a smaller beaker inside
the larger one … and you fix this with a spark-
starter and a blip-switch.’ The effect cost $1.80
and it worked fine!”10
The gore effects by Carlo Rambaldi are
rather crude, and most of the outdoor sequences
run from poor to embarrassing; we follow the
monster (“Peter Whiteman” a.k.a. stuntman Ric-
cardo Pizzuti, the bad guy in many Bud Spencer
and Terence Hill flicks) wandering in the Lazio
countryside and stumbling on hapless victims—
mostly lovemaking couples: a laughable moment
has him throw a supposedly dead (and naked)
girl into a river, which results in the poor actress
desperately trying not to drown for real. On top
of that, the subplot featuring Hargitay and Re-
nate Kasché is merely filler. There is little doubt
that what Welles really cared about was the tit-
ular lady. After all, that was why he was being
paid for.
Predictably, the film was given a V.M.18 rat-
ing by the board of censors, because of the
“many erotic scenes.” When it was released, in
October 171, to mediocre box-office, Welles had
already left Italy to South-East Asia and then to
Australia. He would return to the U.S.A. only in
176. Lady Frankenstein came out in the States
in March 172, five months after its Italian re-
lease: New World had come up with a truly
memorable tagline: “Only the monster could
satisfy her strange desires!” accompanying a
poster featuring a buxom (and blonde!) Lady
Frankenstein, in a tight yellow dress, standing
beside a semi-naked monster lying on the op-
erating table, and apparently well-endowed be-
neath the sheets.
For the U.S. version, Corman cut over ten
minutes, shortening or eliminating no less than
twenty scenes. The cuts affected not the nudity
and gore, but the expository bits, mostly includ-
ing Captain Harris’ investigations, and a scene
between Tania and Charles where the latter ex-
plains to her how the laboratory equipment
works, and the names of pioneer experimentors
with electromagnetics, Alessandro Volta and
Luigi Galvani. Commenting on Corman’s cuts,
Welles observed that “they never … seemed to
 1971: Nella stretta
have any real logic. He never believed in taking
any time to develop insights, character traits,
subtleties. Since he bailed me out of a failed
deal with Skip Steloff, he had all rights to do
whatever he wanted. Most Cormanities suffered
the major frustration of Roger’s slashing of
pictures because they took ‘too much time to
get to the action’ or were ‘too slow,’ or what-
ever.”11
Incidentally, the credits for the American
version have the Italian cast and crew members
concealed under English pseudonyms: most real
names are identified for the first time in this vol-
ume.
NoTeS
1. Tim Lucas, “Father of Lady Frankenstein. Mel Welles
interviewed,” Video Watchdog #78, December 2001, 3.
2. Louis Paul, Tales from the Cult Film Trenches (Jef-
ferson, NC: McFarland, 2008) 272.
3. Lady Dracula was eventually made in West
Germany 177. It was directed by Franz Josef Gottlieb, and
starring Harris and Evelyne Kraft, with Stephen Boyd in
his last film role.
4. Lucas, “Father of Lady Frankenstein,” 3.
5. Paul, Tales from the Cult Film Trenches, 272.
6. Christopher T. Koetting, Mind Warp: The Fantastic
True Story of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (Parkville,
MD: Midnight Marquee Press, 2013), 33.
7. Ibid., 34.
8. Tom Weaver, Interviews with B Science Fiction and
Horror Movie Makers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 188),
34.
9. Gomarasca and Pulici, 99 donne, 267.
10. Lucas, “Father of Lady Frankenstein,” 40–41.
11. Ibid., 41.
Nella stretta morsa del ragno (Web of the
Spider)
D: Anthony M. Dawson [Antonio Mar-
gheriti]. S: Bruno Corbucci, Giovanni Grimaldi;
SC: Bruno Corbucci, Gianni Grimaldi, Antonio
Margheriti, Giovanni Addessi; DOP: Sandro
Mancori, Memmo [Guglielmo] Mancori (Tech-
nochrome, Techniscope); M: Riz Ortolani (Ed.
R.C.A.); E: Otello Colangeli; PD: Ottavio Scotti;
CO: Mario Giorsi; SD: Camillo Del Signore; C:
Mario Sbrenna, Emilio Varriano; AC: Renato
Palmieri, Remo Crisanti; AD: Ignazio Dolce;
MU: Maria Luisa Tilli; AMU: Angelo Malan-
trucco; Hair: Nicla Pertosa Palombi; ACO:
Roberto Ranucci; W: Antonietta Maggi; AE:
Giuliana Colangeli; SO: Pietro Spadoni; Mix:
Sandro Occhetti, Fausto Achilli; SE: Cataldo
Galliano; SP: Mauro Paravano; SS: Eva Koltay.
Cast: Anthony Franciosa [Anthony Papaleo]
37
(Alan Foster), Michèle Mercier (Elisabeth Black-
wood), Klaus Kinski (Edgar Allan Poe), Peter
Carsten (Dr. Carmus), Silvano Tranquilli
(William Perkins), Karin Field (Julia), Raf Bal-
dassarre (Herbert), Irina Malewa [Maleeva]
(Elsie Perkins), Enrico Osterman (Lord Thomas
Blackwood), Marco Bonetti (Maurice), Vittorio
Fanfoni (Guest at the Inn), Carla Mancini.
PROD: Giovanni Addessi for Produzione D.C.7
(Rome), Paris-Cannes Production (Paris),
Terra-Filmkunst (Berlin); PM: Ennio Di Meo;
GM: Franco Caruso; PS: Salvatore Di Rosa; PA:
Furio Addessi; PSe: Dino Di Dionisio; ADM: Sil-
vestro De Rossi. Country: Italy / France / West
Germany. Filmed at De Laurentiis Studios
(Rome). Running time: 110 minutes (m. 3005).
Visa n. 58787 (8.20.171); Rating: V.M.18/V.M.14.
Release date: 8.26.171; Distribution: Panta Cin-
ematografica. Domestic gross: 232,442,000 lire.
Also known as: Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens
(West Germany, 3.16.172); La horrible noche del
baile de los muertos (Spain); Vampyrernas slott
(Sweden, 8.7.172); Skrækuhyret slår til (Den-
mark, 1.15.173); Dracula in het kasteel der ver-
schrikking (Netherlands, 7.8.173); Les fantômes
de Hurlevent (France, 2.8.178).
Alan Foster, an American journalist in En-
gland, challenges Edgar Allan Poe on the authen-
ticity of his stories, which leads to him accepting
a bet from Lord Blackwood to spend the night in
the family’s haunted castle on All Souls Eve.
Ghosts of the murdered inhabitants appear to Fos-
ter throughout the night, re-enacting the events
that lead to their deaths. It transpires that they
feed on the blood of the living visitors in order to
maintain their existence. Blackwood’s sister Elis-
abeth is also one of the ghosts, as she had been
murdered by her husband. Elisabeth and Alan
fall in love, and the woman tries to save his life
from the bloodthirsty undead…
What makes a film director remake his
own work? When asked by François Truffaut
about the difference between the 134 and the
156 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much,
Alfred Hitchcock famously answered: “Let’s say
that the first version is the work of a talented
amateur and the second was made by a profes-
sional,”1 implicitly focusing on the technical as-
pects of the movie and on the more mature han-
dling of storytelling. On the other hand, to
someone like Jess Franco, reworking the same
story over and over again was primarily a way
of reinventing his own cinema, based on the
continual recombination of characters, stories
38 1971: Nella stretta
and events, but also, and quite often, an attempt
at retrieving those ideas that had been dropped
due to budgetary or censorship-related reasons,
or downright altered by producers’ cuts or reed-
its. As for Antonio Margheriti, he was adamant.
“I’m a slave for my producers. A prostitute. If it’s
for money, my answer is ‘yes’; and of course, for
the fun of it all…. If the money’s there, I’m
there.” 2 And this is what happened with Nella
stretta morsa del ragno, a color remake of his
164 black-and-white Gothic horror classic
Danza macabra (a.k.a. Castle of Blood) as he ex-
plicitly acknowledged. “I did it for the money,
and also because it was for the same producer
as Castle of Blood, who also did And God Said
to Cain… He mentioned what a pity it was that
Castle of Blood had not been a big success, be-
cause he loved it so much. I agreed—it is a very
good film, but it didn’t do well at the box-office
at all—so he said, ‘Why don’t we try it again with
a bigger budget and some popular actors?’”3
Nella stretta morsa del ragno was the direc-
tor’s fifth proper Gothic horror film, following
The Unnaturals—Contronatura, even though
Margheriti’s second Western, E Dio disse a
Caino… (170) had a distinct Gothic flair, and
was yet another German co-production, as his
previous three works. The producer, Giovanni
Addessi, was probably aiming primarily at that
market, given the presence of Klaus Kinski in a
small but pivotal role, as none other but Edgar
Allan Poe. The international cast featured An-
thony Franciosa (who was enjoying a revamped
popularity thanks to the TV series The Name of
the Game) and Michèle Mercier, the star of five
Angélique films from 164 to 168. Addessi in-
vested good money in building the sets, which,
in addition to the use of color (with Tech-
nochrome cinematography by Sandro and
Guglielmo Mancori) and to Riz Ortolani’s more
contemporary-sounding score, gave the result a
lush, rich look.
And yet, Margheriti blamed the resulting
failure on the very use of color, which “created
problems and ruined the whole film for me. At
that time, Technicolor in Rome had abandoned
the three-strip printing process; they started
printing directly from the negative, as all the
other labs did. For that reason, most of the film’s
special effects were never used as we planned.
Now, you can see only very simple tricks they
did with one reversal, and that’s it. You see some-
body walking and—Poof!—he has disappeared!
What can be seen is only the beginning and the
end of the planned scene; in between there
should have been a transformation with very
psychedelic effects and opticals. As it stands, he
runs and he’s gone. Great, isn’t it—and very
spectacular for its time! (laughs) We had to cut
all the good stuff out. It was really painful for
me to do that.”4
In addition to that, the director underlined
that color ultimately detracted from the overall
mood and tension, pointing out that “even
today, I’m still convinced that the only way of
making a really scary horror film, with that kind
of disturbing atmosphere and suspense, is to
shoot in B&W. The only other solution would
be to get a really outstanding director of pho-
tography and make a color film with a mono-
chromatic look. Color is important for costume
pictures, but it easily distracts. It takes the at-
tention away and a film can easily drown in
wrongly chosen colors, which is the case with a
lot of modern horror films.”5 A surprising state-
ment, given the exquisite use of color in Con-
tronatura. However, the issues with Nella stretta
morsa del ragno go way beyond the use of color.
Margheriti and Addessi added minimal
touches to the original screenplay: most events
and dialogue from Danza macabra were re-
prised verbatim—from the “living” portrait to
Elisabeth’s infamous line “I am a woman, a real
woman!” in response to Julia’s lesbian advance,
from the nude scene of the bride about to be
vampirized by Julia up to the very same camera
movement that ends the film. Still, even though
they are stylishly shot, the few additions—such
as the long ball scene, or Franciosa’s hallucinated
solo in the graveyard—do not improve upon the
story, but only serve to push up the running
time to one hour and fifty minutes, almost half
an hour more than the original. As a conse-
quence, the movie drags down as it goes along.
As expected, Margheriti emphasizes Poe’s
role in the story, leaning on Kinski’s feverish and
charismatic take on the tormented writer, and
concocts a totally new opening sequence that
visualizes part of the short story Berenice, which
Poe is narrating to his attentive audience in the
tavern. The result, with Kinski wandering
around a damp, gloomy crypt among spider
webs and gravestones, and doing what he does
best—conveying strong emotions with only his
body and face language, and the immense power
of his magnetic stare—is admittedly impressive,
but has a singular, self-sabotaging side effect.
By staging and giving shape to Poe’s words,
 1971: Nella stretta 3

the director whittles away at the previous film’s Foster and Elisabeth’s night of love (which in-
power—the suggestion of what was not shown cludes the same line from the first film, “You
(or was impossible to show)—and solves its am- give me back my life…. I live only when I love”)
biguity right from the start. In Danza macabra, is rendered via a circular panning shot that ends
Poe drew his evocative status by being the con- on a fireplace, as if Margheriti was paying hom-
scious witness of a trascendent reality whose age to a famous scene in Claude Autant-Lara’s
weight ended up crushing him, thus giving sig- Le Diable au corps (147). However, the sapphic
nificance to his line about not being a narrator, torments that drive Julia are not too convinc-
but a reporter. In Nella stretta morsa del ragno, ing, especially when compared with the tor-
the lunatic, incontrollable Kinski is no more a mented sexuality of Marianne Koch’s character
reporter, despite what he says of himself (“I did in Contronatura. What is more, Mercier—look-
not know whether I’d written another story or I ing quite older than her character and saddled
had really lived that hallucinating adventure”), with a bad copper-colored wig—does not have
but, once again, a narrator. This way, he becomes an ounce of Barbara Steele’s unsettling charm,
too strong a counterpoint to the ghosts of Black- and Karin Field (who would later appear in Jess
wood House.
Significantly, Poe is no longer a neutral wit-
ness of the bet between Lord Thomas Black-
wood and Foster, but the direct cause of the
journalist’s perdition: it is he who insists that
Foster spend the night in the haunted castle, be-
cause, he says, “each story needs its own protag-
onist,” and in doing so he marks the man’s des-
tiny. In short, in Danza macabra, Poe was
emotionally crushed by the stories he wrote, and
his torment came from the fact that his only way
to survive the horrors he had witnessed was
writing them down, but with the knowledge that
no one would ever believe him—like a Cas-
sandra of sorts. In Nella stretta morsa del ragno,
Poe creates the conditions for these horrors to
happen.
On the other hand, Lord Blackwood be-
comes a forgettable character—not the least be-
cause Enrico Osterman does not have an ounce
of Umberto Raho’s sinister aplomb in the role.
Margheriti and Addessi went so far in altering
the relationship between these two characters
that a line uttered by one of the spirits that in
the original film referred to Lord Thomas is
changed ad hoc: “Only Poe’s sick mind could
think of sending you here on the night of No-
vember 2.” The writer’s fame has spread among
the dead as well…
Surprisingly, given the fact that Margheriti
had already explored the blending of horror and
eroticism in his previous Gothic, Nella stretta
morsa del ragno is quite shy when it comes to
portraying the assorted passions that tie
together the living and the dead—which re-
sulted in a bad surprise for the makers when the
Italian board of censors initially gave the film a
V.M.18 rating (soon changed into a more apt Surrealist Italian locandina for Nella stretta morsa
V.M.14), as there is very little nudity in the film. del ragno (1971).
40 1971: La notte che Evelyn
Franco’s Les Démons) is singularly bland and
cold.
The other cast members are a mixed
bunch: Silvano Tranquilli (the only returning
cast member from Danza macabra, where he
was a fine Edgar Allan Poe) is good, but Raf Bal-
dassarre is miscast as the hulking, passionate
groom. The film’s best moments are those fea-
turing Carmus, who, as played by co-financer
Peter Carsten, is given a good deal of screen
time. The German version (fancifully titled
Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens, “Dracula in
the Castle of Secrets”) runs 12 minutes shorter
than the Italian one and features a different ed-
iting, including a scene where Julia seduces Her-
bert and convinces him to murder Elisabeth’s
husband, the act that will give way to the
macabre ronde that Alan Foster will witness
years later.
If Nella stretta morsa del ragno is not quite
convincing as a remake, its thematic links with
Contronatura—which can be detected from the
very opening image on a pool of water, the same
as in the 16 film—prove definitely more inter-
esting. Which brings us again to the film’s raison
d’être. It is as if Margheriti returned to the same
story to further investigate the central theme.
“Greed and the violence of passion are primitive
and absolute, and there is no innocence opposed
to them (if not as a remote potential at most…),”
Gothic film scholar Teo Mora observed, adding
that “their condemnation does not come from
the outside (that is, from the Christians’ God or
from the main good character) but from them-
selves, and it is an immediate consequence of
their existence and unwinding. What is more,
their strength is such that, far from being de-
feated … they overwhelm the innocent, or the
least guilty.”6 Here, just like Joachim Fuchs-
berger’s character in Contronatura, Foster is a
collateral damage of such a self-destructive fury.
In both films, as Mora notes, the ghost “ei-
ther does not act and limits itself to the role of
catalyst (as in Contronatura), so that its potential
material nature is neither assumed nor denied,
but becomes a purely secondary matter, whereas
its predominant quality is its providential nature;
or it manifests itself openly, at least for the
viewer, as an image, representing to our eyes a
returning past.”7 Speaking of Nella stretta morsa
del ragno, Mora attributes a decidedly epistemo-
logical connotation to the ghost’s ethical inter-
vention: “The protagonist (and the viewer) is
condemned for having witnessed the reality of
ghosts, that is the deep and hidden (according
to Freud) human reality … and for the very
same reason Poe-Kinski is condemned in the
first part of the film—not to death (and the hope
of redemption that comes with it) but to a limbo
of permanent horror.”8
With its existence, Nella stretta morsa del
ragno—a classically shot film, which administers
scarce scares and thrills, and is based essentially
on atmosphere—showed that the original
season of Gothic had ended and could not be
repeated: such a product could not compete
with the new paths taken by the horror genre in
the decade.
NoTeS
1. François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York:
Simon and Schuster (166) 2015), 4.
2. Peter Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild In-
terview,” Video Watchdog #28, May/June 15, 45.
3. Ibid., 46.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 45.
6. Teo Mora, “Per una definizione del film di fantasmi,”
Il Falcone Maltese #2, luglio 174, 27.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 28.
La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba
(The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave)
D: Emilio P. Miraglia. S: Massimo Felisatti,
Fabio Pittorru; SC: Massimo Felisatti, Fabio Pit-
torru, Emilio P. Miraglia; DOP: Gastone Di Gio-
vanni (Technicolor, Techniscope); M: Bruno
Nicolai; E: Romeo Ciatti; ArtD, CO: Lorenzo
Baraldi; MU: Marcello Di Paolo; Hair: Giusep-
pina Bovino; AD: Palmambrogio Molteni; C:
Fernando Gallandt; AE: Gabriele Ingafú; As-
stArtD: Marco Dentici; SO: Fiorenzo Magli; B:
Armando Jamota; Mix: Mario Morigi; SS: Pa-
trizia Zulini. Cast: Anthony Steffen [Antonio De
Teffé] (Lord Alan Cunningham), Marina Mal-
fatti (Gladys Cunningham), Rod Murdock
[Enzo Tarascio] (George Harriman), Giacomo
Rossi Stuart (Dr. Richard Timberlane), Umberto
Raho (Farley), Roberto Maldera (Albert), Joan
C. Davies (Aunt Agatha), Erika Blanc [Enrica
Bianchi Colombatto] (Susie), Ettore Bevilacqua
(Graveyard Caretaker), Brizio Montinaro, Maria
Teresa Tofano (Polly), Paola Natale. PROD: An-
tonio Sarno for Phoenix Cinematografica
(Rome), PSe: Alberto Passone. Country: Italy.
Filmed in Thiene, Sovizzo and Montegaldella
(Vicenza). Running time: 103 minutes (m. 2807).
Visa n. 58701 (8.12.171); Rating: V.M.18. Release
 1971: La notte che Evelyn 41

dates: 8.18.171 (Italy); 7.26.172 (U.S.A.); Dis- scripts, but a series of interesting TV mini-
tribution: Cineriz. Domestic gross: 446,573,000 series, Qui squadra mobile, and several crime
lire. Also known as: L’appel de la chair; Holo- novels with heavy social and political under-
causte pour une vierge (France; 5.3.173); Die tones, such as Violenza a Roma (174) and La
Grotte der vergessenen Leichen; Stumme Schreie madama (175), which were adapted for the big
(West Germany; 12.5.175). screen, albeit with debatable results.
Note: Brizio Montinaro and Paola Natale, La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba was
although credited, do not appear in the film. Felisatti and Pittorru’s second giallo script after
England. Released from a mental hospital the excellent Concerto per pistola solista (170,
run by his friend Dr. Richard Timberlane, but still Michele Lupo), an amusing take—from a story
haunted by the memory of his deceased wife, the by Sergio Donati—on the typical English-style
redhead Evelyn, Lord Alan Cunningham picks up murder mystery, with clever references to Leo
prostitutes whom he tortures and (apparently) Bruce’s classic novel Case for Three Detectives
murders in the dungeons of his decaying castle. (Gastone Moschin played a bumbling country
Following a hint from his cousin George Harri- cop modeled upon Sergeant Beef ). With La
man, he visits a nightclub where a redheaded notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba, the duo moved
stripper named Susie performs a risqué number, on along the same tracks, and concocted a pas-
invites her home and kills her. The encounter with tiche of classical mystery motifs and Gothic el-
the lovely Gladys seems to cure Cun-
ningham: the two get married and
move to Alan’s castle. There, however,
a series of strange occurrences seem to
suggest that Evelyn’s ghost has come
back from the grave: a series of mur-
ders take place, before a horrible
scheme against Alan is revealed…
Even thought it owes part of its
notoriety among U.S. film fans to
being unfavorably mentioned (“One
imported Italian turkey”) in Stephen
King’s essay on the horror genre,
Danse Macabre,1 La notte che Evelyn
uscì dalla tomba is nevertheless an
interesting—if not really successful—
example of the hybridation between
the Gothic and the rising Argento-
esque giallo.
Scriptwriters Massimo Felisatti
and Fabio Pittorru were, together
with future film director Florestano
Vancini, among the leading figures
in the cultural life of the city of Fer-
rara in the 150s: their political com-
mitment resulted in the collaboration
to local left-wing newspapers and
magazines and, in the case of Pit-
torru, in the making of a documen-
tary (Uomini contro il Po) about the
frightening flood of the river Po,
which was adversely received by the
board of censors. In the 160s, both
writers moved to Rome, and started
working together: their output in- Lurid U.S. poster for the Gothic giallo, La notte che Evelyn uscì
cluded not only a good number of dalla tomba (1971).
42 1971: La notte che Evelyn
ements, this time amply imbibed with the in-
gredients in fashion at the time—a black gloved-
killer and ample doses of sex.
Overall, the result is not quite memorable,
but enjoyable all the same. The Argento connec-
tion is actually very thin, as the movie works
primarily as an old-style whodunit revolving
around the typical “drive someone crazy”
scheme, and in obedience with the spirit of the
time the damsel in distress turns out to be not
quite innocent as she seems. The ample resort
to Gothic staples (the castle, a crypt, a séance, a
vengeful ghost evoked by a portrait that haunts
the protagonist) is spiced with nods to Edgar
Allan Poe (Evelyn’s red hair recalls Berenice),
Hitchcock (primarily Rebecca and Vertigo, not
to mention the umpteenth glass of milk lifted
from Suspicion) and Boileau and Narcejac’s
clever mixture of psychological Gothic and mys-
tery. The story is packed full with plot holes, but
Felisatti and Pittorru come up with no less than
three consecutive endings in a row: the first cli-
max reveals the patently bogus supernatural in-
trigue; the second, and best, is a cynical sting in
the tail as the accomplices turn one against the
other as characters from a Mario Bava movie;
the third and final one is the customary, and
rather perfunctory, happy ending.
All this seamlessly conjugates with the
glamour aesthetics of the period, complete with
design objects and mind-blowing costumes:
Lord Cunningham’s castle is a real joy for the
eyes, with its 17th century frescoes and gloomy
dungeon rubbing shoulders with TV sets and
white leather furniture, but the film’s best visual
joke is provided by the five platinum-blonde
maids who speak in unison, and look like
refugees from a TV ballet show. Add to this the
patently Italian setting (the Cunningham castle
is a Venetian villa) posing as British, with all the
incongruences that follow, such as driver seats
on the left, and the result is a bogus Gothic for
the 170s jaded viewers, a bit rogue in its display
of luxury and wealth (see the high society party
Cunningham and his cousin attend, with lob-
sters and champagne aplenty), which plays with
genre mechanisms in a suitably mocking way.
It would have perhaps taken a better film-
maker to make this shaky concoction work. Di-
rector Emilio Miraglia—an ex assistant to Lu-
ciano Salce and Carlo Lizzani, and previously
the helmer of a couple of passable gangster
movies starring Henry Silva, Assassination
(167) and Quella carogna dell’ispettore Sterling
(168), plus the thriller A qualsiasi prezzo (168),
starring Klaus Kinski—does a rather ordinary
job. The style features the usual overabundance
of zooms and the odd visual tricks (Steffen’s
“veiled” point of view shots in the opening scene
are definitely awkward, though); but Miraglia
fails to fully convey the expected Gothic atmos-
phere. Still, Gastone Di Giovanni’s scope cine-
matography and Bruno Nicolai’s delightful
score—with themes lifted from his work for Jess
Franco’s Eugenie … The Story of Her Journey Into
Perversion—give the movie a lush tone.
The cast is an assembly of familiar actors
for fans of Italian genre movies: EuroWestern
icon Anthony Steffen (wooden as always with
his shortsighted look and unchanging expres-
sion), Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Roberto Maldera
(who is given nothing to do but look menacing),
and Enzo Tarascio (a.k.a. “Rod Murdock”),
easily the best actor in sight. Their female coun-
terparts steal the show: the striking-looking Ma-
rina Malfatti displays a number of breath-taking
négligées and has a couple of risqué love scenes,
while Erika Blanc makes a brief but truly mem-
orable apparition, first performing a night-club
act which wouldn’t be out of place in a Jess
Franco movie, and then running away from
Steffen’s character while wearing only panties
and thigh-high leather boots. Due to the film’s
insistence on eroticism, the board of censors de-
manded a number of cuts concerning the flash-
backs with Evelyn and her lover—a scene similar
to the prologue in Romano Scavolini’s Un bianco
vestito per Marialé (172)—as well as Alan’s love-
making scenes with his wife. La notte che Evelyn
uscì dalla tomba ultimately got a V.M.18 rating,
motivated also by the “terrifying, bloody and
horrid scenes” such as the gory demise of the
character of Aunt Agatha, who ends up eaten by
foxes that rip apart her intestines.
The movie was a reasonable success in
Italy, and was even distributed overseas as The
Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, making it-
self a name in the U.S. grindhouse circuit in the
170s with the help of such gimmicks as theaters
serving “Bloodcorn” (popcorn dyed red) instead
of ordinary popcorn, as King recalled amusedly.2
Several versions circulated, often heavily cut and
re-edited, including one shown late nights on
TV under the title Evelyn Raises the Dead.
Miraglia and Pittorru would team again the
following year for another Gothic-whodunit hy-
brid, La dama rossa uccide sette volte.
 1971: La notte dei dannati
NoTeS
1. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Simon and
Schuster, (181), 2011), 17.
2. Ibid.
La notte dei dannati (The Night of the
Damned)
D: Peter Rush [Filippo Ratti]. S and SC:
Aldo Marcovecchio; DOP: Girolamo La Rosa;
M: Carlo Savina; E: Rolando Salvatori; PD: Elio
Balletti; CO: Virginio Ciarlo; SE: Rino Carboni.
Cast: Pierre Brice (Jean Duprey), Patrizia Viotti
(Danielle Duprey), Angela De Leo (Rita Ler-
nod), Antonio Pavan, Alessandro Tedeschi
(Prof. Berry), Mario Carra (Guillaume de Saint
Lambert), Daniela D’Agostino, Irio Fantini,
Carla Mancini. PROD: Nicola Addario, Lucio
Carnemolla, Gianni Solitro for Primax (Rome).
Country: Italy. Filmed in Ceri, Cerveteri (Rome)
and at Elios Studios (Rome); Running time: Ital-
ian version: 86 minutes (m. 2335). Visa n. 58702
(8.26.171); Rating: V.M.18. Release date: .10.
171; Distribution: Panta Cinematografica. Do-
mestic gross: 82,772,000 lire. Also known as: La
nuit des damnés; Les nuits sexuelles (France;
4.23.175); Sexuelle Gelüste triebhafter Mädchen
(Germany; 5.25.173); Night of the Sexual
Demons.
The famed journalist and amateur detective
Jean Duprey receives a strange letter from an old
friend, Prince Guillaume de Saint Lambert, who
asks him for help. Jean and his wife Danielle travel
to the Saint Lambert castle, where they are wel-
comed by Guillaume’s enigmatic wife, Rita Ler-
nod. Jean discovers that the prince is suffering
from a mysterious disease, and is being cured by
the creepy Professor Berry. According to Guil-
laume, a terrible curse is over his family, whose
members are doomed to die upon reaching 35
years of age. Jean cannot save his friend, who dies
a few days later. Other mysterious deaths ensue:
the victims are young women related to Saint
Lambert, who are drained of their blood. Mean-
while, Danielle is having strange nightmares, and
is falling under the influence of Rita. Jean finds
out that the woman is the reincarnation of a
witch, Tarin Drôle, who had been burnt to the
stake 300 years earlier by one of Saint Lambert’s
ancestors. With her supernatural powers, Rita
performs ritual killings, abducting her victims
and sacrificing them to the forces of evil. Jean—
immune to her powers thanks to an amethyst
ring given to him by Guillaume—locates the
crypt where the witch had been buried, and de-
43
stroys her, saving Danielle just before she is sac-
rificed.
The third-to-last film directed by the vet-
eran Filippo Walter Maria Ratti (114–181) is
one of the most bizarre items in 170s Italian
Gothic. Active in the movie business since the
130s, Ratti had debuted as a director in 146
with the drama Felicità perduta, and helmed a
small number of films, mostly unpretentious
comedies (such as Non è mai troppo tardi, 153),
with the exception of the bleak drama Dieci ital-
iani per un tedesco (162), about the infamous
Fosse Ardeatine massacre, which featured Enzo
G. Castellari as second unit director. By the end
of the decade Ratti got involved with the short-
lived production company Primax and made
two movies written by Aldo Marcovecchio and
starring Pierre Brice and Patrizia Viotti: the
erotic drama Erika and La notte dei dannati,
shot back-to-back on the same sets. Erika was
released in March 171 and met surprisingly
good box-office results, with over 300 million
lire grossed, but was seized because of its al-
legedly obscene content1; by the time the second
film was submitted to the board of censors, Pri-
max had already gone bankrupt.
Despite being a low-budget affair, La notte
dei dannati benefits from a script—originally ti-
tled Il castello dei Saint-Lambert—packed full of
erudite references from the opening scene,
where the protagonist solves a riddle whose key
is hidden in an old edition of Charles Baude-
laire’s book of poetry Les Fleurs du mal. Later
on, another vital plot point has a character using
a fake name borrowed from 18th century phi-
losopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book The
Confessions, and the screenplay also envisioned
an opening sequence inspired by Bruegel’s The
Triumph of Death and Bosch’s Hell, which ulti-
mately remained on paper only. Even the hero,
the unfailing, brilliant, pipe-smoking amateur
detective played by Brice, is depicted with an
eye to illustrious literary models, starting from
the name: Jean Duprey, a reference to Edgar
Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, the protagonist of
The Purloined Letter and The Murders in the Rue
Morgue. Like Poe’s character, Jean has to deal
with cryptograms, anagrams and various riddles
(including a locked room mystery)—and yet, in
an amusing visual joke, he is first seen intent on
reading a Mickey Mouse comic.
However, viewers cared little about all this:
the film’s main selling point was the presence of
sexy starlet Patrizia Viotti. The 21-year-old
44 1971: La notte dei dannati
model had first known notoriety as the heroine
of one of the first adults-only photonovels, the
sci-fi oriented Lunella, and as the ex-girlfriend
of teen pop idol Mal (Paul Bradley Courling),
the former lead singer of the band The Primi-
tives, a love story that ended in a tempestuous
way, with ample coverage in newspapers. In
Ratti’s films, Viotti willingly took her clothes off
before the camera and performed full frontal
nude scenes and simulated sex with an enviable
easiness: an extended sapphic interlude between
her and Angela De Leo caused La notte dei dan-
nati some trouble with the board of censors, re-
sulting in cuts for slightly over one minute. The
scene ended up in the October 171 issue of the
erotic photonovel BigFilm.
The print submitted to the Italian censors
was quite different from the one aimed at
Italian poster for La notte dei dannati (1971). Art by Renato Casaro.
foreign markets: both Erika and La notte dei
dannati were likely produced with the uncred-
ited financial aid of a French production com-
pany (a possibility underlined by the presence
of Brice) and shot in a double version. The one
distributed in France a few years later, under the
title Les nuits sexuelles, featured decidedly more
daring sequences, in tune with what was offered
by the adults-only comics of the period: the
scenes that take place in the witch’s extradimen-
sional reign mixed horror and eroticism, as the
female victims are first tickled by naked hand-
maidens, while heterosexual and lesbian cou-
plings take place all around them, amidst dry
ice and colored lighting, in a surreal set piece
vaguely reminiscent of the nightmare footage in
Julian Roffman’s The Mask (161).
A curious incident took place in a theater
in Genoa, where the “nude
version” was screened by mis-
take, as reported by an arti-
cle—significantly titled E
beato chi c’era! (And lucky who
was there!)—in the weekly
mag ABC (issue #13, January
7, 172), which included ade-
quate photographic documen-
tation of said scenes: “Satur-
day, December 18 … at the
Cinema Smeraldo in Genoa
… an unusual event hap-
pened: the screening of the
film La notte dei dannati was
interrupted by the projection-
ist himself, Lorenzo Mona-
chello, who apologized to the
audience and invited them to
show up at the box-office and
have their ticket money back.
Some had already anticipated
the projectionist’s invitation,
because the movie was being
screened in English and they
did not understand a thing.”
According to the article, the
true reason for the sudden in-
terruption was “the eloquence
of the images, of such an un-
leashed eroticism that was
never seen before on our
screens.”2
La notte dei dannati’s
fame as one of Italy’s first
proto-hard movies risks ob-
 1971: Qualcosa
scuring its qualities as a Gothic tale, which are
quite superior to those of other sex-horror flicks
of the period. The story delves into the usual
clichés—the secular curse, the reincarnated
witch, the old castle with secret passages—and
captures the contrast between the present day
and a menacing past in a way akin to such works
as I vampiri. Moreover, the sparse special effects
have an old-style feel to them that makes them
endearing despite their primitiveness: see, for
instance, the superimposition of a skull over the
bedridden Saint Lambert’s face when he con-
fesses that he has little time left to live, or the
flame that appears over the etching of a witch
burnt at the stake centuries earlier, much to
Danielle’s horror.
The result is strangely captivating, not the
least because of Carlo Savina’s score, abundantly
recycled from his work in Malenka, la sobrina
del vampiro (16, Amando de Ossorio). Still,
the movie would have benefitted from more ca-
pable hands behind the camera: Ratti often fails
to exploit the script’s potential, and despite the
odd intuition—such as the malevolent presence
on the loose across the corridors at night, por-
trayed through a subjective shot reminiscent of
a similar moment in La maschera del demonio—
his direction is often perfunctory. The acting
is nondescript: Brice makes for a suitably sym-
pathetic hero, but De Leo is not nearly as fasci-
nating as her role would require, whereas Viotti
could not act to save her life as the ingénue
who is preyed upon by her vampire-like seduc-
tress.
La notte dei dannati was far less successful
than its companion piece, grossing a modest
sum at the box-office. However, Ratti would not
stray from the path of eroticism, as proven by
his following films, the eloquently titled Mondo
erotico—Inchiesta n. 8 (173) and the Gothic gi-
allo, I vizi morbosi di una governante, shot in
173 (with the title Gli occhi verdi della morte)
but submitted to the censors only in 176, and
released in 177 after a few cuts.
NoTeS
1. In May 172 Erika was judged obscene, and Ratti,
producer Marcovecchio, distributor Stefania Stracuzzi and
actors Viotti and Brice were condemned to pay a fee.
Anonymous, “Autori e attori di ‘Erika’ condannati per
oscenità,” Corriere della Sera, May 24, 172.
2. C.C. [Callisto Cosulich], “E beato chi c’era!,” ABC, 7
January 172, 66–67. The same agency news was reported
by other newspapers such as Corriere d’Informazione and
La Stampa, which specified: “There are two versions of La
45
notte dei dannati, one in Italian, censored for our screens,
and one in English, destined to foreign ones. The distrib-
utor made the mistake of switching the film scans.” Ag.
Italia, “Operatore sospende la proiezione perché il film è
‘troppo erotico,’” La Stampa, December 1, 171; Anony-
mous, “Film proibito pr errore sullo schermo,” Corriere
d’Informazione, December 18–1, 171. However, an
English language version has not surfaced so far. Pics from
the French version were also featured in the magazines
New Cinema (August 171, 28–31) and Cinema Erotico
(172, 160–165.) Over the years, two different French ver-
sions have surfaced to home video: a VHS released in Bel-
gium (La nuit des damnés, although the on-screen title is
Les nuits sexuelles) runs 73 minutes and cuts short a
number of dialogue scenes, and even the suggestive funeral
sequence, but retains the sex sequences. Another version,
featuring an Italian audio track, runs 5 minutes, and can
be found only on bootlegs.
Qualcosa striscia nel buio (Something
Creeping in the Dark)
D: Mario Colucci. S and SC: Mario Colucci;
DOP: Giuseppe Aquari (Eastmancolor); M: An-
gelo Francesco Lavagnino (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Enzo
Micarelli; ArtD: Silvano Pan; SD, CO: Massimo
Bolongaro; MU: Telemaco Tilli; Hair: Nicla
Palombi; AD: Marina Prodan; C: Emilio Gian-
nini; AC: Carlo Aquari; SO: Tonino Cacciuot-
tolo; SOE: Goffredo Salvatori; SS: Maria Pia Ster-
licchio; SP: Gioacchino Cantone; AE: Carlo
Broglio; W: Elisabetta Costantini; KG: Sergio
Profili; ChEl: Michele Pellegrini; SE: Ci.Pa. Cast:
Farley Granger (Spike), Lucia Bosé (Sylvia For-
rest), Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Donald Forrest),
Stan Cooper [Stelvio Rosi] (Dr. Williams), Mia
Genberg (Susan West), John Hamilton [Gianni
Medici] (Joe), Giulia Rovai (Joe’s Girlfriend),
Frank [Franco] Beltramme (Sam), [Angelo]
Francesco Lavagnino (Prof. Lawrence), Dino
Fazio (Inspector Wright), Loredana Nusciak
(Lady Sheila Marlowe). PROD: Dino Fazio for
Akla Productions S.p.A. (Rome); PM: Mario
Colambassi. Country: Italy. Filmed at Incir-De
Paolis Studios (Rome). Running time: 6 min-
utes (m. 2632); Visa n. 57580 (01.23.171): Rating:
V.M.18. Release date: 04.15.171; Distribution:
D.D.F. Domestic gross: 110,05,000 lire. Also
known as: Shadows in the Dark; Something
Creeping in the Night (Ireland; promotional
title); Jigoku no Shainingu (Japan).
Two cars are chasing wildly along a country
road during a stormy night until they are blocked
by the fall of a bridge. Inspector Wright and his
right-hand man Sam arrest Spike, a maniac mur-
derer. Several other vehicles are forced to stop by
the circumstances, and their occupants seek ac-
commodation at a nearby villa: the policemen
46 1971: Qualcosa
and their prisoner are joined by Dr. Williams and
his assistant, a bourgeois couple formed by
Donald and Sylvia Forrest, and a Philosophy pro-
fessor. Then someone has the unfortunate idea to
set a séance. Strange things start happening, as if
an evil spirit had taken possession of some of the
guests. Forrest kills his wife and then himself;
Spike eliminates Sam; more horrific events will
ensue before dawn…
Less than two years after The Unnaturals—
Contronatura, Mario Colucci’s Qualcosa striscia
nel buio reprises the same basic plot as Margher-
iti’s film. However, the two movies actually share
the same source of inspiration: in fact, Colucci’s
original script (initially titled La notte dei dan-
nati) dated back to 161 and was loosely based
on Buzzati’s short story Eppure battono alla
porta, which also provided the inspiration for
Contronatura.1 The project was to be an Italian/
German co-production to be directed by Primo
Zeglio; the tentative cast featured Silvano Tran-
quilli (Williams), Ingrid Stern (Susan) and Rob-
ert Hundar (Spike). Scheduled for shooting in
early 162, it eventually fell apart.2 In 164 Co-
lucci penned another unfilmed Gothic project:
L’ombra, a weird mystery about a seemingly su-
pernatural murderer unleashed in an old dark
castle. It was only after the director’s debut, the
violent Western Vendetta per vendetta (168, as
“Ray Calloway”), that La notte dei dannati was
exhumed from limbo and became Qualcosa
striscia nel buio.
Similarly to Contronatura, Colucci’s film
deals with a heterogeneous group of characters
who are stranded in an old dark house during a
storm and take part in a séance which has lethal
consequences for a number of them. Here,
though, the action is set in the present day, and
the story starts like a crime film of sorts, with a
subplot about two detectives who have just cap-
tured a maniac killer (Farley Granger, looking
rather lost in denim and leather jacket); what is
more, the bickering upper class couple (Lucia
Bosé and Giacomo Rossi Stuart) look and sound
like they have just stepped out of some Sixties
movie on incommunicability, as they keep on
teasing and tormenting each other with a bitter-
ness that hints at a deep conjugal crisis and, on
the part of the husband, implies the inability to
satisfy his wife.
The storm which isolates the main charac-
ters in the haunted house, functions as a means
to cut them away from the present and cause a
de facto regression to Gothic’s ancestral past,
which allows each individual’s fears, obsessions
and desires to come to the surface. Whereas
Margheriti focused on a moral path that led the
protagonists to face their own dirty conscience
and atone their past guilt, Colucci is content to
throw into the fray a rather squalid array of
types and allow their vices to come to the fore.
Not unlike the despicable slice of mankind as
seen in Contronatura, the main characters look
like a concoction of sexually fixated types. In
addition to the bourgeois couple and the dan-
gerous sex offender, Colucci’s script throws in
an inhibited female doctor (Mia Genberg), and
a couple of proletarian servants (Gianni Medici
and Giulia Rovai) with strong sexual appetites;
once it has become clear that she and her tem-
porary companions are stalled in the villa, Sylvia
jokingly suggests that they all indulge in an orgy
to kill time. Nineteen-sixty-eight has not passed
in vain.
Whereas in the original script the malevo-
lent spirit evoked during the séance turned the
possessed guests into vampires, in the movie it
lets loose their erotic passions and frustrations,
starting with Sylvia’s sadomasochistic fantasies.
Nevertheless, Qualcosa striscia nel buio fails to
go all the way and turn into a supernatural ver-
sion of Pasolini’s Teorema. The ghost of the
promiscuous owner of the villa, the late lady
Sheila Marlowe (Loredana Nusciak, here ap-
pearing only in photo, in a modern-day
variation of the typical Gothic theme of the
haunted portrait), possesses the guests one by
one, but this results in a rather tame haunted
house routine, with little or no frissons at all.
Colucci assembled a cast of rather presti-
gious, if fading, names. At that time Granger
was based in Italy, where he acted among others
in Lo chiamavano Trinità… (171), Rivelazioni
di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mo-
bile (172, Roberto Bianchi Montero) and Alla
ricerca del piacere (172, Silvio Amadio), while
former Miss Italy Bosé, once the star of such
prestigious films as Antonioni’s Cronaca di un
amore (150) and La signora senza camelie
(153), had returned to acting by the end of the
160s after over a decade away from the sets; a
curious presence was Mia Genberg, one of the
twin Genberg sisters (the other was Pia),
Swedish dancers at Paris’ Folies Bergères who
played together in a number of films in the early
160s: Mia then acted alone in several more
films, including Fernando di Leo’s Rose rosse per
il Führer (168). However, the shoestring budget
 1971: Qualcosa 47

is not only given away by the use of a crude itage of the old 123 Fascist law that listed
miniature for the outdoor shots of the villa, but séances as one of the reasons for banning a film
by the fact that two key acting roles—a police altogether.
inspector and a enigmatic professor who Qualcosa striscia nel buio was Colucci’s sec-
delivers such stilted lines as “Do you think death ond film as a director, and his last to be distrib-
is the end of everything?” and “Don’t knock on uted theatrically. In 172 he helmed a giallo
hell’s door: it might open”—are played respec- based on a true story and characterized by a
tively by producer Dino Fazio and composer complex flashback structure, L’altro piatto della
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. bilancia (first announced as Tutta la verità sul
Still, Colucci manages to inject some at- caso Izoard) starring Philippe Leroy and Cather-
mosphere in the proceedings: the sequence ine Spaak, which was never released theatrically
where Giacomo Rossi Stuart speaks with Lady because of production problems and resurfaced
Sheila’s voice, with the actor’s face eerily pale via only recently, in 2012.
some white stage make-up, is rather effective, as
are the subjective shots of the spirit roaming NoTeS
across the corridor and the use of slow-motion
1. Alessio Di Rocco, “Da Dino Buzzati a Mario Colucci,”
during Bosé’s erotic nightmares. What is more, in Misteri d’Italia 5. Nocturno Cinema #131, July / August
the ubiquitous presence of clocks, whose ticking 2013.
at a certain point mysteriously 2. The cast also included Herbert Boehme (Wright),
stops in synch, is an unsettling
plot element which predates such
films as Evil Dead II and Lucio
Fulci’s La casa nel tempo (18).
All in all, Qualcosa striscia
nel buio keeps in tune with
several of 160s Gothic staples,
such as the indeterminacy of time
and the blending of past and pres-
ent (as in Danza macabra and
Contronatura). The denouement
is suitably abstract and ambigu-
ous, one would say philosophical.
Faced with puzzling events, the
viewer is left powerless just like
the characters, and must take
note, as Professor Lawrence puts
it, that “the past and the present
meet and intertwine, and leave
the unfolding of the truth to the
future,” so that “we are not al-
lowed to know, only to believe or
not believe.”3
Shot from May to July 170,4
the movie was submitted to the
board of censors in January 171
and passed with a V.M.18 rating
after a brief cut was performed in
a scene featuring the caretaker
and his girlfriend in bed. Curi-
ously, among the reasons that jus-
tified the rating was “the climate
of anxiety and fear that lingers in
the unfolding of the story because Italian poster for Qualcosa striscia nel buio (1971). Art by enrico
of spiritualistic practices,” a her- De Seta.
48 1971: Il sesso
Alfredo Censi (Donald), Edmea Lisi (Sylvia), Pier Ugo
Grignani (Lawrence), Gino Donato (Joe), Dina Ilam
(Betty), Franco Santelli (Sam). La notte dei dannati was to
be financed by Giuseppe Sanna’s company Continentale
Compagnia Cinematografica, Bruno Bolognesi’s C.I.F.-
Consorzio Italuano Film and the German company Film
Kontor. Colucci was to be Zeglio’s asistant director. Ibid.
3. Similarities have been noticed between Colucci’s film
and an obscure novel written by journalist Franco Prattico
under the a.k.a. Morton Sidney: Il messaggero bussa alla
porta (literally, “The Messenger Knocks at the Door,” al-
though the phony original title is listed in the paperback
as “Messager [sic] Is Waiting”), published in November
170 in the series “I racconti di Dracula,” which pays ref-
erence to Buzzati’s story from the very title. Given the cir-
cumstances surrounding the production of Colucci’s film,
the analogies are merely coincidental, but significant to
show the proximity between pulp literature and genre cin-
ema. Even more evident, in turn, is the influence of Qual-
cosa striscia nel buio on the adults only comic Possessione
malefica (Oltretomba Gigante #28, September 175), which
reprises many elements from the movie, starting with the
opening chase between the inspector and the serial killer.
See Davide Rosso, “I sintomi del gotico,” La Zona morta
(http://www.lazonamorta.it/lazonamorta2/?p=17570).
4. Al. Cer. [Alberto Ceretto], “La Bosé e la magia,” Cor-
riere della Sera, July 27, 170.
Il sesso del diavolo—Trittico (Sex of the
Devil—Triptych)
D: Oscar Brazzi. S and SC: Sergio Civinini,
Paolo Giordano; DOP: Luciano Trasatti (East-
mancolor); M: Stelvio Cipriani (Ed. C.A.M.); E:
Attilio Vincioni; PD: Giovanni Fratalocchi; AD:
Jak Şalom; CO: Simonetta Piselli; AC: Giorgio
Di Battista; AE: Massimo Rinchiusi; SS: Ornella
Marandola; SO: Bruno Borghi; MU: Renzo
Francioni; Hair: Walter Giangrasso. Cast: Ros-
sano Brazzi (Andrea), Sylva Koscina (Sylvia),
Maitena [Maïténa] Galli (Barbara), Fikret
Hakan (Omar), Güzin Özipek (Fatma), Aydin
Tezel (Leonid Oblomov), Hülya Şengün, Ali
Necati Çakus, Paola Natale, Brizio Montinaro,
Domenico Stefanucci, Franco Romagnoli.
PROD: Chiara Films Internazionali (Rome),
Tura Film Prodüksiyonlari (Istanbul); PM:
Mario Maestrelli, Erdogan Türkün; GM
(Turkey): Ali Necati Çakus; PSe: Maisie Guakil.
Country: Italy. Filmed on location in Istanbul.
Running time: 0 minutes (m. 2482), 3 minutes
(m. 2560); Visa n. 57444, 57637 (12.2.170;
2.10.171); Rating: V.M.14; V.M.18. Release date:
1.26.171; Distribution: Regional. Domestic gross:
13,607,000 lire.
A surgeon, Andrea, goes on vacation in Is-
tanbul with his wife Barbara, in the hope of
saving their marriage. There they are joined by
Andrea’s assistant, Sylvia, and settle down in a
villa on the Bosphorus, now managed by the eerie
housekeeper Fatma. The previous owner, a French
sculptress named Claudine, died mysteriously,
hanging herself from a tree, and strange things
begin to happen, of a seemingly supernatural ori-
gin. The uneasy relationship between Andrea
(who is impotent) and his wife collapses even
more; meanwhile Sylvia seems to be haunted by
the spirit of Claudine, and she and Barbara start
an ambiguous liaison. Andrea survives attempts
on his life, and becomes obsessed with an elusive
art collector, Leonid Oblomov, who seems to know
more about Claudine’s death. But the key to the
mystery is actually Fatma…
Shot in Istanbul in the summer of 170, Il
sesso del diavolo is one of the most obscure
Italian productions of the period, despite the
presence of such well-known actors as Rossano
Brazzi and Sylva Koscina. Initially it should have
been directed by Renato Polselli, who eventually
dropped out of the project to make La verità sec-
ondo Satana (170). Direction was taken over
by Brazzi’s younger brother Oscar, a longtime
friend of Polselli’s, whose company Chiara Films
had just produced the successful made-for-TV
mystery mini-series Coralba (170) written by
Biagio Proietti and directed by Daniele D’Anza.
It was thanks to his starring roles in such tele-
vision products as Coralba and Melissa (166,
Daniele D’Anza) that the 54-year-old thesp was
enjoying a renewed popularity in Italy.
The script for Il sesso del diavolo (originally
titled Avventura a Istanbul, and signed by the
elusive Sergio Civinini and Paolo Giordano)
sought to recreate a mood similar to the made-
for-TV mysteries of the period, spiced with
plenty of erotic footage and revolving around a
morbid ménage à trois hidden in the past. The
theme of sapphic love was no longer a taboo,
after Alberto Cavallone’s Le salamandre as well
as other movies dealing with female homosex-
uality, from Mark Rydell’s The Fox (167) to
Claude Chabrol’s Les biches (168)—which came
out in Italy with its title maliciously advertised
as Lesbiches, a wordplay on the word “lesbiche,”
lesbians. In addition to that, the theme of
middle-age male crisis was a common topic of
the period, and the stories of couples disinte-
grating in exotic settings (Bora Bora had been a
huge hit in Italy) somehow represented a vul-
garized drift of the dramas on bourgeois incom-
municability, complete with tourist footage,
lounge music and female nudity. Another vari-
ation, akin to the genre, had been Mario
Caiano’s pretentious Love Birds—Una strana
 1971: Il sesso
Italian fotobusta for Il sesso del diavolo—Trittico (1971).
voglia d’amare, characterized by a symbolic,
dreamlike feel.
What makes Il sesso del diavolo worth qual-
ifying as a Gothic, albeit quite a peculiar one, is
the way the narrative is constructed, with a no-
table emphasis on the occult and the esoteric. A
vital element to the story is the villa where An-
drea (Brazzi) and his friends move, which is still
imbued with the presence of its former dead in-
habitant: a mysterious sculptress, Claudine,
whose memory is worshipped by the sinister
housekeeper (the veteran Turkish actress Güzin
Özipek) and whose works (in particular the
stone triptych to which the film’s subtitle refers)
are scattered in the garden as a memento, a
tempting image of the character’s innermost de-
sires as well as an omen whose meaning they
cannot grasp. In pure Gothic spirit, art becomes
a way to the transcendental, linked to “an
abstral, medianic conception of life,” as one
character notes, and paves the way for the theme
of the doppelgänger, as Sylvia (Koscina) seems
to be possessed by the spirit of Claudine, to the
point that she not only dresses like her, but takes
on her lesbian inclinations as well.
The villa becomes a typical Gothic non-
place, where time seems to be frozen (“Since we
4
arrived it seems to me that anything can happen
… or has already happened” Andrea’s friend
Omar says), a Domus mortis (House of Death)
where people’s destiny no longer depends on
free will, but on the unfathomable ways of fate,
according to the stars and their influence on hu-
mans. Astrology is a recurring backdrop to the
story, which can only marginally be labeled as
a giallo: as in some of the Gothics made during
the previous decade (Un angelo per Satana, 166,
Camillo Mastrocinque), the menace is revealed
to be a human conspiracy, but nevertheless the
characters end up fulfilling the destiny that has
been chosen for them, according to their zodiac
signs and the coffee grounds. In a neat ironic
touch, the movie ends not just with destiny re-
peating itself (like Claudine, another character
ends up hanged from the same tree), but also
with the blooming of a ménage à trois which, as
it usually happens in these bourgeois slices of
life, is mutually and silently accepted by all char-
acters involved.
As expected, Il sesso del diavolo relishes
heavily on exotic tourist footage and pleasant
female nudity, plays heavy with esoteric
symbols, and doesn’t do much with its confused
mystery plot, but encompasses a campy feel
50 1972: L’amante
(including the expected distorted visuals and
ominous camera angles) that makes it worth
viewing for devotees of Italian bizarre cinema.
The somnolent pacing makes it difficult to watch
at times, and the unintentionally ridiculous is
often right around the corner: it is hard not to
smile when the main theme of Stelvio Cipriani’s
score, which shamelessly rips off Iron Butterfly’s
In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida, pops up. But Brazzi is a
slightly more competent director than Polselli,
and sometimes he just touches the right note:
the opening sequence on the boat to Istanbul,
which follows Andrea and Barbara’s efforts to
revive their marriage, is suitably compelling. At
times, the result even touches the dreamlike
quality of the Jess Franco films shot in Istanbul,
such as Venus in Furs (168) and Vampyros Les-
bos (170). As the middle-aged Andrea, who
desperately tries to be manly but whose disas-
trous attempts at marital sex are met with laugh-
ter by his sensuous wife (the French-born
Maïténa Galli), Brazzi is less wooden than usual,
and Koscina is ravishing. The cast also included
the Turkish star Fikret Hakan.
1972
L’amante del demonio (The Devil’s Lover,
a.k.a. Lucifera: Demonlover)
D: Paolo Lombardo. SC: Paolo Lombardo;
DOP: Antonino Modica (Eastmancolor, Tele-
color); M: Elvio Monti (Ed. Bixio Sam); E:
Francesco Bertuccioli; PD, ArtD: Giovanni Frat-
alocchi; MU: Maria Mastrocinque, Lucia La
Porta; Hair: Dora Bruno; AD: Marco Masi; APD:
Marco Kamm; SO: Remo Ugolinelli; SE: Sergio
Chiusi, Basilio Patrizi; C: Aldo Ricci; AC: Aldo
Marchiori; W: Renata Renzi; SS: Isabella Piga;
SP: Sandro Borni. Cast: Edmund Purdom (Gun-
ther / The Devil), Rosalba Neri (Helga), Spar-
taco Conversi (Johan), Francesca Lionti (Eva),
Carla Mancini (Woman in tavern), Maria Teresa
Pietrangeli [Maria Teresa Pingitore] (Magda),
Massimiliano Roy (Christine’s beau), Maria
Vianello (Wilma), Bruna Olivieri (Christine),
Giovanna Di Vita [Bruna Antonia Di Vita] (1st
cave inhabitant), Laura De Benedittis (2nd cave
inhabitant), Robert Wood [Robert Woods] (Hel-
mut), Ferdinando Poggi (Knight), John Benedy
[Giovanni Di Benedittis] (Butler), Lella Catta-
neo (Old Hag); uncredited: Veronica Sava (Dam-
Il sesso del diavolo underwent quite a curi-
ous procedure in Italy: it was submitted to the
board of censors in December 170, in a version
running 0 minutes, and received a V.M.14 rat-
ing for the lesbian theme, the scene of Brazzi
and Koscina making love on the beach and the
grisly surprise ending. Then, a few days after its
release, a new version was submitted, running
3 minutes and fleshed out with more erotic
footage: it received a V.M.18 for the scene of
Brazzi and Galli kissing in the nude under the
shower and Andrea’s erotic dream of Barbara
and Sylvia having sex. It received limited distri-
bution in Italy, so much so that reviews turned
up as late as mid–172: the newspaper Corriere
della Sera dedicated only a few scathing lines to
the “Turkish abominations” of “the last photo-
novel signed by the Brazzi duo.”1
NoTe
1. (not signed) “Il sesso del diavolo,” Corriere della Sera,
June 23, 172.
sel). PROD: Dick Randall for Nova International
Films; EP: Harry Cushing; AP: Harold Vander;
PM: Salvatore Miglio; GM: Cesare Seritti; UM:
Ugo Porcelli; PSe: Romeo Corpetti. Country:
Italy. Filmed at Castle Ruspoli in Vignanello
(Viterbo) and at S.C.O. Studios (Rome). Running
time: 7 minutes (m. 2161). Visa n. 5307 (11.2.
171); Rating: V.M.18. Release date: 1.26.172; Dis-
tribution: Regional. Domestic gross: 75,3,000
lire. Also known as: La amante del demonio
(Spain).
The present. Helga and her two friends ar-
rive at Castle Hornberg, a 16th century manor
which is believed to be inhabited by the Devil. The
three girls are welcomed by a sinister butler and
spend the night at the castle. Helga falls into a
deep sleep. She wakes up centuries earlier, on the
eve of her wedding with Hans. When donning her
wedding dress, Helga notices a red-hooded figure
spying on her from behind a window, which ac-
cording to tradition is bad luck. Meanwhile,
Magda, a young girl in love with Hans, asks Hel-
mut to help her ruin Helga’s reputation: he obliges,
but demands to make love to Magda in return.
 1972: L’amante 51

Helga’s damsels, Eva and Wilma,

are kidnapped by two demons,
raped and murdered by a female
vampire. Helga goes to an old
witch, in an attempt to escape
from bad luck, but the hag gives
her to the hooded figure, Gun-
ther, who turns out to be the
Devil. Helga, now in the devil’s
power, agrees to kill Hans on her
wedding night. Then she tortures
Magda, who has discovered the
murder, and rips out her tongue.
But the devil ultimately gives
Helga to the crowd and she is ex-
ecuted. Helga wakes up: it has all
been a dream. She and her friends
leave the castle, watched by the
butler and his master: the devil.
One of the most obscure
Italian Gothic horror films of
the decade, L’amante del demo-
nio is a blatant example of how
the Gothic clichés were re-
worked in the early-to-mid
170s with a copious amount of
eroticism to please the audience,
resulting in a work that is closer
in spirit to the adults-only pa-
perback comics of the period,
such as Ediperiodici’s Lucifera,
centered on a female succubus
whose aim is to practice evil and
fight good. Italian poster for L’amante del demonio (1972). Art by Aldo De Ami-
The film’s genesis is some- cis.
what obscure, as is the figure of
the director, Paolo Lombardo, whose filmogra- he revived the tradition of the French Grand-
phy adds up to three titles overall, the other Guignol—which had first arrived in Italy in
being Re Manfredi (162), an obscure adventure 108, thanks to the “Compagnia del Grand
film co-directed by Piero Regnoli and starring Guignol” led by Alfredo Sainati and Bella
Ken Clark and Moira Orfei, and the spy/crime Starace—with four one-act dramas staged at
hodgepodge Dagli archivi della polizia criminale Rome’s Piper Club, based on popular mystery
(173), itself a patchwork job consisting of scenes and horror stories: Qualcuno viene ad uccidermi
featuring Edmund Purdom added to footage (Sorry, Wrong Number, by Lucille Fletcher), L’al-
from Regnoli’s unfinished 167 spy film Carne lucinante party di Mr. Wu (inspired by the play
per l’inferno, featuring Sergio Ciani (a.k.a. Alan Mr. Wu by Harold Owen and Harry Vernon),
Steel) and Gordon Mitchell.1 The opening line La statua d’argilla (“The Clay Statue,” written by
of L’amante del demonio—which states “this Lombardo himself) and Lui! (based on Oscar
film’s story is based on the theatrical play of the Méténier’s famous one-act play, the first to be
‘Grand Guignol’”—helps shed some light on it. staged at the Paris Théâtre du Grand-Guignol
An ex-magistrate with a passion for script- in 187), starring Pippo Lauricella and Cleofe
writing (he co-wrote The Embalmer, a.k.a. Il Del Cile.
mostro di Venezia, 165) and directing, Lom- Lombardo’s intention—welcomed with
bardo gained a marginal notoriety in 16, when some irony by the press2—was to turn this
52 1972: L’amante
revival into a stable stage attraction in Rome, at
the Teatro Manzoni, where he planned to revisit
old Grand Guignol staples and truculent
Neapolitan sceneggiate. The plan was ultimately
unsuccessful, and led Lombardo to try his for-
tunes on the big screen, with the help of movie
producer Dick Randall and executive producer
Harry Cushing IV, the latter looking for another
vehicle for his beloved Rosalba Neri after Lady
Frankenstein. On a personal level, one would say
that the movie was a triumph, as Neri eventually
agreed to marry Cushing in 172.3 Cinematically
speaking, however, the result was not as success-
ful.
L’amante del demonio is a work of mind-
boggling amateurishness. Technical errors
abound, and production values are cheap be-
yond belief: the two “demons” wearing cut-rate
Halloween rubber masks are especially jaw-
dropping. Despite shooting the opening scenes
at the Castle Ruspoli in Vignanello, near Viterbo
(also seen in Umberto Lenzi’s Zorro contro
Maciste, 163), Lombardo failed to come up with
any convincing Gothic atmosphere whatsoever:
most of the film takes place in the countryside
and in a couple of shabby interior sets, with such
incongruous details as cellophane windows and
modern-day floors and furniture. What is more,
surviving prints feature scenes meant to be set
at night that were not tinted in post-production,
which results in unintentionally comical mo-
ments of characters exclaiming “It’s so dark!” in
broad daylight. Ultimately the references to
Grand Guignol’s over-the-top violence are re-
duced to a stabbing and a tongue ripped out
(offscreen), while the director seems to be more
preoccupied with the erotic digressions, char-
acterized by such lines of dialogue as “You are
too much of a woman in every cell of your body.
Your blood flows too hot in your veins. Only a
lover such as I, free from any human law, could
give you that supreme ecstasy your femininity
deserves!”
Not even the movie’s overall amateurish-
ness can undermine Rosalba Neri’s fulgid
beauty. The actress’ recollection of Lombardo
was curious to say the least: “The director, poor
man, just couldn’t stay awake for more than two
hours … a poor man with white hair…. Paolo
Lombardo looked as if he was near his end, from
the way he walked and moved around. I think
he must have been very ill…”4 Which is puzzling
since the director was merely in his forties when
he made the movie.
At one point, Lombardo was even replaced
by actor Robert Woods—on his first film direct-
ing experience. As Woods explained, “Harry
Cushing felt the movie was incomplete and
needed to be improved upon, and that is why I
was hired to ‘finish it.’ Needless to say, it was
without credit and I did a small part in it as well.
The direction I did for Harry was all in and
around Rome and I have to admit, other than
the dailies, I didn’t see the finished project.”5 The
actor’s words seem to imply that his role was
added later on in the film, and in fact he never
interacts with Neri and her co-star Edmund
Purdom. However, Woods could not do much
to salvage such an utter disaster: his confronta-
tion with the red hooded devil, in a shack that
looks like a leftover from a Western village, is
on a par with the rest.6
Another sequence which was likely filmed
separately (by Randall himself?) is totally unre-
lated to the rest. After the grotesque demons
have abducted Helga’s friends, the two women
are taken to a cave and raped: there, a lesbian
scene-cum-orgy follows, until at one point a
blonde, caped woman enters, reveals her spiked
fangs and vampirizes the girls, who turn up
again vampirized, hand in hand like in a Jean
Rollin film. The vampire woman never appears
again in the story. Such a non sequitur recalls
other Randall-produced films, like Terror! Il
castello delle donne maledette, also featuring Pur-
dom and starlet Laura De Benedittis. An often
overlooked presence in the film is that of Mas-
similiano Roy, who gained minor fame claiming
to be Salvador Dalí’s secret son, and appeared in
a number of photonovels and films in the 160s
and the early 170s, including the leading role
in Il seme di Caino (172, directed by Marco
Masi), credited as “Roy Milian.”
Shot in early 171 (a photonovel version ap-
peared in issue #43 of Cinesex, in July 171), L’a-
mante del demonio underwent some trouble
with the censors, due to its blatant erotic
content: the board demanded that several scenes
be cut,7 for a total of 181 metres (about 6 minutes
and 35 seconds), and gave it a V.M.18 rating. The
film had a marginal theatrical release in Italy in
early 172, but found some notoriety among
genre fans during the glorious heyday of local
broadcast television and then in the home video
circuit, where it was distributed on the well-
known AVO Film label. It was released overseas
to home video, in a terrible-looking, fullscreen
print, on the Mya label as Lucifera: Demon-
 1972: Baron
lover—a misleading title that, willing or not, un-
derlined its proximity to 170s adults-only comics.
NoTeS
1. See Roberto Curti, Italian Crime Filmography 1968–
1980 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 80.
2. Enrico Morbelli, “Brutto, orripilante, militesente cer-
casi per il ‘Grand Guignol,’” La Stampa, December 2, 16.
3. Cushing and Neri got married in a hastily arranged
ceremony in Baltimore, but the marriage was just as hastily
ended by the actress in Haiti less than a month later. In his
autobiography, Vanderbilt Scion–Memoirs of a Modern
Knight-Errant, Cushing claims that he had not seen
Rosalba Neri since the fourth day of their marriage in 172,
but Getty Images does have a photograph in their photo
library of Harry and Rosalba sitting in their swimming
costumes back to back under a sun umbrella at the very
glamorous Il Pellicano Hotel in Porto Ercole, Tuscany, in
173. Cushing—who had already been married two times,
with Georgette Windsor and Ruth Dunbar Swift—got mar-
ried a fourth time, with Laura Alvarez, ending with yet an-
other divorce. A passionate polo player since youth, he
founded the Rome Polo Club. After thirty years of living
in Rome, in 185 he returned in America and spent his last
years in Manhattan, where he died in 2000.
4. Gomarasca and Pulici, 99 donne, 178.
5. Email interview with the author, March 2015.
6. For his part, though, assistant director Marco Masi
(who does not recall anything else about the shooting) is
adamant that Woods did not do any directing on the film.
Phone interview with Marco Masi, December 2016.
7. Namely: “1) Helmut and Magda in bed, from the mo-
ment where she turns back to the end of the scene; 2) The
cave scene from the close-ups of two witches to the
entrance of the female vampire; 3) Gunther and Helga at
the end of the sequence where they make love behind the
flame, to the end of the lovemaking scene…”
Baron Blood, a.k.a Gli orrori del castello di
Norimberga
D: Mario Bava. S: Vincent G. Fotre; SC:
Vincent G. Fotre, Willibald Eser, Mario Bava
[U.S. version: Vincent Fotre, William A. Bairn];
DOP: Antonio Rinaldi (Technicolor); M: Stelvio
Cipriani [U.S. version: Les Baxter]; E: Carlo
Reali; ArtD: Enzo Bulgarelli; CO: uncredited;
MU: Silvana Petri; Hair: Rossana Gigante;
MUFX: Carlo Rambaldi; AD: Lamberto Bava;
C: Emilio Varriano. SE: Franco Tocci; C: Emilio
Varriano. Cast: Joseph Cotten (Baron Otto von
Kleist / Alfred Becker), Elke Sommer (Eva
Arnold), Massimo Girotti (Dr. Karl Hummel),
Antonio Cantafora (Peter Kleist), Alan Collins
[Luciano Pigozzi] (Fritz), Humi [Umberto]
Raho (Inspector), Rada Rassimov (Christina
Hoffmann), Dieter Tressler (Mayor Dort-
mundt); uncredited: Pilar Castel (Madeleine, the
Doctor’s Assistant), Gustavo De Nardo (Dr.
Werner Hessler), Nicoletta Elmi (Gretchen
53
Hummel), Rolf Hädrich (Auctioner), Alfred
Leone (Man on the Aircraft), Kathy Leone
(Woman on the Aircraft), Maurice Poli (Land
Surveyor), Valeria Sabel (Martha Hummel),
Franco Tocci (Baron Blood). PROD: Alfred
Leone for Euro America Produzioni Cinema-
tografiche (Rome), Dieter Geissler Filmproduk-
tion (Munich). EP: J. Arthur Elliot, Samuel Z.
Arkoff; PM: Bruno Frascà. Country: Italy / West
Germany. Filmed in Vienna, Burg Kreuzenstein,
Korneuburg (Austria). Running time: 8 minutes
(m. 2672); U.S. version: 1 minutes; Visa n. 5720
(2..172); Rating: V.M.14; Release dates: 2.25.
172 (Italy), 10.27.172 (U.S.A.); Distribution:
Jumbo Cinematografica (Italy), American In-
ternational Pictures (U.S.A.); Domestic gross:
26,812,000 lire. Also known as: Baron Vampire
(France); Orgía de sangre (Spain); A Câmara de
Torturas do Barão Sangrento (Portugal); Barão
Sanguinário (Brazil); The Torture Chamber of
Baron Blood (U.S.A.—home video).
Peter Von Kleist returns to Austria to re-
search his ancestor, a sadistic baron who terror-
ized the area with his gruesome practices and
eventually met a horrible end at the hand of his
victims. Peter owns a parchment which contains
a curse that is said to have the effect of reviving
the baron. The young man, who is staying at his
uncle, professor Karl Hummer’s place, befriends
young architect Eva Arnold, and together they re-
cite the magic formula, at night, in one of the cas-
tle’s rooms. The baron returns from the grave and
kills three men, including the castle’s current
owner, who was planning to turn the manor into
a hotel. The castle is put on auction and bought
by a mysterious paralytic, Alfred Becker. Eva is
attacked by the disfigured baron but escapes.
Hummer asks the help of a psychic, Christina
Hoffmann, to get rid of the malevolent ghost, but
to no avail, and the woman is killed too. Becker
invites Peter, Eva and Karl to the inauguration of
the castle, which he just restored. There, he reveals
himself to be the baron reincarnated: he imprisons
and tortures his guests, but Eva manages to de-
stroy him by way of an amulet that revives Von
Kleist’s victims…
Ninteen seventy-one had marked the re-
lease of one of Bava’s most extreme and personal
films, Reazione a catena, a gory thriller whose
plot structure would prove influential to the
American slasher film of the following decade.
Still, the movie’s surprising critical success did
not turn into encouraging box-office results with
a disappointing 88 million lire grossed in Italy.
54 1972: Baron
The director’s next work, Baron Blood, filmed in
the fall of 171, was a return to safer territory: ple, down-to-earth horror story which relied on
teaming up with producer Alfred Leone, after
the unfortunate experience of the yet-unreleased
Italian locandina for Mario Bava’s Gli orrori del castello di the funhouse: he presses a button
Norimberga (1972). Art by Piero ermanno Iaia.
Quante volte … quella notte, Bava filmed a sim-
well-tested Gothic clichés: a product easy to sell
abroad (and in fact it was picked up by A.I.P. in
the U.S., and submitted to the usual
“treatment,” with Stelvio Cipriani’s
score replaced by a Les Baxter one
and a number of trimmings which
resulted in a version approximately
seven and a half minutes shorter
than the European cut1) and likely
to please everyone.
The script, by former tennis
player Vincent Fotre, has a preado-
lescent, almost Disney-like quality:
the supernatural is reduced to its
primordial core, in the story of the
cruel baron who returns from the
grave to resume his deeds, amid an-
cestral formulas and family curses.
Not coincidentally, Baron Blood—
released in Italy as Gli orrori del
castello di Norimberga, even though
the story takes place in Austria and
not in Germany: the title alluded to
the “Virgin of Nuremberg” which
appears among the Baron’s torture
instruments and was featured in the
posters—was one of the few Italian
horror movies of the decade to be
given a mild V.M.14 rating. Inciden-
tally, tamer versions of the murder
scenes were shot for television.
Baron Blood bears no trace of
the sinful and lethal females that
populate the Gothics of the period.
The menace is embodied by a male
figure, a senile villain who is
scarcely interested in the heroine’s
body, and even though the female
lead wears a miniskirt from begin-
ning to end, there are no erotic di-
gressions: the romance subplot be-
tween Eva (Elke Sommer) and Peter
(Antonio Cantafora) remains at the
level of the frivolous Hollywood
comedies of the past decades.
In his reincarnation as the
seemingly crippled Alfred Becker,
the baron has fun scaring his poten-
tial victims like a carnival barker
with the unlucky walking around in
and has pre-recorded screams of
 1972: Baron
terror and pain echo all over the castle,2 and dec-
orates the battlements with corpses that look
like macabre puppets. In a way, it is the same
self-satisfied showman’s habit that Bava displays
behind the camera, playing with the audience
with amiable nastiness. Baron Blood is the one
among his works that is closer to William Cas-
tle’s jokey horror movies, such as The House on
Haunted Hill (15), to the point that some gim-
micks, like those Castle toyed with to sell a few
extra tickets, wouldn’t have been out of place
here.
Such a pragmatic, literal approach to the
Fantastic conveys an irreverent attitude, which
never becomes an explicit, postmodernist nod.
Irony is mostly implied in the contemporary set-
ting, because Bava allows the discrepancies and
the perplexities to come to the fore, by juxtapos-
ing a legendary and truculent past on one hand,
and a concrete and indifferent present on the
other, just like that Coca-Cola vending machine
that is incongruously placed in the manor’s
stairs, and which becomes the background for
a murder scene: incidentally, the victim is Dort-
mund (Dieter Tressler), the entrepreneur who
is planning to turn the castle into a hotel (shades
of Tempi duri per i vampiri). In a sense, the
Baron is also protecting the environment from
the invasive shadow of modernity: in some
ways, the castle in Baron Blood can be seen as a
homologue to the bay in Reazione a catena—
whose original ending as devised in the script,
incidentally, underlined the uncompromising
ecologist message.3
Bava’s view of the present is as detached as
it is disillusioned. It is an era of commodities
and superficiality, as colorful and fatuous as the
people that inhabit it: the two protagonists laugh
about past horrors, and when dealing with a for-
mula that must not be recited, they don’t resist
and do exactly the opposite—not once, but
twice—to see the effects. Like in La maschera
del demonio, the new generations pale before the
mythical image of their ancestors, but their at-
titude toward the past is very different: whereas
Katia was oppressed by Asa’s memory, the hand-
some but insignificant Peter, the last in the von
Kleist family line, investigates his ancestor’s grim
history with the hollow excitement of someone
who does not care about the moral weight of
family roots.
The charm of Baron Blood lies in the con-
stant oscillation between the homage to a clas-
sical Gothic that is now impossible to retain in
55
its primigenial essence, and Bava’s sardonic dis-
tance. On the one hand, the director rigorously
separates the good from the bad, and gives away
the villain’s “surprise” identity from his very first
appearance: even the most naive viewers will re-
alize that Baron Blood has reincarnated in the
elderly, wheelchair-bound Alfred Becker long
before the main characters do, and it takes a little
girl to point out the obvious to them. Leone
originally got in touch with Vincent Price and
Ray Milland for the title role, but Joseph Cotten
hams it up with gusto, and relishes his lines so
much that he almost winks to the audience at
every scene he is in. On the other hand, Bava
turns the ever-present Luciano Pigozzi in a gig-
gling caricature as Fritz the guardian, who does
not have a single line in the movie, and whose
performance consists merely in sneers and ro-
tating pupils: he is the typical stupid and de-
mented servant, who in a scene even stages a
gag similar as Igor’s (Marty Feldman) in Young
Frankenstein, when Fritz’s grinning, plump face
pops up at the end of a row of skulls in a crypt,
scaring the impressionable Eva.
The preteen mood with which Bava revisits
the Gothic stereotypes is underlined by the role
of primary importance given to a little girl. Ital-
ian horror would soon follow the thread
launched by The Exorcist with a plethora of
crazed, dirty-talking and sexually precocious
teenagers, whereas Baron Blood makes one step
back to the typical child figure. As Karl Hum-
mel’s (Massimo Girotti) little daughter Gretchen,
the only one able not just to perceive the menace
and identify the bloodthirsty Baron, but also to
understand the real meaning of cryptic prophe-
cies, Nicoletta Elmi—soon to become one of the
symbolic faces of Italian horror movies—brings
the tale back to a fairytale dimension: see the
scene where the Baron pursues Gretchen in the
woods, like a true fairytale ogre. Despite Elmi’s
subtly disturbing features, the result is as de-
tached from Operazione paura’s nods to Henry
James’ work as it is from Shock’s Oedipal under-
tones. Similarly, the insistent use of wide-angle
shots and extreme depth of field, which results
in the characters looking dwarfed in the castle’s
halls, seems to recreate the point of view of a
child, to whose eyes everything seems unrealis-
tically huge.
The film is so down-to-earth that even the
sudden jumps from night to day no longer open
those glimmers of uncertainty that characterized
its predecessors, and the story’s blatant incon-
56 1972: Baron
sistencies (how is the seemingly crippled Becker
supposed to move far and wide through the cas-
tle with no one assisting him?) are accepted by
the protagonists without posing too many prob-
lems. And for the most part of the movie, Bava
seems content to draw from his own past, not
in a bout of postmodernist whim, but as a way
to do his job as efficiently as possible. Hence,
Baron Blood features some extraordinary cam-
erawork: the credited d.o.p. is Antonio Rinaldi,
but according to Leone Bava supervised the cin-
ematography. Cameraman Emilio Varriano re-
called the extraordinary difficulty of several
shots, where the use of the zoom lens (with Bava
calculating the various distances) was nothing
short of virtuosic. “There is a long shot, with the
zoom lens wide open, of two actors walking to-
ward the camera, and little by little the zoom
closes in, and ends on a close up of a hand of
somebody who is putting out a cigarette just a
few feet away from the camera, as close as the
zoom would allow. This person lifts his hand
and we see his face, and at that point we recog-
nize who was the person watching the other two.
The difficulty was to determine the exact point
of arrival of the zoom, because if you start with
a long shot and close in little by little on the ash-
tray, you have to create your landmark as you
go along, or else you’ll end up zooming in on
the feet!”4
In addition to the homages to classic horror
cinema—from Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard
Man to André De Toth’s House of Wax—Bava
reworked a number of scenes from his previous
films: the Baron’s resurrection is culled from Er-
cole al centro della terra (161), the detail of the
oscillating phone in the doctor’s murder recalls
6 donne per l’assassino, and Fritz’s supplice is
culled from La maschera del demonio. Like other
filmmakers who were treading water after a pe-
riod of splendor—such as Riccardo Freda, to
name one—Bava’s resort to his previous work
was some kind of pragmatic safety net; but by
doing what he knew best, revisiting tricks and
images of his own filmic past, the director also
added his trademark ironic distance. Having
Fritz undergo the same horrible fate as Asa de-
tracts any disturbing halo to the scene: instead
of Barbara Steele’s beautiful features, it is the
grotesque-looking Luciano Pigozzi who has his
face punctured by the lethal needles, with the
same shot, counter shot routine as in the direc-
tor’s debut, with the POV shot of the victim
watching the torture instrument approach. The
effect is no more of an alluring beauty being per-
versely disfigured, but only a grim comeuppance
for a minor, forgettable character.
Similarly, the murder of the doctor (Gus-
tavo De Nardo) is another set piece filled with
black humor, as the evil Baron, soon after re-
turning from the grave, knocks at the doctor’s
door for a first aid intervention, and kills the
good Samaritan for a reward. Here, by recycling
a key image in 6 donne per l’assassino (the phone
swinging off he hook in the film’s final scene) as
an unimportant addition in the doctor’s demise,
according to Bava scholar Alberto Pezzotta,
“Bava does not seem to celebrate himself, but
rather to diminish his own past. The self-
reference creates a familiar air, it plays things
down.”5
However, there is a point where the story
falls apart, and Bava indulges in those abstract
and anti-narrative temptations that had found
ample outlet in 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto
(170) as a reaction to an anodyne plot, and
which in Reazione a catena had admirably
welded to the narration instead. It is not, as
some might think, the celebrated sequence
where Eva is pursued by the Baron through the
city’s deserted streets, amid multicolored fogs
and bizarre camera angles, an amiable homage
to House of Wax whose abstractness is part of
the above-mentioned funhouse attitude; but,
rather, the scene where the psychic Christina
Hoffmann (Rada Rassimov) evokes the spirit of
a witch who fell victim to the Baron. It takes
place at sunset, in the woods, and Bava manages
to capture the magic suggestions he already
touched in Operazione paura through the char-
acter played by Fabienne Dali. In this scene,
Baron Blood’s manneristic adherence to classical
Gothic gives way to an original reinterpretation,
entrusted exclusively to visual suggestion. The
Fantastic manifests itself through a creative use
of shots, with the passage from out-of-focus to
focus and vice versa, the objects’ definition or
their dissolution in abstract shapes, rather than
through camera movements or the use of light-
ing. It is perhaps the only moment in the film
where Bava really attempts to escape from the
routine of an enjoyable yet minor work. And it
is telling that, after the good commercial foreign
sales of Baron Blood (which on the other hand
did mediocre business in Italy), he would work
again for Leone on a much more personal proj-
ect, which, sad to say, became one of his most
bitter failures: Lisa e il diavolo.
 1972: Un bianco 57

NoTeS (Rome). PM: Armando Bertuccioli; PS: Antonio

1. For a detailed list of the cuts in the U.S. version, see
Palumbo. Country: Italy. Filmed at Palazzo
Lucas, Mario Bava–All the Colors of the Dark, 885–86. Borghese, Artena (Rome) and Rizzoli Palatino
2. Alberto Pezzotta suggests that the idea of the Baron’s (Rome). Running time: 2 minutes (m. 2525).
peculiar son et lumière show might be taken from Georges Visa n. 61425 (11.17.172); Rating: V.M.18. Release
Franju’s Pleins feux sur l’assassin (161). Reportedly, Bava dates: 11.30.172 (Italy), 4.10.175 (France); Dis-
knew and admired Franju’s work. Alberto Pezzotta, Mario
Bava (Milan: Il Castoro Cinema (15) 2013), 115. Inciden- tribution: Regional. Domestic gross: 64,564,000
tally, the castle where Baron Blood was shot is the same as lire. Home video: Camera Obscura (Blu-ray, Ger-
in Adrian Hoven’s Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde
(168) and Freddie Francis’ Gebissen wird nur
nachts—das Happening der Vampire (171).
3. The script of Reazione a catena kept at
Rome’s CSC features an ending, never shot or ed-
ited, where the two kids add a line with fresh
paint to the sign “LA BAIA” (The Bay), which in
the end becomes “LA BAIA È DI TUTTI” (The
Bay Belongs to Everyone). See Pezzotta, Mario
Bava, 108.
4. Emilio Varriano, quoted in Manlio Go-
marasca and Davide Pulici, “Il talento di Mr.
Bava,” in Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici
(eds.), Genealogia del delitto. Il cinema di Mario
e Lamberto Bava. Nocturno Dossier #24, July
2004, 15.
5. Pezzotta, Mario Bava, 115.

Un bianco vestito per Marialé

(Spirits of Death)
D: Romano Scavolini. S: Giuseppe
Mangione; SC: Giuseppe Mangione,
Remigio Del Grosso; DOP: Romano
Scavolini (Telecolor, Colorscope); M:
Fiorenzo Carpi, conducted by Bruno
Nicolai (Ed. Gemelli); E: Francesco
Bertuccioli; SD: Emiliano Tolve; CO:
Herta Schwarz Scavolini, Angelo Litrico
(Marialé’s white dress); MU: Carlo
Sindici; Hair: Ettore Tarquini, Anna-
maria Ginnoto; AD: Arduino Sacco; C:
Renato Mascagni; AC: Giovanni Can-
farelli Modica; SP: Ettore Papaleo; AE:
Adalberto Ceccarelli; SO: Emilio Pugli-
elli; SP: Ettore Papaleo, Gianni Tatti; KG:
Giulio Diamanti; ChEl: Otello Magalotti;
Mix: Bruno Moreal; Press attache:
Franco Brel. Cast: Evelyn Stewart [Ida
Galli] (Marialé Bellaria / Marialé’s
mother), Luigi Pistilli (Paolo), Ivan Ras-
simov (Massimo), Pilar Velázquez (Mer-
cedes), Edilio Kim (Gustavo), Gengher
Gatti (Osvaldo the butler), Giancarlo
Bonuglia (Jo), Gianni Dei (Marialé’s
mother’s lover), Ezio Marano (Sebas-
tiano), Shawn Robinson (Semy), Franco
Calogero (Marialé’s father), Carla
Mancini (Prostitute), Bruno Boschetti. Italian locandina for Un bianco vestito per Marialé (1972).
PROD: Franca Luciani for KMG Cinema Art by Tino Avelli.
58 1972: Un bianco
many). Also known as: Exorcisme tragique
(France), La orgía de sangre (Spain).
Note: Although credited, Bruno Boschetti
does not appear in the film.
Marialé, who as a child saw her father kill
her mother and her lover and then commit sui-
cide, lives with her husband Paolo in a gloomy
castle. Paolo and the butler keep her segregated
and sedated, and avoid allowing her any contact
with the outside world. However, Marialé man-
ages to invite several friends to the villa, including
her former fiancé Massimo. Paolo is forced to re-
ceive the guests, but maintains a detached atti-
tude. The visitors find an assortment of bizarrely
dressed mannequins in the castle’s basement, and
set up a costume party which turns into a drunken
orgy. Then a mysterious murderer starts killing
them one by one, in many different ways—stran-
gled, slaughtered with a hammer, drowned in the
pool, devoured by dogs, slashed by a razor. Even-
tually Paolo, Massimo and Marialé are left alive,
and the mystery is unveiled…
Although his name is known by English-
language film buffs mainly in association with
the infamous gory psycho thriller Nightmare (a.
k.a. Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, 181), Ro-
mano Scavolini’s career is much more varied and
surprising than one would imagine. Born in
Fiume in 140, Scavolini was a self-taught film-
maker: at 17 he moved to Germany where he
shot his first 16mm film, I devastati, self-
financed with the money he earned working at
the docks; back to Italy, he directed a number
of short films and documentaries and made his
feature film debut in 166, with A mosca cieca.
Influenced by such writers as André Gide and
Albert Camus (The Stranger), shot in 16mm and
in black-and-white, it told a story of alienation
and existential anguish: a man named Carlo
wanders aimlessly in the streets; he thinks about
his love story with a girl named Laura and his
conversation with friends; he steals a gun from
a parked car and fantasizes about committing
crimes; eventually he shoots a passer-by.
A mosca cieca was characterized by a free-
wheeling, experimental style, which departed
from traditional narrative coordinates: the plot
was thin, with very little dialogue, and a contin-
uous interspersing of “reality and unreality, of
fantasies and memories, of past and present”1
which mirrored the psychological condition of
the protagonist, and followed the lesson of the
French Nouvelle Vague (Godard openly ex-
pressed his admiration for the movie). A mosca
cieca announced, albeit in a purely instinctive
level, the great social and political upheaval that
was soon to come in 168. The Italian board of
censors did not like it the least bit: the movie
was banned outright for obscenity, a decision
that underlined the committee’s retrograde
mentality. Scavolini fought against the verdict
and even appealed to the Council of State, but
to no avail. He followed A mosca cieca with more
experimental, avantgardist works, often cen-
tered on political themes, such as the shorts Ecce
Homo (167) and LSD (170) and the feature
films Lo stato d’assedio (16) and La prova gen-
erale (170, starring Lou Castel and Frank
Wolff). In 170 he left for Vietnam, as a freelance
photographer: he was wounded and reported
missing. His return to Italy marked Scavolini’s
descent in the realm of genre moviemaking.
Un bianco vestito per Marialé was by no
means a personal project, but rather a forced
move in order to survive: the director himself
labeled it as “a film which deserves only to be
forgotten.”2 Still, it is an interesting work, which
helps understand how genre labels put on Italian
movies of the period are often approximations
that do not reflect the film’s core. Often de-
scribed as a giallo, Scavolini’s film does in fact
turn into a violent murder mystery of sorts only
around the hour’s mark, but the giallo aspects—
a few violent murders and a (not-so) surprise
twist ending—are definitely marginal, and look
more like a bow to the audience, at a time when
Argento-inspired gialli were the rule, than an
organic aspect of the story. The script, by Giu-
seppe Mangione and Remigio Del Grosso, mixes
cultured and lowbrow elements, by throwing in
assorted references and “creative borrowings,”
so to speak, and is more akin to a perverse kam-
merspiel of sorts, liberally imbued with diverse
elements, which range from Gothic to avant-
garde theater. The result is an uneasy mixture
which gives away the film’s compromise nature.
Mangione and Del Grosso insert a number
of Gothic elements into the story. The premise,
with the main characters locking themselves in
a microcosm isolated from the outside world
where they unravel in decadence, brings to mind
Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death
(but also Sade’s unfinished novel The 120 Days
of Sodom). In typical Gothic fashion, the setting
is a timeless castle (actually Palazzo Borghese in
Artena, also seen in Freda’s Murder Obsession,
among others): with its crypts and old armors,
it becomes a key presence in the film. The hero-
 1972: Un bianco
ine, Marialé, looks at first like the typical damsel
in distress, at the mercy of a possessive and
seemingly psychotic husband and a sinister but-
ler (Gengher Gatti, a fleeting presence in horror
films of the period). A portrait of Marialé’s
mother, who looks exactly like her (both char-
acters are played by the same actress, Ida Galli),
hints at the themes of the double and the “return
of the past,” already introduced by the prologue.
The film fleetingly touches other Gothic staples
such as the uncanny indistinction between an-
imate and inanimate, namely in the introduction
of the butler played by Gengher Gatti, and in
the scene where Sebastiano (Ezio Marano)
seemingly notices his own doppelgänger among
the mannequins in the basement of Marialé’s
castle. What is more, even though the script
never attempts to suggest a supernatural pres-
ence at work, the ending—which bitterly closes
the narrative by way of a violent event that is the
exact repetition of a past tragedy we saw in the
prologue—marks the inescapability of fate, and
suggests a circular structure akin to that of other
Italian Gothic horror films of the past and cur-
rent decade, from Danza macabra to L’assassino
ha riservato nove poltrone.
In blending the old-style Gothic parapher-
nalia with a psychoanalytic exploration of a tor-
tured, paranoic soul, the movie comes closer to
the “Female Gothic” pictures of the decade.
Marialé is the victim of a childhood trauma that
left an indelible mark on her psyche, and, as film
scholar Kai Naumann correctly points out, “the
interior of the castle mutates into a map of Mar-
ialé’s soul.”3 The scene in the cellar, where the
various guests discover extravagantly dressed
mannequins (whose costumes they will end up
wearing for a wild party where they let loose
their vices, neuroses and hidden desires) be-
comes a metaphorical descent into the subcon-
scious that leads to a dual meaning. To Marialé,
wearing the titular “white dress” has the effect
of bringing to the surface her childhood trauma;
to the others, the masquerade actually becomes
an unmasking. It is in their ordinary life that
they wear masks of respectability, which they
put on again after their true self has been tem-
porarily unleashed—a microcosm which is re-
vealing of the human condition according to
Scavolini: “They’re pathetic, hypocritical, gut-
less, jealous and crazy like everybody else,” as
Marialé sums it up.
The fact that Mangione and Del Grosso
openly hint at one of Nobel Prize–winning au-
5
thor Luigi Pirandello’s favorite themes is further
proof of the script’s velleities, which make the
first half look like some sort of off–Broadway
play with a Message (spelled with a capital M…)
to deliver. In addition to exploring a gallery of
unpleasant types, the writers pay reference to
contemporaneous issues, such as Third World
emancipation. “But she learned to walk only yes-
terday!” “Sure. Because people like you have cut
off her legs,” goes a dialogue exchange between
Jo (Giancarlo Bonuglia) and Massimo (Ivan
Rassimov) regarding the former’s Afro-
American lover Semy (singer Shawn Robinson,
in her only film role), in a nod to one of the pe-
riod’s most quoted literary works, Frantz Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth (the inspiration for
Alberto Cavallone’s Afrika, 173).
In order to further expose this slice of hu-
manity’s misery, Scavolini even stages a de-
bauched, blasphemous rendition of the Last
Supper, with the drunken guests mockingly
quoting lines from the Gospel (and using a roast
chicken as “the body of Christ”), which openly
borrows—also visually—from Buñuel’s Viridi-
ana (161). The presence of various animals,
to which the characters are repeatedly com-
pared in a symbolic way, is another Surrealist
touch that somehow recalls the work of Marco
Ferreri.
Stylistically, the movie is more refined than
most Gothic and gialli of the period. Despite the
meagre budget, Scavolini (who acts also as di-
rector of photography) makes ample use of long
takes and dolly shots, and tries to avoid the ex-
pected clichés as much as possible. The impres-
sive opening scene features a number of power-
ful moments: the idyllic sight of the two lovers
amid an Eden of sorts; the arrival of Marialé’s
father, elegantly dressed in white, in an old lux-
ury car; the little girl watching from inside the
vehicle, her hands pressing against the window
like Melissa Graps in Operazione paura; the man
proceeding to the lovers’ romantic nest (with
the camera following his steps via a backward
tracking shot on the man’s feet through the
woods); and the ensuing slow-motion death
scene à la Sam Peckinpah (complete with full
frontal male nudity by Gianni Dei as the unfor-
tunate lover).
Still, Scavolini’s direction (and Fiorenzo
Carpi’s score) cannot overcome the script’s many
shortcomings—namely, sketchily developed
characters, pretentious dialogue, heavy-handed
symbolism. The acting is mediocre overall, with
60 1972: Byleth
the partial exception of Luigi Pistilli as the
ambiguous, tormented husband, in a role very
close to the one he played that same year in Ser-
gio Martino’s Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e
solo io ne ho la chiave; Italian genre film fans will
recognize Carla Mancini in one of her rare
speaking roles, as the girl in a miniskirt (possibly
a prostitute) to whom Ivan Rassimov’s character
asks for direction early on in the film. On top of
that, the sudden turn into giallo territory, with
the expected violent killings (including a
murder interspersed with a gratuitous lesbian
seduction scene and a razor slashing which re-
calls Freda’s Lo spettro), is an ill-fated move,
which undermines the makers’ ambitions and
gives a fatal blow to the fragile balance that sus-
tains the film, one of those amazing oddities that
were not uncommon within the production sys-
tem of the period.
With only 64 million lire grossed, Un
bianco vestito per Marialé did poor business in
Italy, although it surfaced in France a few years
later under the misleading title Exorcisme trag-
ique, to cash in on the success of The Exorcist.
In 172 Scavolini also tried his hand at pro-
ducing with the offbeat mystery drama Amore
e morte nel giardino degli dei, directed by his
brother Sauro and starring Erika Blanc, where
he was also the director of photography: it did
even worse than Un bianco vestito per Marialé
at the box office, with around 38 million. Scav-
olini’s following works were an odd bunch.
Cuore (173) was an adaptation of the epony-
mous, tearjerking novel by Edmondo De Amicis
set during Italian unification and characterized
by its reliance on patriotic themes, whereas
Servo suo (173) was a weird thriller about a pro-
fessor (Chris Avram) who becomes a hitman for
the Mafia, which reprised one of the director’s
favorite themes, violence as an inescapable
human condition.
After a period spent traveling in Central
and South America, Scavolini relocated to the
United States in 176, where he took various jobs
to make ends meet before returning to directing.
He helmed the action thriller Savage Hunt
(180), the infamous Nightmare and the war
movie Dogtags (187), inspired by his own vi-
cissitudes in Vietnam, followed by a long inac-
tivity. He returned behind the camera with Us-
tica: una spina nel cuore (2001), followed by the
documentary Le ultime ore del Che (2004) and
the gangster film Two Families (2007). In 2005
he started shooting L’apocalisse delle scimmie, a
three-part project still in progress, featuring
John Phillip Law’s last screen appearance.
NoTeS
1. Luigi Quaglietti, Cinema 60 #58, April 166, 27–28.
2. Luca M. Palmerini, Gaetano Mistretta, Spaghetti
Nightmares (Rome: M&P edizioni, 16), 127. The page
quote refers to the Italian edition of the book, the only in-
tegral version approved by the authors.
3. Kai Nauman, Blood on a White Dress, essay in the
German Blu-ray Un bianco vestito per Marialé.
Byleth (il demone dell’incesto) (Byleth—
The Demon of Incest)
D: Leopoldo Savona. S and SC: Leopoldo
Savona; DOP: Giovanni Crisci (Eastmancolor,
Telestampa Italiana); M: Vasil Kojukaroff (Ed.
Nazionalmusic); E: Otello Colangeli; PD, SD:
Elio Balletti, Fabrizio Diotallevi; MU: Lucia La
Porta; AD: Roberto Giandalia; AC: Antonio
Minutolo; 2ndAC: Antonio Quattrone; CO:
Tigano Lo Faro; AE: Dante Amatucci; Music ed-
itor: F. Achilli; SS: Clara Tamburini. Cast: Mark
Damon (Lionello Shandwell), Claudia Gravy
[Marie-Claude Perin] (Barbara), Aldo Bufi
Landi (Giordano), Franco Jamonte (Judge),
Tony Denton (Lieutenant), Fernando Cerulli
(Doctor), Silvana Pompili (Floriana), Caterina
Chiani (Gisella), Franco Marletta (Dario, the
groom), Antonio Anelli (Don Clemente, the
priest), Carla Mancini, Alessandro Perrella,
Bruna Baini [Beani] (Dolores, the first victim),
Florian Endlicher (Dolores’s lover), Karin
Lorson (Dolores—additional sex scene). PROD:
Agata Films (Rome); PM: Marino Vaccà; PS: Ste-
fania Garratoni, Eolo Capritti; UM: Maurizio
Pastrovich. Country: Italy. Filmed in Borgo del
Sasso, Cerveteri (Rome), Manziana (Rome) and
at Elios Film Studios (Rome). Running time: 5
minutes (m. 255); Visa n. 60243 (4.26.172);
Rating: V.M.18. Release date: 5.31.172; Distribu-
tion: Panta Cinematografica. Domestic gross: un-
known. Also known as: Les démons sexuels
(France), Trio der Lust (West Germany, 81 min-
utes; 10.7.175).
Italy, mid–19th century. The young duke Lio-
nello welcomes to the family castle his sister Bar-
bara, who has returned from England: the two
siblings share a morbid affection since they were
kids, and Lionello is devoured by jealousy when
he learns that Barbara has married a mature no-
bleman, Giordano. Meanwhile, two mysterious
murders upset the area: a prostitute and Lionello’s
maid Gisella are viciously killed, stabbed in the
 1972: Byleth 61

neck with a three-blade knife. After discovering L’ultima carica (164), the kind of old-style ad-
Lionello and Barbara intent on swearing mutual venture stories that audiences were quickly
fidelity with a blood ceremony, Giordano tries to growing tired of. Savona was also the man be-
cure the duke from his incestuous love by inviting hind the directorial chair for Helmut il solitario,
to the castle his young and beautiful cousin Flo- which was halted and eventually taken over by
riana. Unfortunately the woman is murdered as Mario Bava and became I coltelli del vendicatore
well. An elderly priest, expert in demonology, con- (166). The reminder of his nondescript career
firms Giordano’s suspicions of Lionello, and sug- saw him jump on the Spaghetti Western band-
gests that the man may be a succubus of the wagon, starting with the bizarre El rojo (166),
demon Byleth, who appears in the guise of a starring Richard Harrison.
black-dressed rider on a white horse and pushes After a handful of Westerns came Byleth,
his victims to murder and incest. Giordano pur- the first of two sui generis Gothic yarns which
sues his brother-in-law, who has taken refuge in were heavily influenced by the changing cur-
the ruins of an old village, and shoots him, but is rents in Italian cinema and popular culture. The
killed by Byleth. The wounded Lionello returns script (by the director and the elusive “Norbert
home, and he and Barbara
make love. Then Byleth com-
mands him to kill his sister,
but Lionello refuses, and the
demon kills him.
Although he had actu-
ally debuted behind the
camera with the swash-
buckler Il principe dalla
maschera rossa (155), star-
ring Frank Latimore and
Yvonne Furneaux, Leo-
poldo Savona (113–2000)
worked throughout the
Fifties and the early Sixties
mostly as assistant to such
renowned directors as Luigi
Zampa (Anni facili, 157),
Giuseppe De Santis (Uomini
e lupi, 157), Riccardo Freda
(Agi Murad—Il diavolo
bianco, 15), and Pier
Paolo Pasolini (on Accat-
tone, 161), besides occa-
sionally appearing as an
actor. His directorial career
was nowhere nearly as dis-
tinguished as those famous
names would make one
think, though: on I mongoli
(161) he was credited
alongside André De Toth,
but most of the film was ac-
tually shot by Riccardo
Freda, and Savona’s output
in the early-to-mid-’60s
comprised such nonde- Italian poster for Byleth (il demone dell’incesto) (1972). Art by Mario Pio-
script fare as La leggenda vano / Studio Paradiso. The same image was reused with slight alter-
di Fra Diavolo (162) and ations for the poster of Il sesso della strega (1973).
62 1972: La dama
Blake”) stitches together a number of heteroge-
neous elements: despite Gustave Doré’s itchings
for Dante’s Inferno under the opening credits,
Savona borrows the figure of the demon Beleth
from the 16th century treaty Pseudomonarchia
Daemonum. Unlike the English setting of the
films made during the previous decade, the story
takes place in Italy, and recalls the popular
novels by Carolina Invernizio and the like rather
than the British Gothic horror stories; for one
thing, it has a heavy emphasis on melodrama
and peculiar period details: a police officer
blames the Carbonari revolutionary society,
which struggled for Italian independence, for
the murders. On the other hand, the incestuous
relationship between the young duke Lionello
and his sister possibly draws from John Ford’s
tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, adapted just a
few months earlier by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
(Addio fratello crudele, 171). On top of that, the
sequences in which Lionello slaughters young
naked women are shot through the killer’s sub-
jective shots and look like something out of a
low-budget giallo, with plenty of hand-held
camera shots, distorted wide angles and black-
gloved hands. The result is closer in tone to the
adults-only comics of the period, which bor-
rowed the horror and Gothic setting as an
excuse to depict nudity and sadism.
The most interesting aspect of the story is
its ultimate ambiguity: is Lionello really pos-
sessed by the demon Byleth, as a Catholic priest
claims, or is he just the victim of a schizophrenic
split personality that has him identify with a su-
pernatural entity in order to vent his violent in-
stincts—that is, the unhealthy love for his sister
and his impotence with other women? Sadly, the
psychological element is confusingly developed,
and apart from the emphasis on nudity (with all
the victims dispatched in bed, just after sex),
there is little to recommend in Byleth. The plot
is muddled and slow-moving, and the low
budget is patent: most of the film takes place in
and around Lionello’s castle (the baronal palace
in Borgo del Sasso, in Cerveteri1), but unlike the
black-and-white Gothics of the 160s the result
is far from stylish, and a society ball sequence
ends up looking like a fourth-grade rip-off of
Visconti’s celebrated scenes in Senso (154) and
Il gattopardo (163).
Savona’s direction is characterized by per-
functory, time-saving long takes ridden with
zooms, and rarely comes out with anything in-
teresting. The best bit is possibly Giordano’s pur-
suit of Lionello on horseback in an abandoned
village, where the director’s past in Westerns
comes to the fore, whereas the climax—with
Byleth appearing to Lionello in the house’s mir-
rors, riding his horse—is badly rushed. As the
obsessed Lionello, Mark Damon gives one of the
worst performances in the history of Italian hor-
ror, constantly wide-eyed, his forehead beaded
with sweat and his shirt open to show his macho
hairy chest; in his incarnation as Byleth he is
constantly replaced by a double except in the
very last scene. The Belgian Congo–born (and
naturalized Spanish) Claudia Gravy (seen in
Jorge Grau’s Acteon, 167, and Jess Franco’s 99
Women, among others) fares no better, while the
veteran Neapolitan actor Aldo Bufi Landi is
sympathetic as the doomed Giordano, and even
gets to show his fencing skills in a duel scene
that seems one of the few moments that actually
benefitted from attentive direction on the part
of Savona. The cast also features Silvana Pompili,
Mirella Pamphili’s sister and a recurring pres-
ence in many TV movies and mini-series.
The Italian board of censors gave Byleth a
V.M.18 rating but demanded no cuts. However,
the film was distributed in Germany, as Trio der
Lust, in a significantly different version from the
one released in Italian cinemas: apart from being
several minutes shorter, and doing away with
expository and dialogue scenes, it features a dif-
ferent editing in parts and more explicit sex
scenes, with plenty of full frontal female nudity:
among the actresses stripping off for the camera
is Caterina Chiani, later to be known as Marzia
Damon (an a.k.a. adopted as a homage to the
American actor), one of the more generous
starlets of Italian softcore cinema of the 170s.
The German DVD on the X-rated label features
the shorter, German version, as does the Italian
one.
Savona’s next film was another Gothic/gi-
allo hybrid, the little-seen La morte scende leg-
gera.
NoTe
1. The palace can also be spotted in Mario Bianchi’s
Biancaneve & Co. (182). Another prominent location in
the film is the Macchia Grande woods in Manziana, near
Rome.
La dama rossa uccide sette volte (The
Red Queen Kills 7 Times)
D: Emilio P. Miraglia. S: Fabio Pittorru; SC:
Fabio Pittorru, Emilio P. Miraglia; DOP: Alberto
 1972: La dama 63

Spagnoli (Technicolor, Cromoscope); M: Bruno comes involved in a series of horrible murders.

Nicolai, conducted by the author (Ed. C.A.M.- The perpetrator appears to be a young woman
CIDIAS); E: Romeo Ciatti; ArtD, CO: Lorenzo with a black cape who looks just like the “Red
Baraldi; MU: Giulio Natalucci; Hair: Iolanda Dame,” and all the victims are related to the fash-
Conti; C: Franco Bruni; AC: Cesare Venturini; ion house. Ketty, haunted by guilt for having
AE: Gabriele Ingafú; APD: Ignazio Sig-
noriello; SO: Fiorenzo Magli, Umberto
Picistrelli; SS: Graziella Marsetti. Cast:
Barbara Bouchet (Ketty Wildenbrück),
Ugo Pagliai (Martin Hoffmann), Ma-
rina Malfatti (Franziska Wildenbrück),
Marino Masé (Police Inspector Toller),
Maria Pia Giancaro (Rosemary
Müller), Sybil Danning (Lulu Palm),
Nino Korda (Herbert Zieler), Fabrizio
Moresco (Peter), Rudolf Schindler
[Schündler] (Tobias Wildenbrück),
Maria Antonietta Guido, Carla Man-
cini, Bruno Bertocci (Hans Meier,
Spring Director); uncredited: Sisto
Brunetti (Policeman), Dolores Calò
(Dress-Fitter at Fashion House), Ne-
store Cavaricci (Policeman), Alfonso
Giganti (Fashion Studio Boss). PROD:
Phoenix Cinematografica (Rome), Ro-
mano Film G.M.B.H. (Munich), Traian
Boeru (Munich); PM: Elio di Pietro;
PSe: Giuseppe Bruno Bossio; PSeA:
Michele Figazzaro, Sandro Testa. Coun-
try: Italy / West Germany. Filmed in
Rome and Würzburg (Germany) and
at Safa Palatino Studios (Rome), Run-
ning time: 8 minutes (m. 2668). Visa
n. 6077 (8.2.172); Rating: V.M.14. Re-
lease date: 8.18.172; Distribution:
Cineriz. Domestic gross: 513,725,000
lire. Also known as: The Corpse Which
Didn’t Want To Die; The Lady in Red
Kills Seven Times; Feast of Flesh
(U.S.A.); Die Rote Dame; Horror House
(Germany); La dama rosa mata siete
veces (Spain; 3.4.174); La dame rouge
tua 7 fois (France); La dama de la capa
roja (Mexico; 8.18.173).
Bavaria. The elderly Tobias Wil-
denbrück reveals to his granddaughters
Ketty and Eveline that their family holds
a terrible curse: every 100 years the ghost
of the “Red Dame” returns from the
grave and kills 7 people, to take revenge
on her rival sister (and murderer), the
“Black Dame,” who will be her final vic- Italian locandina for emilio Miraglia’s second giallo/Gothic
tim. Several years later, Ketty—now a hybrid, La dama rossa uccide sette volte (1972). Art by Man-
photographer at a fashion house—be- fredo Acerbo.
64 1972: La dama
unintentionally killed Eveline, believes that her
sister has returned from the grave to take her re-
venge; despite her cousin Franziska’s help in con-
cealing Eveline’s murder, Ketty is persecuted by the
latter’s drug addict boyfriend Peter. Ketty’s lover
Martin—whose demented wife was one of the vic-
tims and who is consequently one of the prime
suspects—investigates, and finds out that som-
eone has put up a diabolical plan against Ketty…
Emilio Miraglia’s second giallo in a row,
again scripted by Fabio Pittorru, blends who-
dunit and the Gothic in a similar manner as La
notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba, and with even
more emphasis on the allegedly supernatural
angle. The prologue contains all the elements of
the customary ghost story: an old castle, a
gloomy portrait, a centuries-old family curse
which is doomed to repeat over and over. All
this is then transferred into the colorful, swingin’
170s Bavaria, amid photoshoots and fashion
houses, miniskirts and sexy outfits (courtesy of
stylist Mila Schön), astonishing wallpapers and
enough J&B in sight to drown a whole city. It is
a pop approach to the genre compared with the
austere black-and-white of the previous decade,
and it employs (naked) bodies, lava lamps and
design objects with the same relish as its pred-
ecessors did with period clothes, chandeliers
and dusty crypts.
Fabio Pittorru’s script winks at the Gothic’s
contemporaneous TV renaissance—here certi-
fied by the casting of Ugo Pagliai, the lead in the
occult-themed mini-series Il segno del co-
mando—and throws in ghastly appearances, se-
cret passages, night visions and a climax in a
flooded crypt that recalls both La vergine di
Norimberga (163) and Contronatura. On the
other hand, the impressive “Red Dame” (or “Red
Queen” in the English version) is a creation that
somehow recalls the Edgar Wallace villains
(think of the Monk with the Whip in Der Mönch
mit der Peitsche, a.k.a. The College Girl Murders,
167), here in a female incarnation—which
might partly be due to the coproduction deal
with West Germany, in order to deliver a more
krimi-oriented product, since some gialli were
actually distributed in Germany as additions to
the Wallace cycle.1 In fact the film was mostly
shot on location in Germany, in Wurzburg and
Weikersheim; the impressive Wildenbrück
manor is a castle in Neuestein, in the Baden-
Württemberg region; only some scenes, such as
those in and around Ugo Pagliai’s modern apart-
ment house, were shot in Rome.
The murders are suitably nasty, includ-
ing an unexpected stabbing (as the Red Queen
pops up from the right edge of the screen in
Hans’ murder) and a scene where a man is
dragged to death by a car that predates Profondo
rosso. Even better, however, is a nightmare se-
quence which features the Red Queen running
toward the sleepy Barbara Bouchet across an ap-
parently endless corridor, a truly unsettling mo-
ment that provides the movie’s most memorable
image. For over an hour, the story flows
smoothly and endlessly enjoyable, thanks also
to Bruno Nicolai’s first-rate score, but when the
time comes to pull the strings of the plot, im-
plausibilities and incongruities pop up, once
again stressing that logic was not one of gialli’s
main strengths.
Just like in La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla
tomba, Miraglia gives plenty of room to the
erotic factor. The cast features striking examples
of pulchritude on the part of the likes of Barbara
Bouchet, Marina Malfatti, Sybil Danning and
Maria Pia Giancaro, most providing nude
scenes: Bouchet’s rape is actually more risqué in
the film’s trailer, where the actress’ pubic hair is
briefly glimpsed. Danning—who in the same
year appeared also in the giallo, L’occhio nel labir-
into (172, Mario Caiano) and in Bluebeard
(172, Edward Dmytryk)—has an especially
memorable sex encounter with Ugo Pagliai
(looking slightly embarrassed in a fancy dressing
gown), during which she has a line that could
be delivered with a straight face only in an
Italian giallo: “Even the police know I’m an in-
credible nymphomaniac.”
La dama rossa uccide sette volte2 did pretty
good box-office in Italy and was distributed
abroad: as it often happened, the German ver-
sion was rather different than the Italian one,
running fifteen minutes shorter. Despite its good
commercial results, it was Miraglia’s last film as
a director.
NoTeS
1. Namely Riccardo Freda’s A doppia faccia (16), L’uc-
cello dalle piume di cristallo (170, Dario Argento), Sette
orchidee macchiate di rosso (172, Umberto Lenzi), Cosa
avete fatto a Solange? (172, Massimo Dallamano).
2. According to Franco Bruni, who debuted as camera-
man in this film, the working title was Sette scialli di velluto
rosso (Seven Shawls of Red Velvet), possibly dropped so as
to avoid confusion with Sergio Pastore’s Sette scialli di seta
gialla (literally, Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk), released
around the same time as Miraglia’s film.
 1972: Estratto
Estratto dagli archivi segreti della po-
lizia di una capitale europea (Tragic
Ceremony)
D: Robert Hampton [Riccardo Freda]. S
and SC: Mario Bianchi [Spanish version: José
Gutiérrez Maesso, Leonardo Martín]; DOP:
Francisco Fraile; M: Stelvio Cipriani; E: Iolanda
Benvenuti; SD: Rafael Ferri, Amedeo Mellone;
CO: Manolita Iglesias; MU: Cristobál Criado,
Renzo Francioni; Hair: Ana Criado; AMU: Luis
Criado; SE: Carlo Rambaldi; SO: Eugenio Ron-
dani, Alberto Escobedo; C: Giorgio Di Battista,
Teodoro Roa; AC: José Luis Criado, Miguel
Ángel Muñoz; AE: Alba Di Salvo, Felisa Rueda.
Cast: Camille Keaton (Jane), Luciana Paluzzi
(Lady Alexander), Luigi Pistilli (Lord Alexan-
der), Giovanni Petrucci (Fred), Tony Isbert [An-
tonio Spitzer Ysbert] (Bill), Máximo Valverde
(Joe), Pepe [José] Calvo (Sam David), Irina
Demick (Bill’s mother), Paul Muller (Doctor),
Beni Deus (Ferguson), Milo Quesada (Cop),
Alejandro de Enciso, Elsa Zabala (Devil wor-
shipper), Ambra Mascarello, Adriana Facchetti
(Woman in Alexander’s house), Fulvio Mingozzi
(Police Inspector), Carla Mancini. PROD: José
Gutiérrez Maesso for PIA—Produzioni Inter-
nazionali Associate (Rome), Tecisa (Madrid).
PM: Sergio Merolle, Faustino Ocaña. Country:
Italy / Spain. Filmed in Costa Brava (Spain).
Running time: 86 minutes (m. 2334). Visa n.
61507 (12.4.172); Rating: V.M.18. Release date:
12.20.172; Distribution: Cineriz. Domestic gross:
7,680,000 lire. Also known as: Trágica ceremonia
en villa Alexander (Spain; ..174).
Bill, an introverted rich young man, invites
three acquaintances on his boat, including Jane,
whom he is attracted to. Bill gives her a necklace
that he has stolen from his mother, and which is
said to have once belonged to a woman possessed
by the devil. On the way home, the group’s dune
buggy runs out of fuel: after an encounter with a
weird gas station owner, the four take refuge in a
villa whose owners, Lord and Lady Alexander,
turn out to be members of a satanic cult. Jane falls
into their hands and is about to be sacrificed dur-
ing a black mass, but the ceremony climaxes in a
massacre: Bill accidentally kills Lady Alexander,
and the devil worshippers are driven to kill each
other by a mysterious force. The hippies flee the
villa and end up at Bill’s place, but they are chased
away by his mother and take refuge at a country
house owned by Bill’s father. There they are dis-
patched one by one by Jane, who has become some
65
sort of succubus. In the end we find Jane in a state
of shock, locked in a cell at a mental home: she is
murdered by a supernatural presence that is re-
vealed to be Lady Alexander.
Riccardo Freda’s penultimate film has long
been a mysterious object, not the least because
the director always carefully avoided mention-
ing it in interviews, and even in his own memoir
Divoratori di celluloide, published in 181. And
yet, in recent years, after its reviviscence at the
2004 Venice Film Festival as part of the retro-
spective “Italian Kings of the Bs”—a screening
which ended with the audience booing, and
definitely not an apt choice to celebrate a master
filmmaker (and not a “King of the B,” whatever
this may mean) as Freda—and its release to
home video, Estratto dagli archivi segreti della
polizia di una capitale europea has become a
rather popular item among genre fans, adding
insult to injury, as there are so many better and
more representative films in the director’s fil-
mography.
Despite the Italian title—literally, “Excerpt
from the secret archives of the police of a Euro-
pean capital”—which seems to belong to some
politically committed crime film à la Damiano
Damiani, Estratto dagli archivi segreti della
polizia di una capitale europea is actually a su-
pernatural Gothic horror story with copious
amounts of gore: the umpteenth in a line of
work-for-hire projects which the director cared
little about. In that period, Freda was trying to
put together the project of a lifetime, on which
he would work for two decades: Francesco
Baracca, about a famous Italian aviator who died
in World War I, a major motion picture that
needed a conspicuous budget and production
values which scared potential financers. And so,
Freda—once a major film director, working for
Italy’s most prestigious studio, Lux Film—had
to settle for B-pictures, jumping from one genre
to another in a thinly disguised way to keep his
name afloat in the stormy Italian film industry,
which he had even briefly abandoned in the
mid–160s, when he had moved to France to di-
rect four pictures (a new version of the novel Les
deux orphelines, two spy flicks in the Coplan se-
ries and the excellent period drama Roger La
Honte).
Following the disastrous Israeli experi-
ence of the Biblical-inspired erotic drama Tamar
Wife of Er (170) and the grim giallo, L’iguana
dalla lingua di fuoco (171), Freda accepted an
offer to direct a horror movie based on a script
66 1972: Estratto

entitled Quella maledetta sera (“That Doomed Freda’s participation in the filming was con-
Evening”), written by Mario Bianchi and co- firmed by Carlo Rambaldi, who took care of the
financed by the Spanish producer José Gutiérrez over-the-top gory effects and who would
Maesso. Maesso’s company Tecisa, based in become a good friend of the director,2 and by
Madrid and active since the early 160s, almost Freda’s eldest daughter Jacqueline, who accom-
exclusively dedicated to co-productions, espe- panied him in Spain with her mother Silvana
cially with Italy. Tecisa advanced the money Merli and served on the set as a factotum—or,
from Spanish distribution, and its participation in her own words, as “assistant slave”—despite
usually varied between 45% and 50%: it took being only eight and a half years old.3 Freda even
care of location shooting, transportation and wrote the lyrics for the title song, composed by
technical equipment, as well as hiring crews and Stelvio Cipriani and sung by Ernesto Brancucci,
extras. La vita, a macabre little number whose lyrics go
Shooting began in June 172: according to like this: “Questa è la vita / Un uomo ride felice
some sources, Freda left the set after a few days, / La bocca già piena di terra / Danza una donna
and was replaced by Filippo Ratti.1 However, / Brulicante di vermi” (This is life / A man laughs
happily / His mouth al-
ready filled with soil / A
woman dances / Teeming
with worms).
By comparing the
original screenplay (kept
at the C.S.C. library in
Rome4) with the finished
film, Ratti’s contribution
can perhaps be circum-
scribed to a couple of
scenes that are not in
Bianchi’s script: namely,
the flashback in which Bill
gives his mother the pearl
necklace and tells her the
legend that accompanies
it, and the epilogue in the
asylum, where a doctor
(Paul Muller) offers an
awkward explanation for
the baffling supernatural
events that have been
going on, disserting about
astral bodies with a raving,
demented look. This addi-
tion might have been ei-
ther the result of the need
on the part of the producer
to come up with enough
footage for a feature length
film, or a consequence of
the story’s awkwardness.
On the other hand,
Bianchi’s script encloses
the story within one long
flashback, after an opening
Italian poster for Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale set in the asylum where
europea (1972). Art by Mario Piovano / Studio Paradiso. Jane is being questioned by
 1972: Estratto
a police inspector and a female doctor, a scene
that in the finished film takes place near the end;
in addition to other minor differences, a few
scenes were cut or possibly never filmed, such
as one where Lord Alexander screens a 16mm
film shot in India for his guests, which depicts
his first encounter with Lady Alexander, thus
hinting at the woman’s supernatural origins.5
The result is a wildly incoherent story,
which at times bears to mind the delirious cir-
cular pattern of Lisa e il diavolo. The two films
have a number of elements in common, such as
the travelers seeking shelter at a villa whose in-
habitants are in league with evil forces, and an
enigmatic Devil (played by the Spanish char-
acter actor José “Pepe” Calvo) with a playful,
catty attitude who acts as a factotum-servant.
What is more, the way the gas station attendant
mocks the young hippies, coming up with every
sort of excuse not to fill their car’s tank, brings
to mind the spiteful attitude of the butler played
by Telly Savalas in Lisa e il diavolo, and Calvo
adds some nice touches, such as his character
sniffing at the traveler’s checks book handed to
him by the wealthy Bill, in a fun variation of the
Latin saying pecunia non olet. However, both
works ultimately met a similar fate, with little
distribution and more or less intrusive manip-
ulations.
Whereas Bava’s film adopted a Surrealist,
poetic approach, Freda’s wavers uncomfortably
between pale reminiscences of 160s Italian
Gothic, frantic splatter scenes and ill-fated nods
to the present. The pairing of beauty and horror
was one of Italian Gothic horror’s staples since
I vampiri and La maschera del demonio: the di-
aphanous Jane, the object of desire of Bill and
his young hippie friends, becomes a ghastly
presence and the instrument of a vengeful force
that seduces her unfortunate lovers, and at one
point she displays a fleshless, putrescent skull
that is the equivalent of Barbara Steele’s rotting
torso in Bava’s debut—and in itself unawarily
reminiscent of the German silent film Von mor-
gens bis mitternacht (120, Karlheinz Martin),
which first featured the image of a woman’s face
transforming into a skull. The same image
would turn up in a much more convincing way
in Aristide Massaccesi’s La morte ha sorriso al-
l’assassino (173). On the other hand, the script’s
biased view of the hippie movement is typical
of many films of the era, and includes a totally
gratuitous reference to the Bel Air massacre
and Sharon Tate’s murder, something not un-
67
common in the period: see also Steno’s giallo
spoof Il terrore con gli occhi storti, also made in
172.
Overall, the mixture of reincarnation and
black magic is fairly pointless, and the additional
scenes only make matters worse. From Bill’s
monologue about the doomed necklace, at first
we are supposed to think that the evil menace
is unleashed by the jewel, which Jane seemingly
cannot take off her neck, and which is paired
with a bracelet worn by Lady Alexander, that
functions as a link between the two women (all
this is more clearly outlined in the script,
though). In the end, however, the diabolical
presence is revealed to be Lady Alexander her-
self, with the help of her devilish factotum-
driver (Calvo again), whereas Paul Muller’s in-
coherent babblings fail to make any sense.
Freda did little to improve upon this mess.
One can only guess that he simply did not care
about such a down-at-heel potboiler. There are
some moments of undeniable suggestion,
though: the scenes set at the gas station, filmed
with the director’s trademark panning shots, are
suitably atmospheric, thanks also to Francisco
Fraile’s accomplished cinematography. At times
Freda resorts to his own cinematic past: the
image of Camille Keaton descending the villa’s
stairs, holding a candlestick, while the night
breeze eeriely raises the windows’ curtains by
her side, brings to mind a similar moment in
Aquila nera (146) and especially the Du Grand
castle scenes in I vampiri; the moment where
the pearls slip out of her necklace and bounce
down the steps echoes not just Bava’s 5 bambole
per la luna d’agosto, but its earlier antecedent,
the scene of a little child’s ball bouncing down
the stairs in Freda’s own La leggenda del Piave
(152), a tearjerking melodrama set during
World War I. Some themes are closer to the di-
rector’s sensibility, though. Bill’s morbid, vaguely
incestuous attraction toward his fascinating and
promiscuous mother (Irina Demick) predates
Murder Obsession, and the story’s original cir-
cular narrative is in tune with Freda’s vision of
a deterministic universe where events are
doomed to repeat over and over.
On the other hand, Freda’s use of hand-
held camera and wide-angle shots shows that he
had put to good use the lesson of contempora-
neous gialli, much more so than in the sub-par
L’iguana dalla lingua di fuoco. Still, the climactic
“tragic ceremony” is rendered with an overre-
liance on weird camera angles and wild-eyed ex-
68 1972: Estratto
tras that recall the black mass scenes in Sergio
Martino’s Tutti i colori del buio, released early
that year, and soon become tiresome. At one
point an on-set light and a cameraman can be
seen popping up in the frame during a low-angle
shot, underlining the director’s habitual use of
several cameras to film a scene as well as the
sloppiness with which the film was made.
Nevertheless, the result is one of the most
bizarre and over-the-top gore scenes ever seen
in an Italian 170s film, and one of the very first,
in a year when Rambaldi also concocted the
equally crude, but more restrained gory f/x for
La notte dei diavoli. In Freda’s film gunshots to
the belly give way to abundant blood spilling, a
man has his face bisected via a sword, Luigi Pis-
tilli’s character receives a bullet to the head
which results in a geyser-like stream of blood
from his forehead, a woman is decapitated, an-
other one catches fire. For all its crudeness, it is
a triumph of Grand-Guignol which tries hard
to cram as many creative deaths as possible in
less than a minute. Regrettably, though, the
black mass’ splattery climax is repeated several
times throughout the picture, with the result of
drastically cutting down its impact. The film
also features a couple of horrific scenes not in-
cluded in the script: Bill ends up dead and blue-
faced inside a wardrobe—Tony Isbert’s make-
up recalls the otherwordly presences seen in yet
another awkward Italian/Spanish horror film,
Mario Siciliano’s Malocchio (175)—whereas an-
other bizarre gory scene looks like a gruesome
variation on Martin Scorsese’s famous short The
Big Shave (168).
The movie stars the 25-year-old Camille
Keaton, one of the many starlets in Italian horror
of the 170s. After her debut in Massimo Dalla-
mano’s Che cosa avete fatto a Solange? (172),
Keaton enjoyed a short-lived popularity: she was
the centerfold of the November 172 issue of the
Italian Playmen, and went on to make a handful
of mostly bad films such as Il sesso della strega
and the parapsychological drama Madeleine–
Anatomia di un incubo (174, Roberto Mauri),
before returning to the U.S. and starring in the
controversial I Spit on Your Grave, a.k.a. Day of
the Woman (178), directed by her then-
husband Meir Zarchi. Despite her none-too
convincing acting skills, the pale, fragile-looking
actress makes for an unsettling presence, partly
because of the visible scars on her face, the result
of a car accident in her youth. She makes an un-
easy pair with a very young, creepy-looking
Tony Isbert. Luigi Pistilli and Luciana Paluzzi,
although top-billed, have minimal roles.
Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di
una capitale europea was submitted to the Italian
board of censors in December 172, and was
given a V.M. 18 rating “in relation to the theme
of the film, the seriously gruesome scenes of vi-
olence (such as the rite that ends up in a mas-
sacre), linked to drug use, as well as the foul lan-
guage used in several sequences.” It performed
very poorly in Italy, and was released in Spain
only two years later. After completing the movie,
it looked like Freda was ready for more impres-
sive efforts, namely Crossroads, an Italian-
French suspense thriller to be filmed in Tunis,
and L’imperatore di New York, a.k.a. Emperor of
New York (a script on real-life mobster Lucky
Luciano dating back to the mid-to-late 160s).6
However, eight years would pass before
Freda’s return behind the camera with Murder
Obsession, his final movie. In the meantime,
definitely less inspiring projects ended up in the
drawer. One was Gli esorcisti (The Exorcists), an
attempt at cashing in on the success of Friedkin’s
film (which was actually released in Italy in Oc-
tober 174), like other similar titles such as
L’ossessa and Un urlo dalle tenebre, from a script
Freda developed from a story by Mario Righi,
who was to finance it with his company Alexan-
der Cinematografica Internazionale. The cast
indicated in the working sheets featured Anto-
nia Santilli (seen in Il Boss, 173), Adolfo
Lastretti and Claudio Cassinelli. Scheduled to
be filmed starting on February 23, 174, it
stopped dead at pre-production stage. In the fol-
lowing years Freda’s name was attached to some
horror-themed projects scripted by Piero Reg-
noli, such as the elusive Thanat 82 (178) which
was supposed to star Ursula Andress and Hardy
Krüger, and Satan’s Night, a.k.a. Qualcosa pene-
tra in noi (Le notti di Satana), first announced
as Sensory in 178 and to be directed originally
by Roberto Montero. The tentative cast featured
Gabriele Tinti, Silvia Dionisio, Olga Karlatos,
Ettore Manni, Laura Gemser and the Swiss
François Simon, and the story was a rather drab
mixture of horror and eroticism, with an em-
phasis on the latter, set in a haunted house where
a number of characters unleash devilish forces
by way of a séance. Filming was scheduled to
start in February 17, but eventually the movie
was cancelled. Gemser and Dionisio would turn
up in Murder Obsession.7
 1972: Frankenstein
NoTeS
1. Alessio Di Rocco, “Estratto dagli archivi segreti della
polizia di una capitale europea,” in Riccardo Fassone (Ed.),
“La stagione delle streghe. Guida al gotico italiano,” Noc-
turno Dossier #80, March 200, 65.
2. “I did a film in Spain with him. Very likeable. A mas-
ter at bypassing obstacles,” Rambaldi stated. Which con-
firms Freda’s presence on the set, and suggests that there
were obstacles during filming. Michele Giordano, Da Ercole
a Piedone (e oltre) il mito dell’uomo forte nel cinema italiano
(Rome: Gremese 18), 128.
3. “Despite being a skinny little girl I woke up early in
the morning with dad, and he made me do any kind of job
on the set, in the most disparate ways. And when I didn’t
know what to do, he would say, ‘Go help the electricians
mount the dolly!’ The things I remember the most about
the film are Rambaldi, the stuntmen, and my decision to
become a stuntwoman myself. When I saw the action
scenes I went to my father and said, ‘Dad, when I grow up
I want to do this!’ And he: ‘Sure, sure, why not…’ Perhaps
he thought it was like that other time when I told him I
wanted to be a CIA agent…!” Jacqueline Freda is adamant
in stating that her father stayed in Spain for the whole
shooting, and directed most of the film. “He directed all
the action scenes. But, you know, on practically every film
he left after finishing the action scenes, ’cause to him the
film was over. He shot all the scenes in the villa, the action
scenes, all of Rambaldi’s splatter scenes, the black mass …
but also the boring stuff, such as the girl in the bathtub….
He never talked about the movie? Of course—he thought
it was crap!” Jacqueline Freda, interview with the author,
May 2015.
4. There are actually two scripts kept at the CSC library,
identical save for the title. One is titled Estratto dagli archivi
segreti della polizia di una capitale europea, and the other
Quella maledetta sera (“That Doomed Evening”), which
echoes the Spanish title, Trágica ceremonia en villa Alexan-
der (“Tragic Ceremony at Villa Alexander”) and was likely
the original title. Both are 166 pages long, and are dated
June 6, 172.
5. The script also features the gory flashbacks from the
“tragic ceremony”—over-the-top, in slow-motion and very
similar to the ones in the film—from the very first scenes;
Bill and friends do not travel on a dune buggy but (more
realistically) on motorbikes, and their initial bet does not
center on nautical terms, but on the non-existent “flying
fish” that Bill’s companions bet they can spot on the sea (a
much more convincing idea, incidentally); during the mas-
sacre, the cultists—who are described as naked, save for
their black cloaks and leather belts with Rosicrucian sym-
bols that cover their pubic area—see each other as mon-
sters (“They cannot see the real, natural faces, but horrible
furry monsters, devilish, unreal-looking”), and the gory
bits are slightly different: there is no mention of the bi-
sected head, and Lord Alexander ends up impaled on a
dagger “that almost cuts him in half.” Also missing is a
brief scene set in a church, where a beat combo is rehears-
ing, and Bill seems to recognize the parish priest as Lord
Alexander. The deaths of the three hippies are also differ-
ent, and decidedly less gory: Bill is found in the bathroom,
a mask of terror, a green foam coming out from his mouth,
eyes wide open (but not that ugly blue-colored face); Fred
hangs himself; Joe runs away from a horrible sight (which
is implied to be Jane, whose monstrous alter ego is not
mentioned in the script) and falls to his death into the sea.
6
6. See respectively Variety, 3 May 172, and 27
December 172.
7. For more details on Freda’s unfilmed projects, see
Roberto Curti, Riccardo Freda: The Life and Works of a
Born Filmmaker (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017).
Frankenstein ’80 (Frankenstein ’80)
D: Mario Mancini. S: Ferdinando De Le-
one; SC: Ferdinando De Leone, Mario Mancini;
DOP: Emilio Varriano (Technicolor, Technis-
cope); M: Daniele Patucchi (Ed. C.A.M.); E:
Enzo Micarelli; AD: Renzo Girolami; AC: Ed-
mondo Pisani; MU: Gianni Amadei; Hair: Lucia
La Porta; SO: Paolo Esposito; SP: Alfio Quat-
trini; SD: Giuseppe Pappalardo; ChEl: Giovanni
Marini; KG: Ubaldo Di Curzio; DubD: Robert
Oliver; English script: Frazier Rippy; SE: Carlo
Rambaldi; SS: Giuseppe Bruno Bossio. Cast:
John Richardson (Karl Schein), Gordon Mitchell
(Dr. Otto Frankenstein), Renato Romano (In-
spector Harald Schneider), Xiro Papas [Ciro
Papa] (Mosaic), Dalila Parker [Dalila Di Laz-
zaro] (Sonia), Bob Fiz [Roberto Fizz] (Prof.
Rudolf Schwartz), Dada Gallotti (Butcher),
Marisa Traversi (Second prostitute), Lemmy
Carson (Head Nurse), Marco Mariani (Track
Spectator), Fulvio Mingozzi (Second Investiga-
tor), Enrico Rossi (First Investigator), Umberto
Amambrini (Vice Straus), Luigi Antonio Guerra
(Agent), Luigi Bonos (Hobo); uncredited: Eolo
Capritti (Bystander at accident site with sun-
glasses). PROD: M.G.D. Film (Rome); PM:
Benedetto Graziani; PS: Eolo Capritti. Country:
Italy. Filmed in Munich and Rome and at Cave
Film Studio (Rome). Running time: 8 minutes
(m. 2604). Visa n. 61258 (10.20.172); Rating:
V.M.18. Release dates: 12.12.172 (Italy); 6.26.174
(France); 8.12.177 (West Germany); Distribu-
tion: Les Films 2R Roma. Domestic gross: un-
known. Also known as: Frankenstein ’80 / Les
orgies de Frankenstein 80 / Frankenstein 2000
(France); Frankenstein ’80 / Midnight Horror
(West Germany), Frankenstein Sex (Belgium).
A girl dies after a heart transplant because
someone has stolen from the clinic an anti-
rejection medication perfected by the surgeon, Dr.
Schwartz. The thief is Dr. Otto Frankenstein, who
works at the same hospital and has secretly as-
sembled an artificial man named Mosaic with the
limbs of deceased people. The monstrous creature
preys on women whom he rapes and horribly
murders. The police, led by Inspector Schneider,
grope in the dark. Meanwhile, the dead girl’s
brother, journalist Karl Schein, is investigating on
70 1972: Frankenstein
his own: he meets Frankenstein’s beautiful niece
Sonia, and falls for her. Mosaic’s new victim is Dr. centered Lady Frankenstein. Whereas Mel
Schwartz, whose eyes Frankenstein transplants to
the monster: however, Schwartz’ serum is almost
finished, and Mosaic’s sexual and bloody appetite
proves difficult to control. When the monster at-
tacks Sonia, Frankenstein tries to stop him, but
is killed by the creature. Mosaic escapes just before
the police’s arrival, and goes on a killing spree.
Forty-eight hours later the effects of the anti-
rejection drug stop, and Mosaic dies just as he is
about to kill Karl and Sonia.
“You may have a limp when you walk, but
I bet you don’t have one in bed!” says the pros-
titute to the eerie-looking scarred giant with a
hat and an overcoat that has approached her in
a park, and who is now following her to her
place like a puppy dog. It is one of many cringe-
inducing moments in Frankenstein ’80, the
decade’s second approximation to the Franken-
German poster for Frankenstein ’80 (1972).
stein myth produced in Italy after the female-
Welles’ film attempted to retain the period feel
of Hammer Gothics, Frankenstein ’80 throws it
in the drain with its very title, which openly
quotes Howard W. Koch’s Frankenstein 1970
(158), and sets its story in the present day.
Despite the liberal use of the name “Frank-
enstein” there is very little in common between
the story and Mary Shelley’s character. Rather,
the inspiration for the script lies heavily in the
adults-only comics, such as Oltretomba, Walle-
stein and the like, which featured copious
amounts of blood and gore in addition to pa-
rades of female flesh. The Frankenstein monster,
aptly named Mosaic, is assembled with various
body organs (mostly female) graphically ex-
tracted from the unwilling donors, courtesy of
Carlo Rambaldi’s special effects—here slightly
above the level of Herschell Gordon Lewis’
blood feasts.
The murder scenes are gro-
tesque: the killing of a female
butcher in a cold room, by means of
a femur bone, sticks in the memory
for its sheer outrageousness. How-
ever, the director is just as interested
in providing a parade of nudity and
over-the-top sex, which climaxes in
the encounter between the above-
mentioned streetwalker and Mosaic,
who rapes the unfortunate woman
(the implication is that he is mon-
strously endowed as well) and mur-
ders her. Even though the gore is
crude, the result is an early hint of
the tendency toward excess that will
characterize Italian genre cinema of
the decade, and the mixture of hor-
ror and sex is as poor taste as the
soon-to-blossom Nazi-erotic cycle.
The story, revolving around a
miraculous healing serum which
prevents post-op rejection, hints at
contemporary issues in the wake of
Dr. Barnard’s exploits: Dr. Franken-
stein, not the least bit preoccupied
with the ethical implications of his
work, is mostly focused on solving
surgical issues, as the monster con-
tinually needs new organs to replace
the rejected ones, and suffers from
a neurological disease too. Not that
the script gives any resonance to this
 1972: La morte
bland theme: the story moves confusingly from
one horrific moment to the other, with an awk-
ward series of police procedural scenes and oth-
ers featuring the vapid hero (John Richardson)
investigating on his own. In contrast to Richard-
son’s somnambulic acting, Gordon Mitchell is
awfully hamming his way throughout the movie
as the unlikely, mustachoed and spirited Otto
Frankenstein, who sutures dead bodies as if he
was darning socks, nonchalantly keeps severed
heads in the fridge, and extracts and manipu-
lates various body organs with leering abandon.
After Dr. Frankenstein is mercilessly dispatched
by his creature roughly around the hour mark,
the viewer must resign himself to a protracted
hodgepodge of badly shot gory scenes (with car
race footage added for good measure in a scene
where Mosaic pops up near a race track) until
the none-too-exciting climax.
Despite the familiar faces in sight—note
also the 1-year-old Dalila Di Lazzaro, soon to
be involved in another Frankenstein movie, and
character actor Renato Romano, playing a car-
icaturish cigar-chomping commissioner—
Frankenstein ’80 has very little in common with
the Gothic films made in Italy in that period,
starting with its German setting and exteriors.
When interviewed by Christian Kessler, Mitchell
recalled: “Parts of the movie were probably shot
in Bavaria, but none of those in which I was in-
volved.”1 Other scenes, such as those at Franken-
stein’s clinic, were filmed in Rome. Lou Castel
was originally to star in the film, possibly in
Richardson’s role, but was forced to withdraw
when he was expelled from Italy in late April
172: his working permit was not renewed be-
cause of the actor’s political views.2
Obviously aimed at foreign markets, Frank-
enstein ’80 has still many shady points, starting
with the presence of dubbing director Robert
Harrison Oliver, who owned a dubbing facility
in Munich. Oliver was involved in various roles
in a number of Dick Randall-produced flicks of
the period, such as Guido Zurli’s grotesque farce
Lo strangolatore di Vienna (171), the sleazy Casa
d’appuntamento (172), and the trashy Terror! Il
castello delle donne maledette, which he signed
as director. The latter film has quite a few things
in common with Frankenstein ’80, starting with
the presence of cinematographer Mario Man-
cini, here credited in his only directorial effort,
and considered by some to have had a hand on
Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette. His di-
rection is flat and perfunctory, with an annoying
71
use of cheap low-angle close-ups in the scenes
of Mosaic attacking the victims.
In addition to Mancini, the name of Ciro
Papa stands out: the bald, hulking actor, usually
typecast as the monster (he was the “monster
vampire” in Il plenilunio delle vergini, and played
“Lupo” in Luigi Batzella’s Nazi-erotic epic La bes-
tia in calore) had served as production manager
in a number of low-budget films of the period,
and popped up in Casa d’appuntamento and Ter-
ror! Il castello delle donne maledette as well. Ac-
cording to Mitchell, Papa “originally worked in
production. Unfortunately he then had an acci-
dent: during a car ride to Venice he fell asleep
driving and his car hit a tree. He was instantly
dead.”3
Frankenstein ’80 passed almost unnoticed
in Italy at the time of its release. It also came out
in photonovel version in the Italian issue of
Cinesex #26 (May 173), and found marginal dis-
tribution abroad, namely in France and West
Germany. It is currently in public domain in the
United States.
NoTeS
1. Christian Kessler, “Maciste und die Spaghetti aus
dem Weltall,” www.christiankessler.de. The German lan-
guage interview was published in a slightly different (and
sometimes not completely faithful) English translation in
the Video Watchdog magazine. Christian Kessler, “Gordon
Mitchell. Atlas in the Land of Cinema,” Video Watchdog
#48, 18, 47. Thanks to Gary Vanisian for the new trans-
lation from the original German text.
2. Appealing against his client’s expulsion, Castel’s
lawyer submitted to the authorities the contract for
Mancini’s film (referred to as Mosaico Frankenstein 80),
which the actor was supposed to start shooting on May 2.
Anonymous, “L’attore Lou Castel ha lasciato l’Italia,” Cor-
riere della Sera, April 27, 172.
3. Kessler, “Maciste und die Spaghetti aus dem Weltall.”
La morte scende leggera (Death Descends
Lightly)
D: Leopoldo Savona. S: Luigi Russo; SC:
Luigi Russo, Leopoldo Savona; DOP: Luciano
Trasatti (Eastmancolor, Telecolor); M: Lallo
[Coriolano] Gori (Ed. Nazionalmusic); the song
Sunday in Neon Lights is played by Mack Sigis
Porter Ensemble; E: Otello Colangeli; ArtD, CO:
Fabrizio Diotallevi; MU: Marcella Pelliccia; AD:
Luigi Russo; SO: Angelo D’Abruzzo; C: Giorgio
Di Battista; AC: Antonio Quattrone; SS: Paola
Tiezzi. Cast: Stelio Candelli (Giorgio Darica),
Patrizia Viotti (Liz), Veronica Korosec (Adele),
Rossella Bergamonti (Marisa), Tom Felleghy
(Savara, the Attorney), Antonio Anelli (Hotel
72 1972: La morte
Owner), Marcello Di Martire (Commissioner
De Carmine), Maily [Mathily] Doria (Irina,
Giorgio’s wife), Fernando Cerulli (Judge Ma-
grini), Franco Marletta (Malvestiti, the stage di-
rector / Man in stag film), Lella Cattaneo (Hotel
Owner’s Wife), Alessandro Perrella, Carla
Mancini (Girl answering the phone); uncredited:
Eros Buttaglieri (Cop at crime scene), Caterina
Chiani (Woman in stag film). PROD: Agata
Films (Rome); PM: Gianni Solitro; PS: Nicola
Addario, Stefania Garratoni, Sergio Bellanti;
APSe: Franco Bartoli. Country: Italy. Filmed at
Rizzoli Studios (Rome). Running time: 88 min-
utes (m. 240). Visa n. 60782 (8.10.172); Rating:
V.M.18. Release date: 8.16.174 (?)1; Distribution:
Regional. Domestic gross: unknown. Home
video: Futurama (VHS, Italy).
Rome. Upon returning home from Milan,
gangster Giorgio Darica finds out that his wife,
Italian poster for La morte scende leggera (1972).
whom he was about to leave, has been murdered.
He asks for help from shady politician Magrini,
who in turn enlists his lawyer Savara to find Dar-
ica a temporary hideout since he has no alibi.
Savara takes Darica and the latter’s lover Liz to
a deserted hotel, where they will stay for a couple
of days. Meanwhile, Magrini gets in touch with a
stage company for a mysterious plan. At the hotel,
Darica and Liz get bored and restless. Soon, their
seclusion is interrupted by a series of strange
events. The hotel’s former owner turns up unex-
pectedly, and a series of seemingly supernatural
events and murders take place. Darica becomes
convinced that the hotel is populated with ghosts.
However, it turns out it was all part of Magrini’s
plan to make him confess his wife’s murder. But
Darica is not the culprit…
Made a short while after the period Gothic
Byleth (Il demone dell’incesto), and again pro-
duced by Agata Film (the com-
pany also responsible for Luigi
Russo’s unfinished sex-horror
Paura, made that same year),
Leopoldo Savona’s penultimate
film (originally to be titled La
morte scende leggera come un
ragno) was a mixture of differ-
ent genres, with an emphasis
on eroticism. At first glance, La
morte scende leggera looks like
a standard giallo: it opens in
modern-day Italy, with a POV
shot of a murderer coming into
a sleeping woman’s room and
dispatching her (offscreen, at
least in circulating prints). As
the protagonist, the menacing
gangster Darica (Jack Palance
lookalike Stelio Candelli, re-
placing Robert Woods in the
lead) asks for help from Mafi-
oso politician Magrini, the
script even throws in some bla-
tant commentary on the coun-
try’s corrupt politicians. The
early scenes look a bit like
something out of a Mafia
movie, not the least because the
politician is played by one of
Fernando Di Leo’s recurring
actors, the slimy-looking Fer-
nando Cerulli: people ex-
change phone calls in a chain
of power that goes from the
 1972: La morte
powerful MP to a corrupt lawyer, a Mafia pic-
ciotto, and ultimately the obedient executors,
each asking a favor (i.e. demanding it, in a men-
acingly mellifluous tone) to someone lower in
grade.
As with most genre films of the era, the
makers’ main preoccupation is eroticism, and
the presence of Patrizia Viotti as Darica’s lover,
Liz, alerts the viewer that soon there will be
plenty of bare female flesh in sight—which soon
happens. Secluded in a deserted hotel in the out-
skirts of Rome (incidentally, the same location
glimpsed in a few scenes of La notte dei dannati,
also starring Viotti), Darica and Liz soon find a
way to kill time, watching an 8mm stag film
(amazingly, even if on the run the gangster
found the time to bring over some diversions)
and indulging in a torrid lovemaking session.
“But this is Italian!” the bewildered Liz says
while watching the loop; “Italy produces more
[porn] than Sweden and Denmark combined”
is Darica’s ironic answer, much more so if we
consider that the supposed stag film is actually
a clip from Savona’s own Byleth (il demone del-
l’incesto) featuring Caterina Chiani and Franco
Marletta. The scene—which does not feature ex-
plicit sex—caused some trouble when the film
was submitted to the board of censors, and was
slightly shortened (with cuts for a total of 23 sec-
onds) to obtain a V.M.18 rating.
It is only halfway through that La morte
scende leggera turns into a sort of modern-day
remake of Danza macabra, as the hotel appears
to be haunted by ghosts who revive bloody
events from the past, and seem to be rather will-
ing to indulge in the pleasure of the flesh: “Come
into my arms. I am alive to love you!” a woman
says to Darica, paraphrasing Barbara Steele’s
most famous line in Margheriti’s film. The best
thing about Luigi Russo and Savona’s script is
precisely the injection of Gothic elements into
a contemporary, ordinary tale: the squalid hotel,
abandoned after a bankruptcy, becomes a
modern-day version of the haunted manor, and
a vague anticipation of the Overlook Hotel in
The Shining.
However, it would have taken a far better
script and direction to make the story work,
whereas Russo and Savona practically give away
the twist early on, as one of Magrini’s men, a
stereotypical Mafioso with a thick Sicilian
accent, is seen calling a theatrical company, aptly
named “I Feretri” (The Coffins), that is about to
stage a macabre mystery play called La matassa
73
disfatta (“The Undone Skein”—a reference to
Paolo Lombardo’s Grand Guignol company, per-
haps?). Incidentally, the stage director, Malves-
titi, is played by Franco Marletta, the same man
seen in the “porn” clip.
When strange and seemingly supernatural
events start to take place at the hotel, then, even
the most naive viewer realizes that the comedi-
ans might have something to do with them. That
is not the case, however, with Darica, possible
the most gullible Mafia killer ever portrayed on
screen: like the journalist played by Georges Riv-
ière in Danza macabra he is just a powerless wit-
ness who does not move a finger to intervene or
stop the events he sees, an attitude that comes
off as forced and ridiculous, as does the gang-
ster’s psychological breakdown.
If Candelli, a supporting actor here playing
one of his rare leading roles, is a weak presence,
Patrizia Viotti is slightly more convincing than
in La notte dei dannati, perhaps since the role
makes her darker side come to the fore, in ad-
dition to her body. Even though 172 was a
rather busy year for the actress, who appeared
also in a couple of “Decamerotics” (Beffe, licenze
et amori del Decamerone segreto and Decamer-
one proibito), La morte scende leggera was one
of her last film roles. In 174 Viotti appeared in
the German comedy Charlys Nichten (a.k.a.
Confession of a Sexy Photographer) directed by
Walter Boos and unreleased in Italy. It was a
nondescript end to an all-too-brief film career,
with a sad coda. On June 25, 175, Patrizia Viotti
was arrested for possession of drugs. She re-
mained in jail for 27 days before release, but her
drug addiction led to another arrest, and to
eleven more days in the pen, in November 184.
Patrizia died at only 44, on August 24, 14.
In a movie hardly noteworthy on the tech-
nical side (d.o.p. Luciano Trasatti, of I vitelloni
fame, had long fallen out of grace and mostly
worked on cheap productions), the opening
song stands out: the fuzzy, doomy Sunday in
Neon Lights, performed by Ghana singer Mack
“Sigis” Porter, features inspired, Hendrix-like
guitar work and sticks in the memory long after
the end credits have rolled. A black African
artist, born in Ghana during the English colonial
occupation, Porter moved to the Netherlands
and then to Italy in the late 160s. He released
four pop and soul-oriented singles for the small
Neapolitan label Fans, and in 16 he won the
“Un disco per l’Europa” song contest in Lugano,
Switzerland.
74 1972: La notte dei diavoli
In 172 Porter recorded the concept album
Peace on You, characterized by a psych and
slightly progressive mood and featuring an Ital-
ian backing band that included keyboardist
Vince Tempera from the prog combo Il Volo.
Tempera would become one of Italy’s leading
authors and arrangers for TV and film. After his
musical career Porter stayed in Italy and became
a stylist under the name Mack Squire.2
NoTeS
1. According to the ANICA reference volumes, La
morte scende leggera was given a marginal release only in
August 174, after a two-year oblivion, but this bit of in-
formation is debated, and there is chance that the movie
circulated earlier. Therefore, as with Ombre roventi, in the
absence of certain data, I have chosen to list the film as a
172 release.
2. The album was reissued by the German label Shadoks
Music in 2006, in a limited pressing of 400 copies in vinyl.
La notte dei diavoli (The Night of the Dev-
ils)
D: Giorgio Ferroni. S: Eduardo Manzanos
Brochero, based on the novelette Sem’ya vurda-
laka by Aleksey Tolstoy. SC: Romano Migliorini,
Giambattista Mussetto; DOP: Manuel Ber-
enguer (Eastmancolor, Techniscope); M: Gior-
gio Gaslini; E: Gianmaria Messeri; ArtD: José
Luis Galicia, Jaime Pérez Cubero; CO: Elio
Micheli; SD: Eugenio Liverani; MU: A. [Pieran-
tonio] Mecacci, Adolfo Ponte; Hair: Júlia Gon-
zález; AD: Gianni Siragusa, Mariano Canales;
PropM: Ginés Blanco; SE: Carlo Rambaldi; As-
stSE: Carlo De Marchis; C, 2ndUD: Nino [Se-
bastiano] Celeste; SP: Antonio Ortas; SS: Monica
Mercatelli, Isabel Mulá. Cast: Gianni Garko [Gi-
anni Garkovich] (Nicola), Agostina Belli
(Sdenka), Mark Roberts [Roberto Maldera]
(Jovan), Cinzia De Carolis (Irina), Teresa Gim-
pera (Elena), William Vanders (Gorka Ciu-
velak), Umberto Raho (Doctor Tosi), Luis
Suárez (Vlado), Sabrina Tamborra (Mira), Rosa
Toros [Rosita Torosh] (Nurse), Stefano Op-
pedisano (Male Nurse), Maria Monti (The
Witch); uncredited: John Bartha (Saw-Mill
Owner), Tom Felleghy (Police Commissioner),
Renato Turi (Kovacic, the Retired Detective),
Giovanni Petrazzi. PROD: Luigi Mariani and
Eduardo Manzanos Brochero for Filmes Cine-
matografica, Due Emme Cinematografica
(Rome), Copercines, Cooperativa Cinemá-
tografica (Madrid); PM: Solly V. Bianco; PA:
Eugenio Silverano, Julián García de la Vega.
Country: Italy / Spain. Filmed in Bracciano,
Manziana, Mazzano Romano (Rome) and at
D.E.A.R. Studios (Rome). Running time: 8 min-
utes (m. 241). Visa n. 60050 (3.28.172); Rating:
V.M.14. Release date: 4.2.172. Distribution:
P.A.C. Domestic gross: 156,686,000 lire. Also
known as: La noche de los diablos (Spain;
6.25.173), La nuit des diables (France; 4.10.173),
Akuma no hohoemi (Japan), Demonen der Nacht
(Netherlands), Djävulens natt (Sweden).
An inmate at a mental hospital, Nicola, tells
his strange and frightening story to a doctor. After
his car broke down in the woods, Nicola took shel-
ter at a farmhouse near the Slovenian border.
Soon he noticed that a strange atmosphere sur-
rounded the place and its inhabitants: the whole
family, led by the elderly Gorka, seemed to be
under the influence of superstitious beliefs, and
its members were terrified by a powerful witch
who could turn people into undead vampires.
After witnessing what he thought to be a murder,
Nicola fled to report it to the authorities, but a re-
tired detective convinced him that the murderous
spell was real, prompting him to run back and
save the young Sdenka, with whom Nicola had
fallen in love. Nicola eventually discovered that
all the members of Gorka’s family had been in-
fected, and barely managed to escape. Back at the
asylum, Nicola receives a visit from Sdenka, whom
he believes has turned into a monster as well…
Over a decade after Il mulino delle donne
di pietra (160), Giorgio Ferroni returned to the
Gothic genre with a new version of Aleksey
Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s novella The Family of
the Vourdalak, already adapted by Mario Bava
as an episode of I tre volti della paura. An Italian-
Spanish co-production, La notte dei diavoli was
co-financed by Eduardo Manzanos Brochero’s
Copercines together with two Italian companies,
Filmes and Due Emme: the latter had been
founded in 171 by Luigi Mariani and Roberto
Maldera, who also played one of the main roles
in the film.
Even though they retained many elements
from the story, scriptwriters Romano Migliorini
and Giambattista Mussetto (although Brochero
was credited as co-scriptwriter, his contribution
to the script—as with most of his credits in Ital-
ian movies—was likely only nominal)1 made a
number of decisive changes. In addition to fram-
ing the story as one long flashback told by the
protagonist, they changed the Wurdalak’s
gender, turning it into a woman, and devised a
modern-day setting, at the border between Italy
and Slovenia.
 1972: La notte dei diavoli
An Italian fotobusta for La notte dei diavoli (1972), emphasizing the film’s gory content.
The horrific clash between modernity and
a rural environment was a typical element in
many horror films of the period, particularly the
so-called “American Gothic” titles of the 170s
(from Deliverance to The Texas Chain Saw Mas-
sacre) and can be found also in a number of
Spanish horror films of the decade, despite their
foreign setting: a case in point is León Klimov-
sky’s La orgía nocturna de los vampiros (173).
The main intuition of Ferroni’s film is that, even
before they become undead, Gorka and his fam-
ily are already ghosts from a world that does not
exist anymore, the remnants of a rural civiliza-
tion wiped away by urbanization—the same sce-
nario evoked by realist dramas such as La grande
scrofa nera (172, Filippo Ottoni), here revised
in a Fantastic key.
“Out here life is hard and the rewards are
small. In the city it’s the opposite. The younger
generation likes money. They don’t want to
break their backs for practically nothing. They
want the good life,” Jovan (Roberto Maldera) ex-
plains to the protagonist, played by Gianni
Garko, commenting on the ongoing exodus
from the countryside. A former documentarist,
Ferroni had depicted the same phenomenon in
75
a propaganda key in the documentary Ai
margini della città (154), where he tried to show
how along the precarious border between the
countryside and the suburbs there was still room
for a poetic portrayal of everyday life; here, he
immerses the Gothic theme in a realistic con-
text, developing Tolstoy’s story in an environ-
ment comparable to that of any rural depopu-
lated Italian area, amid abandoned farmhouses
and poor families still characterized by a rigid
patriarchy in which the woman is a passive and
silent presence. The result is not far in spirit
from the harsh portrayal of Southern Italy as
seen in Lucio Fulci’s Non si sevizia un paperino
(172). As in Fulci’s film, this world is seen
through the eyes of an outsider, a dealer whose
rational, concrete vision is undermined by the
confrontation with such an unexplored, forgot-
ten reality.
Gorka and his family are the obstinate sur-
vivors of a rural world that keeps rejecting civ-
ilization and its benefits, seen as an element of
disruption and contagion. When he sarcastically
claims that the only good thing he learned dur-
ing military service was how to fix cars, Jovan
rejects the alleged social and educational value
76 1972: La notte dei diavoli
of conscription, that rips young people away
from their land and family; and when Sdenka
(Agostina Belli) confesses to the incredulous
Nicola that she has never watched TV in her
whole life, the cultural hiatus between the two
worlds becomes blatant. The germ that infects
and corrodes this microcosm comes from the
outside, from the civilization that corrupts the
impermeability of the family and ultimately
turns its members against each other: just like
the witch that seduced Gorka’s brother, turning
him into a vampire, the city dealer played by Gi-
anni Garko is not only the witness of a tragedy—
the dissolution of Gorka’s family—but a factor
that accelerates its destruction. In a way, then,
Nicola is yet another version of the “visitor” em-
bodied by Terence Stamp in Teorema.
The implosion of family veered in a horror
key in the climax of Ferroni’s film can be com-
pared to the one showed by George A. Romero
in Night of the Living Dead (168): in the film’s
most atrocious and shocking scene, a little girl
(Cinzia De Carolis) attacks her own mother
(Teresa Gimpera), biting her and ripping her
chest—a moment lifted from Tolstoy’s story,
which nevertheless here acquires a savage
power, after Romero’s film broke down the bar-
riers of what could be shown in a horror pic.2
Similarly, Nicola’s desperate escape from the
monsters by car is another scene reinvented
from the literary source and fit to accommodate
the taste for blood and gore, which also pays ref-
erence to Romero’s debut.
Vampirism is never mentioned explicitly:
in order to make the film more akin to the cur-
rent trends, the victims of the contagion are
called “living dead,” and the vampire sorceress
herself is a hybrid, a chilling corruptor whose
nature is elusive. The umpteenth “witch” figure
in Italian Gothic, played by stage actress Maria
Monti, is devoid of the seductive allure of those
embodied by Barbara Steele but is nevertheless
imbued with a sexual power that becomes the
key to erode the family core: she is a wild, lib-
erating force which destroys the patriarchal fam-
ily values. On top of that, the narrative frame
set in an asylum denotes an antipsychiatric and
anti-institutional vein that recalls the political
horror movies of the period.
Despite some poor dialogue and perform-
ances, as well as the time-saving use of zooms,
the result is quite interesting, if not fully suc-
cessful. Ferroni’s mise-en-scène is poles apart
from the languid charm displayed in Il mulino
delle donne di pietra: the budget does not allow
for stylish embellishments, but the director
makes good use of the woods and the dilapi-
dated country farms and huts, with some strik-
ing shots. One such is the first appearance of the
two kids, seen behind a window that frames
them like in a portrait, looking straight at the
camera: a truly Bava-esque moment. The gory
scenes are surprisingly savage: Ferroni embraces
graphic horror with plenty of gruesome gory ef-
fects—stakes driven through hearts and faces
that melt like wax—courtesy of Carlo Rambaldi.
The versions aimed at foreign markets included
additional splatter effects (an exploding head,
an eviscerated heart) and nude bits during the
opening sequence, as part of Nicola’s hallucina-
tions.3 On the other hand, the apparitions of the
witch—filmed in slow-motion, pale and with
silent movie-like moves—recall certain Spanish
horror flicks of the period such as La noche de
Walpurgis (170, León Klimovsky), and are very
evocative: d.o.p. Manuel Berenguer used pe-
culiar black-and-white filters for the night
scenes, in order to obtain a suggestive atmos-
phere. Giorgio Gaslini’s score is another asset.
The film was shot in five weeks, in late 171
and early 172, near the Bracciano lake in the
Lazio region (which nevertheless makes for a
convincing Yugoslavian setting), at a hunting
lodge owned by the proprietors of the Odescal-
chi castle. It was assistant director Gianni Sira-
gusa who suggested Agostina Belli, with whom
he had worked on Lina Wertmüller’s Mimì Met-
allurgico ferito nell’onore (172), for the role of
Sdenka. Led by Gianni Garko, who was trying
to renew his image after his success in 160s
Westerns, the cast also featured the Spanish
Teresa Gimpera (Craig Hill’s wife) and the child
actress Cinzia De Carolis, very popular in Italy
after her roles in the TV movie Anna dei mira-
coli (168) and Dario Argento’s Il gatto a nove
code (171). De Carolis would become an accom-
plished voice actress, and sporadically returned
to the sets: one embarassing occasion was the
trashy erotic drama Libidine (17), in which she
played alongside Marina Hedman, Ajita Wilson,
and a python.
At the time of the filming, the 63-year-old
Ferroni was almost completely deaf, and could
direct the movie only with the help of a hearing
aid; cameraman Nino Celeste directed a second
unit for a number of night scenes, including part
of Nicola’s escape by car. Even though around
the time of La notte dei diavoli’s release news-
 1972: Tutti i colori
papers announced another project with him be-
hind the camera, the evocatively titled E i mostri
uscirono dalle loro tane (And the Monsters Came
Out of Their Lair),4 Ferroni helmed only one
more film—the comedy Antonio e Placido: at-
tenti ragazzi … chi rompe paga, signed as “Calvin
Jackson Padget” like his 160s Westerns—in
175, before retiring. He died in 181.
Tolstoy’s story was filmed again in 175, by
the Spanish film director José Antonio Paramo,
as La familia Vourdalak, a 60-minute movie that
was part of the TV series El quinto jinete,
starring Charo López as Sdenka. Ferroni’s film
was also the inspiration for issue #21 of the
adults-only comic Oltretomba gigante, La
maledizione dei Wurdalak, published in Feb-
ruary 175 by Edifumetto.
NoTeS
1. Romano Migliorini had previously collaborated with
Roberto Natale on the script for a couple of Gothics di-
rected by Massimo Pupillo, 5 tombe per un medium and Il
boia scarlatto (both 165), as well as on Bava’s Operazione
paura; they would work again with Bava (uncredited) on
Lisa e il diavolo. Moreover, he and Mussetto penned a num-
ber of scripts together, such as Bandidos (168, Massimo
Dallamano), Omicidio per vocazione (168, Vittorio Sin-
doni), Freda’s A doppia faccia, and the ultra-violent rape-
and-revenge flick La settima donna (178, Franco Pros-
peri).
2. The image was reprised, albeit in a grotesque way, in
a notorious scene of Andrea Bianchi’s Le notti del terrore
(181).
3. These gory and nude bits are retained in the copy
presented in the Raro DVD and Blu-ray.
4. Anonymous, “‘Catturata’ dal cinema,” Corriere della
Sera, March , 172. The movie was slated to star Angela
Brambati, the singer from the pop band Ricchi e Poveri.
Tutti i colori del buio (All the Colors of the
Dark)
D: Sergio Martino. S: Santiago Moncada;
SC: Ernesto Gastaldi, Sauro Scavolini; DOP: Gi-
ancarlo Ferrando, Miguel Fernández Mila
(Technochrome, Techniscope); M: Bruno Nico-
lai (Ed. Gemelli); E: Eugenio Alabiso; PD: Jaime
Pérez Cubero, José Luís Galicia; SD: Giorgio
Bertolini; CO: Giulia Mafai; MU: Giuseppe Fer-
rante; Hair: Iolanda Conti; AD: Francisco Ro-
driguez Fernández, Vittorio Caronia; C: Bruno
Pellegrini; AC: Adolfo Troiani; ACO: Silvio Lau-
renzi; SP: Francesco Narducci; AE: Amedeo Mo-
riani; SO: Bruno Zanoli; Mix: Bruno Moreal; SP:
Francesco Narducci; SS: Mirella Roy [Mirella
Malatesta]. English version: Lewis E. Ciannelli.
Cast: George Hilton (Richard Steele), Edwige
77
Fenech (Jane Harrison), Ivan Rassimov (Mark
Cogan), Julián Ugarte (Jerome McBride),
George Rigaud (Dr. Burton), Maria Cumani
Quasimodo (Elderly Neighbor), Susan Scott
[Nieves Navarro] (Barbara Harrison), Marina
Malfatti (Mary Well), Alan Collins [Luciano
Pigozzi] (Franciscus Clay), Dominique
Boschero (Jane’s Mother), Lisa Leonardi (Girl
with dog), Renato Chiantoni (Mr. Main), Tom
Felleghy (Inspector Smith), Vera Drudi (Night-
mare Woman), Carla Mancini, Gianni Pulone;
uncredited: Sergio Martino (Journalist/Police-
man). PROD: Mino Loy and Luciano Martino
for Lea Film, National Cinematografica (Rome),
C.C. Astro (Madrid); PM: Fabio Diotallevi; UM:
Franco Fogagnolo, Floriano Trenker. Country:
Italy/Spain. Filmed on location in London, West
Sussex (U.K.) and at Incir-De Paolis Studios
(Rome); Running time: 4 minutes (m. 2570);
Visa n. 5784 (2.24.172); Rating: V.M.14. Release
date: 2.28.172; Distribution: Interfilm. Domestic
gross: 24,470,000 lire. Also known as: Day of
the Maniac; Demons of the Dead; They’re Coming
to Get You! (U.S.A.; 8.13.176); Todos los colores
de la oscuridad (Spain; 8.27.173); Toutes les
couleurs du vice; L’alliance invisible (France;
1.3.174); Todas as Cores do Medo (Brazil); Todas
as Cores da Escuridão (Portugal).
Note: Carla Mancini and Gianni Pulone,
although credited, do not appear in the film.
Due to a childhood trauma (she witnessed
the murder of her mother), exacerbated by a
recent car accident that caused her a miscarriage,
Jane Harrison is plagued by nightmares which af-
fect her sex life with her partner, Richard. Her
fears seem to have materialized, assuming the ap-
pearance of an unknown blue-eyed assassin that
pursues her relentlessly, armed with a dagger. Fol-
lowing her sister Barbara’s advice, Jane turns to
a psychiatrist, Dr. Burton, and starts a series of
therapy sessions. Meanwhile, she makes the ac-
quaintance of Mary, a mysterious young woman
who has recently moved into her own condo, and
who introduces her to a cult of Satan worshipers.
The new experience upsets Jane’s mind even more,
as she is apparently forced to kill Mary during a
ritual. After Dr. Burton and an old couple to
whom the doctor had entrusted Jane are found
murdered, Richard and the police are able to iden-
tify the participants in the black masses and arrest
them. Jane’s nightmares were the result of a dia-
bolical conspiracy…
Following the success of Lo strano vizio
della signora Wardh and La coda dello scorpione
78 1972: Tutti i colori

(both 171), the third giallo written by Ernesto the typical female Gothic heroine, who is “si-
Gastaldi1 for Sergio Martino revolved again multaneously a victim and an investigator of a
around a typical whodunit mystery, but at the haunting that is caused by anxieties about trans-
same time it emphasized extraneous and irra- gressive sexuality,”2 Jane remains a thoroughly
tional elements, which turned the movie into an passive figure.
out-and-out Gothic hybrid. The writer intro- Gastaldi keeps the story firmly anchored
duced a Satanic conspiracy theme borrowed to a rational scheme: the plot against Jane is or-
from Rosemary’s Baby which pushed the story chestrated by the surprise villain for strictly
into “female Gothic” territory: Edwige Fenech monetary reasons, and the Satanic subplot turns
plays a modern-day damsel in distress, a weak- out to be a scam. “It was a film against paranor-
willed woman persecuted by her own sexual mal beliefs which was taken by many for a film
fears (embodied, similarly to Lo strano vizio in favor of those beliefs.”3 But the visuals plunge
della signora Wardh, by the character played by it into the realm of Gothic from the very
Ivan Rassimov)—even though, compared with opening shot, the image of a lake at sundown
where the sounds of na-
ture convey a subtle ee-
rieness that explodes into
a grotesque nightmarish
vision: in a rarefied, the-
atrical space, with sparse
white furniture standing
out on a black back-
ground, three different fe-
male figures—a pregnant
woman on a gynecology
table, another (Do-
minique Boschero) in a
bed and an elderly,
grotesque “living doll”—
are murdered by a blue-
eyed man; the scene is fol-
lowed by a breathless
camera car shot across a
desolate country road, in
negative, which ends
against a tree trunk. The
result is a tad dated and
definitely heavy-handed
in its use of Freudian
symbols paired with
weird wide-angle shots,
but quite effective
nonetheless. Similarly, the
satanic rituals—accompa-
nied by Bruno Nicolai’s
prog-influenced score,
spiced with sitars and fe-
male chants—feel more
than a bit kitschy (and
with a nod to contempo-
raneous adults-only
comics), with the system-
outstanding Spanish poster for Tutti i colori del buio (1972). Art by Fran- atic use of the wide-angle
cisco Fernandez Zarza-Pérez, a.k.a. “Jano.” lens to emphasize the dis-
 1972: Tutti i colori
gusting menace, as the cultists’ leering faces ap-
proach poor Jane in eager anticipation of the
orgy that will follow.
Interestingly, in the final scenes Gastaldi
adds a genuine paranormal touch to the story
that further enhances the Gothic angle and al-
lows for an effective twist ending, as Jane has a
foresight of events to come via a premonitory
dream (also characterized by extreme wide-
angle shots that distort perspectives). It is yet
another example of how the giallo’s rational core
allowed for irrational elements, that would ul-
timately take the upper hand in works such as
Profondo rosso.
Tutti i colori del buio (a title Gastaldi took
from a sci-fi paperback in the Urania series4) is
at its most effective when it plays with the con-
trast between the heroine’s drab existence and
her escapist desires, which lead to her embracing
black magic as a way to leave behind the boring
ordinariness of middle-class life, as opposed to
the rational path to explore the unconscious and
its traumas through psychoanalysis. All this is
underlined by the striking English locations, the
gloomy condo where Jane lives, and the decay-
ing magnificence of the castle where the Satanic
sect performs its rituals.5
The best thing about Martino’s film is pre-
cisely the ability to catch the irrational dissatis-
faction that creeps under the façade of a rational
society, something that Polanski portrayed mas-
terfully, but which here becomes a trait d’union
with the many dramas about married couples
that are no longer able to communicate sexually:
within Italian cinema of the period, a theme
such as marital unhappiness—a recurring topic
in Gastaldi’s work, as proven also by his own
movies as a director, such as Libido (165) and
La lunga spiaggia fredda (171)—could turn up
either in an auteur film or a genre product, from
Antonioni to giallo, without losing its edge.
Here, the heroine’s last line, “I’m afraid I’m not
myself anymore … help me…,” is both an ad-
mission of her detachment from the rational
world and a call for help to her man, in one of
the most problematic reconciliatory happy end-
ings seen in an Italian genre film of the period.
The paranoia mood is well-handled
throughout, and Martino employs convincingly
his leading man, George Hilton, in a role that
remains ambiguous almost until the end; what
is more, the casting of the eerie-looking Julián
7
Ugarte as the sect’s high priest is felicitous,
whereas Luciano Pigozzi is given little to do ex-
cept looking menacing as usual. Given the pres-
ence of Fenech as well as other ravishing ladies
such as Susan Scott and Marina Malfatti, the di-
rector does not stint on eroticism either, and—
a testimony to the makers’ shrewdness—one key
clue to the solution is handed to the viewer dur-
ing a nude scene. Predictably, the board of cen-
sors asked for the erotic scenes between Hilton
and Fenech to be trimmed before giving the
movie a V.M.14 rating.
Gastaldi followed a similar route with his
next script for Martino, Il tuo vizio è una stanza
chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (172), by
blending a typical family intrigue à la Les dia-
boliques (155, Henri-Georges Clouzot) with a
subplot and an ending lifted from Edgar Allan
Poe’s The Black Cat: however, unlike Tutti i colori
del buio, the Gothic elements played more as an
embellishment to a story firmly rooted in giallo,
and overall less convincingly handled.
Tutti i colori del buio circulated overseas in
a trimmed version, released by Sam Sherman’s
company Independent International under the
title They’re Coming to Get You!, featuring a new
credit sequence designed by Bob Le Bar. It also
surfaced on TV as Demons of the Dead. It was
finally released in the U.S. in its uncut version
to home video.
NoTeS
1. Although the script is credited to Gastaldi and Sauro
Scavolini, from a story by Santiago Moncada, Gastaldi
claims to have written it on his own. “Moncada was only
a name for co-production reasons, and perhaps Scavolini
may have done a revision or a reading, I don’t know. But I
never worked with him on the script.” Ernesto Gastaldi,
email interview with the author, September 2016.
2. Misha Kavka, “The Gothic on Screen,” in Jerrold E.
Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21.
3. Ernesto Gastaldi, email interview with the author,
September 2016.
4. Tim Lucas, “What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood
in the Scripts of Ernesto Gastaldi?,” Video Watchdog #3,
May/June 17, 46. The book Gastaldi mentions is Lloyd
Biggle Jr.’s 163 novel All the Colors of Darkness, the first
in the Jan Darzek cycle, published as Tutti i colori del buio,
Urania #335, May 164.
5. The condo is Kenilworth Court, in West Putney, Lon-
don, whereas the castle is Wykehurst Place, in West Sussex,
a Gothic Revival mansion seen in a number of movies, in-
cluding Demons of the Mind (172, Peter Sykes) and Legend
of Hell House (173, John Hough).
80 1973: Flesh
1973
Flesh for Frankenstein, a.k.a. Il mostro è in
tavola, barone … Frankenstein
D: Paul Morrissey [Italian version: Anthony
M. Dawson [Antonio Margheriti]]. S and SC:
Paul Morrissey [Italian version: Tonino Guerra,
from an idea by Paul Morrissey]; DOP: Luigi
Kuveiller (Space-Vision 3-D, Eastmancolor, LV-
Luciano Vittori); M: Claudio Gizzi (Ed. R.C.A.);
E: Jed Johnson [Italian version: Franca Silvi]; PD,
CO: Enrico Job; ArtD: Gianni Giovagnoni; MU:
Mario Di Salvio; SE: Carlo Rambaldi [and An-
tonio Margheriti]; Hair: Paolo Franceschi; AD:
Paolo Pietrangeli; 2ndUD: Antonio Margheriti;
C: Ubaldo Terzano; SO: Carlo Palmieri; B: Piero
Fondi; SOE: Roberto Arcangeli; Mix: Fausto An-
cillai; 3-D consultant: Robert V. Bernier; SP:
Paolo Pettini; ACO: Benito Persico; AE: Loretta
Mattioli; SS: Silvia Petroni. Cast: Joe Dallesandro
(Nicholas), Monique Van Vooren (Katrin Frank-
enstein), Udo Kier (Baron von Frankenstein),
Arno Juerging (Otto), Dalila Di Lazzaro (Female
monster), Srdjan Zelenovic [Italian version:
Aleksic Miomir] (Sacha), Nicoletta Elmi
(Marika / Diastola), Marco Liofredi (Erik / Sis-
tolo). Liù Bosisio (Olga), Fiorella Masselli (Large
prostitute), Cristina Gaioni (Nicholas’ girl-
friend), Rosita Torosh (Sonia, the prostitute),
Carla Mancini (Farmer girl), Imelde Marani
(Blonde prostitute). PROD: Andrew Braunsberg
and Carlo Ponti for Compagnia Cinemato-
grafica Champion (Rome); PM: Mara Blasetti;
PA: Vasco Mafera; PAcc: Maurizio Anticoli.
Country: Italy / France. Filmed in Passerano
(Rome) and at Cinecittà Studios (Rome). Run-
ning time: 5 minutes (Italian version: 8 min-
utes—m. 2448). Visa n. 64264 (3.28.174); Rat-
ing: V.M.18. Release dates: 11.30.173 (West
Germany); 3.17.174 (U.S.A.); 3.15.175 (Italy);
Distribution: Gold Film (Italy); Bryanston Pic-
tures (U.S.A.). Domestic gross: 345,023,314 lire.
Also known as: Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein
(U.S.A.; Germany); Chair pour Frankenstein
(France); Carne para Frankenstein (Spain, Ar-
gentina).
Baron von Frankenstein is obsessed with cre-
ating a perfect Serbian race by assembling a pair
of perfect male and female creatures from parts
of corpses and having them mate. To do so, he
and his servant Otto seek a head donor with a
powerful libido at the nearby brothel: due to a
misunderstanding, Frankenstein ends up decap-
itating Sacha, a prospective monk who was taken
to the brothel by his friend, the sexually hyperac-
tive peasant Nicholas. The latter survives the at-
tack and is summoned to the castle by Franken-
stein’s wife (and sister) Katrin, who uses him to
satisfy her carnal appetites. Nicholas discovers the
baron’s experiments and sneaks in the lab, but is
captured by the doctor. Frankenstein’s plans are
destined to disaster, though: Katrin succumbs
after intercourse with the monster, and Otto de-
stroys the female creature while attempting to
have sex with her. The baron kills his assistant,
but when he orders the male creature to dispatch
Nicholas, the latter rebels and murders Franken-
stein in gruesome fashion. The creature then com-
mits suicide by disemboweling himself. But
Nicholas is not safe yet: the baron’s children seem
all too happy to follow their father’s experiments…
The names of Paul Morrissey and Joe
Dallesandro gained notoriety in Italy in early
172, when Trash (170) was released (Heat and
Flesh wuld follow a few years later, namely in
175 and 178). The Italian version, distributed
by Alberto Grimaldi’s company P.E.A., was cu-
rated by Dacia Maraini and Pier Paolo Pasolini,
who supervised respectively the dubbing and
the dialogue, and employed unprofessional voice
actors with heavy dialectal accents. The board
of censors banned the movie for obscenity due
to the foul language, the bleak depiction of drug
use, and especially the abundant sex (including
Holly Woodlawn’s infamous masturbation with
a bottle) and nudity.
Pasolini’s Il Decameron had broken the bar-
rier of male genitals on screen in a mainstream
picture, but Morrissey’s constant resort to Dalle-
sandro’s apollonian body and the recurrent sight
of the actor’s pubic area were nothing short of
scandalous in a country that was just getting
used to female nudity on screen. Undoubtedly,
the presence of Pasolini as a supervisor of the
Italian version emphasized the transgressive
quality of Morrissey’s film to the eyes of the cen-
sors, since the director of Accattone (161) was
the target of trials and controversy for his own
work, and the controversial fame that preceded
Andy Warhol’s Factory did the rest.
The ban caused a sensation, with ample
coverage in the media, and the intervention of
 1973: Flesh
Baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier) contemplates his female creature (Dalila Di Lazzaro) in Paul Morrissey’s
Flesh for Frankenstein (1973).
eminent cultural personalities such as novelist
Alberto Moravia. The controversy centered on
the film’s artistic quality, and underlined the
backward-minded approach of the censors’
committees, at a time where the public’s taste
and sensibility were undergoing big changes.
Grimaldi resubmitted the movie in October 172
with the new title 1 Trash i rifiuti di New York
(Trash—New York’s garbage) and a number of
cuts and changes: Dallesandro’s nude scenes
were either cut or altered (and partly obscured)
by way of optical reframings, and new footage
was added in place of the missing scenes. The
movie finally obtained a V.M.18 rating.2
The following year Morrissey and Dalle-
sandro came to Italy to shoot a movie with Carlo
Ponti and Andrew Braunsberg’s money and
Andy Warhol’s nominal aegis. The original idea
came through Roman Polanski, whom Morris-
sey met during a promotional tour in Europe,
and who was shooting his movie Che? (172) in
Italy. Originally Polanski was to shoot it in 3-D
but abandoned the idea; nevertheless he and the
producers were toying with the idea of a 3-D
horror spoof. “Polanski thought that I, for some
reason, would be a natural person to make a 3-
D film about Frankenstein. I thought it was the
81
most absurd offer I could ever imagine,” Mor-
rissey commented.3
That such an anarchistic, commercially
challenging project ever got made gives an idea
of the adventurousness of the Italian movie in-
dustry of the period, where even the oft-quoted
“fifteen minutes of fame” were sufficient to con-
vince a producer to concoct a movie around
something or somebody. But Morrissey actually
managed to persuade Ponti to make two movies,
the second one being a Dracula spoof, for the
cost of $350,000 each and a shooting schedule
of three and a half weeks per film. Despite his
name being amply featured on both films, Andy
Warhol did not put in a penny with his own
company, and had practically nothing to do with
the concept, the filming and the final result.
To film the story (deposited at Rome’s SIAE
offices on January 24, 173, with the title La
famiglia Frankenstein), Ponti and Braunsberg
gave the American filmmaker a first-rate tech-
nical crew to begin with. It included Luigi Ku-
veiller as the d.o.p., Enrico Job as production
designer (note the exquisite Klimt-like mosaics
on the wall of Frankenstein’s lab), pianist
Claudio Gizzi (who provided an eerily romantic
score4) and Carlo Rambaldi, who took care of
82 1973: Flesh
the extra-gory special effects. The film was shot
with the 3-D process Space-Vision, which Mor-
rissey employed not only to highlight the gory
excesses, exposing viscera to the camera and so
on, but also for the sex scenes, giving ample
prominence to Joe Dallesandro’s buttocks: “I saw
3-D as the ultimate of all absurdities,” the direc-
tor claimed. “Horror movies themselves are ab-
surd, but 3-D itself is totally absurd.”5
In addition to the Factory’s homemade su-
perstar, the cast comprised a varied list of names,
including Udo Kier (“Udo always seemed like
he had a face from another planet,” Morrissey
noted), the debuting Arno Juerging, the stun-
ning Dalila Di Lazzaro and the weird-looking
Monique Van Vooren, a former Belgian night-
club artist and Warhol’s personal friend. At first
the director sought to rely on the improvisa-
tional method of his earlier films, giving the cast
carte blanche for their dialogue; but after finding
out that this would not work with non–Anglo-
Saxon actors like Kier, Morrissey started prepar-
ing the dialogue day by day, dictating it to Pat
Hackett on his way to the studio.6
Shooting began on March 20, 173. In
order to obtain Italian nationality, and the en-
suing benefits of law, in official papers the di-
rection was credited to Anthony M. Dawson,
a.k.a. Antonio Margheriti, with Morrissey as
“supervisor,” whereas the script figured as the
work of the famed screenwriter Tonino Guerra,
“from an idea by Paul Morrissey.” Needless to
say, the American director never even met
Guerra, whose contribution was limited to the
Italian adaptation.
Morrissey minimized Margheriti’s contri-
bution: “He did two second units, one day on
each film.”7 On his part, the Italian director re-
called:
I really directed a lot. I got involved because, when
Paul Morrissey came to Rome to start with Andy
Warhol’s Frankenstein, they arrived with four pages
of script and they wanted to shoot a 3-D picture the
way they had done with movies like Flesh: with a
camera standing in one corner running for 10
minutes without a cut and that’s it! Not the best idea
when using a technique such as 3-D. Carlo Ponti in-
troduced me to Paul Morrissey because he didn’t
want to shoot a period film with costumes, good ac-
tors and rich sets with that technique. Ponti is a real
producer and he wasn’t interested in backing an un-
derground film … a lot of the scenes had to be rewrit-
ten for the script, or entirely invented, and that was
all up to me.8
Margheriti’s recollections are often at odds
with Morrissey’s, such as when he claimed that
his American colleague “was afraid that it all
would become too ‘gamey’ and not enough
‘film-vérité,’”  a statement which clashes with
Morrissey’s irreverent intentions. “Paul offered
a certain resistence because he perceived these
things as artificial, because he was used at mak-
ing another kind of cinema … whereas, with
great immediacy, Andy understood that this
double game of … ironic fiction, would allow
him to do all that the characters will do in the
movie … the work I did has remained in the
movie; in fact, maybe Andy felt a rush of regret
for not having followed me in a couple more
ideas.”10
The Italian filmmaker’s mention of War-
hol’s active participation in the movie (whereas
it is a known fact that the artist only visited the
set once and briefly stopped by during the edit-
ing, and when asked about his contribution he
simply answered: “I go to the parties”11) makes
one suspect that Margheriti was somewhat ex-
aggerating his contribution. The core of the
movie—its approach to the story and characters,
its peculiar and idiosyncratic humor, its
directing style (see the long dinner sequences,
or Frankenstein’s monologues) are purely Mor-
rissey, and Margheriti’s contribution can there-
fore be circumscribed to the opening sequence
(similar to the one in La morte negli occhi del
gatto) and others featuring the kids, including
the one where they are scared by bats in the cas-
tle’s cellar and another that appears in the Italian
version only, with Marika and Erik feeding the
fish in the tank with a severed hand (“That all
came from me, 100%, and I shot them after prin-
cipal photography was completed…” 12). The
Italian director went so far as considering the
parts with Nicoletta Elmi and Marco Liofredi
the core of the movie. “The children are vital to
the story; the things they see, how they move,
the crystals, the surgical instruments hanging
in the air … in my opinion they allow us to show
other things that otherwise would have resulted
… a bit ‘Deodato-like,’ very vulgar and violent,
and which this way become ironic, almost
gamely, the ironic presentation of a story.”13 And
yet, the ending (similar in tone to the epilogue
of Bava’s Reazione a catena, where the children
kept playing the gruesome games they had seen
adult people play…) seems the work of Morris-
sey.
Margheriti also took care of the special ef-
 1973: Flesh
fects, such as the “breathing lungs,” made with
pig’s lungs, an idea that came from the director’s
own I diafanoidi vengono da Marte (166), as
well as some of the gory bits, which too were
shot after principal filming had been wrapped
and Morrissey was already busy making Blood
for Dracula. “I shot a lot of the special effect
scenes with the blood and intestines bursting in
the direction of the audience…. You can actually
see me in Frankenstein: when the male zombie
destroys himself at the end and rips his intes-
tines out, those are my hands. I prepared and
staged the effect. I have a stiff finger, which I
broke when I was young, which is kind of like a
signature.”14
Contrary to what has been stated else-
where, Flesh for Frankenstein was not shown in-
tact in Italy. It was submitted to the board of cen-
sors as Carne per Frankenstein in January 174.
This version (running 2583 metres, that is ap-
proximately 4m0s) presented a number of im-
portant differences from the American cut,
starting with the line “un film di Andy Warhol”
(a film by Andy Warhol) as a bait and switch.
The sex scene between Nicholas and the baron-
ess while Frankenstein is spying on them behind
the mirror was shot in a tamer version for the
Italian market, with Dallesandro and Van Vooren
partially dressed in bed; on the other hand,
Otto’s disemboweling of the maid featured a
gory shot of the woman’s open torso, with Otto
commenting “S’è rotta!” (“She’s broken!”) before
she falls dead, which is absent in the U.S. ver-
sion.
The movie met a similar fate as Trash. Mor-
rissey’s mixture of grotesque humor, sex and
gory effects prompted the committee to deny it
a visa, since “the scenes of violence of a sexual
nature, the sadistic and severely insane coupling
between the baron and the ‘monster woman,’ the
prolonged erotic scenes between the baroness
and her servant Nicholas, the ugly and heavily
erotic scenes in the brothel, and the gruesome
attempt at sexual coupling on the part of Otto
with the ‘monster woman,’ (all this in an inces-
tuous family environment) constitute a grave of-
fense to morality.”15
Despite the distributor’s willingness to per-
form cuts, the committee banned the film in ap-
peal too. The motivation, however, for once
aimed at safeguarding the movie’s artistic in-
tegrity, stating that “in its unitary conception it
features scenes of eroticism interspersed with
others of delusional and bloody sadism with
83
necrophiliac implications; considering that these
scenes are, in their inseparable whole, the means
by which the author has accomplished his idea,
it would be fair to say that without them the
movie itself would become incomprehensible
and would have no reason for being, particularly
given the ambitious nature of the theme, treated
with a renewed conception and vitality.”
A month later the distributor submitted a
new version, entitled Il mostro è in tavola, barone
… Frankenstein (The Monster Is Served, Baron
… Frankenstein), which presented a number of
cuts and alterations. Namely:
• The scene in the brothel was almost completely
eliminated, leaving only the parts essential to the un-
derstanding of the narrative developments;
• The scene in which the baron operates on the
sutures of the “female monster” has been reduced to
a mere suggestion and replaced with new ambient
scenes;
• The love scene between the baron and the “fe-
male monster” has been wholly excised; in a number
of points various scenes featuring the children have
been added;
• A long dialogue scene between the baron and
his assistant has been added;
• All the love scenes between the baroness and
the butler have been considerably shortened and sim-
plified;
• All the most horrifying bits have been removed
from the scene of the killing of the housekeeper;
• The love scene between the baroness and the
monster has been shortened;
• The whole final sequence (Otto’s death, the
baron’s mutilation and death, the monster’s death)
has been completely re-edited in order to remove
whenever possible the horrific details, leaving only
what is essential to the understanding of the story.
• On top of that, there have been substantial
changes to all the dialogue, highlighting the film’s
caricatural and grotesque tone.
The latter observation seems to imply that
the grating Italian dubbing, which featured de-
batable “humorous” additions, was concocted
subsequently. For one thing, Frankenstein’s chil-
dren Erik and Marika were renamed “Sistolo”
and “Diastola” (after the heart valves, systole and
diastole). On some occasions the dialogue is
completely different from the original: for in-
stance, in the first dinner sequence, in the En-
glish version Frankenstein and the baroness talk
about their parents, from which we realize they
are brother and sister; in the Italian one they dis-
cuss about their children’s sadistic habits, such
84 1973: Lisa
as torturing small animals. Needless to say, the
scene’s absurdist humor gets lost. Similarly, the
film’s most famous line, Frankenstein’s oft-
quoted “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck
life in the gall bladder”—a low blow to one of
Morrissey’s most hated movies, Bernardo Ber-
tolucci’s Ultimo tango a Parigi (172) 16—be-
comes, in the Italian version, “Per vincere la par-
tita con la vita, giocala col morto!” (To win the
game of cards with life, play it with the dead!”)17
The Italian dubbing is also over the top, making
Frankenstein’s lines often sound much more de-
mented than in Kier’s quiet delivery; Otto, who
in the original version is totally submissive to
the baron, becomes rather arrogant; Olga utters
guttural verses. The “various scenes featuring
the children” that were added actually amounted
to the “fish feeding” bit and a brief shot of the
kids spying on the final massacre.
The new version was 2448 metres long (ap-
proximately 88m13s). The substantial amount
of manipulations (including a new title devised
to emphasize the movie’s essence as a spoof )
granted Il mostro è in tavola, barone … Franken-
stein a visa, albeit with a V.M.18 rating.
The movie was eventually released in Italy
one year later, in March 175, to mediocre busi-
ness. Italian posters misspelled Frankenstein as
“Frankstein.”
NoTeS
1. Italian censorship law demanded that a movie
banned by the board after two sets of proceedings (first
degree and appeal) could be resubmitted again to the
board only under a new title and with enough changes that
would make it a “different movie” from the previous ver-
sion.
2. For a detailed report of the movie’s censorship vi-
cissitudes, see Roberto Curti and Alessio Di Rocco, Visioni
proibite—I film vietati dalla censura italiana (dal 1969 a
oggi) (Turin: Lindau, 2015), 157–16.
3. Paul Talbot, “Monsters for Morrissey. The Making
of Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein & Dracula,” Video Watchdog
#28, May/June 15, 22.
4. Gizzi would later reach fame as an easy listening
soloist with the pseudonym Jean-Pierre Posit. In 178
he released an instrumental electronic record with
Romano Musumarra under the moniker Automat, in
which he played the MCS70 synthesizer created by Mario
Maggi.
5. Talbot, “Monsters for Morrissey,” 25.
6. Ibid., 24.
7. Ibid., 25. What is more, in the Italian titles Dalila
Di Lazzaro is credited “for the first time on screen” which
was not true, having already appeared in some films, in-
cluding Frankenstein ’80 and Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa
e solo io ne ho la chiave. On top of that, Srdjan Zelenovic
is credited as “Aleksic Miomir.”
8. Peter Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild
Interview,” Video Watchdog #28, May / June 15, 57.
9. Marcello Garofalo, “La tecnica e gli effetti. Le inter-
viste celibi: Antonio Margheriti 2,” Segnocinema #85, May
/ June 17, .
10. Ibid.
11. Talbot, “Monsters for Morrissey,” 23.
12. Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Inter-
view,” 57.
13. Garofalo, “La tecnica e gli effetti,” .
14. Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Inter-
view,” 57.
15. The censorship data are taken from Curti and Di
Rocco, Visioni proibite—I film vietati dalla censura italiana
(dal 1969 a oggi), 240–245.
16. Marlon Brando’s original line in Bertolucci’s film
was: “You don’t know death until you fuck life up the ass.”
17. Literally, “giocare col morto” means “to play with
the dummy player.”
Lisa e il diavolo (Lisa and the Devil)
D: Mario Bava. S and SC: Mario Bava, Al-
fred Leone (international version); Giorgio
Maulini, Romano Migliorini, Roberto Natale
[and Francesca Rusicka] (Italian version); DOP:
Cecilio Paniagua (Technicolor); M: Carlo
Savina, conducted by the author; E: Carlo Reali;
PD, CO: Nedo Azzini; SD: Rafael Ferri; AD:
Lamberto Bava; C: Emilio Varriano; AC: Gianni
Modica [Giovanni Canfarelli Modica]; MU:
Franco Freda; Hair: Adalgisa Favella; SE: Franco
Tocci. Cast: Telly Savalas (Leandro), Elke Som-
mer (Lisa Reiner), Sylva Koscina (Sophia Lehar),
Alessio Orano (Max), Gabriele Tinti (George,
the Chaffeur), Kathy Leone (Lisa’s Friend), Ed-
uardo Fajardo (Francis Lehar), Franz von Treu-
berg (Shopkeeper), Espartaco Santoni (Carlo),
Alida Valli (Countess); uncredited: Andrea Es-
terhazy (American Tourist). PROD: Alfred
Leone for Euro America Produzioni Cinemato-
grafiche, Leone International Film (Rome),
Roxy Film (Munich), Tecisa (Madrid); PM:
Fausto Lupi (La casa dell’esorcismo: Faustino
Ocaña). Country: Italy/West Germany/Spain.
Filmed in Barcelona, Toledo and Madrid (Spain)
and at Villa Frascati (Rome). Running time: 5
minutes (international version); 87 minutes (m.
2370, Italian version), Visa n. 63474 (11.10.173).
Release date: 5..173 (Cannes Film Market),
11.25.174 (Spain). Also known as: El diablo se
lleva los muertos / El diablo se lleva a los muertos
(Spain), Lisa och djävulen (Sweden), Besatt av
djevelen (Norway).
La casa dell’esorcismo, a.k.a. House of Ex-
orcism (Re-edited version) D: “Mickey Lion”
[additional scenes: Alfred Leone, Lamberto
Bava]. SC: Alberto Cittini, Alfred Leone; Ad-
 1973: Lisa 85

ditional cast: Robert Alda (Fa-

ther Michael), Carmen Silva
(Anna). Running time: 1
minutes (m. 2500); Visa n.
66007 (2.11.175); Rating:
V.M.14. Release date: 4.2.
175 (Italy); 7..176 (U.S.A).
Distribution: Transeuropa
(Italy); Peppercorn-Wormser
Film Enterprises (U.S.A.);
Domestic gross: 0,3,354
lire.
Note: Rodrigo’s “Con-
certo of Aranjuez” directed by
Paul Mauriat (Philips Record
L 6444–504).
Toledo, Spain. Struck by
an ancient fresco depicting the
devil, American tourist Lisa
Reiner leaves her group and
gets lost in the town’s narrow
alleys. After a meeting with a
man named Carlo, who seems
to recognize her, Lisa gets a lift
with the wealthy Francis Lehar
and his wife Sophia. However,
their car breaks down and
stops in front of an old villa.
While the driver George tries
to fix the vehicle, the trio is
hosted by the owners, a blind
Countess and her son Massi-
miliano, who invite them to
spend the night in the man-
sion. Lisa seems to be living a
strange nightmare, recalling Striking Spanish poster for Lisa e il diavolo (1973). Art by Francisco
her love from a past life. Soon Fernandez Zarza-Pérez, a.k.a. “Jano.”
the guests are killed one by
one, and the events seem orchestrated by the Migliorini, Roberto Natale and Maulini’s girl-
butler Leandro, who resembles the image of the friend Francesca “Chicca” Rusicka (who had the
devil in the painting. Eventually Lisa finds out original idea for the story but, being a non pro-
that she is a dead ringer for Elena, the woman fessional, preferred to remain uncredited), 1 the
loved by Massimiliano; he keeps her skeleton in director concocted an elaborate story that
his bedroom and even kills his mother in order to touched such themes as eternal return and the
keep Lisa with him. But the devilish Leandro circularity of destiny. The original story, La casa
manages to get rid of him too. The next morning del diavolo (House of the Devil) started with an
Lisa wakes up in the empty and dilapidated villa, American tourist feeling ill in front of a fresco
and returns to normal life. But on the plane home in a chapel, which portrays a devilish scene, and
a grim surprise awaits her… according to Natale the fresco was Bava’s idea.2
For his second movie in a row with Alfred Shooting for the film, provisionally titled
Leone, Mario Bava was given carte blanche by Il diavolo e i morti (The Devil and the Dead),
the Italian-American producer, and set to work took place mostly in Spain, from early Sep-
on a much more personal project than Baron tember to late November 172, with an impres-
Blood. Together with Giorgio Maulini, Romano sive cast that featured Elke Sommer, Telly
86 1973: Lisa
Savalas, Sylva Koscina, and Alida Valli, in addi-
tion to the Spanish Eduardo Fajardo and the
Venezuelan Espartaco Santoni, plus a handsome
young newcomer, Alessio Orano, who gained
fame after Damiano Damiani’s film La moglie
più bella (170), in which he co-starred with his
future wife Ornella Muti. Leone’s dream cast was
even more ambitious, as the producer had ap-
proached Louis Jourdan (for the role that went
to Santoni) and Bette Davis and Anthony Perkins,
respectively, to play the Countess and her son.
Born as a summation of Bava’s conception
of the Fantastic, Lisa e il diavolo encompassed
diverse themes, influences and references
throughout. The central theme was not new:
Italian Gothic had explored the boundaries be-
tween this world and the afterlife, and the tor-
ment of souls that are trapped in a limbo where
they are forced to live the same passions again
and again had been the subject of such works as
Danza macabra and Nella stretta morsa del
ragno, whose romantic intensity is akin to Bava’s
film.
With brilliant, thought-provoking intui-
tion, Bava scholar Alberto Pezzotta hypothe-
sized an affinity between Bava’s film and Pierre
Klossowski’s 165 experimental novel The
Baphomet. 3 The paradoxical, nonlinear story
told by the French author, about the “eternal re-
turn” experienced by the souls of Templar
knights devoted to a disturbing young idol (the
titular Baphomet), indeed has similarities with
Lisa e il diavolo’s tangled plot. Whereas Klos-
sowski revisited Nietzsche and Sade in the light
of psychoanalysis, and focused on the
dissolution of the self and the affirmation of sim-
ulacra, in Bava’s film each character has its own
simulacrum, a life-size puppet that will serve—
as the butler Leandro (Telly Savalas) explains—
for a performance.
In addition to that, Klossowski’s convo-
luted, difficult prose can well be a written ho-
mologue to Bava’s style, which here is extremely
calligraphic and self-conscious. Reviewing the
movie in Positif, Emmanuel Carrère wrote: “By
deforming the visible—the horribly broken lines
and the blue-green colors make up a monstrous
space, vaguely haunted, which is a signature in
itself—, by giving a mediocre piece of music (the
Concierto de Aranjuez) a tragic resonance, an
unexpected softness, by organizing a cyclo-
thimic mise-en-scène that moves constantly
from a prosaicness charged with latent horror
to the most disheveled poetic flights, like in the
opera the recitative precedes the air or the en-
semble pieces, Bava pursues, without paying
much attention to what happens around him, a
frenzied, accurate reverie on death….”4
But there are many more references, either
relevant or simply possible, woven into the
fabric of the film. According to Lamberto Bava,
some lines of dialogue were lifted verbatim from
Dostoyevsky’s novel The Demons; Leandro’s
monologue, with its reference to ancient history
and Greek mythology, brings the story into a
territory akin to Jean Ray’s Malpertuis, to which
Lisa e il diavolo can be compared for the theme
of the memory of an ancient status that rises in
characters that are only apparently human. Like
Euryale the Gorgon in Ray’s novel, Lisa—whom
in the final shot we see dressed and coiffed in
ancient Greece style—is a detached, passive,
enigmatic character. Once again in Bava’s cin-
ema the theme of the double is the key to enter
the story: Lisa is the doppelgänger (or the rein-
carnation?) of Elena, the woman loved by Mas-
similiano (Alessio Orano), who had killed her
after discovering her affair with his stepfather
Carlo (Espartaco Santoni), and preserved her
dead body on the nuptial bed. On top of that,
Bava draws again from his beloved Jean Coc-
teau: Lisa’s awakening in the villa immersed in
vegetation recalls a famous moment in La Belle
et la Bête (146).
More prosaically, Lisa e il diavolo is remi-
niscent also of a well-known episode of the TV
series The Twilight Zone, “The After Hours,”
written by Rod Serling and directed by Douglas
Heyes. In the episode, a young woman named
Marsha White (Anne Francis) experiences a dis-
turbing misadventure at a department store and
finally remembers that she is not a person of
flesh and blood but a mannequin that has briefly
come to life for a short holiday among humans.
Not a far-fetched source, incidentally, given that
the inspiration for the ending of Terrore nello
spazio (165) came from another episode of Rod
Serling’s TV series, “Third from the Sun,” from a
short story by Richard Matheson. The plot has the
same mechanism, and the events that poor Lisa
(Elke Sommer) experiences, with characters that
continually allude to her previous life and treat
her like a different person, serve as prelude to the
final revelation: on an airplane piloted by the devil,
Lisa meets the other protagonists of the story,
and eventually acquires the notion of herself. In
the film’s last image, she limps to the ground,
lifeless, as if she was a mannequin. Her time as
 1973: Lisa
a tourist among the living is over, just like that
of Anne Francis’ character in Serling’s story.
Whereas in Baron Blood Bava seemed con-
tent to rely on his own past as a safe way to deal
with a simple horror story, here he reprises his
main stylistic traits and visual tricks in an at-
tempt to build a formally coherent universe:
ghosts sliding as if on ice as in La goccia d’acqua;
children playing with balls as in Operazione
paura; faces appearing behind windows as in I
Wurdalak; the insistent use of zooms and focus-
out-of-focus shots; and, most of all, the contin-
uous blurring between the animate and inani-
mate, which characterized such works as 6
donne per l’assassino and Il rosso segno della follia
and here becomes the film’s core.
However, compared with Bava’s master-
pieces of the previous decade, Lisa e il diavolo—
hailed by many as the director’s greatest achieve-
ment—is a singularly overindulgent work,
characterized by a visual profligacy that ulti-
mately goes at the expense of elegance. As Pez-
zotta notes, “the movie is marked by blatant
signs of fatigue. The style is less controlled and
creative than in the past. The zooms, never so
many as noted by Luc Moullet, accompany, with
an obstinacy that has something masochistic in
it, not only the moments of terror, but almost
every close-up, and each thing that appears on
screen for the first time: thus they engage a ten-
sion that ends up idling, depriving everything
of its meaning. So much so that eventually one
does not even perceive the zoom, unlike in the
director’s previous films. The sloppy moments
are countless: overly lengthy bits … shots that
start or end with the camera framing meaning-
less objects … soft-focus and slow-motion flash-
backs; blood (red paint) dropping on the lens….
Even the bravura shots (the characters are
always reflected in the most unexpected sur-
faces…) are so emphasized, reiterated and nar-
ratively meaningless that they become cloying.”5
Honestly, it is hard to disagree. Fellow di-
rector Riccardo Freda, who had always been an
admirer of Bava’s work, pointed out the abuse
of the zoom on the part of his friend in the
movie. “The exorcist’s house [author’s note:
Freda, who had seen the reedited version of the
film, La casa dell’esorcismo, is referring to the
Countess’ villa] was portrayed in every shot with
four or five zooms, and at that point the film lost
its effectiveness because of the addiction to that
effect.”6 Even Lamberto Bava admitted: “Lisa e
il diavolo had a wonderful setting—which my
87
father cared about more than the screenplay. As
for the story, it was fragile, with plot holes. Such
an intricate story needed a good revision and
some more ideas: there were things that did not
add up at all.” 7 What is more, some parts, like
Massimiliano’s visits to Elena’s bedroom, are lazy
rehashes of the dialogue scenes between Nor-
man Bates and his “mother” in Psycho, and the
character is basically a reprise of the man-child
psycho figure Bava had employed to better use
in Il rosso segno della follia.
Despite the inconsistencies, the narrative
confusion and the formalistic self-complacency,
Lisa e il diavolo represents a key moment in
Bava’s filmography and in the realm of Italian
Gothic. Firstly, leaving aside the made-for-TV
La Venere d’Ille (co-directed with Lamberto,
shot in 178 but broadcast in 181), it is the last
movie the director conceived and filmed with
an eye to the stylistic elements of Italian Gothic
films made during the previous decade. Else-
where these traits were inexorably harmed and
hybridized, especially in the shabbier subprod-
ucts made around the same time, whereas in the
average genre products they gradually gave way
to other, extraneous sources, such as the upcom-
ing Exorcist-inspired thread.
For Lisa e il diavolo Bava—who in his fol-
lowing works would fully immerse himself in a
contemporary setting, with Cani arrabbiati and
the middle-class ghost story Shock—chooses a
diametrally opposite approach to the Gothic
genre as he had done with Baron Blood, and
reprises the most typical elements of Italian
Gothic: the propensity for morbidness, from the
implicitly Oedipal relationship between the
characters played by Alida Valli and Alessio
Orano to the latter’s necrophile obsession; the
reference to melodrama; the emphasis on the
haunted house setting and the baroque attention
to the décor; the preponderance of weak male
figures; the theme of the female double and the
femme fatale who leads her lovers to death, will-
ingly or not; the manipulation of space-time co-
ordinates.
Not that Lisa e il diavolo is impervious to
the infiltration of the present, both in the eroti-
cism and in the mise-en-scéne of violence that
characterizes the murders in the second part.
The love scene between Sylva Koscina and
Gabriele Tinti was filmed by Lamberto Bava:
“My father was very puritan, I a little less; but
there was a limit to decency. Moreover, that se-
quence has nothing to do with the movie.”8 The
88 1973: Lisa
scene also exists in a more risqué version, shot
by Leone with two stand-ins, which can be
found as an extra in the DVD release. Bava’s son
also filmed Koscina’s death scene.
Compared with his previous Gothic movies,
Bava does not even bother to scare the audience,
but he fully embraces restlessness as the privi-
leged vehicle for the Fantastic. The core of the
film is memory, the surfacing of an awareness
of one’s own condition linked to the notion of a
destiny that repeats itself cyclically, overcoming
the barriers of time; and the real horror is that
one’s self is revealed as illusory—a feeling only
fleetingly experienced by Dr. Eswai (Giacomo
Rossi Stuart) in Operazione paura’s most cele-
brated scene.
The Fantastic imposes itself with the
strength of evidence, against all appearances,
and Bava challenges the logic of the story by
considering space and time as arbitrary notions,
destined to fall like shedded skin as soon as re-
ality as we know it displays the first cracks. After
stepping off the bus in Toledo, in the movie’s
first scenes, Lisa enters a labyrinth of alleys that,
through the judicious use of the zoom lens and
the tracking shot, seem to appear and disappear
behind her; Carlo is at the same time alive and
dead, a real person and an inanimate puppet, as
Bava replaces Espartaco Santoni with a dummy
in the span of a shot / reverse shot; in the final
scenes, Lisa awakes in the villa’s bedroom,
magically invaded by greenery as if centuries
had passed, and recognizes a wax mannequin
with Massimiliano’s features, submerged by veg-
etation like the busts and statues that dot the
overgrown garden; then she finds herself in the
Toledo square she had left the previous day, get-
ting lost; and the seemingly endless aircraft cor-
ridors in the epilogue exude the same dread as
the series of identical rooms in Operazione
paura.
Gradually, each coherent explanation falls
apart, but above all it is the moral of the story
that eludes the viewer. Unlike Danza macabra,
where the souls of Elisabeth and her misfortu-
nate companions relived endlessly their own
death as an otherwordly supplice, and despite
the sulphureous presence evoked by the title, in
Lisa e il diavolo there is no tangible sign of moral
path or punishment. Everything happens ac-
cording to the will and the whims of the devil,
who plays with the characters’ lives in his own
liking just like he does with cards, like a magi-
cian, during the opening credits. Bava’s devil dis-
plays a playful, almost childlike attitude, like a
kid who breaks his toys to see what is inside: the
sequence of Massimiliano’s death, as he sees his
revived mother (whom he had just killed) com-
ing at him, recoils in terror and falls headlong
out of the window, is not the revenge of a
revenante a bit less scary than the one in La goc-
cia d’acqua (the director employs the same trick
of having Alida Valli slide onward), but Lean-
dro’s umpteenth mockery, as the butler maneu-
vered the dead woman’s boy like a puppeteer
from behind.
Ultimately, there is not a single innocent
character in the movie. “They’ll pry into our
lives and we’ll all be guilty,” says Massimiliano
to Francis (Eduardo Fajardo), and at a certain
point the protagonists start killing each other
like in Danza macabra, or, indeed, Reazione a
catena. But the latter film’s moralistic sarcasm
gives way to a disenchantment that arises from
the confrontation with the volatility of existence,
and a resigned helplessness in the face of the
mockeries of an inescapable destiny. Like the
characters in so many horror movies to come,
Lisa and her companions in misfortune are al-
ready dead, and they don’t know it. And yet the
awareness they ultimately achieve does not lead
to an acceptance of their state or to inner peace,
but to a depletion. The soul, or whatever it is,
flies away from the body like helium from a bal-
loon. The end.
Lisa e il diavolo looks like it was conceived
as a serious project, or at least more cultured
and self-conscious than it would be expected
from its makers and its destination. Accordingly,
Bava had his cast listen to Carlo Savina’s music
on the set, in order to have them achieve a
sleepwalking-like acting—an unusual concern
for a director less known for his ability with ac-
tors than for his visual tricks. The ending, where
Lisa and the other simulacra are carried away
by the devil on a plane, seems an up-to-date ver-
sion of the final procession in Ingmar Bergman’s
Det sjunde inseglet (a.k.a. The Seventh Seal,
157), and suggests cumbersome metaphysical
implications—and even bizarre ones: Satan con-
trols the sky as well…?—for such an average
horror film with a commercial destination. But
Lisa e il diavolo’s tormented souls are in turn the
victims of the director’s biting irony: notoriously
superstitious, accustomed to playing with his
own reputation as a fearful and mild fellow, Bava
exorcises the metaphysical temptations, and
plays down the hubris by exposing the ridicule.
 1973: Lisa
And so, he counterparts the eerie music box that
portrays the totentanz of Death and the souls,
and from which Leandro is inseparable, with the
amusing funeral procession with the butler car-
rying the body of the chaffeur (Gabriele Tinti)
on a wheelbarrow, like disposable waste: one of
those moments where the movie seems to make
fun of itself. Bava’s simulacra-dummies, like the
human insects of Reazione a catena, are not even
granted post-mortem dignity.
After its disastrous appearance at the 173
Cannes Film Market, Lisa e il diavolo underwent
vicissitudes as troubled and unhappy as those
of its protagonists. It was submitted to the Italian
board of censors in November 173, and was
given a V.M.14 rating: interestingly, this copy al-
legedly ran 2370 metres, that is approximately
86 minutes and 25 seconds, several minutes less
than the international version. It was released
in Spain by Maesso, in a truncated form, as El
diablo se lleva los muertos, which premiered in
Barcelona in November 174 and in Madrid in
March 175: this cut contained a gorier version
of Koscina’s death scene, but sex scenes were
heavily truncated, and part of the ending was
cut out.
The movie was never released in Italy in its
original form. On December 26, 173, The Ex-
orcist was unleashed overseas to a shocked au-
dience, and the wave of its extraordinary success
soon reached the Old World. Alfred Leone, well
aware of Lisa e il diavolo’s shady commercial
perspectives, decided to jump on the band-
wagon. “He came to my father and said, ‘Why
don’t we add some exorcism scenes?’ and gave
him three or four ideas,” Lamberto Bava re-
called. “My father didn’t know what to say at
first, and replied: ‘I don’t care about this thing.
If you want to do it on your own, for the Amer-
ican market, it’s fine by me, I’m even sending
Lamberto to give you a hand…’ and so he sent
me to assist Leone—that is, to prevent him from
fucking it all up.” 
Leone’s intervention—with the uncredited
contribution of art director Nedo Azzini and of
a certain Alberto Cittini, credited as co-
scriptwriter—basically destroyed the original
movie and turned it into an Exorcist rip-off by
concocting a new framing story featuring an ex-
orcist (Robert Alda), and transforming the film’s
discourse on reincarnation and eternal return
into an out-and-out possession tale. In the new
version, aptly titled La casa dell’esorcismo, Lisa
is possessed by Elena’s spirit and tells her story
8
to Father Michael, who has come to exorcise her,
and events from Lisa e il diavolo form the series
of flashback at the film’s core. Needless to say,
the additional scenes are terrible, with Sommer
vomiting green soup and toads and uttering
plenty of four-letter words. The ending was also
changed, with Alda’s character sneaking into the
abandoned villa to exorcise Elena’s skeleton and
facing hordes of snakes: eventually the demonic
spirits are eradicated and a flash of light, wind
and an explosion suggest that the mansion has
been cleansed. The new cut also included some
risqué footage featuring Sommer and a more
gruesome version of the killings.
The resulting hodgepodge, signed “Mickey
Lion,” was at least commercially viable. Leone
always maintained that he and Mario shot the
additional scenes, even though the director ab-
stained from filming the blasphemous parts. On
the other hand, Lamberto Bava is adamant on
the paternity of the new footage: “Some stuff in
La casa dell’esorcismo was directed by Leone,
whereas other scenes, I taught him how to make
them, technically speaking.”10
La casa dell’esorcismo was submitted to the
Italian board of censors in January 175: the
committee, when asked for a new rating, com-
pared the new version with the old one and de-
cided that it was indeed “a different movie, in
terms of the story, made using a number of clips
from the old film, with the addition of several
new sequences, interpolated with a new audio
track that is effectively descriptive of the new
narrative conception” and gave the film a V.M.18
rating due to the “many and horrifying scenes
of violence as well as other macabre and grue-
some ones, the exaggerated foul language and
many scenes featuring female nudity in lascivi-
ous attitudes…”
When asked about La casa dell’esorcismo,
in a scathing May 176 interview, Bava was
adamant: “La casa dell’esorcismo is not my film,
even though it bears my signature. It is the same
situation, too long to explain, of a cuckolded fa-
ther who finds himself with a child that is not
his own, and with his name, and cannot do any-
thing about it.”11 To the director, the débacle of
Lisa e il diavolo was one of the most bitter dis-
appointments in his career, but unfortunately
not the last: his following film, Cani arrabbiati,
was to follow an even worse fate, ending up un-
seen for two decades after the producer went
bankrupt. Once again, the devil had put his tail
on it.
0 1973: La morte
NoTeS
1. Pezzotta, Mario Bava, 116.
2. Roberto Natale, quoted in Manlio Gomarasca and
Davide Pulici, “Il talento di Mr. Bava,” 15.
3. Pezzotta, Mario Bava, 118.
4. Emmanuel Carrère, “La Maison de l’exorcisme,”
Positif #1, November 177, 72. Note how Carrère’s style
purportedly mimicks the film’s baroqueness.
5. Pezzotta, Mario Bava, 118.
6. Riccardo Freda, Divoratori di celluloide (Milan: Edi-
zioni del Mystfest, Il Formichiere, 181), 100. In the book,
Freda mistakenly refers to the film as Operazione paura.
7. Lamberto Bava, quoted in Manlio Gomarasca and
Davide Pulici, “Il talento di Mr. Bava,” 15.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Mario Bava interviewed, in Giuseppe Lippi and
Lorenzo Codelli (eds.), Fant’italia. Emergenza, apoteosi e
riflusso del fantastico nel cinema italiano (Trieste: Ed. Fes-
tival Internazionale del film di fantascienza, 176).
La morte ha sorriso all’assassino (Death
Smiles on a Murderer)
D: Aristide Massaccesi. S: Aristide Massac-
cesi; SC: Aristide Massaccesi, Romano Scandari-
ato, Claudio Bernabei; DOP: Aristide Massaccesi
(Telecolor); M: Berto Pisano, conducted by the
author (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Piera Bruni, Gianfranco
Simoncelli; PD, CO: Claudio Bernabei [and Eve-
lyn Melcherich, uncredited]; MU: Maria Grazia
Nardi; SO: Franco Rucci; C: Guglielmo Vincioni;
AD: Romano Scandariato; AC: Gianlorenzo
Battaglia. Cast: Ewa Aulin (Greta von Holstein),
Klaus Kinski (Dr. Sturges), Angela Bo (Eva von
Ravensbrück), Sergio Doria (Walter von
Ravensbrück), Attilio Dottesio (Inspector Dan-
nick), Marco Mariani (Simeon, the Butler), Lu-
ciano Rossi (Franz, Greta’s Brother), Giacomo
Rossi Stuart (Dr. Von Ravensbrück, Walter’s
Father), Franco [Fernando] Cerulli (Prof.
Kempte), Carla Mancini, Giorgio Dolfin (Maier,
Ballet Dancer); uncredited: Evelyn Melcherich
(Gertrud, the Maid), Tony Askin [Antonio As-
chini] (Reanimated Corpse), Oscar Sciamanna
(Party Guest), Pietro Torrisi (Dr. Sturges’ assis-
tant). PROD: Franco Gaudenzi for Dany Film
(Rome); PM: Oscar Santaniello; PS: Massimo
Alberini, Sergio Rosa. Country: Italy. Filmed at
Palazzo Patrizi, Castel Giuliano (Rome), Villa
Parisi, Frascati (Rome) and at Elios Film
(Rome). Running time: 2 minutes (m. 2520).
Visa n. 6262 (6.20.173); Rating: V.M.18. Release
date: 7.11.173; Distribution: Florida Cine-
matografica. Domestic gross: 70,0,000 lire.
Also known as: Death Smiles at Murder (U.S.A.),
La muerte sonríe al asesino (Spain), La mort a
souri à l’assassin (France), Die Mörderbestien
(West Germany), A Máscara da Mulher Fan-
tasma (Portugal).
Note: Although credited, Carla Mancini
does not appear in the film.
Early 1900. Franz von Holstein mourns over
the body of his sister Greta, with whom he had
an incestuous affair, until the day she met a ma-
ture stranger. Greta turns up again as the victim
of a carriage accident: she is assisted by a young
couple living nearby, Walter and Eva von Ravens-
brück, and is cured by Dr. Sturges, who is im-
pressed by an amulet she carries on her neck.
Sturges, who is carrying on experiments to revive
the dead, is dispatched by a mysterious killer, and
so is Gertrud, the Ravensbrücks’ maid. Greta se-
duces both Walter and Eva, but when the latter
finds out about Greta’s affair with her husband,
she walls her alive in the crypt. However, Greta
returns from the dead and provokes Eva’s demise.
Next are Walter’s father, who turns out to be
Greta’s former lover, and Walter. Inspector Dan-
nick finds out that Franz von Holstein was a
necromancer, and was perfecting a method to res-
urrect the dead, based on an ancient Inca ritual…
Shot between November and December
172,1 under the working title 7 strani cadaveri
(Seven Strange Corpses),2 Aristide Massaccesi’s
La morte ha sorriso all’assassino is a weird
hodgepodge of various themes and references
that stands out as one of the most bizarre exam-
ples of the decade’s Gothic. It was produced by
Franco Gaudenzi, a business consultant who
worked in the film business and also dabbled
with production. Massaccesi had met him
through a friend, production manager Oscar
Santaniello, and their collaboration resulted in
the Western flick Un bounty killer a Trinità
(172), directed by Massaccesi but signed by
Santaniello—one of several uncredited directing
jobs Massaccesi took on before his official first
feature, often recycling unused footage—and the
bawdy Sollazzevoli storie di mogli gaudenti e
mariti penitenti (172, signed as “Romano Gas-
taldi”). Unlike his previous ventures with Gau-
denzi and Santaniello, this time Massaccesi
chose to sign the movie with his own name—an
una tantum occurrence in his career, before
adopting a number of pseudonyms, including
the notorious “Joe D’Amato”—as a sign of the
confidence he had in the result.
The story takes place in a period setting,
and borrows the premise from Joseph Sheridan
Le Fanu’s Carmilla: the mysterious Greta enters
 1973: La morte ha sorriso
U.S. lobby still for La morte ha sorriso all’assassino (1973), featuring Klaus Kinski.
the home and the lives (not to mention the beds)
of the aristocrat von Ravensbrück spouses after
a carriage accident. Then the script (by Massac-
cesi, Romano Scandariato and Claudio
Bernabei, the latter merely a typist according to
Scandariato 3) adds a number of elements taken
from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, namely The
Black Cat (Greta is walled alive in the basement,
and a cat comes out of the tomb) and The
Masque of the Red Death (Greta appears as an
uninvited guest during a masked ball, just like
the Red Death in Prospero’s castle). Like with
many Gothics of the previous decade, an elusive
literary source was brought up: an article in the
January 173 issue of Playmen mentioned a nov-
elette by a “Herbert Peuckardt” which, according
to the article, had also been the basis for one of
Marlene Dietrich’s first films,4 but Scandariato
recalled: “I don’t think we took inspiration from
anything in particular: the story came from
Aristide, but it was more or less one page.”5
In accordance with one of Italian Gothic’s
most significant characteristics, the male figures
are weak, submissive, scarcely virile, and all fall
prey to a lethal woman, who promises them love
1
and pleasure but ultimately gives them horrible
deaths. Similarly, Greta’s face suddenly turning
from beautiful to decaying before her victims is
the umpteenth example of the duality of the fe-
male as both seductive and repulsive, since the
early examples in I vampiri and La maschera del
demonio.
The mixture of varied influences was not a
novelty, but La morte ha sorriso all’assassino is
nevertheless more audacious (if not more felic-
itous) than many of its peers in mixing refer-
ences to literary masterworks with nods to con-
temporary trends and demands. First of all, and
similarly to what happened with Giorgio Fer-
roni’s reprisal of I Wurdalak in La notte dei di-
avoli, Greta is not a vampire, but a living dead;
what is more, her character pays homage to the
period’s renewed interest in the occult and eso-
terism, with the allusions to an ancient Central
American ritual and the mysterious amulet
which Greta carries on her neck, and the subplot
about Dr. Sturges’ necromantic practices.
In addition to that, Massaccesi injected
conspicuous doses of sex and violence to the
recipe, while keeping in tune with Italian
2 1973: La morte ha sorriso
Gothic’s primary themes: Greta is a revenante
who returns from the grave to kill those who
loved her in life, starting with her incestuous
brother; like many other fleshly ghosts that pre-
ceded her, she infiltrates into her victims’ sub-
conscious, by perturbing their sexuality and
flaking off their defenses: in doing so, in homage
to the central role of eroticism in Italian genre
cinema of the decade, she retaliates on both
sexes. Whereas in Camillo Mastrocinque’s ver-
sion of Le Fanu’s novel, La cripta e l’incubo
(164), the lesbian passion between the vampire
and her victim was alluded to but not shown ex-
plicitly, here it climaxes in a sapphic sex scene
with full frontal female nudity.6 According to
Scandariato, the erotic element was not as em-
phasized in the script: “We had inserted the idea
of Ewa Aulin who identifies with Death, which
ended up teasing everybody. There was the
scene in which he goes to bed with Aulin, who
turns into a skeleton in his arms. We also in-
serted what we called ‘the lesbian act,’ but it was
just a matter of looks, there was no ‘act.’ Whereas
in the end they shot those risqué scenes.”7
The director did not spare the gore either:
in the carriage accident sequence the unfortu-
nate coachman ends up transfixed by a shaft and
with his intestines exposed; the maid receives a
fatal gunshot to the face; a character has his face
slashed open with a razor, while another one has
his eye gouged out by a cat. The low-budget,
merely 150 million lire, did not allow for con-
vincing special make-up effects, but even
though they are often crude-looking in an H. G.
Lewis way (with Massaccesi becoming familiar
with the baby veal intestines—the so-called pa-
jata—he would use in one of Antropophagus’
most infamous bits), the gore scenes have the
same over-the-top quality as the ones in the sexy
horror comics of the period. In addition to that,
the subplot centered on the mysterious killer
who dispatches several characters allows for
hand-held POV scenes that blatantly pay refer-
ence to the profitable gialli thread. According to
Scandariato, “there was much more suspense in
what we had written, it was much more giallo,
and until the end you didn’t realize who was
there behind the camera POV that approached
during the murder scenes. Then, unfortunately,
many things were changed out of necessity.” 8
The most unusual aspect of Massaccesi’s
film is its almost abstract narrative construction,
which liberally upsets the chronology and allows
the viewer to put together all the pieces of the
puzzle just at the very end. Likely dictated by
the rush in filming rather than by the makers’
interest in experimenting, it is nonetheless an
effective move. Massaccesi (who also acted as
d.o.p. and cameraman) manages to keep the
story lively with an abundant use of wide-angle
shots, which, paired with Berto Pisano’s eerie,
fuzz guitar-based score, suitably make up for the
scarcity of means.
According to Claudio Bernabei the movie
was shot in just seven or eight days, but a more
likely figure would be two or three weeks. Some
scenes that were not in the script were impro-
vised on the set, such as the one set in the
“changing room” with veils and cobwebs, mean-
ing that time has passed, as Scandariato recalled.
Others were achieved through decidedly prag-
matic means: for the one where Luciano Rossi
is attacked by a cat, after a number of unsuccess-
ful attempts, Massaccesi achieved the wanted ef-
fect by literally throwing the feline against
Rossi’s face.
The film’s main asset is the casting of the
then-23-year-old Ewa Aulin as Greta, in one of
her last film roles. The days of A-grade pictures
such as Col cuore in gola (167, Tinto Brass) and
Candy (168, Christian Marquand) were gone,
and after the divorce from the English writer
John Shadow, the Swedish actress was grow-
ing so dissatisfied with her film career that she
soon retired and married a landowner, Cesare
Paladino, and had a daughter with him, Cris-
tiana.
If Aulin’s ravishing looks and innocent air
suit perfectly her enigmatic character, Klaus
Kinski—saddled with one of his customary spe-
cial appearances, inflated as a main role for the
credits—does what he is usually required to,
looking pensive, handling medical instruments,
scribbling numbers on a chalkboard, and barely
uttering a word. He is offed way too early in the
picture, in a scene that is more chilling for its
aftermath: one of Dr. Sturges’ experiments, a re-
animated corpse, comes briefly to life before
being terminated once and for good by the un-
known murderer. As Massaccesi recalled, “Kin-
ski did everything just for the money. You called
him for two days, gave him lots of dough … a
true prostitute, pure and simple. But I must say
that he always gave you something more, be-
cause he really got into the character, maybe be-
cause of an inner vein of madness, not even in
a lucid way. He was fascinated of playing a half-
lunatic in my film, and gratified by the idea of
 1973: La morte negli occhi
acting over the top in a movie. So it was really
pleasant working with him.”10
The rest of the cast comprises familiar faces
such as Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Sergio Doria
(seen in L’iguana dalla lingua di fuoco and in Ro-
molo Guerrieri’s La controfigura) and recurring
character actors such as Fernando Cerulli,
Marco Mariani and the weird-looking Luciano
Rossi, the latter in one of his typical demented-
looking appearances. Rossi’s career waned in the
late Seventies: among his last roles were a couple
of Lucio Fulci films—Luca il contrabbandiere
and Paura nella città dei morti viventi, both
180—and his final appearance was in Ermanno
Olmi’s Lunga vita alla signora (187). Plagued
by mental illness, he died in 2005. Angela Bo
was one of the many starlets of the “De-
camerotics,” and her short career comprised
such works as Canterbury proibito (172, Italo
Alfaro) and Quando i califfi avevano le corna
(173, Amasi Damiani). Rossi’s agent, Tony
Askin, played a small role, the reanimated
corpse that Dr. Sturges is operating on, a last-
minute choice on the part of Massaccesi, who
was afraid that Kinski’s realistic acting style
would have had dangerous consequences for the
unfortunate extra.11
The movie did scarce business in Italy,
partly due to its regional distribution, as no im-
portant distributor agreed to pick it up due to
its unknown director. Massaccesi would return
to the horror genre six years later, with Buio
omega.
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on November 13, 172. Interestingly, Mas-
saccesi was to use the a.k.a Michael Wotruba. The outdoor
scenes were filmed at Palazzo Patrizi in Castel Giuliano,
near Bracciano, whereas the indoor scenes were shot at
Villa Parisi in Frascati, one of Italian Gothic’s recurring lo-
cations.
2. The working title 7 strani cadaveri was eventually
changed by the distributor, in order to follow the thread
of films with the word “death” in the title, such as Luciano
Ercoli’s gialli La morte cammina coi tacchi alti (171) and
La morte accarezza a mezzanotte (172). Scandariato would
have preferred the more allusive L’angelo finisce dove com-
incia il diavolo (The Angel Ends Where the Devil Begins),
a quote from Pope Paul VI.
3. Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, “La morte
ha sorriso all’assassino,” in Manlio Gomarasca and Davide
Pulici (eds.), Joe D’Amato. Guida al cinema estremo e del-
l’orrore. Nocturno Dossier #78, January 200, 15.
4. Ibid., 13.
5. Ibid., 15.
6. Ewa Aulin and Angela Bo’s sapphic interlude was
one of the two (the other being Bo and Doria’s lovemaking
3
scene) that the board of censors demanded be cut, for a
total of 10 meters (approximately 21 seconds), before giving
the film a V.M.18 rating.
7. Gomarasca and Pulici, “La morte ha sorriso all’as-
sassino,” 15.
8. Ibid.
9. Aulin and Shadow got married in Tijuana on March
21, 168. The couple had a son, Shawn, born on June 15,
16, and the following year Aulin starred in Shadow’s
debut as a director, the experimental Microscopic Liquid
Subway to Oblivion (170). They divorced in 172.
10. Gomarasca and Pulici, “La morte ha sorriso all’as-
sassino,” 13.
11. See Sorridere alla morte, extra on the Italian
Cinekult DVD of La morte ha sorriso all’assassino.
La morte negli occhi del gatto (Seven
Deaths in the Cat’s Eyes)
D: Anthony M. Dawson [Antonio Mar-
gheriti]. S: based on the novelette Corringa by
Peter Bryan; SC: Antonio Margheriti, Giovanni
Simonelli; DOP: Carlo Carlini (Technicolor,
Techniscope); M: Riz Ortolani (Ed. C.A.M.); E:
Giorgio Serralonga; ArtD: Ottavio Scotti; SD:
Roberto Granieri; CO: Mario Giorsi; MU:
Marisa Tilli; Hair: Giancarlo De Leonardis; AD,
2ndUD: Patrick Wachsberger; SO: Pietro
Spadoni; Mix: Fausto Achilli, Sandro Occhetti;
C: Sergio Martinelli; AE: Alessandro Ceran-
tonio; Additional dialogue (English version): Ted
Rusoff. Cast: Jane Birkin (Corringa), Hiram
Keller (Lord James MacGrieff ), Françoise
Cristophe (Lady Mary MacGrieff), Venantino
Venantini (Father Robertson), Doris Kunts-
mann (Suzanne), Anton Diffring (Dr. Franz),
Dana Ghia (Lady Alicia), George Korrade [Kon-
rad Georg] (Campbell), Serge Gainsbourg (Po-
lice inspector), Alan Collins [Luciano Pigozzi]
(Angus), Bianca Doria (Janet Campbell), Franco
Ressel (Priest), Alessandro Perrella (Policeman),
Bruno Boschetti (Policeman with mustache);
uncredited: Tom Felleghy (Man at Funeral), Sil-
vio Klein (Undertaker). PROD: Luigi Nannerini
for Starkiss s.r.l.; Falcon International Film
(Rome); Roxy Film (Munich); Capitol Films
(Paris); PM: Tommy [Thomas] Sagone; PSe:
Maurizio Biasini, Giancarlo Nannerini. Country:
Italy / West Germany / France. Filmed at Castle
Massimo in Arsoli (Rome) and at Incir-De
Paolis Studios (Rome). Running time: 5
minutes (m. 2585). Visa n. 61830 (2.6.173); Rat-
ing: V.M.18. Release date: 4.12.173; Distribution:
Jumbo. Domestic gross: 21,556,000 lire. Also
known as: Seven Dead in the Cat’s Eye (U.S.A.),
Les diablesses (France); Sieben Tote in den Augen
der Katz (West Germany, 12.7.173); Siete muertos
4 1973: La morte negli occhi
en el ojo del gato; La muerte en los ojos del gato
(Spain, 4.1.174); Sept morts dans les yeux d’un
chat (Canada); Sete Mortes nos Olhos do Gato
(Portugal); Sete Mortes nos Olhos de um Gato
(Brazil); Kauhujen kappeli; Kauhujen verinen
kappeli; Kauhun verinen kappeli (Finland).
Scotland, early 1900. Corringa arrives at
Dragstone castle, owned by Lady Mary MacGrieff
and her son James, to stay with her mother Alicia,
Lady Mary’s sister. The manor is inhabited by a
series of weird characters, who seem to be at odds
with one another: the eccentric James, who mur-
dered his little sister as a kid, keeps a gorilla; Dr.
Franz, Mary’s lover, has an affair with the young
bisexual housekeeper, Suzanne, who in turn is at-
tracted by the newcomer; Father Robertson, a vis-
iting priest, is understandably upset by the strange
atmosphere of the place. Corringa is frightened
to hear that the family castle is plagued by a hor-
rible curse: if a MacGrieff is killed by a relative,
he or she will turn into an undead vampire. Soon
after Corringa’s arrival, Alicia is smothered in
German lobby card for La morte negli occhi del gatto (1973), featuring Doris Kuntsmann (left) and Jane
Birkin.
bed, and the faithful servant Angus is murdered
near the family chapel. The police investigate, but
Corringa begins to suspect that the culprit might
be her undead mother, who has turned into a
vampire, since her body has disappeared from the
coffin. Other deaths ensue, and Corringa eventu-
ally finds herself face to face with the murderer…
Following the ill-fated Nella stretta morsa
del ragno and an aborted thriller project written
by Ernesto Gastaldi and to be produced by Carlo
Ponti, Gli agghiaccianti suoni del silenzio (The
Chilling Sounds of Silence), Antonio Margheriti
returned to the Gothic genre, albeit this time
with quite a different attitude. The evocatively
titled La morte negli occhi del gatto (Death in the
Cat’s Eye), shot in February and March 172,1
was not a ghost story but a period murder mys-
tery with a supernatural red herring, that made
it closer to the director’s own La vergine di
Norimberga, as well as to other Gothic mysteries
of the past decade, such as Horror (163, Alberto
De Martino) and La lama nel corpo (166, Elio
 1973: La morte negli occhi
Scardamaglia). Still, inevitably, the result accom-
modated elements of the Argento-esque giallo,
resulting in an animal’s name in the title (even
more explicitly in the Anglo-saxon Seven Deaths
in the Cat’s Eyes, which adds a number as well
in true Argento fashion) and in gory razorblade
murders, with throats cut open and blood
sprayed all over. In addition to that, as he had
done in Contranatura, the director gave reason-
ably ample room to eroticism, which caused it
a V.M. 18 rating in Italy.
According to the credits, the film was
scripted by the director and his friend Giovanni
Simonelli from the “novella” (novelette) Cor-
ringa by Peter Bryan, a fact that Margheriti
stressed in interviews. 2 Corringa was actually
the working title; however, as with other Italian
Gothic films, the real existence of the alleged lit-
erary source is debatable. Was this the same
Peter Bryan who signed Hammer’s The Hound
of the Baskervilles, The Brides of Dracula and
Plague of the Zombies, among others? However,
there is no trace of the original novelette, which
makes one suspect that it was all a fabrication
on the part of Margheriti and Simonelli, also
considering that the latter had been a prolific
pulp writer in the 150s, before he became a
scriptwriter.3 The script kept at the CSC does
not mention Bryan’s story and is credited to
Margheriti and Simonelli.
Whatever the truth, the writers concocted
a pastiche that benefits from extraneous ele-
ments which seem to hint at its spurious origin:
the presence of a gorilla (an orangutan in the
script) as an unlikely red herring seems a self-
conscious nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story
The Murders in the Rue Morgue or, even more
fittingly, Ralph Spence’s play The Gorilla,
whereas the revelation of the murderer’s identity,
without giving too much away, is in tune with a
typical tendency in gialli of the period. Another
nod to Poe is the titular cat, a key presence in
the story, and the imperturbable witness of the
whole chain of murderous events: as Margher-
iti’s son Edoardo recalled, “Another important
character in the film was Mushi, one of An-
tonio’s cats, in a prominent and omnipresent
role; at times he acted even better than many
regularly credited actors.” 4 As the presence of
the feline underlines, the movie is spiced with
irony, which gives it a somehow lighter tone
than Margheriti’s earlier Gothics. As Simonelli
recalled, “The irony was intentional, without al-
lowing it to become too much, but just a little
5
bit, in order to minimize the excessive macabre
and horror elements which would have dis-
turbed people more than entertained them. This
was the kind of movies Antonio made. They
were not meant to be artistic, they were just en-
tertaining. With these movies what you see is
what you get.” 5
Not that the human cast was without its
points of interest: Jane Birkin, in the lead, was
still surrounded by the same aura of scandal that
had accompanied the Italian release of Je t’aime
… moi non plus, the hit single she sang together
with her then-lover Serge Gainsbourg, charac-
terized by explicit sexual lyrics and published in
Italy with the warning “vietato ai minori di 18
anni” (Forbidden to those under 18 years old).
The song was censored by the Italian national
broadcasting service Rai (Lelio Luttazzi, the host
of the program “Hit Parade” was even forbidden
to mention the title and the spot it had reached
in the charts), and on August 28, 16, the single
was seized by order of the authorities because
of obscenity. In a nice publicity stunt, Margheriti
managed to cast Gainsbourg as well, in a bit role
as the inspector on the case: the French singer
appears in less than a handful of scenes, carrying
a stick, and his lines are often delivered off-
screen, a sign that his scenes were shot in a rush.
Margheriti even claimed in an interview that
Gainsbourg himself asked him to play a cameo
while visiting Birkin on the set: “He came to
Rome and one evening at dinner he asked me,
‘Why can’t I play a part too?’ and I said, ‘Sure,
why not?’ and so I changed the role of the in-
spector for him, adding a few lines; I must say
he was rather good, short, believable as a pain
in the ass type, a bit stiff….”6
Less inspired was the casting of the male
lead, Hiram Keller, who was enjoying the last
gleamings of the short-lived popularity brought
to him by Fellini—Satyricon (16). Working
with a German co-production, Margheriti cast
the veteran Anton Diffring, in one of his usual
stiff-upper-lipped scoundrel roles, and the beau-
tiful Doris Kuntsmann, who the same year
would play Eva Braun in Ennio De Concini’s
Hitler: The Last Ten Days (173). Rounding up
the cast were a number of Italian actors, such as
Venantino Venantini, Dana Ghia and Margher-
iti’s friend and regular Luciano Pigozzi, in his
usual turn as the designated victim.
If the plot is more than a bit silly, and the
murderer rather easy to spot, the director man-
aged to make things look compelling, at least
6 1973: Il plenilunio
visually. The opening scene starts with the out-
standing image of a spurt of blood over a spider’s
web as someone is being murdered off-screen,
and then proceeds, via an exquisite focus
change, with a long take from behind an iron
gate, following the murderer’s actions—a Bible
is picked up, a body is locked in a trunk—under
the cat’s attentive eyes. It is a really impressive
beginning, showing that—when he was not busy
shooting a scene with three cameras at the same
time—Margheriti was capable of a stylishness
worthy of Bava. And, like Bava, he knew how to
embellish a so-so script with enough eye candy
to make it worth viewing, such as rooms and
faces bathed in bright reds and greens, or scenes
shot through veils, cobwebs or other semi-
transparent surfaces. In addition to that, a
couple of moments—a Bible burning in extreme
close-up in a fireplace, a razor lifting a latch—
blatantly predate as many moments in Tenebre
(182) and Suspiria, hinting that perhaps
Argento knew this movie well.
Besides paying homage to Bava (the scene
where the coffin is found ripped open from the
inside, as if destroyed by the body buried inside
it, recalls the aftermath of Barbara Steele’s res-
urrection in La maschera del demonio), Mar-
gheriti managed to squeeze in his beloved minia-
tures: the night scenes at the cemetery are shot
on a studio set, with the castle in the background
being a miniature surrogate of the original. He
even allowed himself a reference to his own I
lunghi capelli della morte (164), also shot at the
castle Massimo in Arsoli, in the scene where
Corringa and Suzanne take a walk in the park,
a long take that recalls a similar moment in the
earlier film. In addition to Carlo Carlini’s scope
cinematography, La morte negli occhi del gatto
benefits from the décor (by Elio Micheli), which
becomes a character on its own. On the other
hand, Riz Ortolani’s score was not one of the
composer’s best, and recycled a theme from Il
merlo maschio (171, Pasquale Festa Campanile).
According to the director, the film under-
went the same color issues that had determined
the failure of the special effects in Nella stretta
morsa del ragno. “There was a really beautiful
scene, in which a cat visits Jane Birkin at night,
one of the best moments in the film. The cat was
some sort of vampire and it starts to drink blood
from Birkin’s neck. Two or three scenes like that
suffered immensely. Two different scenes were
supposed to be printed on top of each other with
very unusual and vivid colors. Technicolor
didn’t use any optical systems at that time, which
would have made the whole atmosphere very
weird and dreamlike.”7 Margheriti was not sat-
isfied with the gorilla either: “In my opinion the
orangutan, which was in the original story, was
a mistake, and if we’d managed to replace it with
something else, the film would have surely ben-
efitted … on the other hand, if that is the story,
it is useless to try and make a different movie:
the only option is to improve upon it as far as
possible…”8
Simonelli and Margheriti collaborated
again on a number of works, including the West-
ern comedy Whiskey e fantasmi (174), the film
noir Controrapina, a.k.a. The Rip-Off (178) and
the adventure story La leggenda del rubino
malese (185).
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on February 7, 172.
2. “It was born from an English story written by Peter
Bryan, which I and my trusted Simonelli tried to make a
little less dusty, a bit more modern and captivating; the
story was titled Corringa, which was the female protago-
nist’s name.” Garofalo, “La tecnica e gli effetti,” 11
3. “I was writing crime novels with another guy, who
is now a director too, Gianfranco Parolini. We’d write crime
novels, print them ourselves, we’d do everything. I would
write three, maybe four a month because we had two bi-
weekly publications.” Giovanni Simonelli, interviewed in
Murder, He Wrote, extra in the Blue Underground DVD
of Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eyes.
4. Edoardo Margheriti, La morte negli occhi del gatto,
www.antoniomargheriti.com.
5. Giovanni Simonelli, interviewed in Murder, He
Wrote.
6. Garofalo, “La tecnica e gli effetti,” 11. In the Italian
version, Gainsbourg is dubbed by voice actor and
comedian Oreste Lionello, the Italian voice of Woody
Allen, with jarring effect.
7. Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Inter-
view,” 47.
8. Garofalo, “La tecnica e gli effetti,” 11.
9. “You always had to keep up with Antonio and un-
derstand what he really had in mind. Otherwise he would
go off on a tangent and you’d lose him,” Simonelli recalled.
“Anyway, we got along quite well, and although we were
close friends we didn’t make many movies together. We
argued, sometimes strongly for a whole day or half day.
And then each of us would write by himself according to
what we had decided. He would take care of the special ef-
fects scenes, because, of course, he knew how and where
to shoot a scene, but we never sat down and exchanged
opinions or ideas.” Simonelli, interviewed in Murder, He
Wrote.
Il plenilunio delle vergini (The Devil’s
Wedding Night)
D: Paolo Solvay [Luigi Batzella] [and Aris-
 1973: Il plenilunio 7

tide Massaccesi, uncredited]. S and

SC: Walter Bigari, Paolo Solvay;
DOP: Aristide Massaccesi (Tele-
color); M: Vasil Kojucharov [Ko-
jukaroff ] (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Piera
Bruni, Gianfranco Simoncelli; PD:
Carlo Gentili; AD: Romano Scan-
dariato; AC: Lorenzo Battaglia;
MU: Liliana Dulac; SO: Franco
Ricci, Manlio Urbani; W: Tigano
Lo Faro. Cast: Mark Damon (Franz
Schiller / Karl Schiller), Rosalba
Neri (Countess Dolingen de Vries),
Esmeralda Barros (Lara), Francesca
Romana Davila [Enza Sbordone]
(Tanya), Xiro Papas [Ciro Papa]
(The Vampire Monster), Sergio Pis-
lar (Mark Damon’s double), Gen-
gher Gatti (The Mysterious Man),
Giorgio Dolfin (First Villager at
Inn), Stefano Oppedisano (Second
Villager at Inn); uncredited: Carlo
Gentili (Innkeeper). PROD: Franco
Gaudenzi for Virginia Cine-
matografica (Rome); PM: Walter
Bigari; EP: Ralph Zucker; PS: Mas-
simo Alberini, Sergio Rosa; PSA:
Angelo Santaniello. Country: Italy.
Filmed at Piccolomini Castle, Bal-
sorano (L’Aquila) and at Elios Film
Studios (Rome). Running time: 4
minutes (m. 2264); Visa n. 62028 French poster for Il plenilunio delle vergini (1973). Art by Con-
(3.14.173); Rating: V.M.18. Release stantin Belinksy.
date: 3.14.173; Distribution: Florida
Cinematografica. Domestic gross: 117,150,000 lire. be sacrificed during a Satanic ritual. Tania, a
Also known as: The Devil’s Crypt; Les vierges de waitress at the inn, recovers the amulet, and man-
la pleine lune; Les vierges maudites de Dracula ages to save Karl, who kills the Countess and her
(France; 8.7.174); O Castelo de Drácula (Brazil) servants, and dispatches his twin brother. How-
Note: In the Italian end credits, Sergio Pis- ever, just as he is about to leave the castle with
lar is credited as “Franz Schiller,” and Rosalba Tania, a grim surprise awaits him…
Neri as “Countess Dracula.” “That was a movie Mark Damon wanted
Carrying an amulet that protects him from to do, it was a script he had, it was his creature.”1
evil, Franz Schiller travels to Dracula’s castle in That’s how producer Franco Gaudenzi recalled
Transylvania to seize a magic ring that gives do- the genesis of the evocatively titled Il plenilunio
minion over the world, as did the most powerful delle vergini (“Full Moon of the Virgins”). Gau-
figures of the past, such as Alexander the Great denzi adamantly acknowledged the film’s Gothic
and Caesar. He spends the night at an inn where core, adding: “It was a Dracula movie, but back
he forgets the amulet, and once at the castle he is then sexy titles worked.” This might explain why,
seduced and vampirized by the Countess compared with other Italian low-budget horror
Dolingen De Vries. Franz’s twin brother Karl ar- films of the period, including the Gaudenzi-
rives to the castle to search for his sibling. The produced La morte ha sorriso all’assassino, it
“full moon of the virgins,” which occurs every fifty sounds more conventional on paper.
years, is approaching: by way of her ring, Countess The premise basically revisits the classical
De Vries draws to the castle five virgins that will plot of Harker’s journey to Dracula’s castle, with
8 1973: Il plenilunio
a couple of important twists: the hero has a twin
brother, and, in tune with the demand for eroti-
cism, Dracula is replaced by a ravishing female
vampire (his widow, actually), thus giving to
Italian cinema one of its more sensual icons:
Countess De Vries, unforgettably embodied by
Rosalba Neri.
By applying the theme of the double to a
male character, the script relies on a more classic
type of hero, split into two distinct halves, as the
twin brothers Schiller (not by chance named
after the famous German poet, philosopher and
playwright). On the one hand, we have Franz,
the rascal, Romantic type, an impulsive Byro-
nian figure, a seducer and a reckless adventurer
who dreams of being a ubermensch and rule the
world; on the other hand, his bookworm brother
Karl, an intellectual who is interested in the oc-
cult, recites excerpts from The Raven, labels Poe
as “the fashionable writer from the new world,”
passingly mentions a “Karnstein Museum”
which winks at Le Fanu’s Carmilla, quotes
Eliphas Levi’s definition of the vampire in Latin
(“Sine vita vivus, sine morte mortuus”) and even
name-drops the Greek Neoplatonic philosopher
Sinesius.
Last but not least, Countess De Vries (her-
self the namesake of a character in Bram Stoker’s
short story Dracula’s Guest, Countess Dolingen
of Gratz) is vaguely patterned over the real-life
Countess Erzsébet Báthory, whose notorious
deeds had been brought to the screen a number
of times in the previous years, most notably in
Hammer’s Countess Dracula (171, Peter Sasdy),
starring Ingrid Pitt, and in a couple of Spanish
horror films, the Paul Naschy vehicle El retorno
de Walpurgis (173, with María Silva as the
Countess) and in the politically charged Cere-
monia sangrienta (173, Jorge Grau), where
Báthory was played by Lucia Bosé. But the char-
acter was also evoked in Franco Brocani’s ex-
perimental oddity Necropolis (170), where
Báthory was played by Warhol superstar Viva,
in Harry Kümel’s La rouge aux lévres (170),
played by Delphine Seyrig, and most memorably
in an episode of Walerian Borowczyk’s Contes
Immoraux (174), with Paloma Picasso.
The tendency for literate references puts
the script in the same vein as La notte dei dan-
nati. Both movies share the same mixture of
classical Gothic and lowbrow sexploitation: in
the most notorious scene—possibly influenced
by a similar sequence in Countess Dracula—the
Countess takes a sensual bath in blood while her
female servant (Esmeralda Barros) pours over
her a pitcher of the substance, and then emerges
from the bathtub completely covered in scarlet
liquid, among dry ice smoke and ethereal lights.
It is truly one of Italian erotic cinema’s most
iconic moments.
According to Gaudenzi, Damon was plan-
ning to sell the film to an American company
that was interested in distributing it in the States;
however, the Italian producer never met any as-
sociate of the company, and suspects that
Damon himself was willing to take the task of
releasing Il plenilunio delle vergini in his home
country. As for the choice of the director, Gau-
denzi claimed, “We hired Paolo Solvay, since he
was often in our office, and there he, Massaccesi
and Mattei used to talk and come up with ideas
for movies.” 2 Still, Solvay (real name Luigi
Batzella, nicknamed “il tranviere,” the tram
driver, among insiders) is credited as the the co-
author of the screenplay with Walter Bigari
(a.k.a. Walter Brandi, Italian cinema’s first home-
made bloodsucker, in L’amante del vampiro),
whereas the script kept at the CSC (which
carries the unlikely subtitle Eros Vampiros and
is dated July 27, 1723) bears only Batzella’s
name. Incidentally, the screenplay—very pre-
cisely written, with many technical indications,
and otherwise quite close to the finished film—
includes an over-the-top prologue that is not in
the movie, in which the Countess summons the
forces of evil with her ring while in the castle’s
halls a savage orgy climaxes in the ritual torture
and throat slashing of a nude woman tied to a
column. What is more, in the script the Schiller
brothers are renamed Richard and William Ben-
son.
Born in 124 in San Sperate, Sardinia,
Batzella had moved on to directing in 166 with
the war melodrama Tre franchi di pietà after a
nondescript career as an actor. Coming after a
trio of cheap Westerns, Il plenilunio delle vergini
was his first horror movie, although he had
played the savant in an early Italian Gothic,
Roberto Mauri’s La strage dei vampiri (162).
According to the producer, however, the movie
was co-directed by the director of photography
Aristide Massaccesi: “Actually they made it to-
gether, he [Batzella] made him reshoot some
things, not the least because Aristide had an im-
portant role in the crew.”4 Damon was so im-
pressed by Massaccesi’s work that he recom-
mended him to Roger Corman as the d.o.p. for
their next project, The Arena (174, Steve
 1973: Il prato
Carver), which Massaccesi partly directed as
well.
The cinematography is indeed one of the
movie’s assets. Shooting in a real location, the
Piccolomini castle in Balsorano, Massaccesi
makes impeccable use of hand-held camera
shots, and gives the movie’s typical adults-only
imagery an aesthetic quality that puts it one step
above the typical erotic fare of the period. The
direction is surprisingly witty at times, such as
in the scene where Karl (whose wine has been
drugged by the Countess) and his hosts start
laughing uncontrollably, and their madly cack-
ling faces, shot in extreme close-up, are visually
compared to the grotesque stone faces carved in
the fireplace; then, in an almost psychedelic
crescendo, the sight of De Vries’ ruby ring and
a red wine glass dissolve into an abstract tunnel-
like vision à la 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is one
of those priceless moments that make Italian
Gothics of the period poles apart from their
Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
Some visual ideas were borrowed from
other sources: the Countess advancing toward
the camera as if she was fluctuating in the air
was lifted from Bava, the ceremonial with the
five virgins comes straight out of Twins of Evil
(171, John Hough), while the moment where
De Vries discovers that Schiller is not a vampire
since he is reflected in the hall’s huge mirror is
a nod to The Fearless Vampire Killers, a detail
which may also hint at the makers’ tongue-in-
cheek approach. The low budget resulted in
some ludicrous special effects—such as the ex-
treme close-ups of real bats to suggest Neri’s
transformation into a vampire, and the giant bat
that appears at the climax—whereas the huge
red ruby ring which the Countess uses to sum-
mon her victims was another small miracle of
resourcefulness. As Neri recalled, “I had recently
bought a Pomellato ring, you know, those big
red stones … and I thought: ‘Why not put a light
bulb in it…?’ Because, you see, the ring we used
for that sequence had a bulb inside the stone:
there was a battery somewhere (laughs)…”5
Neri (who had crossed Mark Damon’s path
on the set of Romolo Guerrieri’s Western Johnny
Yuma, 166) did not have much to say, neither
about the film, nor about Batzella: “I never un-
derstood him. It was like there were two of them,
going different directions … and rarely meeting
(laughs). A bit schizophrenic, indeed.” 6 The cast
also included Esmeralda Barros, Maurizio
Arena’s ex-lover, and Francesca Romana Davila

(real name Enza Sbordone), a refugee from the
“Decamerotics” of the period. On top of that,
the movie sported a tendency toward the
grotesque in its parade of monstrous male char-
acters: the wan-looking Gengher Gatti—who
collected a scarce number of appearances in a
career that seemingly lasted the space of five
years, including Batzella’s Anche per Django le
carogne hanno un prezzo (171) and Jorge Grau’s
No profanar el sueño de los muertos—plays the
“mysterious man” who pops up every now and
then and has the last laugh in the cynical bad
ending, while Ciro Papa (Frankenstein ’80; Ter-
ror! Il castello delle donne maledette) is a con-
vincing “monster vampire” with minimal resort
to make-up. The use of freakish-looking actors
as monsters would reach its peak in the Nazi
subgenre, with Batzella distinguishing himself
with the casting of Salvatore Baccaro as the tit-
ular “beast” in La bestia in calore (177).
Due to its erotic content, the movie had
some trouble with the Italian censors, who de-
manded that the sapphic lovemaking sequence
be shortened and that “all scenes be eliminated
where the man kisses the lower part of the
woman’s body.” The photonovel published in the
magazine Cinestop Attualità (issue #12, May
173) retained some additional frissons (full
frontal nudes, an emphasis on the Sapphic in-
terludes), whereas for once the French version
was identical to the Italian one.
NoTeS
1. Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, Nude per
Dracula, extra in the Italian DVD Il plenilunio delle vergini
(Cinekult).
2. Ibid.
3. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on July 31, 172.
4. Gomarasca and Pulici, Nude per Dracula.
5. Gomarasca and Pulici, 99 donne, 171.
6. Ibid.
Il prato macchiato di rosso
D: Riccardo Ghione. S and SC: Riccardo
Ghione; DOP: Romolo Garroni (Technicolor,
Techniscope); M: Teo Usuelli, conducted by the
author (Ed. R.C.A.), choirs by Nora Orlandi; the
song Il prato macchiato di rosso (Ghione-Dalla-
Baldazzi) is sung by Lucio Dalla; E: Cleofe Con-
versi; PD: Arrigo Equini; CO: Osanna Guardini;
AD: Luciano Palermo; SS: Rosanna Seregni; C:
Ruggero Radicchi; SO: Umberto Picistrelli; Mix:
Fausto Ancillai; AE: Aloisa Camilli; MU: Cris-
tina Rocca; SE: Giuseppe Pagnotta, Arnaldo
100 1973: Il prato
Mangolini. Cast: Marina Malfatti (Nina Gen-
ovese), Enzo Tarascio (Dr. Antonio Genovese),
Daniela Caroli (Max’s Companion), Georg Will-
ing (Max), Claudio Biava (Alfiero, Nina’s
Brother), Barbara Marzano (Gypsy girl), Do-
minique Boschero (Prostitute), Lucio Dalla
(Tramp), Nino Castelnuovo (UNESCO agent);
uncredited: Tiziana Inzani (Girl in the street),
Giovanni Zappieri (Waiter). PROD: Alfredo
Chetta, Aldo Pascucci for Canguro Cinema-
tografica (Rome); PS: Alfredo Sinatra; PSe: Gio-
vanni Bruno Bossio. Country: Italy. Filmed in
Castell’Arquato and Fiorenzuola d’Arda and at
Centro Dear Studios (Rome). Running time:
0 minutes (m. 240); Visa n. 61372 (11.13.
172); Rating: V.M.18. Release dates: 3.2.173
(Italy); Distribution: Drago Film. Domestic gross:
56,364,000 lire.
A UNESCO agent discovers that blood is
being smuggled abroad, hidden in bottles of wine.
Meanwhile, in a small Northern Italy village, the
original Italian poster art for Il prato macchiato di rosso (1973). hood) as well as from novelists
The incongruous figure on the left, wielding a machine-gun, is Alberto Moravia and Carlo Levi.
recycled from the poster for Svegliati e uccidi (1966, Carlo Liz- Ghione, with the complicity of
zani).
enigmatic Alfiero picks up a number of misfits (a
gypsy, a prostitute, a drunk, a pair of hitch-hiking
hippies) and takes them to the villa of Antonio
and Nina Genovese, a pair of upper class wine
merchants. Soon the guests notice that something
is wrong with their apparently affable hosts: Al-
berto is a crazed scientist, obsessed with the cre-
ation of an immortal being, whereas the greedy
Nina runs the blood smuggling ring, draining
lowlives of their blood which is then shipped to
Third World countries. After a delirious orgy, dur-
ing which they are drugged, the guests are offed
by the trio, who employ a robot built by Alberto
to suck their blood. The two hippies are about to
end up as their unfortunate companions, when
the UNESCO agent shows up and saves the day.
A low-budget production filmed in the late
spring and summer of 172, in the Northern re-
gion of Emilia Romagna, in the villages of
Castell’Arquato and Fiorenzuola (in the province
of Piacenza) under the working title Vampiro
2000, Il prato macchiato di rosso
(“The Red-Stained Lawn”) was Ric-
cardo Ghione’s fourth feature film.
The son of the famous orchestra
conductor Franco Ghione, he had
risen to notoriety in 150, when he
and his associate Marco Ferreri cre-
ated the short-lived newsreel Doc-
umento mensile, which the creators
conceived as “a new cinematic
‘genre.’ Like a cultural magazine, in
each issue it brings together critical
notes, documentation, short stories,
poetry. The contributors are the
best-known filmmakers, as well as
eminent personalities of the Italian
and foreign cultural world, who for
once express themselves through
the cinematic medium.”1
Despite a short and troubled
existence, due to many censorship
issues, Documento mensile was an
extraordinary accomplishment, and
featured contributions from Vit-
torio De Sica and Luchino Visconti
(the moving short documentary
Appunti su un fatto di cronaca, in-
spired by the killing of a 12-year-old
girl in a Roman suburban neighbor-
screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, tried
 1973: Il prato
to revive the same formula of Documento
mensile for a feature film, provisionally titled Lo
spettatore n. 1, which was to be the first in a
series of anthologies based on real-life facts and
featuring non-professional actors. “These films
can be compared to as many issues of a maga-
zine,” he and Zavattini pointed out. “Each article
in each issue will be signed by this or that direc-
tor.”2 The names involved were Carlo Lizzani,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Dino Risi, Alberto Lat-
tuada, Francesco Maselli, Zavattini himself and
Federico Fellini. Eventually the project for Lo
spettatore fell apart, and the resulting film be-
came the anthology L’amore in città (153).
It took over a decade before Ghione made
his film debut, and it was a one-of-a-kind effort:
Il limbo (167), written with Luigi Malerba, fea-
tured only two-year-old children, and aimed at
portraying a view of life and the world as seen
through the eyes of a newborn baby. Regrettably
the film was never released theatrically, and to
this day it remains impossible to view. Then
Ghione helmed La rivoluzione sessuale (168),
an interesting if flawed apologue inspired by the
theories of Wilhelm Reich and featuring among
others a young Laura Antonelli, and A cuore
freddo (171), a grim “hippie vs bourgeoisie”
drama starring Enrico Maria Salerno and Rada
Rassimov.
For Il prato macchiato di rosso Ghione re-
sorted to a plot which mixed elements from the
Gothic genre, the thriller and a little bit of
science fiction, spiced with ample doses of eroti-
cism and served as a political fable of sorts. As
the working title implied, Ghione’s are modern
day vampires, who literally steal the blood from
the lower classes (prostitutes, tramps, gypsies,
hippies) and sell it back to the Third World,
where the ongoing state of war results in con-
tinuous demand for the vital fluid: as Nina (Ma-
rina Malfatti) explains, “Blood is worth quite
a lot, you know? More than oil, more than
gold….”
The concept of upper-class bloodsuckers,
which draws back to I vampiri, found fertile
ground after the 168 turmoil, from the political
allegory of …Hanno cambiato faccia to the biting
satire of Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco
ovvero: Dracula in Brianza (175), but the way
Ghione’s film deals with it is bizarre to say the
least. The trio of wealthy “vampires”—Nina, her
crazy husband Alberto and the former’s brother
Alfiero—are wine dealers who smuggle blood
inside wine bottles, and employ a very peculiar
101
device to drain their victims: a tin robot which
looks like it just stepped out of some bad 150s
sci-fi flick.
Ghione adds a few references to Nosferatu
(a scene where Daniela Caroli’s hippie girl cuts
her own finger like Harker does in Murnau’s
film, an eerie dinner in which the owners pro-
claim they don’t eat meat, being vegetarians) and
depicts Enzo Tarascio’s character as a demented
mad doctor with a lab full of body parts and
weird machinery, who delivers crazy mono-
logues and has a fixation with automatons and
robots (a nod to the character of Coppelius in
Hoffmann’s The Sandman, perhaps?). In A cuore
freddo, Ghione portrayed the hippies and the
wily upper-class couple with the same nihilistic
contempt; here, in full post–168 mode (see Il
delitto del diavolo), the joint smoking, guitar
playing, free lovemaking young couple are the
good guys, whereas the villains are rich fascists
who listen to Wagner (“I love German music
very much, it makes us feel bigger, more impor-
tant … it is undoubtedly a music for a superior
race,” Nina comments), nurture perverted
sexual whims and claim that “only money gives
happiness.”
Beneath the anticapitalistic discourse and
the decadent vision of bourgeois family (Nina
despises her husband and has an incestuous re-
lationship with Alfiero), there is a heavy satirical
undercurrent at work. Tarascio’s character is
openly caricaturish, starting with his outstand-
ing, gigantic, colorful bow-ties, neurotic behav-
ior and incoherent monologues (“I have come
to the conclusion that nature is imperfect. We
must provide to modify afterwards what nature
has created, the dynamics of automatisms …
this is perfection!”). He is a man-child who
keeps playing with robots like a grown-up kid
and keeps a doll house of sorts in the garden,
and his duets with the drunken tramp (Lucio
Dalla) are openly tongue-in-cheek.
The bare-bones plot, which in parts recalls
Alain Jessua’s Traitement de choc (a.k.a. Shock
Treatment, 173), is fleshed out with ample doses
of nudity, courtesy of Caroli, Dominque Bo-
schero (as a prostitute) and Barbara Marzano.
Ghione even stages a psychedelic orgy scene in-
side a room covered with mirrors whose access
is shaped like a gigantic vagina—a nod to Niki
de Saint-Phalle’s notorious 166 sculpture “La
Hon” (and to Piero Schivazappa’s Femina Ri-
dens)—to the sound of Teo Usuelli’s outstanding
score. The out-and-out horrific moments are
102 1973: Riti
few and far between, namely a scene where the
hippies find blood-drained victims amassed in
an underground cell (a moment vaguely remi-
niscent of Bava) and the robot’s gory blood-
draining practices by way of a mechanical suc-
tion pump.
All this is interspersed with scenes showing
a UNESCO agent (played by Nino Castelnuovo)
investigating the blood smuggling ring, which
makes for a number of blatant plugs for a local
winemaker and assorted awkward dialogue bits
featuring Castelnuovo with local non-actors in
small roles, plus a scene in which a vital clue to
the solution of the mystery comes in the form
of a bottle of Chivas Regal whisky.
The most interesting aspect is the presence
of Lucio Dalla, one of Italy’s most talented
singer-songwriters. His acting role in such a
low-budget obscurity seems odd at first, given
that in 172 he participated to the San Remo fes-
tival with one of his best songs, Piazza Grande,
and was already a household name. But Dalla’s
sparse cinematic career (17 acting appearances
between 165 and 2008) is littered with such
oddities, from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s I
sovversivi (167) to Fernando di Leo’s Amarsi
male (16), not forgetting Avati’s La mazurka
del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone. Here, as
the ugly-looking, balding, bearded tramp who
has always a bottle of wine at hand, Dalla (who
also sings the pleasant folk-rock titular number
under the opening credits) shows a talent for
comedy that comes to the fore in the scene
where Tarascio’s mad doctor illustrates to him
his vision of the übermensch: “Man is shit! From
tall, blond, rangy, you see, he became dark,
short, fat, ugly, hairy … and he sweats too …
like you!”
Il prato macchiato di rosso was given a
V.M.18 rating “for the erotic and nude scenes,
those of violence to individuals and those con-
cerning the use of drugs” (namely, a sequence
where the hippies smoke hashish). After the pre-
miere in Fiorenzuola d’Arda, on March 2, 173,
it disappeared into oblivion and surfaced to
home video only recently. It was Ghione’s last
film as a director, as his project to adapt for the
screen Giuseppe Berto’s powerful novel Il male
oscuro, with Ugo Tognazzi in the lead and to be
filmed in September 172, ultimately sank.3 His
subsequent work was mainly as a scriptwriter in
the erotic genre, for Salvatore Samperi (Fo-
tografando Patrizia, 184; La bonne, 186),
Gabriele Lavia (Scandalosa Gilda, 185) and
Tonino Valerii (Senza scrupoli, 186), although
his best work was a collaboration on Marco Fer-
reri’s outstanding Diario di un vizio (13). He
died in 2003.
NoTeS
1. Riccardo Ghione, quoted in Lino Micciché (ed.), Sto-
ria del cinema italiano 1949/1953 (Rome: Edizioni di Bianco
& Nero, 2001), 8.
2. m.g., “Il balletto delle ombre,” La Stampa, March 26,
153.
3. Alberto Ceretto, “‘Il male oscuro’ a Milano,” Corriere
d’Informazione, March 10–11, 172. Il male oscuro was later
turned to a movie in 10 by Mario Monicelli, starring Gi-
ancarlo Giannini and Emmanuelle Seigner.
Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Tre-
cento… (Black Magic Rites, a.k.a. The Rein-
carnation of Isabel)
D: Ralph Brown [Renato Polselli]. S and
SC: Renato Polselli; DOP: Ugo Brunelli (East-
mancolor); M: Gianfranco Reverberi, Romolo
Forlai, conducted by the author (Ed. Tickle); E:
Renato Polselli; ArtD: Giuseppe Ranieri; CO:
Wally Boni; MU: Marcello Di Paolo; Hair: Ag-
nese Panarotto; AD: Raimondo Esposito; SO:
Maurizio Ferrari; Color technician: Pio Matassi.
Cast: Mickey Hargitay (Jack Nelson), Rita
Calderoni (Isabella / Laureen), Raoul [Raoul
Lovecchio] (Trauker, the Occultist), Krysta Bar-
rymore (Christa), Consolata Moschera, William
Darni (Richard Brenton), Max Dorian (Doctor),
Marcello Bonini Olas (Gerg, the Servant),
Cristina Perrier (Glenda), Stefania Fassio
(Stefy), Gabriele Bentivoglio (Priest), Vittorio
Fanfoni (Rocky), Anna Ardizzone (Raquel, the
first victim), Marisa Indice; uncredited: Dunca
Balsor, Carmen Young (Mabel). PROD: Renato
Polselli for G.R.P. Cinematografica; PM: Mario
Maestrelli; PSe: Gianni Di Clemente, Giuseppe
Bruno Bossio; ADM: Giuseppe Gargiulo. Coun-
try: Italy. Filmed at and at Castle Piccolomini,
Balsorano (L’Aquila) and at Elios Film Studios
(Rome). Running time: 4 minutes (m. 2584);
Visa n. 6075 (11.18.172); Rating: V.M.18. Release
date: 1.17.173; Distribution: Primula Cine-
matografica. Domestic gross: 68,080,000 lire.
A man named Jack Nelson buys a castle with
a dark history: 500 years earlier a woman named
Isabella had been burnt there as a witch, being
the lover of Count Dracula. In the castle’s crypts
horrible rites are still taking place, though: a sect
of vampires perform sadistic tortures on their vic-
tims in order to revive Isabella, their high
priestess. Several young women who are guests at
 1973: Riti
the castle are sacrificed, and among the vampires
there are an occultist named Trauker, the local
doctor, a priest, the disfigured servant Gerg, and
even Nelson himself. The last victim about to be
sacrificed is Laureen, Nelson’s daughter and a
dead ringer for Isabella. Her fiancé, Richard Bren-
ton, eventually finds out the truth: Nelson is the
reincarnation of Count Dracula, and his body
must be destroyed for the curse to end…
Shot between December 171 and January
1721 as La reincarnazione, and released only two
years later under a title that tried to exploit the
current vogue of the so-called “Decamerotics”—
the sex comedies set in the Middle Ages,
launched by the success of Pasolini’s films Il De-
cameron (171) and I racconti di Canterbury
(172)—Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Tre-
cento… marked Renato Polselli’s return to the
Gothic genre, after L’amante del vampiro (160)
and Il mostro dell’opera (shot in 161 but released
in 164). Once again Polselli built the story
around an offbeat erotic variation on the theme
of vampirism and metempsychosis: whereas L’a-
mante del vampiro focused on a female vampire
and her monstrous servant/lover, and Il mostro
dell’opera depicted a misogynist bloodsucker
who wanted to take revenge on the reincarna-
tion of the woman who betrayed him, here a
whole sect of vampires, on the order of Count
Dracula himself, perform magic rites on their
victims in an extra-dimensional torture cham-
ber in order to revive Dracula’s lover, burnt at
the stake 500 years earlier.
If Polselli’s earlier Gothics were merely sug-
gestive in their eroticism, and were content with
showing ample female décolletage and the like,
here the director takes full advantage of the dif-
ferent climate: the movie looks like a demented
adults-only comic book brought to life, with a
gleeful insistence on all things sexual, from
weird sadistic torture scenes on women (where
the victims seem to oddly enjoy their supplice,
one of Polselli’s favorite leitmotivs) to enthusi-
astic sapphic interludes, with full frontal female
nudity and a whole range of starlets ready to take
their clothes off, starting with the gorgeous Rita
Calderoni.
Despite the references to his previous work
(the idea of an extra-dimensional torture cham-
ber was recycled from Il mostro dell’opera), and
the resort to Gothic clichés such as the burning
of the witch, the result does not quite feel as it
belongs to the genre. In fact, Polselli’s treatment
of Gothic staples (metempsychosis, the haunted
103
manor, the return of the repressed past by way
of a curse, the doppelgänger, the premature bur-
ial…) is purely instrumental, as means to delve
into the director’s own erotic obsessions. Always
faithful to his philosophical and psychoanalytic
ambitions, Polselli claimed in interviews that he
wanted to “look for the reason behind the psy-
chosis that moved people toward this type of
films. In fact, when you watch the movie, you’ll
see that the girl who has stayed at the doctor’s
house at night sees the vampire with his features.
The one who was perturbed by the priest, sees
him again at night as a vampire. In fact, each
one sees the vampire with her own eyes.”2
Polselli would delve even deeper in the ex-
ploration of sexual deviations with Rivelazioni
di uno psichiatra sul mondo perverso del sesso
(173), but compared with works like La verità
secondo Satana (shot in 170, but released in
172), Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Tre-
cento… looks like a “commercial” project for the
director, starting with the presence of Mickey
Hargitay, who had also starred in Delirio caldo.
The cast is filled with familiar Polselli faces, such
as Raoul Lovecchio (seen also in many Fernando
di Leo films), Krysta Barrymore, Marcello
Bonini Olas, William Darni and Max Dorian.
According to some sources, scenes featuring
Tano Cimarosa were cut prior to release, but this
is dubious. Production values are surprisingly
decent for a Polselli movie, even though on the
lower side of low budget: the film was shot at
the Castle Piccolomini in Balsorano in 5 or 6
weeks (according to Calderoni), and it bene-
fitted from a score by Gianfranco Reverberi and
Romolo Forlai, which mixed African percus-
sion, a groovy bass and female orgasmic cries;
the main theme, aptly titled Orgiastic Ritual
(b/w Black Secret), even came out in a 7" vinyl,
credited to South African Combo.3
That said, the movie borders on the incom-
prehensible, as the basic plot is continually sab-
otaged by Polselli’s own script, which leaves
giant-sized plot holes at every turn. There is no
real storyline to speak of, but a series of barely
connected scenes: the vampires (who wear red
costumes and capes that make them look like
homologues of the titular characters in the
Three Supermen series) abducting and torturing
their nubile victims during the cycle of the full
moon; the other characters wandering around
the castle; and lots and lots of talk—all this be-
tween one erotic scene and the next.
Dialogue scenes go on forever, and the
104 1973: Il sesso
actors declaim their lines in an unlikely aulic
language that makes them even more jarring.
Equally grating is the comic relief provided by
the character of Stefy (Stefania Fassio), a dimwit
who claims “I always seem to fall on something
hard,” and who ends up in bed with a female
friend and the idiotic caretaker Rocky (Vittorio
Fanfoni), full of nervous twitches but apparently
insatiable, in one of the worst threesome sex
scenes ever committed to celluloid. Polselli even
throws in the odd gore bit, such as a stake being
slowly driven into Rita Calderoni’s bare chest,
or a heart ripped out of a victim, but fails to
build any frissons; worse still, the attempts at
suspense, such as the scene where Krysta Bar-
rymore is buried alive (Polselli’s own self-
homage to L’amante del vampiro), come out pre-
posterous if not utterly ridiculous.
If that wasn’t enough, the direction is over
the top from start to finish. Polselli employs
plenty of reds and greens in the torture scenes
and lights the actors’ faces with a vortex of col-
ored lights: far from being the movie’s answer
to Bava’s masterful use of color, it merely looks
like an assortment of cheap funhouse tricks. The
editing is epileptic, with continuous cuts to the
rhythm of music, in a homemade attempt at psy-
chedelic effects that soon becomes exhausting,
since each scene goes on forever, such as the one
where two women are chased by the villagers
(with Polselli recruiting the local people from
Balsorano as extras, to grotesque effects). The
odd striking shot, such as two characters staring
at the camera at the opposite borders of the
frame, their faces cut in half to suggest their du-
ality, is repeated ad nauseam and soon loses ap-
peal. Lastly, the concept of continuity is some-
thing to which the makers seem to be totally
oblivious, as the story repeatedly jumps from
day to night within the same scene and back
again, and incongruences abound: “I cannot
stand electric light. I’m going to have a moon
bath,” a character says, leaving the castle’s hall:
but the room is lit by candles, and outside the
sun is shining.
Like most Polselli films, Riti, magie nere e
segrete orge nel Trecento… had trouble with the
censors. It was submitted to the rating board on
July 31, 172, and a couple of weeks later, on Au-
gust 11, the committee rejected it, motivating its
decision as follows: “The movie consists of a
rambling series of sadistic sequences, meant to
urge, through extreme cruelty mixed with de-
generate eroticism, the lowest sexual instincts.”
Polselli appealed, agreeing to shorten the most
audacious bits, and on November 11 the censors
overturned their judgment, stressing the film’s
belonging to the horror genre and giving it a
V.M.18 rating.
Released in January 173,4 it did poor busi-
ness and soon disappeared without a trace. A
heavily shortened print running only 56 minutes
surfaced among collectors in the 10s; at the
turn of the millennium the film was unearthed
to home video by the British label Redemption,
under the titles The Reincarnation of Isabel and
Black Magic Rites.
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on December 21, 171.
2. Manlio Gomarasca and Daniele Aramu, “Renato
Polselli: il mio cinema blasfemo,” Solamente giallo. Person-
aggi, luoghi e paure del giallo all’italiana 1950–1979. Noc-
turno Book #7, 61.
3. Orgiastic Ritual was released by Tickle Records (TSP
1308). The cover depicts the film’s most iconic image, the
naked Rita Calderoni on the stake, tied to a St. Andrew’s
cross. The funk / afrobeat / psychedelic South African
Combo (featuring Antonio Bartoccetti from the band Jac-
ula on bass) had released another 7” the previous year:
African Flute / Around the Stars, the main theme from the
TV program “Viaggio tra le stelle.” The soundtrack LP, fea-
turing 15 tracks with additional music by Massimo
Catalano and Mauro Chiari, has been released only in late
2016 by Cinedelic Records, in a limited edition of 666
copies.
4. That same month, the photonovel version appeared
in Cinesex mese #1, under the original title La reincar-
nazione.
Il sesso della strega (Sex of the Witch)
D: Elo Pannacciò [Angelo Pannaccio]. S:
Elo Pannacciò [and Franco Brocani, un-
credited]; DOP: Maurizio Centini, Girolamo La
Rosa; M: Daniele Patucchi; E: Marcello Mal-
vestito; ArtD: Egidio Spugnini; CO: Osanna
Guardini; AD: Salvatore Sicurezza; SE: Luigi
Gizzi; AE: Anna Bolli; SS: Marisa Muneratti.
Cast: Susan Levi [Susanna Levi] (Susan), Jessica
Dublin (Evelin Hilthon), Sergio Ferrero (Ingrid-
Man), Camille Keaton (Ann), Christopher
Oakes [Franco Garofalo] (Tony), Donald
[Donal] O’Brien (Inspector), Gianni Dei (Simon
Dvoskin), Augusto Nobile (Edward), Maurizio
Tanfani (Nath), Marzia Damon [Caterina Chi-
ani] (Gloria), Irio Fantini (Markey, Assistant In-
spector), Ferruccio Viotti (Notary Thompson),
Giovanni Petti [Giovanni Petrucci] (Johnny),
Annamaria Torello (Ingrid), Simone Santo
(Thomas Hilthon), Lorenza Guerrieri (Lucy).
 1973: Il sesso
PROD: Produzione Cinematografica Universa-
lia; UM: Sergio Rosa. Country: Italy. Filmed in
Sermoneta (Lazio). Running time: 81 minutes
(m. 2202). Visa n. 61744 (1.24.173); Rating:
V.M.18. Release date: 10.18.173 (France); 3.20.
174 (Italy); Distribution: Regional. Domestic
gross: 72,16,000 lire. Also known as: Les Anges
pervers (France).
The elderly sir Thomas Hilthon gathers all
his descendants at his deathbed, and tells them
he wants to take to the grave the family’s terrible
secret: the power to transform human cells. After
the burial, the notary proceeds to the reading of
his will: the assets will be divided equally among
all the heirs, including Hilthon’s secretary Simon,
except for Evelin, the deceased’s daughter, who
has been disinherited for her hatred towards her
relatives. But Evelin knows Thomas’ secret: a mys-
terious serum with which she injects her niece In-
grid to exact her revenge on the family. One of
the heirs, Johnny, is murdered, and a police in-
spector shows up to investigate. Johnny’s cousin
Nath is arrested after the murder weapon (a
heavy mallet) is discovered in the basement. A
mysterious young man then shows up at the villa:
he rapes and tortures two of Hilthon’s nieces, Ann
and Lucy, and cuts Simon’s throat. The intruder
is killed by the inspector’s assistant, and he is re-
vealed to be none other but Ingrid, who has
turned into a man thanks to Evelin’s serum. The
surviving heir, Susan, leaves the place, while the
butler and the maid take possession of the
house…
When asked by an interviewer about Il
sesso della strega, Camille Keaton commented:
“I don’t know what this film is about!” and re-
called an anecdote that happened during the
shooting, as the actor who was filming a scene
with her confessed the same feeling of bewilder-
ment about the movie they were both in. 1 Those
feelings are likely to be shared by most viewers.
Indeed, describing Elo Pannacciò’s film is quite
a task, let alone put down a coherent synopsis.
Not surprisingly, since it comes from one of
Italy’s most singular filmmakers.
Born in Foligno in 123, as Angelo Pannac-
cio, he moved at an early age in Rome, where he
was bitten by the film bug. He studied at Rome’s
CSC, and during that period he collaborated on
a few scripts, including Duilio Coletti’s war
drama Divisione Folgore (154), but never grad-
uated. He resurfaced in the movie business near
the end of the 160s, and teamed up with direc-
tor Luigi Petrini for a couple of films, the
105
lesbian-themed erotic drama La ragazza dalle
mani di corallo (16) and Così … così … più
forte (170), before going bankrupt. After his
debut as a director, the Western Lo ammazzò
come un cane … ma lui rideva ancora (172),
Pannacciò founded another company, Univer-
salia. Il sesso della strega came after an aborted
project, a weird parapsychological yarn titled
Subliminal (Una splendida giornata per morire),
starring Kay Fisher and Gordon Mitchell, about
a girl with telepathic powers who becomes the
instrument of a vengeance against a former SS
acolyte. Subliminal was abandoned halfway
through shooting due to lack of funds.2
Il sesso della strega has vaguely Gothic un-
dertones. At first the story seems to move along
as a typical haunted house mystery, with a num-
ber of people gathered for the reading of a will
at a villa where weird, seemingly supernatural
events take place; what is more, it features per-
haps the looniest case of transformation this side
of Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (171, Roy Ward
Baker). Still, the script (co-authored, uncredited,
by Franco Brocani, a painter and avant-garde
filmmaker who helmed the obscure but inter-
esting Necropolis) throws in disparate elements,
including nods to the Argento-style gialli (the
first murder via a mallet, which turns out to be
unrelated to the others) as well as to adults-only
comics imagery, and even a weird sequence in
a disco featuring psychedelic visuals.
Overall, the plot is so difficult to follow that
a lot of things are left unexplained long after the
end credits have rolled. What is the significance
of the so-called “Javanese fingernails” worn by
the murderer? Why do the cops leave the villa
without even noticing that there are still two
bodies and one demented woman in the bed-
rooms? What is the role of Tony the butler
(played with his usual demented exuberance by
Franco Garofalo) and his lover, Gloria the maid
(Marzia Damon), on whose crotch the camera
finally zooms, in an ending which literally par-
aphrases the film’s title, in a reference to Gustave
Courbet’s painting L’origine du monde…?
What the film lacks in coherence, it makes
up in bare female flesh. Soon after the opening
credits Tony and Gloria are seen indulging in
oral sex in the family chapel, next to the grave
where their master’s body will soon be buried.
Other sex scenes follow, lovingly accompanied
by Daniele Patucchi’s postribular lounge score,
including Tony masturbating Gloria by way of
an iron poker (“You push me directly toward the
106 1974: Le amanti
end … the agony has started,” she moans), the
gender bending murderer raping the characters
played by Lorenza Guerrieri and Camille Keaton
and torturing them with the above-mentioned
nails (shades of La notte dei dannati), and an
abruptly excised threesome. Speaking of which,
Il sesso della strega had lots of trouble with the
board of censors, which requested a number of
cuts in practically every sex sequence. Unfortu-
nately, Pannacciò fails to make sex erotic, as he
shoots the ample nudity and carnal exuberance
in an indifferent, tedious manner.
Technically, the film is inept, with lots of
awkwardly conceived shots featuring people
walking across the surroundings and talking of
who-knows-what. The shoestring budget shows
at every turn: the villa where the story takes
place is actually an old convent (as evident from
its typical inner courtyard), and despite the
characters having Anglo-Saxon names, car
plates and locations are blatantly Italian (the
movie was shot in Sermoneta, in the Lazio prov-
ince of Latina). On top of that, the acting ranges
from catatonic to caricatural: a case in point is
Donal O’Brien3 as the cop on the case, complete
with a Columbo-style overcoat. The Irish actor
recalled: “That was a down-at-heel production
indeed. We filmed it near Rome and during the
shooting I didn’t see two nickels to rub together.
In fact, the rumors circulating were alarming.
One night, at the restaurant, I dared to ask about
my wage, and the reply was: ‘Do you want the
money? It’s already a lot if at the end of the day
you won’t have to pay for the hotel and the food.’
I almost choked on my spaghetti!”4
Pannacciò’s subsequent career was as
bizarre and elusive as Il sesso della strega.
Throughout the 170s he kept creating short-
lived production companies—such as Film
Montecarlo Produzione Televisiva and Colos-
seum International—which usually lasted only
one movie, and helmed a handful of low-budget
films, which veered toward more and more ex-
1974
Le amanti del mostro
D: Sergio Garrone. SC: Sergio Garrone;
DOP: Emore Galeassi (Eastmancolor, Telecolor);
M: Elio Maestosi, Stefano Liberati, conducted
by Stefano Liberati (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Cesare Bian-
plicit eroticism: the Exorcist rip-off Un urlo dalle
tenebre (actually directed in large part by an un-
credited Franco Lo Cascio); a remake of La
ragazza dalle mani di corallo titled Comincerà
tutto un mattino: io donna, tu donna (178); and
Holocaust parte seconda: i ricordi, i deliri, la
vendetta (filmed in 178 but released in 180),
which recycled the footage from the unfinished
Subliminal with additional scenes about an or-
ganization of Nazi hunters as well as a new title,
in the attempt to cash in on the success of the
TV mini-series Holocaust (178, Marvin J.
Chomsky). Eventually, his creative output
drifted toward hardcore porn, with such titles
as the self-explanatory Luce rossa (17), Erotico
2000 (181) and Fantasia erotica in concerto
(185). Pannacciò died in 2001.
NoTeS
1. Un’americana a Roma, Camille Keaton interviewed
by Manlio Gomarasca. Extra in the Italian DVD of Il sesso
della strega (Cinekult).
2. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on March 6, 172. Another unfinished Pan-
nacciò project, also starring Mitchell, was the obscure Il
mio demonio nel tuo corpo (My Demon in your Body),
dated late 172 (unless it is yet another title for Sublimi-
nal).
3. By then O’Brien had changed his given name from
“Donal” to “Donald,” given his film contracts and credits
frequently misspelled his name: “On one occasion, I tried
to cash in the pay check, and they wouldn’t give me the
money, ’cause the check was for one ‘Donald O’Brien.’ So
I had to go to the Embassy and have my passport corrected,
with ‘Donald’ in parentheses.” Christian Kessler, “Gun-
slingers, Cannibals, and More…: An Interview with Donal
O’Brien,” European Trash Cinema #16, March 16.
4. Manlio Gomarasca, “Una vita da cattivo. Intervista
a Donal O’Brian [sic],” in Manlio Gomarasca and Davide
Pulici (eds.), Eroi & antieroi del cinema italiano. Nocturno
Dossier #10, April 2003, 50. O’Brien told a slighly different
version to Christian Kessler: “I remember that this pro-
duction was so cheap we were thrown out of the hotel we
were staying at. Believe it or not, we realized that each one
of us would have to pay for himself! They sure had money
trouble.” Christian Kessler, “Gunslingers, Cannibals, and
More…”
chini; PD, ArtD, CO: Amedeo Mellone; MU:
Maia Arié; Hair: Ivana Bernardi; AD: Alessandro
Frollano; AE: Bruna Abbatelli. SO: Armando
Timpani; SOE: Enzo Diliberto, Roberto Arcan-
geli; B: Amedeo Timpani; SE: Carlo Rambaldi;
 1974: Le amanti 107

AC: Lino Galeassi; SP: Serto Giannini; SS: Paola In 172, after directing a string of Westerns
Fabiani. Cast: Klaus Kinski (Prof. Alex Nijinsky), and the war movie La colomba non deve volare,
Katia Christine (Anna Nijinsky), Ayhan Işık (Dr. Sergio Garrone decided to try his hand at an-
Igor Valewsky), Marzia Damon [Caterina Chi- other commercially viable genre, the horror
ani] (Farmer’s Wife), Erol Taş (Tramp), Romano film. He got in touch with an Italian distributor
De Gironcoli, Luigi Bevilacqua, Bruno Arié (In- named Sabatini, who introduced him to an ac-
spector), Osiride Pevarello (Feodor Polanski), quaintance, the Rome-based Turkish producer
Amedeo Timpani (The Judge), Pasquale Tos- Şakir V. Sözen, and suggested he co-produce the
cano, Roberto Messina (Farmer, Nijinsky’s first movie. Sözen—the producer of Farouk Agrama’s
victim), Carla Mancini, Alessandro Perrella, crime flick L’amico del padrino—offered the
Stella Calderoni. PROD: Amedeo Mellone for main location, a huge villa on the Bosphorus
Cinequipe (Rome) and Şakir V. Sözen; PM: channel, and proposed the casting of local star
Claudio Sinibaldi; PS: Vincenzo Iaccio. Country: Ayhan Işık, who also co-starred in Agrama’s film
Italy / Turkey. Filmed in Istanbul, Turkey and at and was concentrating on International co-
Elios Studios (Rome). Running time: 87 minutes productions. The project’s main selling point,
(m. 2384). Visa n. 64152 (3.22.174); Rating: however, would be the presence of Klaus Kinski.
V.M.18. Release date: 5.28.174; Distribution: According to Garrone, it was during the meeting
Morini. Domestic gross: unknown. Also known with Sözen that the director suggested that, in-
as: Canavarin Sevgilisi (Turkey). stead of making one movie in six weeks, they
Note: Although credited, Carla Mancini, could make two in eight weeks, for roughly the
Alessandro Perrella and Stella Cal-
deroni do not appear in the film.
Ayhan Işık, Erol Taş and Roberto
Messina are not credited in Italian
prints.
Anna, heiress of the Rassimov
fortune, returns to her family’s
sumptuous villa in the countryside
with her husband Alex Nijinsky,
whose impotence affects their un-
happy marriage. One day Alex
finds a diary in which the late Dr.
Ivan Rassimov noted his experi-
ments to discover the secret of life
and death and reanimate dead bod-
ies by way of electrical impulses. Ex-
asperated by jealousy of Dr. Valew-
sky, to whose courting Anna is not
insensitive, Alex further immerses
himself in his work: after being ex-
posed to an electric shock, he devel-
ops a split personality, and goes
around murdering villagers. His
crimes are pinned to someone else,
but Anna and Valewsky find out
that he is the culprit. Nijinsky furi-
ously attacks and kills Anna.
Finally, the conscience-stricken Alex
runs to the village to stop the exe-
cution of an innocent tramp who
has been sentenced to death for his
crimes, and is killed by soldiers as
he climbs the gallows where the
man has just been hanged. Italian poster for Le amanti del mostro (1974). Art by Morini.
108 1974: Le amanti
same budget. Thus were born Le amanti del
mostro and La mano che nutre la morte, whose
production history is singularly troubled and,
to this day, uncertain.1
During shooting in Turkey, problems arose
and the production came to a halt: Garrone was
vague about the nature of the issues, labeling
them as “personal matters,”2 but it seems Sözen
seized the negatives for a while. Perhaps the deal
for making two movies instead of one had not
really been made, and the producer discovered
what Garrone was aiming at only during the
filming? Anyway, when the Italian director was
finally able to resume shooting, Kinski had left,
and some scenes—namely most of those in the
lab—had to be filmed with a stand-in. Back to
Italy, the director shot additional scenes at Elios
Film’s Western village (posing as a Russian vil-
lage), again with Kinski’s double. Lastly, during
the editing he came up with a number of tricks.
Like many other Italian Gothics, Le amanti
del mostro features a weak, scarcely virile male
figure: Dr. Nijinsky’s impotence has mined the
marriage with his beautiful wife Anna, and the
couple’s return to the woman’s family mansion
is one last attempt at putting back together the
pieces. The recovery of a diary with Dr. Rassi-
mov’s studies on re-animation seems to take the
story to territories close to Frankenstein, but the
first experiment (on his wife’s dead dog—
Frankenweenie this ain’t, and Garrone does not
spare the sight of the animal’s viscera) goes ter-
ribly wrong and Nijinsky falls victim of a per-
sonality split, Jekyll/Hyde type, that turns him
into a rapist and murderer. There is a supernat-
ural angle, though, as it seems that he is actually
being possessed by the evil spirit of the late Dr.
Rassimov—possibly an in-joke dedicated to
actor Ivan Rassimov, the lead in Garrone’s debut,
the Western Se vuoi vivere … spara! (168). The
plot thickens, so to speak, when an innocent
tramp is arrested and condemned for a double
murder committed by Nijinsky, who finally be-
comes aware of his murderous deeds.
Compared with the gorier, nastier La mano
che nutre la morte, Le amanti del mostro has
strong melodramatic elements, namely the
scenes devoted to Nijinsky’s infelicitous marital
life and the subplot about the blossoming love
between Anna and the sympathetic Dr. Valew-
sky, and the climax—Nijinsky raping and mur-
dering his wife, then desperately running to the
village square where an innocent man is about
to be hanged for the crimes he committed—is
along the same lines. Besides the aforemen-
tioned dog autopsy, the gory scenes are limited
to the sight of the victims’ bloody faces in the
aftermath of Nijinsky’s murderous punches, and
the nudity is not up to the level of La mano che
nutre la morte, although Katia Christine has a
nude scene, unlike in the other movie. Interest-
ingly, the scenes featuring nudity, with the ex-
ception of Christine’s, were all shot in Rome, as
part of Nijinsky’s attacks. In spite of Garrone’s
efforts at creating a suitably Gothic mood, the
villa where the film takes place is a rather incon-
gruous architectural element, and the clueless
Turkish extras do little to make it believable. In
addition, the sequences shot at Elios Village sink
the film: the sight of a shabby Western setting
passed off as 1800s Russia kills whatever mood
the director might have hoped for.
That said, despite Le amanti del mostro and
La mano che nutre la morte’s utter mediocrity,
their technical analysis underlines the director’s
ingenuity in their making. First of all, when
scripting the second movie, Garrone was careful
to concoct a number of very similar scenes to
the first one. During shooting, to save on the
time for lighting and camera placing, he shot
scenes for both films on one location, using the
same camera angles, then moved on to the next:
compare, for instance, Kinski and Katia Chris-
tine visiting the basement where Ivan Rassi-
mov’s tomb is located, accompanied by a servant
(in Le amanti del mostro) and Kinski taking his
guests on a guided tour of the crypt (in La mano
che nutre la morte).
In addition to recycling the same shots (like
those of Rassimov’s lab), Garrone used different
takes of the same scene on each film. An ex-
ample is the second murder sequence in Le
amanti del mostro, when Kinski attacks a love-
making couple in the woods: in La mano che
nutre la morte, it is Kinski’s servant who dis-
patches the couple near the film’s beginning and
takes the woman to his master’s lab. Another
similar scene occurs where a drunken Kinski
picks up a volume which turns out to be Ivan
Rassimov’s diary in Le amanti del mostro: the
beginning of the same scene is used in a differ-
ent context in La mano che nutre la morte. On
other occasions, Garrone simply re-used the
same sequence, either with a slightly different
edit or in its entirety—Kinski, Christine and Işık
having breakfast on the terrace; the village dig-
nitaries discussing—and came up with totally
different dialogue, based on the actors’ labials.
 1974: L’assassino
Ultimately, he even used the same opening
credit sequence (a montage of footage from
both films veered in red-and-blue), save for the
title—which explains why some credited actors
don’t actually appear in Le amanti del mostro.
On the other hand, the Turkish actors are not
credited in Italian prints, and the film figures as
an Italian production, possibly because of the
financial trouble Garrone underwent with
Sözen.3
If La mano che nutre la morte is the more
tightly plotted of the duo, Le amanti del mostro
is often so shabbily stitched together that some-
times its only feeble red thread is Klaus Kinski’s
truly demented performance, Actually, he is on
the screen much less than he seems to be: Gar-
rone likely took precautions by storing a huge
number of close-ups of the actor, and in addition
to the use of a stand-in (in long shots and/or
filmed from behind) he resorted to the use of
POV shots in the scenes where Nijinsky stalks
the countryside, looking for victims. But when-
ever he is on screen, Kinski captures the audi-
ence’s attention with his trademark intensity, all
spirited eyes, trembling lips and nervous ges-
tures: Nijinsky’s ever-changing moods, with mo-
ments of languor and exhaustion alternated with
murderous rampages, carry the weight of the
film.
The result is almost hallucinatory, with
whole scenes built on nothing: an exemplary
moment is the seven-and-a-half-minute-long
sequence where the drunken Nijinsky wanders
aimlessly throughout his mansion, discovers
Rassimov’s diary, plunges into reading it, ex-
plores the house’s basement and breaks into a
secret lab. Here the story halts, and the direction
totally clings to the actor’s performance, obses-
sively stalked by the camera and asked to fill the
running time with his sole presence—some-
thing similar to what Jesús Franco had done
with him in the sequences of Count Dracula
(170) with Kinski playing Renfield. It is the tri-
umph of atmosphere, based on the dilation of
filmic pacing and on the interaction of the
actor’s body with the set pieces (a library, a
cobweb-filled dungeon, an absurd-looking lab
full of boiling stills and an abstruse instrumen-
tation inspected almost in real time), carried al-
most to the point of abstraction. It would be
something unthinkable in British and U.S. low-
budget horror flicks, where the over-abundance
of dialogue advances the story in endless expos-
itory sequences, and it is the sign of a cinema
10
where anything is potentially transformable into
a visual attraction.
Both films were submitted to the board of
censors in a very short period of time, but Le
amanti del mostro came out in Italy one month
later. They sank without trace, also due to dis-
tribution issues: Garrone explained that his as-
sociate broke the original deal with an inde-
pendent distributor and offered the movies to a
major company, that understandably refused.4
In Turkey the films were thought to be unfin-
ished and considered lost: Işık, who died in 17,
never saw them. Only in 186 actor-cum-
producer Yılmaz Duru unearthed La mano che
nutre la morte for the Turkish audience (see
entry for the film).
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on July 23, 173, whereas the filming for
La mano che nutre la morte started on March 26. The dates
are debatable since the movies were shot together: it might
well be that the July date regarding Le amanti del mostro
refers to the shooting at the Elios Western village.
2. Davide Pulici, Due mostri al prezzo di uno, extra fea-
turette in the Italian Cinekult DVD of La mano che nutre
la morte. It must be added that, according to Yılmaz Duru,
the foreign cast and crew one day “disappeared,” i.e. they
left Turkey without notice to the Turks involved. However,
Duru’s testimony must be taken with a grain of salt as he
was not involved in the original film.
3. An interesting analysis of the different edits by inde-
pendent filmmaker Roger Fratter can be found in Double
Target, extra featurette in the Italian Cinekult DVD of Le
amanti del mostro.
4. Pulici, Due mostri al prezzo di uno.
L’assassino ha riservato nove poltrone
(The Killer Reserved Nine Seats)
D: Giuseppe Bennati. S and SC: Biagio
Proietti, Paolo Levi, Giuseppe Bennati; DOP:
Giuseppe Aquari (Eastmancolor); M: Carlo Sav-
ina; E: Luciano Anconetani; PD: Mario Chiari;
SD, CO: Enzo Eusepi; AD: Mario Garriba; AE:
Rita Triunveri; APD: Alberto Luciani; C: Emilio
Giannini; AC: Carlo Aquari; PROP: Adriano
Tiberi; B: Giancarlo Laurenzi; SO: Manlio Ma-
gara; KG: Nello Adami; SP: Ermanno Serto; W:
Anna Onori; SS: Renata Franceschi. Cast:
Rosanna Schiaffino (Vivian), Chris [Cristea]
Avram (Patrick Davenant), Eva Czemerys (Re-
becca Davenant), Lucretia Love (Doris), Paola
Senatore (Lynn Davenant), Gaetano Russo
(Duncan Foster), Andrea Scotti (Albert), Ed-
oardo Filippone (Mystery Man), Howard Ross
[Renato Rossini] (Russell), Janet Agren (Kim).
110 1974: L’assassino
Spanish lobby card for L’assassino ha riservato nove poltrone (1974), featuring Rosanna Schiaffino and
the grotesque-looking masked killer.
PROD: Cinenove (Rome); EP: Dario Rossini;
PM: Domenico Bologna, Dino Di Dionisio.
Country: Italy. Filmed at the Gentile Theater
(Fabriano) and at the Orto Botanico (Rome).
Running time: 104 minutes (m. 2836); Visa n.
64565 (5..174); Rating: V.M.18. Release date:
5.21.174; Distribution: Overseas Film Company.
Domestic gross: 427,544,000 lire. Also known as:
El asesino ha reservado nueve butacas (Spain); 9
fores dolofonos (Greece—video title).
Note: Luigi Antonio Guerra, although cred-
ited, does not appear in the film.
On the evening of his birthday, Patrick Dav-
enant invites a few friends to visit the old theater
located in the family mansion, which has been
closed for a hundred years since a massacre took
place in it. Patrick’s guests are his daughter Lynn
with her boyfriend Duncan; his sister Rebecca and
her lesbian lover Doris; Davenant’s ex-wife Vivian
and her husband, Albert; Patrick’s new fiancée
Kim and a painter, Russell, who is actually her
lover. Another mysterious character, whom no-
body seems to know, joins the party. As soon as
Davenant and his guests enter the place, strange
things start happening, and Patrick escapes an at-
tempt on his life. Soon after Kim is murdered on
the stage, and the guests are offed one by one by
a mysterious figure in a grotesque mask that
prowls the theater. Every attempt at escaping
proves useless, as all the doors are locked, and the
chain of crimes and horrors seems to be related
to a centuries-old curse…
L’assassino ha riservato nove poltrone was
Giuseppe Bennati’s final work as a director. A
former documentarist, Bennati (121–2006)
achieved a remarkable critical success in Italy
with his second film Musoduro (153), starring
Fausto Tozzi and Marina Vlady, a rural drama
about a poacher who is unjustly accused of mur-
der, which displayed an influence of the Holly-
wood Western in the use of rural landscapes.
The director’s following output in the 150s was
mostly noteworthy, even if often little seen, from
the drama Operazione notte (157) to the
comedy L’amico del giaguaro (15). In the 160s
Bennati helmed two more first-rate works: Lab-
bra rosse (160, released in the States as Red Lips)
was the thought-provoking story of a middle-
aged man’s relationship with an underage girl,
with surprising affinities with Nabokov’s novel
Lolita, published in Italy the previous year;
Congo vivo (162) mixed melodrama and doc-
 1974: L’assassino
umentary, and used the love story between an
Italian journalist (Gabriele Ferzetti) and a Bel-
gian woman (Jean Seberg) in Congo as a pretext
to analyze the social and political issues of the
independent African states.
Coming twelve years after Congo vivo, and
four after the six-part TV mini-series Marcov-
aldo (170, based on Italo Calvino’s book), L’as-
sassino ha riservato nove poltrone was poles apart
from the director’s favorite themes; even though
conceived as a commercial project, it was not a
work-for-hire job, as Bennati himself got in
touch with Paolo Levi and Biagio Proietti to con-
coct a script. The choice of Proietti was most
likely suggested by the latter’s work for the small
screen: after starting as assistant director to
Francesco Maselli (in the 162 film Gli indiffer-
enti, based on Alberto Moravia’s novel), he
found his way as a screenwriter, collaborating
on Maselli’s black comedy Fai in fretta a ucci-
dermi … ho freddo! (167), starring Monica Vitti
and Jean Sorel. After adapting Giorgio Scerba-
nenco’s novel I milanesi ammazzano al sabato
for Duccio Tessari’s La morte risale a ieri sera
(170), Proietti started working in television, and
scripted several very successful mystery TV se-
ries such as Coralba, Un certo Harry Brent (170),
Come un uragano (171) and Ho incontrato
un’ombra (174, with Proietti responsible for the
story, and co-scripted by the renowned film
critic Enzo Ungari). Paolo Levi (with whom
Bennati had worked on Labbra rosse and Congo
vivo) was also an accomplished writer for tele-
vision and film, having penned Giorgio Alber-
tazzi’s outstanding Jekyll (16) 1 and Schiva-
zappa’s Femina Ridens, among others. Proietti
recalls the marginal intervention of a fourth
writer, who remained uncredited.
Bennati, Proietti and other financers formed
a cooperative called Cinenova to produce the
film, and since one of the associates was able to
obtain permission to shoot inside the Gentile
Theater in Fabriano, a fascinating 1th century
building, the script (originally titled Faccia di
morte, “Face of Death”: the copy kept at Rome’s
CSC is dated September 25, 172) evolved with
the idea of exploiting such a suggestive setting.
L’assassino ha riservato nove poltrone was
an average-budgeted production, shot in six
weeks2 and with a cast that featured familiar
genre faces and ample female pulchritude, plus
the odd has-been: Rosanna Schiaffino’s declin-
ing popularity had marked her transition from
auteur films (Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another
111
Town, 162; Roberto Rossellini’s Illibatezza in
the omnibus Ra.Go.Pa.G., 163) to nondescript
genre fare, such as Giuseppe Rosati’s Il testimone
deve tacere (174); she would soon retire from
acting, her last feature film being La ragazza
dalla pelle di corallo (176). Renato Rossini, a.k.a.
Howard Ross, recalled Schiaffino’s disillusion-
ment toward the movies,3 an attitude common
to her co-star Cristea Avram (131–18), the
handsome Romanian actor who had relocated
in Italy after fleeing from Romania to Paris in
166 with his friend Marina Vlady. On the other
hand, the Swedish Janet Agren was enjoying her
sex symbol status after such works as Brunello
Rondi’s Tecnica di un amore (173) and Ingrid
sulla strada (173), produced by her future hus-
band Carlo Maietto, whereas the Bavarian Eva
Czemerys was already falling back to supporting
parts after a brief stint of starring roles in the
early 170s; ditto for Lucretia Love, whose career
would soon fall into obscurity. As for Paola Sen-
atore (“The most beautiful body in Rome,” ac-
cording to Rossini4), she would mostly stick to
the erotic genre, and even briefly surrendered
to hardcore porn in the final part of her career,
in the mid–180s.
Usually (mis)labeled as a giallo, L’assassino
ha riservato nove poltrone is actually an inter-
esting, if not completely successful, rereading of
the Gothic genre as seen through the prism of
the decade’s most influential trend. The plot pays
homage to the Golden Age of mystery, with its
British setting and an archetypal situation (ten
people trapped in a secluded place and dis-
patched one by one) that draws from Agatha
Christie’s Ten Little Indians (as well as its lesser
known inspiration, Gwen Bristow and Bruce
Manning’s 130 novel The Mystery Host), and is
liberally spiced with elements from the already
declining protoslasher, Argento-style, whose
guidelines are spelled according to the rules: the
aestheticism in the staging of violent deaths, the
misogynist and voyeuristic mood, the ambigu-
ous attitude toward female homosexuality, the
inclusion of a number in the title—which on the
other hand, and possibly inadvertently, recalls
the Italian title of Ellery Queen’s first novel, The
Roman Hat Mystery, published by Mondadori
as La poltrona n. 30 (Seat No. 30). And yet, the
Gothic’s typical elements emerge forcefully and
take over from the very opening, as the charac-
ters arrive at the fascinating yet menacing
theater where the macabre roundabout of mur-
ders will take place.
112 1974: L’assassino
Besides the nods to The Phantom of the
Opera, such as the setting and the characteriza-
tion of the mysterious killer who wears a cape
and a grotesque mask, Bennati, Levi and Proietti
pay homage to another, surprising model: Luis
Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador (162). In Buñuel’s
film, the guests at an upper class dinner party
find themselves unable to leave their host’s lavish
house, and the forced confinement brings to the
surface their savage instincts and unspeakable
secrets. Similarly, in Bennati’s film the victims
are a group of bored and debauched members
of the ruling class, too intent on spitting their
mutual hatred against each other (“You have
been hating each other for so long that you don’t
even remember the reason why,” one of them
says) as well as indulging in their sexual appetite
to realize they are in danger until it is too late.
Their inability to leave (not psychological as in
Buñuel’s film, but physical, and yet caused by in-
explicable events) ultimately brings out their
vices, secrets, hypocrisy. In a way, the nine (plus
one) despicable protagonists recall the main
characters of Luigi Pirandello’s 121 play Sei per-
sonaggi in cerca d’autore, a.k.a. Six Characters in
Search of an Author: like them, they show up in
a theater without really knowing why, as if sum-
moned by a superior will, actually looking for
the play they have to stage.
What sets apart L’assassino ha riservato
nove poltrone from the Gothic-tinged gialli of
the early 170s is the decisive turn toward the
supernatural, which becomes an integral part of
the story. In doing so, the film touches a number
of themes that are typical of Italian Gothic. One
of the “ten characters in search of a death,” the
“mystery man” (Edoardo Filippone) dressed in
Oriental fashion with a Nehru jacket, is actually
a ghost who drove the others in the place where
the massacre is doomed to happen: he is like a
stage director who instructs the players and
pulls their strings throughout their perform-
ance—a theme that is only suggested, but nev-
ertheless enriches the story with fascinating un-
dertones; and if the murders have a rational
explanation and are committed by a human
hand, the killer is driven by an otherworldly
force.
What is more, the laws of time and space
succumb to other rules, mysterious and unpre-
dictable. The theater where the story unfolds—
not an unusual location for an Italian horror
film: think of Polselli’s Il mostro dell’opera and
Luigi Russo’s unfinished Paura (172), not to
mention Michele Soavi’s Deliria and Dario Ar-
gento’s Opera (both 187)—becomes a rarefied
metaphysical space, yet another variation of the
huis clos as well as a “restricted mirror of the
human condition” which, as noted by Spanish
film historian Ramón Freixas, echoes the char-
acters’ moral decay hidden under a beautiful
and urban façade with its own decadence. 5 In a
manner not dissimilar to Margheriti’s The Un-
naturals—Contronatura, each character meets
an end that functions as a retribution for his or
her sins: betrayal, greed, sexual aberration, in-
cest, murder.
In pure Gothic fashion, the haunted house
becomes a character itself, which speaks in its
own voice (the hisses that come out of tubes and
frighten Doris) and plays a cat-and-mouse game
with its inhabitants/prisoners. Its bowels host
secret passages and traps, its basement turns out
to be endless and labyrinthine, and leads to a
sort of extra-dimensional crypt that predates
Fulci’s …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà, (181),
in a paranormal ending devised by Proietti. And
it may even happen that a door bashed in with
a hammer appears intact shortly after, or that
(in one of the film’s best scenes) the characters
hear voices that a tape recorder cannot capture,
which belong to people who lived and died a
hundred years earlier.
Even time ceases to be an absolute and un-
equivocal value: the events happen during the
course of an endless night, like in Danza maca-
bra, and here as well the protagonists are forced
to relive a tragedy that cyclically repeats itself
with no variants, with Filippone’s “mystery man”
playing a similar role as that of Dr. Carmus in
Margheriti’s film, luring the victims to their des-
tiny. Interestingly, the only character left alive,
Vivian, is an ex-prostitute: in an ironic reversal
of the stereotypical rule that only the young vir-
gin will survive, here the only survivor of the
massacre is a declining beauty in her forties, a
former hooker who is ultimately the purest of
all.
Proietti recalled that, while dubbing the
movie, Bennati seemed a bit embarrassed about
the erotic interludes, and tried to justify himself:
such material was far from the director’s previ-
ous works, even though Proietti was adamant
that “the distributor always recommended the
insertion of sex scenes, but in this case actually
there was not much pressure…. It was our idea
to focus very much on the theater and a bit on
sex.”6 The need to spice up the proceedings with
 1974: Il bacio
gratuitous nudity results in some awkward mo-
ments, such as the scene where Lynn (Paola Sen-
atore), stoned out of her mind, puts on some
music, takes off her dress and starts dancing be-
fore a mirror while wearing only a transparent
gown—all this while around her the bodies are
piling up. And yet the sequence is staged with
an undeniable taste, as Senatore’s image is re-
flected and multiplied by the two opposing mir-
rors, with an almost psychedelic effect, to the
sound of Carlo Savina’s titillating lounge score.
Bennati seems also uncomfortable with
brutality and gore, so much so that most mur-
ders take place offscreen, except for those of the
lesbian couple, Doris (Lucretia Love) and Re-
becca (Eva Czemerys). Even though it plays on
one of the leitmotivs in Italy’s horror and
thrillers of the decade—the violence directed to
female private parts, a recurring occurrence
from Cosa avete fatto a Solange? to 5 donne per
l’assassino (174), from L’ultimo treno della notte
(175) to Enigma rosso (178)—Rebecca’s de-
mise, by way of a dagger repeatedly stuck in her
vagina, is suggested but not graphically shown,
and the most blatant bit of gore (the woman’s
hand nailed to a girder) is rendered with an un-
convincing special effect. It is a jarring moment,
one that feels like a compromise on the part of
the makers in order to give the audience the
expected quota of sadistic violence, in tune
with the punitive attitude toward “immoral”
women that characterized so many gialli. And
yet the aftermath of the scene has a pictorial
quality, as the two dead women are discovered
positioned like two mannequins, in what is per-
haps a nod to 6 donne per l’assassino, where the
murderer played with dead bodies in a similar
way.
The overall mood is suggestive and often
disquieting, and Bennati’s direction is much
more accomplished than the average genre
products of the period, even more remarkable
in its rejection of the visual stereotypes in vogue,
such as the killer’s POV shots and the penchant
for crazy camera angles, in favor of fluid camera
movements and languid pacing. On the other
hand, the director adds subtle unnerving touches
that display an interesting and cultured ap-
proach to the fantastique. For instance, an early
scene where Doris notices a storeroom man-
nequin that seemingly comes to life recalls Lisa
e il diavolo, as Bennati plays with the uncertainty
between animate and inanimate objects that
Freud emphasized in his study of the “uncanny,”
113
by briefly replacing the dummy in the back-
ground with a real actor. The murderer’s mask,
which portrays a smiling carrot-haired, balding
man—whereas in the script its features are de-
scribed as those of a “laughing kid”—, is another
unsettling detail (perhaps a nod to Pirandello’s
play, where one of the characters is a fat woman
with unlikely red hair) which explains the
script’s working title.
Kim’s murder, on the other hand, plays
with the thin boundaries between reality and
appearance, as the woman recites Juliet’s suicide
monologue from Romeo and Juliet and fakes her
own stabbing with a retractile blade, but ends
up dead on stage with a knife in her back in front
of her bewildered audience: “You never acted so
well,” one exclaims. The most outstanding mo-
ment, however, is the mystery man’s surprising
disappearance before Patrick’s eyes (and the au-
dience as well) as if by magic, a moment where
the Fantastic manifests itself unexpectedly and
without any editing cut, during a long take: here
Bennati’s use of depth of field and offscreen
space is not dissimilar to Bava’s trick of the child
transforming into the father in Shock, but played
for wonder instead of scare value. It is moments
like that which grant this often overlooked little
oddity a niche among the most interesting
Gothic horror films of the decade.
NoTeS
1. See Curti, Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957–1969, 176.
2. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on January 7, 174.
3. Federico Caddeo, “Hanging with Howard,” featurette
included in the German BD of The Killer Reserved Nine
Seats.
4. Ibid.
5. Ramón Freixas, El asesino ha reservado nueve
butacas, in Antonio José Navarro (ed.), El giallo italiano.
La oscuridad y la sangre (Nuer, Madrid 2001), 247.
6. Federico Caddeo, “Writing with Biagio,” featurette
included in the German Blu-ray of The Killer Reserved Nine
Seats.
Il bacio (The Kiss)
D: Mario Lanfranchi. S: based on the novel
Il bacio di una morta by Carolina Invernizio; SC:
Pupi Avati, Mario Lanfranchi; DOP: Claudio
Collepiccolo; M: Piero Piccioni, conducted by
the author; E: Luciano Anconetani; PD, CO:
Giancarlo Bartolini Salimbeni; SD: Francesco
D’Andria; MU: Franco Schioppa, Gianni Ama-
dei; AMU: Alfonso Cioffi; Hair: Vittoria Silvi,
Gerardo Raffaeli; AD: Lamberto Bava; 2ndAD:
114 1974: Il bacio
Antonio Avati; C: Roberto Gengarelli; AC:
Massimo Pau, Fabio Placido; SO: Franco De Ar-
cangelis; B: Tommaso Quattrini; SE: Guido Mas-
sari; KG: Angelo Tiberti; ChEl: Riccardo Car-
alella; SP: Francesco Bellomo; W: Mina Manes;
AE: Gabriella Vitale; SS: Egle Guarino. CHOR:
Alberto Testa. Press office: Lucherini, Rossetti,
Spinola. Cast: Maurizio Bonuglia (Guido Ram-
baldi), Eleonora Giorgi (Elena Vergani, Guido’s
Wife), Martine Beswick (Nara Kotosky), Valen-
tina Cortese (Elizabeth Blixen), Massimo Girotti
(Eugenio Dazzi), Brian Deacon (Alfonso Ver-
gani, Elena’s half-brother), Vladek Sheybal
(Concierge), Antonio Pierfederici, Gianni Cav-
ina (Gravedigger), Barbara Romana [Vittoria]
Calori, Franca Maresa, Glauco Scarlini, Luigi
Zerbinati, Giovanni Vannini (Doctor), Vittorio
Fanfoni (Nara’s Lawyer), Riccardo Berlingeri,
Gabriele Bentivoglio (Witness #1 at Duel), Ales-
sandro Perrella, Corrado Annicelli, Edoardo To-
niolo, Macia [Ines] Pellegrini (Myosotis); un-
credited: John Karlsen (Friedrich), Antonio
Spaccatini (Jeweller). PROD: Sandro Bolchi and
Mario Lanfranchi for InterVision (Rome); PM:
Pierluigi Ciriaci; GM: Mario Davidde; PS: Pietro
Nardi; Pse: Vittorio Fornasiero; ADM: Aureliano
Lalli Persiani. Country: Italy. Filmed in Venice,
Frascati (Rome) and at Elios Film Studios
(Rome). Running time: 103 minutes (m. 2828).
Visa n. 64757 (6.25.174); Rating: V.M.14. Release
date: 8.22.174; Distribution: Euro International
Film. Domestic gross: 123,128,000 lire.
Countess Elena Rambaldi has a natural
brother, Alfonso, hated by the old Count Ram-
baldi and banished from his home. The Count
dies of a heart attack on the day he sees Alfonso
and his sister tenderly embrace. Elena, heir to the
family fortune, meets by chance Guido and falls
in love with him. They get married and travel on
their honeymoon to Venice. There, Guido is se-
duced and ensnared by the perfidious dancer
Nara, eager to get her hands on the title and on
the Rambaldi fortune. Nara has no difficulty in
making Guido believe his wife is betraying him,
by passing for adultery a clandestine meeting be-
tween Elena and Alfonso, who is leaving for
America. Then she tries to poison Elena under
the eyes of her drugged and unconscious husband.
But when Alfonso arrives at the cemetery to give
one last kiss to his sister, already placed in the cof-
fin, he discovers that she is still alive and brings
her back to Venice. Guido starts to have glimpses
of his presumedly dead wife, repents and leaves
Nara, who takes revenge by taking him to court
and accusing him of uxoricide. The trial would
end badly for Guido if Elena did not appear in
court to unveil the mystery…
One of the main literary progenitors of Ital-
ian Gothic were the feuilletons, or serial novels,
which between the late 1th and early 20th cen-
tury provided the audience with forbidden fris-
sons and complex intrigue, mixing romance,
melodrama, and horror. The most important
writers in the field (called “romanzi d’appendice”
in Italy) were Luigi Natoli (the author of I Beati
Paoli, a 10 novel about a mysterious secret sect
in Sicily), Francesco Mastriani, Emilio De
Marchi, Guido Da Verona. But a couple of no-
table and very successful female novelists stood
out as well: Matilde Serao and Carolina Inv-
ernizio. Born in 1851, Invernizio published her
first novelette in 1876, and wrote 123 books over
the course of a 40-year career, becoming one of
Italy’s best selling authors of the early 20th cen-
tury. Often leaning on intricate and far-fetched
plots, and peopled with clichéd characters, In-
vernizio’s novels were characterized by a strong
taste for the horrific and the macabre, as proven
by some of her most popular works, Il bacio di
una morta (A Dead Woman’s Kiss, 188), La se-
polta viva (Buried Alive, 186), L’albergo del
delitto (Murder Inn, 105), Il cadavere accusatore
(The Accusing Corpse, 112).
Invernizio’s oeuvre had been brought to the
screen a number of times since the silent era.
One year after the novelist’s death, La vergine
dei veleni (117, Enrico Vidali) adapted the epon-
ymous novel, blatantly influenced by Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s short story Rappaccini’s Daughter;
others, like Satanella (11) and La vendetta di
una pazza (11) followed. More adaptations
took place during the heyday of melodrama in
the late 140s and early 150s, with Il bacio di
una morta (14, Guido Brignone), La mano
della morta (14, Carlo Campogalliani) and La
vendetta di una pazza (151, Pino Mercanti).
Paired with such present-day melodramas as
Raffaello Matarazzo’s Catene (14), it was the
kind of simple entertainment that audiences
were striving for to put the painful post–World
War II years behind them, and one which politi-
cians and the Church approved, as it conveyed
positive values (faith, hope, marital love) as op-
posed to the often grim depiction of everyday
life in Neorealism.
Curiously, melodrama resurfaced in an un-
likely period, the early 170s, at a time where the
public’s demand focused mainly on sex. The
 1974: Il bacio
short-lived thread of films following the tradi-
tion of melodrama or inspired by serial novels
were perhaps one of the signs of the public’s
withdrawal after the politically committed late
160s and the type of cinema they spawned; on
the other hand, this return to the roots was char-
acterized by a similar emphasis on eroticism and
nudity as most popular genre cinema, which
gave way to odd hybrids that uneasily attempted
to mix old style romanticism with modern-day
shrewdness.
These movies were released between 173
and 174—interestingly, at a time when the Ital-
ian government was forced to pursue economic
policies and measures in order to drastically
contain energy consumption, after the 173 oil
crisis.
The first of the thread was Sepolta viva
(173, Aldo Lado), based on a novel by Marie
Eugénie Saffray bearing the same title as Inv-
ernizio’s, followed by Luciano Ercoli’s Il figlio
della sepolta viva (174, signed as “André Col-
bert”), Bruno Gaburro’s I figli di nessuno (174)
and two adaptations of Invernizio’s novel, Il
bacio di una morta (174, Carlo Infascelli and
Ferdinando Baldi) and Mario Lanfranchi’s Il
bacio. Other projects were announced but not
filmed or completed: Satanella ovvero la mano
della morta (Primo Zeglio), La cieca di Sorrento
(Ruggero Deodato), La vendetta di una pazza
(Carlo Infascelli), all slated to be filmed starting
in March 174.
“Why do theater owners keep asking pro-
ducers for movies based on serial novels?” an
article on La Stampa asked rhetorically, conclud-
ing: “Because they understood that they could
have a new audience. In weekdays these movies
gross next to nothing, and explode on Sundays,
because whole families get out of the house.
Nowadays parents are obsessed with the flood
of rubbish centered on sex and violence: the line
“forbidden to minors” compromises the choice
of common entertainment, and even risks un-
dermining the unity of the family core, corroded
during the course of the week by work, school,
TV. Then the old foxes of the cinema industry
thought cynically: ‘Crying is good.’”1 The thread
was dictated by economic reasons: it did not re-
sult in box-office hits, but it marked a good in-
vestments for producers and distributors: “These
releases are launched not in the traditional
‘prima visione’ theaters, with tickets priced 1500
lire, but in ‘terza visione’ venues, located in the
suburbs and with wide capacity. If a father is
115
asked only 700 or 800 lire per person, it won’t
be a venture to drag the whole family to the
movies…. The feuilletons’ fortune is not flashy.
It originates in the suburban areas, in the prov-
inces where nothing happens. It takes shape in
the boredom of festive afternoons … there is no
hurry to make profits. The tearjerkers are safe
investments.”2 This first wave of period dramas
would give way to tearjerking dramas about
children, which proved even more successful.
Lanfranchi and Sandro Bolchi’s company
Intervision started working on the adaptation
of Invernizio’s novel around the same time as
Carlo Infascelli’s Infafilm: Intervision deposited
the title at ANICA’s office (ANICA being the
Italian association that represents movie com-
panies with the government and trade unions),
whereas Infascelli deposited it at the Ministry
of Spectacle and SIAE (the copyright collecting
agency), therefore Intervision was unable to use
the full title, and consequently was forced to de-
part from the original story in order to offer
something different to the audience.3 The result
fully explored the dark and Gothic influences of
Invernizio’s novel.
Lanfranchi, a stage and opera director, was
one of the first to work at Italy’s public broad-
casting company RAI when it finally became a
regular television service in 154. Lanfranchi
brought operas to the small screen, and his in-
novative filming style led the way to many tech-
nical innovations. He had debuted with the ex-
cellent Western Sentenza di morte (168, starring
Robin Clarke, Enrico Maria Salerno, Tomas Mil-
ian, Richard Conte and Adolfo Celi), but it took
him six years to return behind the camera, right
after his divorce from soprano Anna Moffo. As
the director explained,
Due to my non-cinematic provenance and Milanese
origin, in order to make movies I had to come up
with genre stories, and Il bacio was one of those serial
novels that might seduce producers and distributors
alike. With the complicity of my friend Pupi Avati I
tried to add a certain imprint to it, by taking from
Carolina Invernizio’s novel the cue that I needed so
as to seduce the producers, rather than a story to
follow to the letter. I was especially interested in
the morbidity, which was quite evident in the novel
itself, this morbid tension that had quite impressed
me. To bring to the surface the perverted element in
this female writer who was considered almost for
families … and also bring out something I felt living
in Venice, a certain indecency that circulates in the
city.4
116 1974: Blood
Avati, who in Lanfranchi’s words “floated
in Rome” after the débacle of his first two films
as a director, brought to the adaptation a distinct
morbid and horrific mood. From the opening
sequence where Alfonso (Brian Deacon) reaches
the cemetery where his half-sister Elena (Eleonora
Giorgi) is about to be buried while in a cataleptic
state, Il bacio fully embraces the genre trappings.
It is indeed one of the few examples of a
narrative that harks back to the standard Gothic
novel, with its duality between the innocent
heroine and the belle dame sans merci, the em-
phasis on romantic love (also declined in a mor-
bid way, with the almost incestuous relationship
between Elena and her half-brother, an element
lifted from the novel), the occult subplot, the
far-fetched plot twists, the triumph of good over
evil.
Some elements, like the premature burial,
were already in Invernizio’s novel, whereas
others (like the Satanic sect in which Elena’s hus-
band Guido is introduced) are developed or
made from scratch. Compared with the other
adaptations of the period, Il bacio benefits from
a more cultured approach. The insistence on the
occult, which makes the story briefly slip into
horror movie territory, likely came from Avati,
and the sabbath scene is quite impressively ren-
dered in comparison with the cheap rites seen
in exploitation movies from the same decade;
similarly, the film briefly flirts with the super-
natural, in the sequence where Guido spots what
looks like the “ghost” of his supposedly dead
wife and chases the elusive apparition amid the
Venetian alleys.
In addition to that, Il bacio offers a fair
share of eroticism, tastefully presented. The
script felicitously reinvents the character of the
femme fatale, Nara the dancer, who seduces and
dominates Guido: in Invernizio’s novel she has
Javanese origin, whereas Avati and Lanfranchi
make her a Slavic “with something demoniac in
her,” as one character observes. Played by the
stunning Martine Beswick, Nara is one of the
few real maneaters of 170s Italian Gothic, and
her obscene dance in a tiny costume whose bra
is shaped like demonic hands groping her
breasts is ample proof of the director’s ability in
filming musical scenes. Lanfranchi also squeezes
the most out of the autumnal Venetian setting,
which recalls Chi l’ha vista morire? (172, Aldo
Lado) and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (173)
for its mysteriousness and eerieness.
The 21-year-old Eleonora Giorgi, in one of
her first film roles, is ravishing, while Maurizio
Bonuglia is wooden as always as the weak-willed
Guido, but the supporting cast is top notch, in-
cluding Valentina Cortese as the ambiguous
Madame Blixen, Massimo Girotti as a Duke, and
Avati regular Gianni Cavina as the gravedigger.
Lanfranchi directed two more feature films,
the grotesque comedy La padrona è servita
(176, also scripted by Avati and plagued by cen-
sorship problems at its release) and the top-
notch crime action film Genova a mano armata
(176, starring Tony Lo Bianco and Adolfo Celi).
Lanfranchi then retired from cinema, and
moved to London, where he directed operas and
stage plays, but earned a living mostly as a
breeder and owner of race horses and grey-
hounds. In England, one of his dogs was even
nominated as one of the year’s sports figures.
“The news was even reported by the Corriere
della Sera, on the front page and with a photo
too. It was the one and only occasion when I had
managed to be on the Corriere’s front page; not
because of my directing, but because of my dog.
And when I met my publisher friend Franco
Maria Ricci at the restaurant, he introduced me
to the lady by his side saying: ‘This is the only
case of a man maintained by a dog!’”5
NoTeS
1. Piero Perona, “Al cinema si piange,” La Stampa, May
7, 174.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Renato Venturelli, “Eroi senza pietà. Intervista a
Mario Lanfranchi,” in Renato Venturelli (ed.), Cinema e
generi 2010 (Genoa: Le Mani, 2010), 115.
5. Ibid., 122.
Blood for Dracula, a.k.a. Dracula cerca
sangue di vergine e … morì di sete!!!
D: Paul Morrissey [Italian version: Anthony
M. Dawson]. S and SC: Paul Morrissey [Italian
version: Tonino Guerra, from an idea by Paul
Morrissey] ; DOP: Luigi Kuveiller; M: Claudio
Gizzi; E: Jed Johnson [Italian version: Franca
Silvi]; PD, CO: Enrico Job; ArtD: Gianni Gio-
vagnoni; MU: Mario Di Salvio; SE: Carlo Ram-
baldi; Hair: Paolo Franceschi; AD: Paolo Pie-
trangeli; 2ndUD: Antonio Margheriti; C: Ubaldo
Terzano; B: Piero Fondi; SOE: Roberto Arcan-
geli; Mix: Carlo Palmieri; SP: Paolo Pettini; W:
Benito Persico; AE: Loretta Mattioli; SS: Silvia
Petroni. Cast: Joe Dallesandro (Mario Balato),
Udo Kier (Count Dracula), Vittorio De Sica
 1974: Blood 117

(Marchese Di Fiore), Maxime McKendry (Mar- shoots him before dying. Mario dismembers Drac-
chesa Di Fiore), Arno Juerging (Anton), Milena ula with an axe, and kills him and Esmeralda
Vukotic (Esmeralda), Dominique Darel (Saphi- with a stake. Now he is the new master of the
ria), Stefania Casini (Rubinia), Silvia Dionisio house.
(Perla), Irina Alexeievna, Gil Cagné (Towns- On the same day principal shooting for
man), Emi Califri, Eleonora Zani; uncredited: Flesh for Frankenstein was wrapped, Paul Mor-
Giorgio Dolfin, Stefano Oppedisano, Roman rissey sent Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro and Arno
Polanski (Man in Tavern). Juerging to get shorter haircuts, and filming for
PROD: Andrew Braunsberg for Compa- Blood for Dracula began immediately. 1 It would
gnia Cinematografica Champion (Rome) [and last for three weeks as well. This time Morrissey
Carlo Ponti]; PM: Mara Blasetti; PA: Vasco abandoned 3-D because of technical issues
Mafera; PAcc: Maurizio Anticoli. Country: Italy raised by d.o.p. Luigi Kuveiller: the Spacevision
/ France. Filmed in Villa Parisi, Frascati (Rome), system required a very large lens in order to
Vulci (Viterbo) and at Cinecittà Studios (Rome). frame three people in the shot, and since the sec-
Running time: 103 minutes (Italian version: 8 ond film would not be shot in studio but on lo-
minutes—m. 268). Visa n. 644 (5.14.174); cation in Villa Parisi, in Frascati, due to the
Rating: V.M.18. Release dates: 3.1.174 (West Ger- smaller setting it would be practically impossible
many); 11.27.174 (U.S.A.); 8.14.175 (Italy); Dis- to dolly the camera back. Morrissey later partly
tribution: Euro International Film (Italy); regretted his decision, but Blood for Dracula is
Bryanston Pictures (U.S.A.). Domestic gross: undoubtedly the more stylish of the diptych, due
345,023,314 lire. Also known as: Andy Warhol’s to the director’s ample use of dolly and tracking
Dracula (West Germany, U.S.A.), Sangre para shots, which made the result closer to his
Drácula (Spain, Argentina); Du sang pour Drac- original idea.2
ula (France); Dracula vuole vivere:
cerca sangue di vergine! (Italy—al-
ternate title).
Early 1920s. Count Dracula,
who must drink virgins’ blood to
survive, moves from Transylvania
to Italy with his servant Anton, hop-
ing to find plenty of nourishment in
a Catholic country. In Italy, Dracula
befriends the impoverished Mar-
chese di Fiore, who is more than
happy to marry off one of his four
daughters to the wealthy aristocrat.
Two of Fiore’s daughters, Rubinia
and Saphiria, enjoy the sexual serv-
ices of the estate handyman, Mario,
a proud Marxist. Dracula, who
drinks their blood upon assurance
from Di Fiore that they are virgins,
becomes even weaker, but he is able
to turn the two girls into his tele-
pathic slaves. The youngest and eld-
est daughters, Perla and Esmeralda,
are virgins, but Mario, who has dis-
covered that Dracula is a vampire,
rapes the 14-year-old Perla in order
to save her. Meanwhile, though,
Dracula has drunk the blood of Es-
meralda, turning her into a vampire
and regaining strength. Anton stabs Paul Morrissey (left), Joe Dallesandro and Udo Kier (in the coffin)
the Marchese’s wife, who in turn on the set of Blood for Dracula (1974).
118 1974: Blood
Blood for Dracula is overall a more serious
work despite the contamination of gore, humor
and sex, possibly because Kier’s Count is a more
full-fledged character than Frankenstein, and
his desperate attempts to preserve himself be-
come the core of the film. In a way, Dracula is a
homologue to Von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde)
in Luchino Visconti’s Morte a Venezia (171),
one of Morrissey’s favorite films, and explicitly
quoted, albeit humorously, in the opening scene,
where the Count applies make-up on his face in
front of a mirror that casts no reflection. Scenes
like these convey a sympathy and a warmth that
Frankenstein’s absurd monologues on the
perfect Serbian race did not solicit, and truly
make Morrissey’s interpretation of the character
one of the most original and effective, closer to
Herzog’s rereading of Nosferatu (17), or even
to the blood-addicted bloodsuckers in Abel Fer-
rara’s The Addiction (16) than to Hammer and
Universal’s classics.
The meditation on the changing of times,
in tune with the director’s reactionary view of
contemporary society, comes in the form of
grim jokes: in Catholic Italy, supposedly a land
of “wirgins,” Dracula keeps vomiting the impure
blood he has sucked from nubile girls who have
already lost their virginity before marriage.
“Vomiting looks so great if you have a tuxedo
on!” Kier commented mockingly in regard to
Morrissey’s exquisite mise-en-scène of one of
the movie’s outrageous sight gags, with poor
Dracula running to Villa Parisi’s exquisite
marble-covered bathroom and throwing up
freshly sucked blood in the toilet (“The blood
of these whores is killing me!” he’ll comment in
despair, a line worthy of the previous’ film infa-
mous “fuck life in the gall bladder”). Jokes aside,
the director caught the dissolution of family and
patriarchal mores in quite an effective manner,
not to mention the notion of class struggle via
deflowering perpetrated by Joe Dallesandro’s
Marxist handyman, who eventually makes a rev-
olution and becomes the new master of the
house, in an ending that is more subtle and
ironic than Flesh for Frankenstein’s grim epi-
logue.
The cast is, once again, pitch perfect: Dalle-
sandro’s void acting style and Brooklyn accent
match Kier and Juerging’s over-the-top delivery,
and Vittorio De Sica, in a special participation,
is delightful as the impoverished Marchese Di
Fiore, who would do anything to marry his
daughters to a weird-looking but wealthy stranger:
accordingly, the Italian director wrote his own
lines on the set. It was his last appearance in a
theatrical feature: De Sica died in November
174. Roman Polanski also turned up in a brief
cameo3 in the tavern scene, as a witty gambling
peasant who outsmarts Dracula’s servant by
playing a trick that the Polish director will
reprise in a scene in Bitter Moon (11). The
same sequence also featured an Italian celebrity
of sorts, make-up artist Gil Cagné (140–2003),
nicknamed “il visagista delle dive” (the beauti-
cian of divas) for his work with Liza Minnelli,
Lana Turner and Bette Davis. The female cast
included the gorgeous Stefania Casini (who
would become Dallesandro’s partner in real life
for a while), Silvia Dionisio and Dominique
Darel (seen in Giancarlo Santi’s Western Il
grande duello, 172).
Once again, the Italian version bore the
name “Anthony M. Dawson” as director, with
Morrissey credited as supervisor. “I also did
some stuff on Blood for Dracula, but that was
much more organized because, after Franken-
stein, Carlo Ponti convinced Morrissey to write
a real screenplay and not just a treatment,”4
Margheriti explained, adding that he directed
scenes with Vittorio De Sica and Silvia Dionisio.
Again, the Italian director’s words are at odds
with Morrissey’s. But this time even Margheriti
admitted that his input on the movie was min-
imal, not the least because while Morrissey and
company were shooting in Frascati, he was busy
taking care of the special effects scenes for Flesh
for Frankenstein. And Udo Kier was adamant
that he and the other cast members received di-
rection only from Morrissey, and stated that he
never saw Margheriti on the set.5
This time, Margheriti’s credit as director
was mainly a scam on the part of Ponti’s in order
to obtain the benefits provided by law for Italian
films (which would be granted only by credit-
ing an Italian director). Ponti and Margheriti
were later put to trial and accused of “continued
and aggravated fraud against the State.”6 Accord-
ing to the prosecution, between 173 and 176
the producer had unduly received over a billion
and a half lire for movies produced by Cham-
pion, the French-based Les Films Concordia
and the Spanish Cipi (also owned by Ponti)
which did not have the necessary requirements
in order to be classified of Italian nationality.
Blood for Dracula was one of such titles, together
with, among others, Mordi e fuggi (173, Dino
Risi), Professione reporter (175, Michelangelo
 1974: Un fiocco
Antonioni), and Margheriti’s Ming, ragazzi!
(173) and Whiskey e fantasmi. Even though
Ponti was finally acquitted, 7 this might finally
explain why Margheriti kept faithful to his ver-
sion over the years about his own role in Mor-
rissey’s films.
Both Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for
Dracula were picked up for distribution overseas
by the New York–based company Bryanston
Pictures, owned by Louis Peraino, who adver-
tised the movies respectively as Andy Warhol’s
Frankenstein and Andy Warhol’s Dracula. Pre-
dictably, both earned an X rating from the
MPAA. Frankenstein was a hit, and Peraino also
obtained an R-rated version that allowed him to
maximize profits, with a total of $5 million
earned by the end of 174. Dracula was less suc-
cessful, despite Peraino’s attempts to cash in on
the success of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein,
by retitling it Young Dracula and re-releasing an
R-rated 4-minute version. In U.K. the movie
was passed with cuts but did not end up listed
as a Video Nasty. The uncut version surfaced in
England only in 15.
Even though it did not have the same cen-
sorship troubles in Italy as Flesh for Franken-
stein, Blood for Dracula had to be slightly trimmed
in order to obtain a visa: the board asked the
scene where Dracula licks menstrual blood on
the floor (about 7 seconds) to be shortened be-
fore giving a V.M.18 rating. However, the length
(268 metres, that is 8 minutes) reveals that
some cuts had already been made by the pro-
ducer.
Blood for Dracula was released theatrically
in Italy over one year later, in August 175. The
working title Sangue per Dracula (with which it
was referred to just months before its release)
gave way to one as demented as the one reserved
to Morrissey’s other horror spoof: Dracula cerca
sangue di vergine e … morì di sete!!! (Dracula Is
Searching for Virgin’s Blood and … He Died of
Thirst!!!—note the weak temporal construction)
to mediocre box-office. By then, Joe Dallesandro
had relocated to Rome and become a recurrent
presence in Italian and European cinema, star-
ring in such works as L’ambizioso (175, Pasquale
Squitieri, co-starring Casini), Fango bollente
(175, Vittorio Salerno) and Black Moon (175,
Louis Malle). Dallesandro’s European career en-
compassed such interesting works as Je t’aime
moi non plus (176, Serge Gainsbourg), La
Marge (176, Walerian Borowczyk) and Vacanze
per un massacro (180, Fernando di Leo). On his
11
part, Morrissey moved on to England for an-
other spoof, The Hound of the Baskervilles
(178), this time with far less brilliant results.
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
on April 11, 173.
2. Talbot, “Monsters for Morrissey,” 25.
3. However, it is incorrect to state, as some sources do,
that Polanski was shooting Che? on a set nearby around
the same time, as Che? had been released in Italy in De-
cember 172, several months before shooting for Blood for
Dracula took place.
4. Blumenstock, “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild Inter-
view,” 57.
5. Tim Lucas, “Udo Kier: Andy Warhol’s Horror Star,”
Video Watchdog Special Edition #2, 15.
6. Anonymous, “Nuovo rinvio a giudizio per il produt-
tore Carlo Ponti,” Corriere della Sera, February 16, 17.
The other accused were Luigi Tedeschi, Giancarlo Pettini
(Ponti’s fronts), Giorgio Odoardi and Paolo Ferrari.
7. The prosecutor asked for a three year sentence, but
Ponti and Margheriti were acquitted on first degree in Jan-
uary 181 (Anonymous, “Truffa allo Stato—Assolto Carlo
Ponti,” Corriere della Sera, January 22, 181); the following
year the sentence was confirmed in appeal (Anonymous,
“Carlo Ponti assolto in Appello dall’accusa di truffa allo
Stato,” Corriere della Sera, May 16, 182), and in 183 by
the Supreme Court (P.L.F., “Carlo Ponti assolto dall’accusa
di truffa allo Stato,” Corriere della Sera, April 30, 183).
Un fiocco nero per Deborah (A Black Rib-
bon for Deborah, a.k.a. Deborah, a.k.a. The
Torment)
D: Marcello Andrei. S and SC: Piero Reg-
noli, Marcello Andrei, Alvaro Fabrizio, Giu-
seppe Pulieri; M: Albert [Alberto] Verrecchia,
conducted by Nicola Samale (Ed. La Galere);
DOP: Claudio Racca (Eastmancolor, Telecolor);
E: Gianni Oppedisano; PD, SD: Elena Ricci Poc-
cetto; CO: Silvio Laurenzi; AD: Alfredo Varelli;
2ndAD: Orlando Pagliari; C: Giorgio Di Battista;
AC: Carlo Milani; SP: Mauro Paravano; MU:
Lamberto Marini; AMU: Cristina Rocca; Hair:
Anna Cristofani, Iolanda Conti; SO: Roberto Al-
berghini, Benedetto Conversi; B: Antonino Pan-
tano, Giuliano Maielli; AE: Nadia Mazzoni,
Alessio Mazzoni; SS: Luigina Lovari, Rita Ban-
otti; ChEl: Gaetano Coniglio; KG: Teodorico
Meme; W: Margherita Mannelli; PM: Francesco
Raffa; Stunt: Sergio Mioni. Cast: Bradford Dill-
man (Michel Lagrange), Marina Malfatti (Deb-
orah), Gig Young (Ofenbauer), Delia Boccardo
(Mira Wener), Micaela Esdra (Elena), Lucretia
Love (Ofenbauer’s wife), Adriano Amedei
Migliano (Albert Wener), Gigi [Luigi] Casellato
(Psychiatrist), Vittorio Mangano, Mario Gar-
riba, Luigi Antonio Guerra, Raffaele Di Mario,
120 1974: Un fiocco
Matilde Dell’Acqua, Rita Lo Verde, Giuseppe
Castelli; uncredited: Antonio Anelli (Party
Guest), Ulla Johannsen (Blonde Party Guest),
Alba Maiolini (Ofenbauer’s friend), Giuseppe
Marrocco (Party Guest). PROD: Paola Film s.r.l.
(Rome); EP: Paolo Prestano; PM: Diego Spataro;
PS: Anselmo Parrinello; PSe: Giuseppe Cas-
tagna; ADM: Sergio Rosa. Country: Italy. Filmed
at Anguillara Sabazia (Rome) and on location
in Rome. Running time: 108 minutes (m. 264).
Italian poster for Un fiocco nero per Deborah (1974).
Visa n. 65205 (.26.174); Rating: none. Release
dates: .26.174; Distribution: Alpherat. Domestic
gross: 118,687,000 lire. Also known as: The Tor-
ment (U.K.); El lado oscuro de Deborah (Spain);
Psycho Maniacs (Germany).
Deborah, the wife of nuclear physicist Michel
Lagrange, is unable to have children, and her in-
fertility looms over her marriage. After visiting
some children’s homes, with the intention of
adopting a child, she gives up because of the com-
plex paperwork. One day, after wit-
nessing a gruesome car accident that
involves a German man and his
pregnant wife, Deborah turns out to
be pregnant. From that moment, she
begins to be followed by a strange
woman named Mira. Michel does
not believe in Deborah and nobody
seems to have ever seen the elusive
woman she describes. As the days
pass Mira becomes more and more
present and, in the end, she and Deb-
orah become friends. Eventually,
though, it turns up that Mira ac-
tually died a few months earlier as a
result of the accident Deborah wit-
nessed. The child she was bearing
now lives in Deborah’s womb…
Often enclosed in the “de-
monic possession” cycle of the mid–
170s, mainly because of its passing
similarities to Rosemary’s Baby—
starting with the title, which openly
hints at Nastro rosso a New York, the
Italian subtitle of Polanski’s film—
Marcello Andrei’s Un fiocco nero per
Deborah1 is actually a subtle ghost
story disguised as a psychological
drama. Featuring no devil figure or
evil child, the movie leaves aside de-
monic possession and deals with
one of the decade’s main staples,
parapsychology. Like Jennifer
O’Neill’s character in Sette note in
nero, the titular heroine played by
Marina Malfatti is a medium, who
in the opening sequence foresees an
accident at the circus during a tra-
peze performance, and a key char-
acter is a parapsychologist, played
(in his only role in an Italian movie)
by Gig Young.
Similarly to other films of the
period, such as Madeleine–Anatomia
 1974: Mania
di un incubo and Un sussurro nel buio, Andrei’s
film delves with the anxieties of pregnancy and
the fear of losing a child, a common theme
partly because of the growing importance of the
debate on abortion in Italy: in 174 a law pro-
posal was made to legalize it, but only in 178
the parliament passed a law that depenalized it.
The movie revolves around Deborah’s mysteri-
ous pregnancy, which the doctors label as hys-
terical as the woman cannot bear children: she
tightens a bond with a mysterious young woman,
Mira (Delia Boccardo), who lost her baby in a
car accident, and who becomes some sort of a
doppelgänger, with whom Deborah discusses her
fears and delusions. The disturbing crescendo
is orchestrated in much the same way as the
other “female Gothics” of the period, with poor
Deborah facing a reality that increasingly feels
like a nightmare, as no one believes in her preg-
nancy, and nobody else but her can see Mira.
Andrei and co-scriptwriters move from a
rather original idea, a dying woman “passing”
the child she is bearing to another one. Giuseppe
Pulieri, who wrote the original story, claimed
that it had been ruined by the producer’s attempt
to exploit the “Demonic possession” thread.
“The script stayed ten years in the drawer, I even
pestered Raymond Stross into making it, to no
avail … they altered the story, threw in all the
usual bullshit: the witches, the sorcerer, the spe-
cial effects…”2 The attempts at building a per-
turbing atmosphere include a psychic experi-
ment which goes wrong—an idea scriptwriter
Regnoli reprised in his unfilmed script Qualcosa
penetra in noi (Le notti di Satana)—and an
eerie sequence at the zoo, where animals go
crazy at Deborah’s presence (a moment which
predates The Omen, 176). But the movie pri-
marily aims to be a character study, focusing on
Deborah’s conjugal crisis and her growing in-
communicability with her estranged husband
(Bradford Dillman, also in his only role in an
Italian film), thus avoiding the typical excesses
of the period, so much so that the board of cen-
sors gave it a “per tutti” (all audiences allowed)
rating, something of a rare bird for a 170s
Italian movie.
Un fiocco nero per Deborah is pleasant to
watch, thanks also to Alberto Verrecchia’s eclec-
tic score (very much reminiscent of Albinoni’s
work in places, and echoing progressive rock in
others), and Andrei’s direction is suitably stylish,
with an emphasis on slow-motion, but it fails to
be punchy when the story shifts from melo-
121
drama to the Fantastic. Overlong and sluggishly
paced, with overly didactic dialogue (with the
odd Luddite touch: “Automation has driven us
to a future without alternatives. The day will
come when political, economic, and even emo-
tional decisions will be made for us by a ma-
chine, even in love, and mankind would have
lost the most fascinating of all the qualities he’s
endowed with, the ability to make mistakes,”
Ofenbauer proclaims), the movie ultimately fails
to make the most of its grim, circular twist end-
ing.
Malfatti, sporting a short hairdo very sim-
ilar to Mia Farrow’s in Polanski’s film, is quite
convincing, and her American co-stars fare bet-
ter than expected: Young, in particular, delivers
a good performance as the flamboyant psychic,
always half-drunk and playing malicious ditties
on the piano. Despite Malfatti’s popularity in
Italy (the actress had recently starred in a suc-
cessful 4-part TV version of Malombra), the
movie passed almost unnoticed on its theatrical
release, and disappeared from sight. It resur-
faced to home video in the U.S. and U.K. in the
early 180s.
Andrei’s subsequent career was nonde-
script, with less than a handful of movies in a
few years, incuding the crime film Il tempo degli
assassini (175) starring Joe Dallesandro.
NoTeS
1. Pulieri’s original story was titled Quegli strani malori
di Eilen, deposited at SAIE’s registers on April 6, 173, but
according to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on May 13, 174. The script kept at CSC
bears the title Un fiocco nero per Deborah (La quinta sta-
gione).
2. Franco Grattarola, “È arrivato il risolutore. Intervista
a Giuseppe Pulieri,” Cine70 e dintorni #7, 2006, 1.
Mania
D: Ralph Brown [Renato Polselli]. SC:
Ralph Brown; DOP: Ugo Brunelli (Telecolor,
Eastmancolor); M: Umberto Cannone (Ed.
Tickle); E: Roberto Colangeli; AD: Claudio Fra-
gasso; ArtD: Giuseppe Ranieri; CO: Maria Rosa
Catinello; SS: Iolanda Mascitti; AE: Dante Am-
atucci; SO: Alberto Vani; MU: Marcello Di
Paolo; C: Domenico Giannotti. Cast: Brad Eu-
ston [Ettore Elio Aricò] (Germano / Brecht),
Ivana Giordan (Katia), Isarco Ravaioli (Lailo),
Mirella Rossi (Erina), Eva Spadaro (Lisa), Max
Dorian (Dr. Lous), Filomena Desiato (Elderly
woman), Carla Mancini, Giorgio Dolfin. PROD:
Renato Polselli and Mushi Glam for G.R.P.
122 1974: Mania
Cinematografica (Rome); PM: Bruno Vani; PS:
Francesco Francioso. Country: Italy. Filmed at
Cave Film Studio (Rome); Sound recording at
Otello Colangeli’s “Cinemontaggio” (SO: Sandro
Occhetti, Bruno Penzo). Running time: 84 min-
utes (m. 225). Visa n. 6362 (12.18.173); Rating:
V.M.18. Release date: 8.25.174; Distribution:
RCR; Domestic gross: unknown.
Note: Although credited, Carla Mancini
and Giorgio Dolfin do not appear in the film.
Lisa, the widow of the brilliant scientist Dr.
Brecht, is still shocked by the traumatic death of
her husband, whom she betrayed with his twin
brother Germano. Brecht, who had discovered his
wife’s infidelity, subsequently died in a fire in his
lab, before Lisa’s eyes, while Germano was left dis-
figured and on a wheelchair. Following the advice
of Dr. Lous, Lisa moves to the villa where she once
lived with Brecht. There, she meets the embittered
Germano, the housekeeper Katia, and Brecht’s for-
mer assistant Erina, who has been left deaf after
a shock. Soon inexplicable and terrifying events
occur, and it looks as though Brecht’s ghost is
haunting Lisa from the afterlife. However, Lisa’s
new lover, Lailo, is suspicious, and starts to in-
vestigate the house’s surrounding. Eventually, it
Italian fotobusta for Mania (1974).
turns out that Brecht only faked his death, and
took Germano’s place in order to drive his wife to
madness. He succeeds: Lisa cuts Katia’s throat and
kills herself, in front of Lailo and Lous. The shock
has Erina miraculously recover her voice and
hearing.
“When the dark shadows of the night can-
cel the world’s view, then from the mysterious
depths of the subconscious the uncontrolled
forces of the unconscious are unleashed, and no-
body knows what the boundaries of reality are
anymore.” Thus begins Renato Polselli’s most
obscure work of the 170s, Mania, which has
been unavailable for over thirty years after its
marginal theatrical release, save for a May 2007
screening of the print kept at the Cineteca
Nazionale that took place at the Trevi cinema in
Rome. In September 2016 it surfaced on YouTube,
to a small but affectionate audience. Polselli fans
labeled it as “an extraordinary film.” Beauty, as
they say, is in the eye of the beholder.
Originally to be titled Terrore mania, the
film borrowed a key plot point (a man fakes his
own death in order to take a contorted revenge
over the woman who betrayed him) from
Polselli’s own La verità secondo Satana, but
 1974: Mania
turned into a Gothic tale of sorts, which encom-
passes some of the genre’s staples: the mad doc-
tor, the haunted house, the döppelganger, the in-
decision between a rational and supernatural
explanation of the events. All this is concocted
in the director’s inimitable manner.
For one thing, Polselli’s Dr. Brecht is a
bizarre modern-day variation of the mad doctor
type, a brilliant scientist “always full of his own
enthusiasm” who is conducting weird experi-
ments that he explains as follows: “With these
radiations I can make a bee fly and stop it in
mid-air … the important thing is to center the
wavelength on which each individual’s nervous
system works. In other words,” he adds, perhaps
sensing the viewers’ perplexity, “I can apply
radio controls on living matter. This means that
I can stop the course of any illness in the human
body,” he concludes, and who are we to object
to the compelling logic of a Polselli character?
The fact that Brecht’s lab is placed in a base-
ment and consists of some bogus equipment
props and a spinning device which looks suspi-
ciously like a cement mixer pretty much gives
away Polselli’s scant budget from the start. Com-
pared to Mania, Delirio caldo and Riti, magie
nere e segrete orge nel Trecento… were big budget
affairs: this time the director had no “name”
actor to rely on and worked with a cast of only
seven people led by “Brad Euston,” a.k.a. Ettore
Elio Aricò, an aspiring actor who had previously
appeared in the director’s Quando l’amore è
oscenità, and provided most of the budget from
his own pocket, on the condition of being the
protagonist. Polselli obliged.1
Most of the film was shot in and around Is-
arco Ravaioli’s own house, a modest suburban
villa (already employed by the director in some
of his previous works, such as Delirio caldo
and Rivelazioni di uno psichiatra sul mondo per-
verso del sesso) which provided a surrogate for
Gothic films’ typical haunted mansion; the
opening credits’ mention of Mania having been
shot at Gordon Mitchell’s Cave Film Studio was
simply a trick for bureaucratic reasons, as was
the mention of two C.S.C. actors (the ubiquitous
yet elusive Carla Mancini and Giorgio Dolfin)
who do not appear in the film at all.
Polselli piles on the typical Gothic para-
phernalia with wild abandon: the assorted phe-
nomena that take place, driving poor Lisa (Eva
Spadaro) to madness, include the apparition of
a madly cackling, silver-painted Brecht; a phan-
tasmatic hand with seemingly hot-iron fingers;
123
a decomposed body, and so on—all this spiced
with the director’s beloved wild (and, in his own
words, “marvelous”2) color effects, although not
so over-the-top as in Riti, magie nere e segrete
orge nel Trecento…
The basic revenge-from-the-dead plot
turns out to have more than a passing analogy
to Riccardo Freda’s Lo Spettro, to the point that
some moments are quite similar: the scene
where Erina (Mirella Rossi) opens Brecht’s coffin
(located in the basement, in spite of any attempt
at verisimilitude) and finds a maggot-infested,
decaying body in it—an effect Polselli recalled
enthusiastically, boasting about his idea to spray
maggots over a human skeleton and claiming
that he himself was scared by the result3—recalls
a similar passage in Freda’s film. Lisa’s descent
into violence and madness, with her vicious as-
sault to Katia (Ivana Giordan), recalls Steele
slashing poor Peter Baldwin with a razor. On
the other hand, the sequence where Lisa finds
mysterious footsteps on the terrace vaguely re-
calls Bava’s La frusta e il corpo.
Ultimately the apparently supernatural
events are explained (in a manner similar to
William Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill,
15) as devices operated by Brecht through a
makeshift keyboard panel, which makes the
haunted house like a funhouse of sorts—not by
chance a reviewer of the time observed that “it
looks like a ride through one of those ‘fun-
houses’ that amusement parks’ barkers suggest
to couples looking for Grand Guignol–style
thrills.”4
Yet, Polselli’s use of genre staples is idio-
syncratic to say the least, starting with the abun-
dance of over-the-top, mind-boggling dialogue
which sometimes borders dangerously on the
unintentionally ridiculous, and frequently falls
into it headfirst (“Stay away from this villa! Let
ghosts do the ghosts!”). On top of that, the
viewer is treated with ample doses of the spe-
cialty of the house, those weird, over-the-top
sadomasochistic bits that are Polselli’s trade-
mark. A scene juxtaposes a fight betwen Lisa
and Irena (which evolves into a lesbian inter-
lude) with Germano groping and fondling Katia,
who’s lying over his wheelchair in the garden;
later on, Irena spies on a lesbian tryst between
Lisa and Katia and masturbates with a bottle;
and Germano takes every opportunity to punish
the poor deaf girl, preferably with a rope used
as a whip and iron tongs. The most hilarious
bit has to be the scene where Germano/Brecht
124 1974: La mano
gleefully tramples on the helpless Irena with his
wheelchair, a moment worthy of Delirio caldo’s
murder-cum-masturbation in the bathtub, fol-
lowed closely by the scene where the madly
cackling Germano traps Lisa and Irena inside a
sort of shrinking device (that is, a curved alu-
minum sheet maneuvered by an unseen assis-
tant) and watches as the two women are slowly
squeezed by its embrace, a moment that recalls
the “invisible force” in Il mostro dell’opera.
If Spadaro’s acting constantly borders on
the hysterical, since her character is given little
else to do but scream in despair, Aricò hams it
up savagely in a dual role, in jarring contrast to
Isarco Ravaioli’s catatonic performance. A karate
black belt, the Sicilian Aricò (born in 13) had
debuted in the 166 Western Per una manciata
d’oro, and enjoyed a brief acting career before
leaving the cinema business for good.5 He went
through rough times in his later life, sometimes
living by his wits. He died of a laryngeal cancer
in 17. Polselli claimed that Mania’s invisibility
was caused by Aricò’s dissatisfaction with the
distribution: according to the director, he took
the existing prints out of circulation and disap-
peared.
As the deaf, masochistic Irena, Rossi—a
Polselli regular, having appeared also in Quando
l’amore è oscenità and Rivelazioni di uno psichi-
atra sul mondo perverso del sesso, as well as in
the Vani/Polselli hybrid Casa dell’amore … la
polizia interviene—spends most of the film
wearing only slippers, panties and an unbut-
toned shirt, and the other leading ladies have
their share of nude scenes as well. However, the
only existing copy is devoid of all the erotic in-
terludes, which nevertheless are featured in the
photonovel of the film published in Cinesex
magazine.6 One has the feeling that the jaw-
dropping opening sequence in which Lisa and
Lailo, driving on a lonely country road, are pur-
sued by a mysterious car with no driver on it—
a blatant rip-off of Steven Spielberg’s Duel
(171)—had no other purpose than to replace
the abundant sex scenes in order to obtain a visa
safely, with the director planning to restore the
most risqué bits subsequently.
Polselli would not be so lucky with Quando
l’amore è oscenità, which was banned when first
submitted to the Board of Censors in October
175: it was reedited with the addition of new
scenes and a totally new dialogue track, and re-
submitted to the board in 180 as Oscenità.
NoTeS
1. In a 1 interview with Pete Tombs and Luca Rea,
Polselli claimed that Aricò later cashed checks for seven
million lire that the director had advanced him as a war-
ranty. Having to repay the millions to the bank, Polselli re-
lied on luck, and bet on horse races: he won seven million
four hundred thousand lire. (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=20lUv0tDYGg&feature=youtu.be)
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. S.c., “Nel tunnel dell’orrore si può anche sorridere,”
La Stampa, August 28, 174.
5. The “Brad Euston” who appears in the Turkish crime
film Four for All directed by Yılmaz Atadeniz (retitled Quei
paracul … pi di Jolando e Margherito by the Italian distrib-
utor Bruno Vani and credited to “Jerry Mason,” a.k.a.
Giulio Giuseppe Negri) is not Aricò, but Turkish actor
Kazım Kartal.
6. See Cinesex Mese #10, November 173.
La mano che nutre la morte (The Hand
That Feeds the Dead, a.k.a. Evil Face)
D: Sergio Garrone. SC: Sergio Garrone;
DOP: Emore Galeassi (Eastmancolor, Telecolor);
M: Elio Maestosi, Stefano Liberati, conducted
by Stefano Liberati (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Cesare Bian-
chini; PD, ArtD, CO: Amedeo Mellone; MU:
Maia Arié; Hair: Ivana Bernardi; AD: Alessandro
Frollano; AE: Bruna Abbatelli; SO: Armando
Timpani; SOE: Enzo Diliberto, Roberto Arcan-
geli; B: Amedeo Timpani; SE: Carlo Rambaldi;
AC: Lino Galeassi; SP: Serto Giannini; SS: Paola
Fabiani. Cast: Klaus Kinski (Prof. Nijinsky),
Katia Christine (Masha / Tanja Nijinsky), Ayhan
Işık (Alex), Marzia Damon [Caterina Chiani]
(Katja Olenov), Carmen Silvia, Stella Calderoni
(Sonia), Romano De Gironcoli, Alessandro Per-
rella (Feodor), Erol Taş (Vanya, Prof. Nijinski’s
Henchman), Luigi Bevilacqua, Bruno Arié (In-
spector), Osiride Pevarello (Inn-Keeper), Ame-
deo Timpani (The Judge), Pasquale Toscano.
PROD: Amedeo Mellone for Cinequipe (Rome)
and Şakir V. Sözen; PM: Claudio Sinibaldi; PS:
Vincenzo Iaccio. Country: Italy / Turkey. Filmed
in Istanbul, Turkey and at Elios Studios (Rome).
Running time: 88 minutes (m. 23); Visa n.
6410 (3.22.174); Rating: V.M.18. Release date:
4.2.174; Distribution: Regional. Domestic gross:
unknown. Also known as: Ölümün Nefesi (Tur-
key).
Note: Although credited, Carla Mancini
does not appear in the film. Ayhan Işık and Erol
Taş are not credited in Italian prints.
Two newlyweds on their honeymoon, Masha
and Alex, have a coach accident near the mansion
inhabited by Prof. Nijinsky, whose wife Tanja was
 1974: La mano
horribly scarred ten years earlier in a fire which
also killed her father and Nijinsky’s mentor, Pro-
fessor Ivan Rassimov. Nijinsky is attempting to re-
store Tanja’s beauty with a series of gruesome sur-
gical experiments, inspired by Rassimov’s works:
he operates on young women, abducted by his
hulking servant, and attempts to graft their skin
onto Tanja. Other guests at Nijinsky’s house are
a prostitute named Sonia, and a young woman,
Katja, who is actually investigating the disappear-
ance of her sister, with the help of her fiancé Feo-
dor. As the guests start disappearing, Masha and
Alex suspect that something terrible is going on,
but the woman—who turns out to be a dead
ringer for Tanja—is captured and subjected to a
gruesome surgery where her face is stitched onto
Tanja’s disfigured one. As she recovers, Tanja stabs
Nijinsky and plans to leave with the unaware
Alex, passing herself off as Masha. But Nijinsky’s
revenge from beyond the grave awaits her…
Of the two movies Sergio Garrone shot in
Turkey for the Rome-based Turkish producer
Şakir V. Sözen,1 La mano che nutre la morte was
the original story the director had in mind,
while Le amanti del mostro was concocted
later—whether Sözen was aware or not of this
is anyone’s guess—to exploit the cast and loca-
tion.
According to the director, the basic idea for
the film was some sort of “Frankenstein story,”
but La mano che nutre la morte actually owes
more to the surgical sub-genre inaugurated by
Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (160) and
Jesús Franco’s Gritos en la noche (161), and is
closer in spirit to the Italian Gothics made in
the early 170s, with its emphasis on eroticism
and its taste for the macabre and gore. As for the
sex factor, Garrone included the obligatory les-
bian scene between Stella Calderoni (Rita’s
sister) and Marzia Damon (real name Caterina
Chiani, seen also in other sexy Gothic flicks of
the early 170s, such as Byleth and Il sesso della
strega), that was slightly shortened (by  meters,
about 1 seconds) by the board of censors in
order to give the film a V.M.18 rating.
Carlo Rambaldi provided the effects for the
surgical scenes, whose crudeness rivals Spanish
horror films made around the same time, for the
morbidness and insistence on the details in spite
of the poverty of means. Garrone’s camera
lingers on the close-ups of Kinski (or, more fre-
quently, his double) carving with his scalpel on
the victims’ thighs, lifting ample portions of skin
and using them to replace gruesomely burnt tis-
125
sue. The scenes also works as an unintended
metaphor on the making of the two pictures, in
turn assembled with bits and pieces of film
transplanted and recycled from one to another,
starting with the very opening credits (see the
entry on Le amanti del mostro for further de-
tails.)
That said, La mano che nutre la morte
amply deals with recurring themes of Italian
Gothic, starting with its evil, Machiavellan cen-
tral female character opposed to a weak, feeble-
willed male figure. In addition to controlling her
surgeon husband, persuading him to murder
young women so as to regain her lost beauty, the
scheming Tanja has sex with her deformed and
retarded servant, whom she lures by way of a
tuning fork, just like Barbara Steele’s character
played a piano motif to alert her groom lover in
Mario Caiano’s Amanti d’oltretomba (165).
Eventually, she does not hesitate in dispatching
her husband so as to start a new life, taking the
place of the “twin” she has sacrificed. La mano
che nutre la morte features the umpteenth “black
veiled lady” of Italian horror, and liberally draws
from such themes as the doppelgänger (Katia
Christine plays Nijinsky’s wife and a dead ringer
to her) and the partially disfigured face, half-
beautiful and half-horrific, which Tanja exhibits
just like Barbara Steele’s ghost character in
Amanti d’oltretomba. On the other hand, poor
Nijinsky is one of the most unfortunate mad
doctors in Italian Gothic: not only he is totally
submissive to his wife’s will, a closer relative to
Dr. Du Grand in I vampiri than to Franju’s
Genessier, but he is also possibly impotent (as
Kinski’s character in Garrone’s twin film) and
ends up deceived, betrayed and (literally)
stabbed in the back.
Like Le amanti del mostro, the film features
scenes shot at the Elios Western village in Rome,
with Osiride Pevarello and other little-known
Italian actors, such as Antonio Timpani and
Bruno Arié. Alessandro Perrella, credited in
both films, appears only here; on the other hand,
it is likely that some of the cast names (such as
Romano De Gironcoli and Pasquale Toscano)
were actually made up, as was the case with
some Italian versions of Turkish co-productions.
La mano che nutre la morte was submitted
to the board of censors five days after its com-
panion piece (on March 7) and obtained a visa
on the same day, but was eventually released one
month earlier. The Turkish version came out
only in 186, seven years after Ayhan Işık’s pre-
126 1974: Nuda
mature death in 17, thanks to the efforts of
actor-cum-producer Yılmaz Duru (133–2010),
who had bought the negatives from Sözen and
released it for Tuğra Film with the title Ölümün
Nefesi (Breath of Death). Duru re-edited a 77-
minute-long version (crediting himself as co-
director in the process!) and added additional
music by Arif Melikov. This version is cut with
some gore footage missing, and it is oddly,
slightly re-edited, with the lesbian scene shifted
to a later point. Moreover, the characters’ names
were anglicized in the dubbing (Nijinsky became
Marshall, Masha became Martha, Vanya became
Johnson), except for Ayhan Işık’s, who was
turned into Turkish and renamed Han Bey (!).
The actor was dubbed by Ersan Uysal while
Katia Christine’s voice was provided by Ayşin
Atav.
Ölümün Nefesi was released on video in
German for the Turkish community, and broad-
cast on Turkish television. Local film historian
Kaya Özkaracalar organized a screening of the
movie in 2001 during the Ankara Film Festival.
NoTe
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on March 26, 173. Interestingly, La mano
che nutre la morte was registered only in November 178,
five years after its making.
Nuda per Satana (Nude for Satan)
D: Paolo Solvay [Luigi Batzella]. S and SC:
Luigi Batzella; DOP: Antonio Maccoppi (Tech-
nicolor, Techniscope); M: Alberto Baldan
Bembo (Ed. S.A.A.R.); E: Luigi Batzella; AD:
Michelangelo Ricci; SO: Antonio Forrest; C:
Giuliano Grasselli; AC: Luciano Ronconi; CO:
Simone Chapoutier; MU: Ultimo Peruzzi. Cast:
Rita Calderoni (Susan Smith / Evelyn), Stelio
Candelli (Dr. William Henry Benson / Peter),
James Harris [Giuseppe Mattei] (The Devil), Re-
nato Lupi (Butler), Iolanda Mascitti (Servant
Girl), Luigi Antonio Guerra, Barbara Lay
(Brown Coven Member), Augusto Boscardini
(Naked Man), Alfredo Pasti (Naked Man); un-
credited: Gota Gobert (Blonde Coven Member).
PROD: Remo Angioli for C.R.C. Produzioni
Cinematografiche e Televisive (Rome); PM:
Michelangelo Ciafré; PSe: Mario Ciafré. Coun-
try: Italy. Filmed at Castle of Monte San Gio-
vanni Campano (Frosinone, Lazio). Running
time: 1 minutes (m. 243). Visa n. 64782 (7.
28.174); Rating: V.M.18. Release dates: 10.23.174
(Italy), 1.25.178 (France); Distribution: P.A.B.
Domestic gross: 56,364,000 lire. Also known as:
Les Nuits perverses de Nuda (France).
While driving through the countryside late
at night, on his way to visit a patient, Dr. Benson
finds a crashed car with a young woman named
Susan hanging out of it. The doctor puts Susan
in his car and drives for help to the nearest house,
which turns out to be a mysterious castle. He is
greeted at the door by a woman named Evelyn
who looks exactly like Susan, and who invites
them both to stay for the night. Then it’s Susan
who wakes up and enters the castle, where she
finds a man named Peter who is a dead ringer for
Benson. The two visitors are involved with mirror
images of themselves, while time and space seem-
ingly cease to obey the ordinary rules. It turns out
that their actions are driven by Satan himself…
If the title was not enough, the opening
image of Nuda per Satana is emblematic of the
evolution of Italian Gothic in the early 170s: a
slow-motion shot of Rita Calderoni running in
the woods at night toward the camera, amid
eerie lights, and dressed only with a light night-
gown that leaves her body exposed to the cam-
era. It looks like an almost perfect reworking of
one of 160s Italian Gothic’s clichés—the hero-
ine pursued by some menacing and invisible
force at night, in a hostile environment, an
image that had its archetypal antecedent in the
opening scene of Riccardo Freda’s masterpiece,
Beatrice Cenci (156). All this with the addition
of full frontal nudity, a move that turns the sug-
gestive into explicit, the erotic into voyeuristic.
The effect is strangely compelling: on the
one hand, the shot’s iconic power is sabotaged
by the exploitative resort to nudity; on the other,
the attention to light effects and formal presen-
tation feels like a surplus, a justification for a
film that borders on hardcore porn but has still
the need to present itself with a certain formal
aplomb. By walking on the thin edge between
erotic horror and pornography, Nuda per Satana
follows the same path as other horror films of
the period, tempted to jump to the other side of
the fence but still retaining some prudish reser-
vation, and also recalls the adults-only comics
of the era, which were still on the edge of (but
not yet) hardcore.
Filmed in spring 174, 1 Nuda per Satana
was Luigi Batzella’s second Gothic effort after Il
plenilunio delle vergini. The script is nothing but
a potpourri of Italian Gothic’s main themes and
narratives, which perhaps is the most evident
symptom of the creative impasse (or indiffer-
 1974: Nuda
ence, if you please) that characterized most of
the genre’s efforts. The miles of naked flesh
added to its Gothic cloth notwithstanding, the
references are so pedantic as to border on philol-
ogy. Despite the contemporary setting, the
movie has its roots firmly in the circular theme
of the eternal return, so that the present
becomes a necessary mirror of the past, similarly
to L’amante del demonio. The plot revolves
around the Romantic theme of the doppelgänger
with whom the two main characters are forced
to confront, firstly via a variation on the theme
of the “living portrait” (in a crudely animated
bit) and then in person: the encounters give way
to a peculiar ménage-à-quatre that is a wild im-
provement over the black-and-white prudery of
the previous decade. Like the ghosts of Black-
wood castle depicted in Danza macabra, the
film’s supernatural presences, Evelyn and Peter,
live only when they (make) love; and, like Elis-
abeth Blackwood and her lovers, they lure new
living flesh in order to perform their rituals.
Even the locations are the expression of this
“return of the past”: the “villa” (actually a castle)
where Dr. Benson (Stelio Candelli) ends up after
a bizarre car accident is the same as in Roberto
Mauri’s La strage dei vampiri, and Rita Cal-
deroni’s wandering in the villa’s park recalls Gra-
ziella Granata’s night escapades in Mauri’s film.
What is more, Batzella’s approach to the Fan-
tastic is the same as its predecessors of the pre-
vious decade, with a circular narrative and
whole sequences that look like they were devised
on the blueprint of a previous work: most no-
tably, the sequence where Dr. Benson pursues a
mysterious cloaked figure through the park,
only to find himself facing his own double, is an
explicit reference to Operazione paura’s most fa-
mous bit; on the other hand, the scene in which
Susan finds herself imprisoned in a huge web
and is menaced by a laughable rubber spider
could have been taken from either L’amante del
vampiro or Il boia scarlatto. 2
Space and time prove equally malleable and
misleading, as when Benson keeps walking away
from the villa and finds himself directing toward
it, and the sudden transitions from day to night
draw from 160 Gothics’ liquid chronology. The
discourse on time, and on “the illusion of living,
of loving, of dying” is at the film’s centre, and
characters keep referring to it in long, stilted di-
alogue passages such as “What is a memory? It’s
just a fraction of time, a moment recovered from
the vastness of the past, and the past is no longer
127
of this time, and time is silence, here there is no
place for memories … please don’t think about
the past or the present, just think about now…,”
or “Time is no longer yours, time is suspended,
and you are eternal prisoners of your own
selves.”
Batzella throws in the odd optical effect,
devises elaborate tracking shots and delights in
tilted camera angles, with sometimes amusing
results: during Susan’s exploration of the garden
the frame keeps tilting on its axis as if the cam-
eraman was sitting on a seesaw. Moreover, he
has d.o.p. Antonio Maccoppi light every se-
quence with a mixture of reds and greens that
look half–Bava and half–Polselli; Calderoni
claimed that the director cast her after watching
the latter’s Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Tre-
cento…, which the film recalls in parts.
Overall, the visual and special effects have
an endearing amusement park quality to them,
and recall the so-called “cinema of attractions”
from Méliès onwards. Sometimes the director
even comes up with the odd surreal touch: Ben-
son’s initial discovery of the villa’s weird inhab-
itants, by opening various doors and discovering
the occupants intent in bizarre lovemaking acts
and the bad-toothed, grotesque butler (Renato
Lupi), posing like a still-living corpse with a
knife protruding from his neck, looks like a poor
man’s variation of the celebrated sequence of the
“Hotel des Folies Dramatiques” in Jean Coc-
teau’s Le Sang d’un poet (130); the following
image of a vertiginously whirling statue’s head
might well prove that the Cocteau reference was
not casual on Batzella’s part.
The eruption of Fantastic is first and fore-
most at the service of nudity: in a scene Susan
is stripped naked before the Devil by an invisible
force, her clothes disappear instantly, and she is
left like a modern version of Botticelli’s Venus,
shyly covering her breast and pubic area, which
nevertheless is featured prominently throughout
the film. Her image is superimposed to Satan’s
eye, in a game of shot counter shots that reveal
how this poor devil is less menacing than horny.
All this considered, even though the result
is more enjoyable than such dreck as Riti, magie
nere e segrete orge nel Trecento… and La san-
guisuga conduce la danza (175), the direction
is as clueless as its heroine, because Batzella can-
not find a formal balance and keeps piling up
whatever comes to his mind. As a result, the
movie often slips into the ridiculous, and the
inane dialogue does not help: while making love
128 74: Nuda
with Susan’s double Evelyn, the unaware Dr.
Benson says to himself that his patient must still
be in a shock after the accident. Which, inciden-
tally, is hilariously suggested by the absurd sight
of a single tire rolling into the frame, possibly
justified by the lack of budget: however, one is
puzzled by Calderoni’s recollections that it took
Batzella all night to shoot it, as he was a very ac-
curate director.3 The actress also complained to
have been injured in the making of the accident
scene as well as during the filming of another
side-splitting bit, the spider attack sequence.4
The appearances of the Devil (played by
Giuseppe Mattei, also seen in Alberto Caval-
lone’s Zelda) are no less grotesque than those in,
say, L’esorciccio (175, Ciccio Ingrassia), and
worse still is the climax, with Satan sitting on a
throne and holding the naked Susan in his arms,
in a room decorated with two graves from which
a pair of naked women come out and start danc-
ing, à la Orgy of the Dead (165, Stephen C.
Apostolof); soon they are joined by two men
with their bodies colored in white and red (the
umpteenth nod to man’s dichotomy), in what
looks like an adults-only version of some Italian
Saturday night TV show’s ballet, complete with
zooms galore.
All in all, Nuda per Satana is largely inco-
herent when it comes to squeeze a sense out of
its threadbare plot. At a certain point, the Devil
gives Benson a medallion whose sides should
represent man’s two halves, which never get to
see one another: Plato’s myth of the androgy-
nous comes to mind, although the philosopher
employed it to explain heterosexual desire,
whereas Batzella uses it to underline man’s
love/hate duality. Still, the Devil’s idea of “a
world in which your loves and hates will be to-
gether at the same time” is pretty hazy, and re-
sults in a loosened inhibition on the characters’
part, in an eternal limbo where the quest for
pleasure seems the only thing that matters. No
wonder that, in typical Catholic fashion, the
hero renounces the idea of such a sinful nether-
world and defeats (at least apparently) the curse
by destroying the Grimorium which gives Satan
its powers over time and people. And yet the
spell appears to be undefeated, as Benson finds
himself again on the site of the car accident that
gave way to his outlandish adventure, and no-
tices the same medallion on Susan’s neck. Like
Plato’s androgynous, men are doomed to look
for their hidden counterparts and lose them-
selves in amazement.
Not that this really mattered to the audi-
ence at whom the movie was aimed. The many
sex scenes go as far as censorship would allow,
but are not particularly enticing in themselves:
a sequence starts with the camera zooming out
of Susan’s derrière while she is taking a bath,
whereas the heroine’s lesbian approach with a
servant girl (Iolanda Mascitti) takes place amid
white veils and see-through curtains, and curi-
ously brings to mind a notorious dream inter-
lude in the anthology comedy Sessomatto (173,
Dino Risi).
The board of censors initially rejected
Nuda per Satana because of its “continuous ob-
scene sequences, some of them even portraying
lesbian intercourses” (female and especially
male homosexuality being an aggravating factor
as far as eroticism was concerned). The verdict
was partially changed in appeal: the commis-
sioners “invited” (a more pleasant way to say
“demanded”) the producer to perform a number
of cuts, as follows:
1. A considerable reduction of the scenes of sexual
intercourse between the doctor and the woman who
represents Susan’s double, to prevent the description
of suckings and lickings.
2. A significant reduction in Susan’s nightmare
scene, so that it gets to the attempted strangula-
tion avoiding the description of the lesbian inter-
course.
3. A reduction of the final scene, before and af-
ter the ballet around the chair, trying to avoid the
sequences of the erotic acts of the man on the
chair with regard to the woman he has in his
arms.
The producer obliged and the movie was
finally given a V.M.18 rating. It was released in
late 174, grossing little more than 50 million
lire in the regional circuit. Even though the copy
submitted to the board of censors was a little less
than 1 minutes long, the current prints run
about 82 minutes. However, a version with hard-
core inserts circulated, and is currently available
on a Dutch DVD.5
Nuda per Satana marked yet another step
down in Rita Calderoni’s career. Even though
around the same time she appeared in a couple
of important productions, Roberto Rossellini’s
Anno uno (174) and Maximilian Schell’s Der
Richter und sein Henker (a.k.a. End of the Game,
175), her subsequent movie roles were mostly
confined to low-budget, obscure affairs such as
Un attimo di vita (175, Dante Marraccini), Fate
 1974: Il profumo
la nanna coscine di pollo (a.k.a. Amori morbosi
di una contessina, 177, Amasi Damiani), Dolce
pelle di donna (178, Alessandro Santini) and
Polselli’s own Torino centrale del vizio (17,
signed by Bruno Vani). Calderoni claimed that
this last experience was so disheartening (the
budget was so scant that there wasn’t even an
hairdresser on set) that she gave up acting alto-
gether.6
As for Batzella, he moved on to a more pro-
fitable and ever sleazier genre, the nazi-erotic,
with Kaput Lager—Gli ultimi giorni delle S.S. and
the notorious La bestia in calore, both released
in 177 and signed as “Ivan Kathansky.” He then
helmed the sex comedy Proibito erotico (178),
starring Ajita Wilson and signed “Paul Selvin”)7
and an Eurociné-produced adventure film,
Strategia per una missione di morte (17), writ-
ten by French film historian Alain Petit and star-
ring Richard Harrison and Gordon Mitchell,
also signed “Ivan Kathansky” (whereas the
French version is credited to “A.M. Frank,” that
is Marius Lesoeur), his last official screen credit.
According to some sources, Batzella appears to
have had a hand in another Dick Randall pro-
duction, Mie jue qi qi, a.k.a. Challenge of the
Tiger (180, Bruce Le). He died in 2008, aged 84,
in his hometown of San Sperate, in Sardinia.
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on March 25, 174.
2. A variation of the same scene can be found also in
Riccardo Freda’s last film, Murder Obsession.
3. Franco Grattarola, “Le occasioni di Rita,” Cine70 #11,
2008, 17. According to the actress the movie was shot in
five or six weeks.
4. Rita Calderoni interviewed in the TV program Strac-
ult, 200.
5. The first hardcore insert comes during Benson’s
initial exploration of the castle: upon opening a door, in
the softcore edit he briefly glimpses a man fondling a
woman’s breasts, while in the explicit version a small orgy
ensues, featuring two girls and a heterosexual couple (2:21
min.); later on, the shower and dream scene are expanded
and Rita Calderoni and Iolanda Mascitti are replaced by
two body doubles (1:08 min. and 3:06 min. respectively);
after the whipping scene, the black girl is penetrated with
a candle (51 sec.); during the love scene between Benson
and Evelyn, brief hardcore footage is inserted (2:13 sec.);
lastly, during the final ballet/orgy the two naked girls that
came out from the coffins have a lesbian intercourse, then
one of them turns to Peter and Susan (2:48 min.). Overall,
the Dutch hardcore cut runs nine minutes longer.
6. Ibid.
7. Released on DVD in the U.S. on the Mya label as Eros
Perversion (not to be confused with Ron Wertheim’s film
of the same name).
12
Il profumo della signora in nero (The
Perfume of the Lady in Black)
D: Francesco Barilli. S and SC: Francesco
Barilli, Massimo D’Avack; DOP: Mario Masini
(Technicolor); M: Nicola Piovani (Ed. Eurofil-
music); E: Enzo Micarelli; PD: Franco Velchi;
CO: Piero Cicoletti; MU: Manlio Rocchetti;
AMU: Cesare Biseo; Hair: Renata Magnanti; AD:
Giorgio Scotton; APD: Ezio Di Monte; AsstArtD:
Nello Giorgetti; C: Maurizio Scanzani; AC: Gior-
gio Urbinelli; AE: Aloisa Camilli; SO: Mario
Dallimonti; B: Giovanni Fratarcangeli; Mix: Al-
berto Bartolomei; SS: Bona Magrini; DubD: Re-
nato Izzo; Press attache: Lucherini-Rossetti-
Spinola-Giovannini. English version—DubD:
Christopher Cruise; voices: Gene Luotto (Ros-
setti), Ted Rusoff (Roberto), Edmund Purdom
(Andy). Cast: Mimsy Farmer (Silvia Hacher-
man), Maurizio Bonuglia (Roberto), Mario
Scaccia (Mr. Rossetti), Orazio Orlando (Nicola),
Jho Jenkins (Andy), Nike Arrighi (Orchidea),
Daniela Barnes (Young Silvia), Alexandra Paizi
(Miss Cardini), Renata Zamengo (Marta, Silvia’s
Mother), Ugo Carboni (Sect Member), Roberta
Cadringher (Antique Dealer), Sergio Forcina,
Gabriele Bentivoglio (Shop Boy), Luigi Antonio
Guerra (Chemical Worker), Carla Mancini
(Elisabetta), Donna Jordan (Francesca Vin-
cenzi); uncredited: Renato Chiantoni (Luigi, the
Porter), Margherita Horowitz (Mrs. Lovati),
Aldo Valletti (sect Member), Attilio Viti (Silvia’s
father in photograph). PROD: Giovanni Berto-
lucci for Euro International Film (Rome); GM:
Aldo U. Passalacqua; PS: Attilio Viti; PSe:
Francesco Vetrano; ADM: Rolando Pieri; As-
stADM: Silvana Olasio. Country: Italy/France.
Filmed at Incir-De Paolis (Rome). Running time:
101 minutes (m. 2777). Visa n. 64151 (3.22.174);
Rating: V.M.18. Release date: 3.2.174; Distribu-
tion: Euro International Film. Domestic gross:
582,674,000 lire. Also known as: Le Parfum de
la dame en noir (France); Das Parfüm der Dame
in Schwarz (West Germany); Poseidas del demo-
nio (Mexico).
Silvia Hacherman, the young director of a
chemistry lab in Rome, has been deeply marked
by a childhood trauma, having caused the death
of her mother Marta. Even though she seems to
be able to lead a peaceful life, she still feels sexu-
ally inhibited with her boyfriend Roberto. One
evening, during a dinner with Roberto’s friends,
Silvia is impressed by the words of a professor of
African sociology, Andy, about black magic cults,
130 1974: Il profumo
which are still practiced in Africa by cannibal
sects that lead their victims to suicide. Gradually,
Silvia’s memories come back to haunt her, like the
image of her mother, dressed in black and intent
on putting on perfume in front of the mirror.
From that moment on disturbing facts begin to
Italian locandina for Il profumo della signora in nero (1974).
happen: a mysterious girl settles in Silvia’s house;
her neighbors, acquaintances, and even Roberto
seem to behave strangely; and Silvia starts to
think that she is being persecuted. Eventually she
plunges into madness, and apparently kills her
mother’s lover Nicola, Roberto and her zealous
neighbor, Mr. Rossetti. Finally she
commits suicide by throwing herself
from the terrace. Her body is recovered
and placed in a secret tunnel under-
neath Rome. There, dozens of people—
including Andy, her neighbors, friends
and Roberto—gather around her body
and feed upon her. The secret sect
really exists…
Born in 143 and raised in a
family of artists (he is the nephew of
painter Cecrope Barilli) in his home-
town of Parma, Francesco Barilli took
his first steps in the movie business as
an actor, when he showed up in a
small role in Antonio Pietrangeli’s La
parmigiana (163). “Pietrangeli wanted
to shoot some scenes in my parents’
own house … but it was too small and
there was no room for the dolly, so
they eventually opted for another
villa,” he recalled. “But Pietrangeli
came over to dinner with my family,
and we talked and talked and
talked—I was crazy about John Hus-
ton, and just kept talking about his
films—until he eventually asked me
to be his assistant on set, and even
gave me a small part.”1
Then came Barilli’s big break:
the leading role in Bernardo Berto-
lucci’s sophomore effort Prima della
rivoluzione (164), a critical success
that made young Francesco one of the
most promising actors of his genera-
tion. Around the same time he also
starred in Camillo Bazzoni’s uncanny
experimental sci-fi short L’urlo (163).
But Barilli wanted to be a filmmaker
instead: he ended up in Cinecittà,
working as Bazzoni’s assistant in the
latter’s feature film debut, a Western
starring Steve Reeves titled Vivo per
la tua morte (168). Barilli recalled
the experience as follows: “That
Western was one of the most comical
movies ever made. It was like being
on the set of Blake Edwards’ The
 1974: Il profumo
Party (168), believe me! I saw things I thought
could not happen when you are making movies.”
After another film as Bazzoni’s assistant
(Commando suicida, 168, starring Aldo Ray),
Barilli tried his hand at scriptwriting, and
penned a couple of screenplays with Massimo
D’Avack. The author of an impressive volume
on movies and literature and a talented young
fiction writer, D’Avack had already co-authored
a number of interesting scripts, including Al-
berto De Martino’s Roma come Chicago (168),
Romolo Guerrieri’s Un detective (16) and Al-
fonso Brescia’s pseudo documentary Nel
labirinto del sesso—Psichidion (16). He would
then embark on a career as a novelist, and ended
up among the finalists at the prestigious Premio
Strega with Si sa dov’è il cuore (186), whose style
the renowned Fernanda Pivano favorably com-
pared to such Postmodernist masters as Donald
Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut.
Barilli and D’Avack had similar tastes in lit-
erature and movies, and were an effective script-
writing pair. “We got along very well. I had the
ideas, he put them on paper. Massimo wrote
very well and had a wonderful ear for dialogue.
He had fun working with me, because I really
went over the top. I came up with such weird
ideas…. It was a perfect match.” Their efforts
were made into two cult movies: the giallo, Chi
l’ha vista morire? and the violent adventure film
Il paese del sesso selvaggio (172, Umberto Lenzi),
born as a rip-off of A Man Called Horse and
eventually the progenitor of one of Italy’s most
notorious subgenres of the decade, the Third
World cannibal film.
Finally, for Barilli came the time of his di-
rectorial debut. Once again he co-wrote the
script with D’Avack. The starting point was the
horror genre, a profitable venture at that period,
and one that could grant him a safe distribution
deal in Italy and perhaps abroad as well. How-
ever, what became Il profumo della signora in
nero started in a quite unique way: “You see,
there were these two scripts I’d written: one was
the story of a schizophrenic woman, while the
other was about a cannibal sect based in Geneva
… there were these bankers who used to meet
in the city sewers at night and eat people. When
I brought these two scripts to Euro Productions,
they told me: ‘OK, let’s make the movie. But
we’re going to stitch the two scripts together!’
… I really liked both stories, so I told myself:
‘Well, that’s quite a challenge. Let’s see what I
can do with it!’”
131
On a productive, stylistic and narrative
side, Il profumo della signora in nero distin-
guishes itself from the typical horror genre re-
leases: not only it was made by a director with
auteur ambitions, with a first-level cast and top-
notch technical values, but it bends only par-
tially to commercial conventions, and does not
allow itself to be labeled within a particular
trend. Over the years Barilli’s film has often been
misleadingly called a giallo, which it is not; even
though its theme and mood are deeply imbued
with the period when it was made, it falls into
that category of the Gothic which David Punter
called “paranoid texts.”
According to Punter, this branch of the
Gothic is characterized by three main elements:
“The shift towards the psychological, the in-
creasing complexity of verification, the emphasis
on the ambivalence of persecution.”2 The main
characters, facing a world that progressively
takes the shape of a nightmare, feel like the vic-
tims of a persecution whose ultimate goal eludes
them, and carry out a detection that will bring
them to discover a truth hidden within them-
selves. In a way, this “return of the past” is the
same that characterizes classical Gothic, where
it takes the shape of vampires or revenants, but
it brings to a different approach to the element
of the “uncanny,” since the horrors that take
form on the screen have an inner genesis. The
supernatural becomes merely an insinuating
suggestion, an option that is briefly touched but
never fully embraced, and which is born and
dies within the protagonists’ tormented subjec-
tivity.
That is the case with Silvia (Mimsy Farmer),
the enigmatic protagonist of Barilli’s film, whose
descent into madness takes place in full daylight,
in the hot summer, in sunny contemporary
Rome.3 It seems the exact opposite of a Gothic
ambience; and yet the ghosts and shadows that
lurk underneath the apparently calm surface of
Silvia’s ordinary bourgeois life gradually take
shape, between a tennis match and a dinner with
friends, while the streets and buildings take on
a menacing air, and even the smiling elderly
gentleman next door starts looking suspicious
and sinister.
In dealing with a female perspective, Il pro-
fumo della signora in nero embraces the contem-
porary evolution of the 1th century “female
Gothic,” centered on heroines who, despite their
strong and independent surface, turn out as
fragile and defenseless damsels in distress, just
132 1974: Il profumo
like their Romantic predecessors; what is more,
they are afflicted by psychosexual taints: the “re-
turning past” that generates terror is a traumatic
event hidden in the subconscious, which comes
to the surface in the moment when the heroine
loses touch with her certainties and defenses,
and finds herself at the center of unexplicable
events—unless they are read under the paranoid
perspective of a conspiracy against her.
The hidden secret in Silvia’s past—her
mother’s murder—returns to persecute her
through objects and apparitions that may be just
the product of her own imagination, or may be
the work of a sect that pushes its victims to sui-
cide. In giving voice to its protagonist’s inner-
most self, Barilli’s film undermines a linear nar-
rative progression (which had already been
sabotaged in 160s Gothic: think of Danza
macabra, for instance) and turns it into an in-
decipherable voyage to the center of the mind.
The linear perception of reality is constantly
broken by a chaotic, distressing coexistence of
past and present.
Similarly, the male figures undergo a fur-
ther mutation, compared with the previous
decade’s counterparts, and the weak and inade-
quate hero gives way to ambiguous, hostile
figures: on the one hand we have Roberto (Mau-
rizio Bonuglia), Silvia’s boyfriend, who frus-
tratingly tries to have sex with her but clashes
against his fiancée’s frigidness; on the other we
have the brutish Nicola (Orazio Orlando), the
substitute for an absent father figure who brings
to the surface Silvia’s Oedipal traumas by vio-
lating her amid the remnants of her old apart-
ment, in one of Italian cinema’s most uncom-
fortable and painful rape scenes, perhaps
horror’s answer to a famous moment in Rocco e
i suoi fratelli (160, Luchino Visconti).
The “complexity of verification” mentioned
by Punter refers to the formal structure of para-
noid texts, which are built so as to make as plau-
sible as possible an obviously unreal world. In
Il profumo della signora in nero, the dualism be-
tween the unlikely story and the realistic context
in which it takes place gives birth to a complex,
faceted narrative, that moves along the tracks of
a difficult, painful detection: viewers grope in
the dark just like Silvia, forced as they are to see
the world through the eyes of the heroine’s de-
viated subjectivity, and the pieces of the puzzle
make sense only at the end.
The movie’s refined visual style has a vital
part in creating a reality on the verge of collaps-
ing. There is no trace of the stylistic sloppiness
of the contemporaneous low-budget Gothic
films, plagued with zooms and shaky mise-en-
scène. Each scene is very carefully designed:
Barilli builds the suspense with patience, and
takes care of the set-pieces, props and costumes
with a painterly eye. An example is the nosy
neighbor, Mr. Rossetti, played by Mario Scaccia,
always impeccably dressed, with his bow-tie and
white shoes.
Oh, those shoes! You wouldn’t believe how much
time it took me to find just the right shoes I wanted,
chamoish leather, white, an English model! The cos-
tume designer probably ended up hating me, as I was
such a pain in the ass … (laughs) … I literally drove
them crazy! But, you see, if in the U.S. you write a
script which says: “On a wall, we get to see a number
of stuffed birds which ominously pop out of the dark
because of the light coming from a window. A crow’s
eye shines in the dark etcetera,” or: “Outside, in the
rain, a pink Buick is parked…,” nobody changes a
single word. The script is Gospel, period. Here in
Italy, when producers read the script, they say: “Gee,
that’s cool!,” then the day you are about to shoot the
scene with the rain and the pink Buick … there is no
Buick in sight! “What about that damn car?!?” “Hey,
who cares about the car, let’s get to work…” (laughs)
I mean, you are making a movie and you keep asking
yourself why do you waste your time writing a script,
given that on the set everything has to be changed at
the very last minute!
Barilli’s visual talent shines in the choice of
the story’s main setting, an elegant building in
piazza Mincio, in Rome’s Coppedé district, first
seen in Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva
troppo (163) in the scene where Nora Davis
(Leticia Román) arrives by taxi at the deserted
apartment, and later re-used by Dario Argento:
it is the library where Eleonora Giorgi enters,
again after a cab ride, in Inferno (180). In truly
Gothic fashion, the building becomes a char-
acter in its own right from the exquisite opening
sequence, in which the camera rises up from a
fountain in the middle of the square and pans
to a balcony where Silvia’s elderly and affable
neighbor is watering flowers, in an idyllic and
yet illusory portrayal of Silvia’s quiet and soon-
to-be-shattered universe.
Barilli never denied the enormous influ-
ence of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (165) and
Rosemary’s Baby on his work. Il profumo della
signora in nero pays many references to the Pol-
ish filmmaker: for one thing, the photograph
that appears under the opening credits, depict-
 1974: Il profumo
ing Silvia as a child with her father and hinting
at her unresolved incestuous issues, recalls the
one in the closing sequence of Repulsion, and in
fact there seems to be an ideal red thread be-
tween Polanski’s film and Barilli’s. Both deal
with a fragile woman on the verge of madness,
and the characters played by Catherine Deneuve
and Mimsy Farmer have many things in com-
mon, starting with an obscure childhood trauma
they removed from their memory and the fear
of sexual contact with the opposite sex. “The
reference to Repulsion was intentional,” as Barilli
admitted; “I took that picture, by the way. The
man you see in the photograph, playing the fa-
ther, was Attilio Viti, an organizer who worked
with Bernardo Bertolucci, Anghelopoulos and
so on.” Some claims point at Robert Altman’s
Images (172), another portrait of a woman (Su-
sannah York) succumbing to madness, as a pos-
sible influence: however, Images was released in
Italy only in mid–175, over one year after Bar-
illi’s film.
Barilli develops one of Gothic’s character-
istic situations, in which “a suspicion of paranoia
on the part of the protagonist is accompanied
by a development in the expressionist charac-
teristics of the world through which [she]
moves.”4 Hence, the palace where Silvia lives
turns into a haunted house that little by little is
peopled with presences from the past. A central
leitmotif in the film is the doppelgänger, the ma-
terialization of the “return of the repressed” that
haunts the brain. In Il profumo della signora in
nero it is embodied in Silvia’s alter ego: a little
girl, a bit like Alice (explicitly evoked in the
scene where Silvia reads Lewis Carroll’s book),
but primarily a nod to Truman Capote’s short
story Miriam,5 who summons Silvia from the
other side of the mirror. The girl is played by the
8-year-old Daniela Rachele Barnes, the daughter
of Britta and Walter Barnes, and soon to become
popular in Italian cinema under the name Lara
Wendel. “Oh, to find the right girl was a night-
mare! Dear me, I may have screened hundreds
and hundreds of little girls! I visited all the Ger-
man schools in Rome because, you see, I wanted
a girl who would not look Italian at all. Daniela
Barnes had done a film with Di Leo, I think.
Anyway, then she ended up doing softcore flicks
like Maladolescenza…”
According to a famous definition by Leslie
Fiedler (in his pioneering tome Love and Death
in the American Novel), the Gothic mode is “es-
sentially a form of parody, a way of assailing
133
clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of
grotesqueness.”6 And indeed Barilli highlights
his character’s bizarre traits, from the nosy Mr.
Rossetti to the sinister street-sweeper who leafs
through bodybuilding magazines, not to men-
tion the well-dressed African professor who po-
litely discusses black magic and cannibalism as
if it were just another mundane small talk. Sim-
ilarly, the director stages empty and frivolous
society rituals that have a ridiculous and yet
frightening side to them, and range from sé-
ances held by black psychics to mysterious col-
lective gatherings in Rome’s underground. Ul-
timately, these rituals are all generated by the
same ennui. Barilli’s sarcastic, detached look de-
picts with acute wit the spiritualist fashion of
the period as well as the bougeoisie’s politically
correct façade of Third Worldism.
The main asset of Il profumo della signora
in nero is the ambiguity of the heroine’s perse-
cution. Unlike the orthodox Gothics, there is no
dialectic between the protagonist and the antag-
onist, but an overwhelming disproportion that
turns into a conspiracy—most likely a nod to
Rosemary’s Baby. In Silvia’s cloudy and unreli-
able vision anyone could be an enemy, and it is
the continuous suspension of truth that holds
the narrative. Then, ultimately, Barilli ends the
film with a twist that gives concrete form to the
heroine’s fears, after giving us the illusion that
it was all the product of her paranoia. At the
same time, he broadens the perspective from the
individual to the global. A conspiracy does in-
deed exist, and Silvia has been pushed to suicide
by a sect devoted to ritual cannibalism, that cuts
across all social classes and hides in the hum-
drum, apparently mundane reality of today’s so-
ciety.
Besides its undeniable horrific power, the
extraordinary final scene—a blasphemous can-
nibalistic communion, celebrated in the mil-
lenarian subterraneans of the Eternal City, at the
Caracalla thermae 7—suggests also a thought-
provoking message. Civilized countries are
plagued by a barbarism that has come from the
Third World (Africa is a recurrent theme in the
film), a plague that can be read as a retaliation
on the part of the “Wretched of the Earth” (to
quote Frantz Fanon’s famous 161 book which
provided a psychologic analysis of the effects of
colonization) toward the post-colonial Western
society, whose capitalistic “hunger” has turned,
literally, in hunger for human flesh—a political
angle even more explicit in Barilli’s original
134 1974: Terror!
story, which took place in Geneva’s high finance
environments. The “return of the past” at the
core of Gothic here also conveys subtle political
and apocalyptic undertones: the satiated nor-
malcy of Western civilization is just an illusion,
and behind the façade madness has spread and
taken power—a theme very similar to Giulio
Questi’s extraordinary, if unclassifiable, Arcana
(172).8
Coming at the end of a movie so languidly
paced and suggestive, the climactic cannibal
feast is a punch in the stomach, incredibly raw
and intense: the woman’s trunk is pulled open
and eviscerated, and the sect members (all wear-
ing transparent raincoats: yet another of Barilli’s
surreal visual touches) take turn grabbing
chunks of raw meat which they take away and
devour in a frenzy, like wild animals before a
dead prey. After the cannibals’ fury has been
satiated, the director dedicates the last shot to
Silvia’s desecrated, lifeless body—alone in a cold
silent crypt, forgotten by all, and yet still worthy
of the filmmaker’s pity.
Il profumo della signora in nero had some
trouble with the board of censors, which re-
quested a number of cuts (for a total of 8 metres:
16 seconds overall) before granting a V.M.18 rat-
ing; however, one member voted against the
granting of the visa to the film. The cuts per-
tained to the love scene between Silvia and Ro-
berto, a sex encounter between Silvia’s mother
and her lover, and Nicola’s attempted rape of Sil-
via. Interestingly, the board did not have any-
thing to object on the graphic gore of the can-
nibalistic ending (passingly referred to as “rather
macabre”). As the director admitted, “it was the
ending that sold the film abroad.”
NoTeS
1. Roberto Curti, “Francesco Barilli Interview. Cinema
Between Brush Strokes,” Offscreen Vol. 15, issue 12, Decem-
ber 2011. (http://offscreen.com/view/francesco_barilli_
interview.). Unless noted otherwise, Barilli’s statements
come from this interview.
2. David Punter, The Literature of Terror. Volume 1: The
Gothic Tradition (London: Routledge, 16– 2014), 138.
3. According to he Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on July 16, 173.
4. Punter, The Literature of Terror. Volume 1, 123.
5. Miriam was adapted for the small screen by Biagio
Proietti, as part of the TV series Il fascino dell’insolito, and
broadcast in 180.
6. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
(New York: Stein & Day, 160), 452.
7. The catacombs’ entrance shown in the film is actually
the train station at the central Piazzale Flaminio, yet an-
other example of Barilli’s extraordinary eye for locations.
8. Written by Questi and Franco Arcalli, Arcana is the
surreal tale of a Southern woman (Lucia Bosé) who earns
her living as a modern day witch in Milan, exploiting peo-
ple’s superstition for commercial purposes, with the help
of her son (Francesco Degli Esposti) who actually has su-
pernatural powers. While not a Gothic horror film per se—
and therefore not discussed in this volume—Arcana paints
an impressive portrait of the irrational roots beneath
modern-day urban society, and the eruption of the irra-
tional, removed or forgotten with the end of the rural cul-
ture and the abandonment of traditions, but ready to
return to the surface with disturbing effects. Badly distrib-
uted at the time of its release, it quickly disappeared, badly
damaging Questi’s career as a director.
9. “I have a story for you: there was a big calf liver, this
big [mimes]. One of the extras was despised by the whole
crew because he was a Fascist; anyway, he just wanted to
stay on shot whenever possible. I called him and said: ‘Lis-
ten, why don’t you eat this big liver right in front of the
camera? I’m going to make a close-up of you!’ [laughs]
And he did eat that raw liver, all of it! Just to have a close-
up in the movie! However, I had to cut that shot—it was
just too gory.” Curti, “Francesco Barilli interview.”
Terror! Il castello delle donne male-
dette (Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks)
D: Robert H. Oliver. SC: Mark Smith,
William Rose, Roberto Spano [and Mario
Francini, uncredited]; DOP: Mario Mancini
(Technicolor); M: Marcello Gigante (Ed. MAS];
E: Enzo Micarelli; PD: Mario Ciccarella; MU:
Giovanni Amadei; Hair: Stefano Trani; AD:
Renzo Girolami; C: Emilio Varriano; AC: Gian-
lorenzo Battaglia; PM: E. Rancati; SD: Giuseppe
Pappalardo; SOE: Tonino Cacciottolo; Mix: Re-
nato Cadueri; SS: Marina Grimaldi. Cast:
Rossano Brazzi (Count Frankenstein), Michael
Dunn (Genz), Edmund Purdom (Prefect), Gor-
don Mitchell (Igor), Loren [William Russell]
Ewing (Goliath), Alan Collins [Luciano Pigozzi]
(Hans), Xiro Papas [Ciro Papa] (Kreegin), Si-
mone Blondell [Simonetta Vitelli] (Maria), Eric
Mann (Eric), Robert Marx (Koerner), Laura De
Benedittis (Valda), Boris Lugosi [Salvatore Bac-
caro] (Ook), Christiane Royce [Christiane
Rücker] (Krista), Margaret Oliver (Paisan
Woman), Alessandro Perrella (Doctor), Bob Fiz
[Roberto Fizz] (Paisan), Annamaria Tornello
(Raped Girl), Aristide Caporale (Gravedigger),
Nicola Palumbo (Agent), Mike Monty (Paisan),
Rossella Ferrero (Paisan Woman), Ozzie Raghet
(Almut), Walter Saxer (Warner). PROD: Dick
Randall and Oscar Brazzi for Classic Film In-
ternational; EP: G. Robert Straub; PM: Ciro
Papa; PS: Sergio Merolle, Emilio Cannaroli; PSe:
Egidio Ippoliti, Rossella Ferrero. Country: Italy.
Filmed at Borgo di Castello di Rota and Palazzo
Patrizi, Castel Giuliano, Bracciano (Rome). Run-
 1974: Terror!
ning time: 8 minutes (m. 2468). Visa n. 63500
(11.17.173); Rating: V.M.18. Release dates: 2.1.
174 (Italy); January 175 (U.S.A.); Distribution:
Nettunia Film (Italy); Aquarius Releasing / Box-
office International Pictures (U.S.A.). Domestic
gross: 51,004,000 lire. Home video: Something
Weird (DVD, U.S.A). Also known as: Terror Cas-
tle; The House of Freaks; The Monsters of Dr.
Frankenstein; Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks
(U.S.A.); Frankenstein’s Castle (U.K.), Le château
de l’horreur (France); El castillo de las mujeres
malditas (Spain); Die Leichenfabrik des Dr.
Frankenstein (West Germany); Frankensteinin
hirviöt (Finland).
Note: In the English version, Mitchell,
Ewing, Collins and Papas are listed as “Franken-
steins Monsters.” In the Italian version, Chris-
tiane Rücker is credited as “Krista Roker.”
In the countryside near Count Frankenstein’s
castle, a caveman who has survived from the pre-
historic age is captured and killed by the villagers.
Frankenstein uses the body to test his theories on
re-animation: after conducting a brain transplant,
the scientist brings the creature (whom he rebap-
tizes Goliath) back to life and keeps it concealed
in a cell. But Frankenstein’s freakish assistants
Igor, Genz and Hans, who provide the Count with
the dead bodies for his experiments, are jealous
of the new creature. Mary, Frankenstein’s niece,
arrives at the castle with her boyfriend Eric and
her friend Krista for a brief stay. Genz discovers
Ook, another Neanderthal man who is mysteri-
ously alive and well, and uses him to kidnap the
beautiful and uninhibited Krista, who has a liai-
son with the Count and has kindled a glimmer of
passion in Goliath’s brain. The creature escapes
and kills both the Count and Ook; the police guide
the furious farmers to the castle, and the crowd
sets the place on fire…
One of the trashiest horror movies pro-
duced in Italy in the 170s, Terror! Il castello delle
donne maledette bears the mark of the notorious
Dick Randall, real name Irving Reuben (126–
16), an extraordinary globetrotter producer
responsible for such trashy low-budget exploita-
tion flicks as The Wild, Wild World of Jayne
Mansfield (168, Charles W. Broun Jr., Joel Holt,
Arthur Knight), Lo strangolatore di Vienna and
Casa d’appuntamento. For about a decade, start-
ing from the late 160s, Randall was based in
Rome, where he produced such titles as Quante
volte … quella notte, L’amante del demonio, and
this bizarre variation on the Frankenstein story.
As with many other Randall productions,
135
the details surrounding the making of Terror! Il
castello delle donne maledette are shady if not
contradictory. For a long time the movie has
been the object of an argument over the true
identity of the director, Robert H. Oliver, which
is definitely more thrilling than the movie itself.
Over the years different conjectures have piled
up. Some hypothesized it was a pseudonym for
the Spanish actor Ramiro Oliveros, whereas oth-
ers claimed that the name concealed the Italian
co-producer Oscar Brazzi, or the director of
photography Mario Mancini (who signed the
equally obscure Frankenstein ’80). Another
school of thought credited the direction either
to Randall himself, or to co-scriptwriter William
Rose, another American in Rome, and the di-
rector of an elusive giallo-horror hybrid of un-
certain origin, La casa della paura (a.k.a. The
Girl in Room 2A, 174), also produced by Ran-
dall.
The enigma seemed to be solved by a paper
from the Ministry of Spectacle, deposited at
SIAE (Italy’s copyright collecting agency) on
April 21, 176, which certifies that “Robert H.
Oliver” is a pseudonym of Mario Mancini, but
direct testimonials point otherwise. According
to Gordon Mitchell, “The director was Robert
Oliver, an American, whose wife later married
Sinatra!”1 Actress Simone Blondell recalls:
“What I remember is that the director spoke En-
glish, he wasn’t Italian.”2 Assistant cameraman
Gianlorenzo Battaglia flatly denies it was Man-
cini directing, but adds: “I believe the American
director left the movie because of disagreements
with the producer, and so Mario finished it on
his own. I’m not 100% sure though!”3
The U.S. born Robert Harrison Oliver was
in fact the director of a dubbing facility in Mu-
nich, and had a past as a functionary of the Miss
Universe beauty contest. He was indeed the ex-
husband of Barbara Marx, who later became
Frank Sinatra’s fourth and last wife, and he was
a good friend of Randall’s. Oliver was also cred-
ited as co-producer (together with Robert
Straub, Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette’s
executive producer) and co-scriptwriter (with
Dag Solis) in the U.S. version of Lo strangolatore
di Vienna, The Mad Butcher.4 Which might pos-
sibly mean that the document deposited at SIAE
would be the umpteenth trick in order to obtain
Italian nationality and law benefits, unless
Mancini’s role on the set was more like a co-
director of sorts. Incidentally, Mancini was an-
other recurring presence in Randall productions,
136 1974: Terror!
and served as d.o.p. on Eva, la venere selvaggia
(168, Roberto Mauri), Casa d’appuntamento
and The Girl in Room 2A.
That said, the movie’s rowdy tone bears
Randall’s signature, and clearly differentiates the
result from Italian Gothic, past and contempo-
raneous. The story (which moves from a prem-
ise that brings to mind Freddie Francis’ Trog,
170) apes Universal Gothic, with a monster
mash not dissimilar from those found in Erle C.
Kenton’s films or, without moving too back-
wards in time, in certain adult horror comics of
the decade. In fact, the horror icons are placed
in a context that openly aims at sexploitation,
not unlike the American homologous works
Italian poster for Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette (1974). Art an Italian one: in Franken-
by Carlo Alessandrini a.k.a. “Aller”.
produced by Harry Novak around the same
time. The proximity to Z-grade U.S. horror flicks
can be found in the predictable references to the
ever-present theme of Frankenstein as the mod-
ern Prometheus (“Somehow it doesn’t seem to
be right to fool with the laws of God.” “No, my
dear, I disagree: science gives privilege to a few
… we must never stop learning. I am sure that
God meant it that way.”). Even the direction’s
pragmatism is at odds with the style of the
Gothic horror films made in Italy during the
same period, which often border on the abstract
and are characterized by resorting to mood and
camera movements.
On top of that, the excessive bawdiness
makes the result closer to
other Randall productions,
such as Lo strangolatore di Vi-
enna or even Casa d’appunta-
mento, which featured for no
apparent reason a Humphrey
Bogart lookalike (Robert Sac-
chi) in the lead. The examples
are countless: Frankenstein’s
constantly horny dwarf assis-
tant (Michael Dunn) gropes
a freshly exhumed female
corpse’s bosom, and shows
caveman Ook (Salvatore Bac-
caro) how to fornicate with an
abducted peasant girl (“Watch
me, I’m going to teach you the
pleasures in life!”); the hunch-
back chef (Ciro Papa) has an
affair with the butler’s (Luci-
ano Pigozzi) wife; and, last but
not least, Frankenstein’s castle
is full of secret peepholes
through which the servants
spy on the beautiful female
guests as they take a bath or
are in intimate conversations
with their boyfriends, just like
in the German sexy pochades
directed by the likes of Franz
Antel.
That the movie was most
likely produced for exporta-
tion, is proven by some blatant
howlers and in-jokes, which
would pass unnoticed to an
American audience but not to
stein’s diary one can spot such
 1974: Terror!
amusing notations as “salutame a soreta” (“Say
hello to your sister for me,” in Neapolitan dia-
lect, with a blatant double meaning) and “un
toast al prosciutto, bacon e wodka (sic!!)” (“A
toast with ham, bacon and vodka”). Someone in
the crew was clearly having lots of fun. What is
more, incongruities abound: 1th century peas-
ants sport blue jeans, and the Creature (Loren
Ewing) wears an embarrassing rubber cap to
simulate the aftermath of cranial surgery.
The cast is every trash connoisseur’s de-
light. Randall and Oscar Brazzi assembled a
mixture of has-beens, exploitation regulars and
out-and-out freaks that must be seen to be be-
lieved. Brazzi managed to get his brother Ros-
sano, far away from the days where he was Italy’s
biggest movie star after Freda’s Aquila nera, to
play Frankenstein. Not the greatest of actors,
Brazzi (who dubs himself in English) defines ri-
diculous with his portrayal of the titular scien-
tist. Gordon Mitchell (as Frankenstein’s manser-
vant Igor) was sneering toward his co-star:
“Brazzi produced the film. His brother Rossano
is the main lead, I had got to know him already
in Gariazzo’s Il giorno del giudizio. There he
played a sheriff, but he resembled just as much
a sheriff as I resemble a pope!”5 Another survivor
of a past glory, Edmund Purdom (a Randall reg-
ular, from L’amante del demonio to Juan Piquer
Simón’s Pieces, 182), is as wooden as ever as the
Prefect.
Alongside the three male leads, Randall
and Brazzi gathered a number of lovely ladies,
headed by the gorgeous blue-eyed Simonetta
Vitelli, a.k.a. Simone Blondell, and a quartet of
supporting actors that justified the movie’s
American title, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks:
the omnipresent face of Italian Gothic, Luciano
Pigozzi; the bald, hulking Ciro Papa (credited
as the author of the script kept at the CSC library
under the title Il castello della paura 6); the di-
minutive Michael Dunn, who had moved from
Off-Broadway stage plays and auteur cinema to
Z-grade exploitation; and the ace in the hole,
“Boris Lugosi” a.k.a. Salvatore Baccaro as the
neanderthal man Ook, complete with club and
fur coat à la Fred Flintstone.
A hairy, rugged, Lombrosian extra who
popped up in down-at-heel productions, Bac-
caro was born in 132 in the Molise village of
Roccamandolfi. He was an ex-florist who worked
near the Incir-De Paolis studios in Rome and
137
was noticed by some casting director for his pe-
culiar appearance. His misshapen, almost animal-
like features, characterized by a heavy jaw,
jutting nose, low protruding brow and hands
with big fingers, caused by acromegaly, made
him ideal for outlandish roles, such as the titular
character in La bestia in calore, where he used
the pseudonym Sal Boris. Baccaro played in over
60 movies, the last being Dino Risi’s Dagobert
(184) before his untimely death in 184, after a
thyroid surgery. He was only 52.
Filmed in late 172/early 173,7 Terror! Il
castello delle donne maledette was submitted to
the Italian board of censors in late 173: the Ital-
ian title (“Terror! The Castle of Cursed Women”)
was an infelicitous choice, since Don Weis’ Ghost
in the Invisible Bikini (166) had been released
in Italy as Il castello delle donne maledette merely
a couple of years earlier. It predictably earned a
V.M.18 “for the environment of terror and vio-
lence, as well as for the macabre atmosphere in
which the whole story takes place, and finally
because of the abnormality of the characters and
the situation alike,” and was released in early
174 to a well-deserved oblivion. On the con-
trary, it found a minor cult status in the United
States (where it was distributed by Harry Novak)
when it aired on the “Elvira’s Movie Macabre”
series in the early 180s.
NoTeS
1. Christian Kessler, “Maciste und die Spaghetti aus
dem Weltall,” www.christiankessler.de. The German lan-
guage interview was published in a slightly different (and
sometimes not completely faithful) English translation in
the Video Watchdog magazine. Christian Kessler, “Gordon
Mitchell. Atlas in the Land of Cinema,” Video Watchdog
#48, 18, 46. Thanks to Gary Vanisian for the new trans-
lation from the original German text.
2. Simone Blondell, private email with the author, Sep-
tember 2016.
3. Gianlorenzo Battaglia, private email with the author,
September 2016.
4. In this regard, director Guido Zurli commented:
“Who knows! Perhaps [Oliver and Straub] took over later
on, and bought the movie … anything could happen with
Dick Randall (laughs)…. Actually, the story is mine and
the script was written by me and Gicca [author’s note: Enzo
Gicca Palli].” Franco Grattarola, “Intervista a Guido Zurli—
Il dissacratore dei generi,” Cine 70 #10, 2008, 34.
5. Kessler, “Maciste und die Spaghetti aus dem Weltall.”
6. The 114-page long script is copyrighted Classic Film
International (Rome) and dated December 16, 172. Frank-
enstein is misspelled “Frankestein” throughout the script.
7. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on December 18, 172.
138 1975: Il cav. Costante
1975
Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco
ovvero: Dracula in Brianza (Young
Dracula, a.k.a. Dracula in the Provinces)
D: Lucio Fulci. S: Lucio Fulci. SC: Pupi
Avati, Bruno Corbucci, Mario Amendola, Lucio
Fulci; Dial: Enzo Jannacci, Giuseppe Viola;
DOP: Sergio Salvati (Eastmancolor, Staco Film);
M: Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera [Franco Bixio, Fabio
Frizzi, Vince Tempera] (Ed. ZITA); E: Ornella
Micheli; AE: Bruno Micheli; SS: Roberto Gian-
dalia; ArtD: Pier Luigi Basile; CO: Massimo
Lentini; AD: Victor Tourjansky, Giuseppe Pol-
lini; C: Franco Bruni, Enzo Tosi; AC: Maurizio
Lucchini, Bernardo Valli; MU: Maria Luisa Tilli;
Hair: Luisa Piovesan; W: Bertilla Silvestrin; SO:
Mario Ottavi; B: Marco Donati; SP: Gianfranco
Massa; KG: Luciano Micheli: ChEl: Eugenio Rai-
mondi; PM: Duilio Caltabellotta, Mario Gen-
tilini. Cast: Lando Buzzanca (Costante Nicosia),
Rossano Brazzi (Dr. Paluzzi), Sylva Koscina
(Marilù, Costante’s wife), Moira Orfei (Bestia
Assatanata), Christa Linder (Liù Pederzoli), John
Steiner (Count Dragulesku), Francesca Romana
Coluzzi (Wanda Torsello), Grazia Di Marzà
(Prostitute), Antonio Allocca (Peppino the
Hunchback), Grazia Spadaro (Aunt Maria),
Franco Nebbia (Meniconi), Michele Cimarosa
(Salvatore Cannata), Giampaolo Rossi (Brother-
in-Law), Ciccio Ingrassia (Salvatore, the Wizard
of Noto), Valentina Cortese (Olghina Franchetti),
Franca Martelli (Gia), Mauro Vestri (TV Journal-
ist), Ugo Fangareggi (Battai, the Count’s servant),
Carlo Bagno (Head Worker), Renato Malavasi
(Arnaldo), John Bartha (Concierge), Barbara
Musci (Georgia), Gianfranco Bocca (Colombo),
Belsana Arfenone (Nicosia’s assistant); uncred-
ited: Dori Dorika (Night Club singer), Ilona
Staller (Janka), Aldo Valletti (Plane passenger).
PROD: Coralta Cinematografica (Rome); PM:
Alfonso Donati; UM: Ennio Di Meo, Franco
Mancarella, Romualdo Buzzanca. Country: Italy.
Filmed in Brianza, Merano and at R.P.A. Elios
Studios (Rome). Running time: 101 minutes (m.
2768). Visa n. 67018 (8.31.175); Rating: V.M.14.
Release dates: 8.31.175; Distribution: Titanus.
Domestic gross: 40,484,803 lire. Also known as:
Muérdame Sr. Conde (Spain; 8.31.181).
Note: the songs Vampiro S.p.A. and Lady
Pamela (Nebbia-Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera) are sung
by Franco Nebbia.
Costante Nicosia, a Sicilian immigrant who
made money in Brianza with his brand of tooth-
paste, leaves for a business trip to Romania.
There, he is seduced and vampirized by Count
Dragulesku, a descendant of Count Dracula.
Upon returning to Italy, Costante finds himself
attracted to blood, and is afraid he has become a
homosexual. After unsuccessfully attempting to
get rid of the curse he believes his relatives have
put on him, Nicosia undergoes a series of sexual
encounters, in the hope of finding a cure to his
state. Meanwhile he becomes more and more de-
manding toward his employees, and finally has a
brilliant idea to satisfy his thirst: he founds a
blood bank and has his workers give their blood
for money…
Right after wrapping principal shooting on
the Western I 4 dell’Apocalisse (175), Lucio Fulci
started working on a new project, of a very dif-
ferent genre: a return to comedy, mixed with a
demystifying approach to horror clichés, in the
vein of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Shot in
eight weeks between March and April 175, Il
cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco ovvero: Dracula
in Brianza1 (a nod to Lina Wertmüller’s habit of
using similarly endless titles) starred Lando Buz-
zanca, in his third and last collaboration with
the director.
The script sports an array of diverse names:
Bruno Corbucci and Mario Amendola were a
well-oiled team of comedy scriptwriters, whereas
Pupi Avati was gradually finding his way as a
filmmaker with such peculiar and grotesque
comedies as La mazurka del barone, della santa
e del fico fiorone and Bordella (shot in 175 but
released in early 176). On top of that the dia-
logue was revised in order to make it more spon-
taneous, especially regarding the use of North-
ern lingo, by Enzo Jannacci and Giuseppe
“Beppe” Viola, respectively a popular songwriter
whose ironic demeanor had characterized his
acting stints, such as in Marco Ferreri’s out-
standing absurdist drama L’udienza (172), and
a sports journalist and humorist. In addition
to co-authoring a number of songs—includ-
ing Tira a campa,’ included in the score of
Lina Wertmüller’s Pasqualino settebellezze
(176)—Jannacci and Viola had worked together
on a number of scripts, most notably Mario
Monicelli’s Romanzo popolare (174), starring
 1975: Il cav. Costante 13

Ugo Tognazzi, Ornella Muti and

Michele Placido.
Pupi Avati’s contribution to
the screenplay has been wildly
overestimated over the years,
much to Fulci’s chagrin. The di-
rector was adamant that Avati
wrote only a few pages, namely
the trip to Romania (but not the
encounter in the night club,
which Fulci claimed as his own
creation). Even thought the
theme of sexual ambiguity and
grotesque eroticism are the core
of many Avati films, from Bor-
della (about a male prostitute
brothel) to La casa dalle finestre
che ridono, the many allusions to
homosexuality—from Costante’s
dance with a male customer in
the nightclub to his sexual en-
counter with the bisexual Count
Dragulesku and his effeminate
male friend Sperandeu, and
Nicosia’s subsequent fear of hav-
ing become “a fag”—must be as-
cribed to Fulci himself, who had
developed the theme of the dis-
covery of one’s own sexual am-
biguity in one of his best thrill-
ers, Una lucertola con la pelle di
donna.
It is interesting to note how Italian poster for Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco ovvero: Dracula
the Italian farces on vampirism in Brianza (1975). Art by Averardo Ciriello.
adopted a political approach.
Whereas Tempi duri per i vampiri (15, Steno) producing the toothpaste “Pasta del Colonnello”
depicted the bloodsucker as a remnant of the (a nod to one of Italy’s most popular toothpaste
past in a country undergoing an economic brands, “Pasta del Capitano”), but is still strug-
boom, Fulci’s film analyzes the master/workers gling to make himself accepted as “one of them.”
dynamics, in the wake of the 170 “Statuto dei Therefore, he is an outsider well before becom-
lavoratori” (Workers’ Statute), which finally reg- ing a vampire; like Robert Neville in Richard
ulated labor law and established rights never be- Matheson’s I Am Legend, he is the different one,
fore codified, after the strikes, struggles and the anomaly, despite his attempts at hiding his
protests that characterized the previous decades origin.
and especially the “hot autumn” of 16. On the On the one hand, the script plays on the
other hand, …Hanno cambiato faccia had also stereotype of the virile Southerner, Buzzanca’s
analyzed vampirism as a metaphor for power, pièce de resistance; on the other, it investigates
in the light of Marcuse’s work, with a bleak hu- the individual’s fear of the way society perceives
morous vein. his image, and the attempts at becoming one and
This time, however, and with quite a smart the same with the moral (and judging) majority,
move, the audience is invited to identify with in a similar way as the previous Fulci-Buzzanca
the vampire. Costante Nicosia is a successful comedy All’onorevole piacciono le donne (172),
businessman, an industrialist who has emigrated where the focus was on Catholic sin. In Co-
from Sicily and made a fortune in the North by stante’s case, his drama rises from a duality that
140 1975: Il cav. Costante
recalls such Victorian characters as Dr. Jekyll.
His attempts at integration range from aesthetic
(he dresses in fashion and inhabits a house fur-
nished with stylish, modern objects, in stark
contrast with the old-fashioned apartment
where his relatives live) to behavioral ones (he
tries to move and speak like Brianza people, and
gives generous tips like he believes the rich do),
and even involve the sexual sphere: like his
Northern industrialist peers, Nicosia keeps (and
maintains economically) a lover, whom he treats
as his own property. And yet he cannot detach
from his roots—the burden of family, the cult
of the deceased, the superstitious beliefs—which
haunt him and come out at every step, prevent-
ing his mimesis with the surrounding world and
society.
The first part plays like an amusing modern-
day variation of Jonathan Harker’s trip to Tran-
sylvania in Bram Stoker’s novel. For one thing,
here it is Costante who acts like Stoker’s super-
stitious peasants, giving way to his Southern
good luck practices, such as carrying horseshoes
in the pocket and spreading salt in the aircraft’s
pilot cabin. The view of Communist Romania
is as funny as it is bleak: Costante has brought a
suitcase full of female garments, in the hope of
seducing the local beauties, but finds himself in
a squalid night club whose only other occupant
is another Italian traveler (Franco Nebbia), sip-
ping mineral water with bicarbonate (the only
drinkable item in the place), who has been stuck
in the country for weeks because of the local bu-
reaucracy and is reduced to wearing the female
panties he, like Costante, had hoped to trade for
sex. The scene in which the two men, out of res-
ignation, dance together in the deserted dance
floor, surrounded by rapacious waiters, is a
priceless moment which sums up the union of
bitter humor and socio-antropological observa-
tion of the best Commedia all’italiana.
When Costante arrives at the castle of
Count Dracula,2 he becomes a willing victim of
power’s blandishments. The Count (John Steiner)
welcomes him in the company of three gorgeous
and very uninhibited girls (one of them is an
uncredited Ilona Staller) and treats him to a
“Transylvanian dinner” whose participants have
to attend in the nude. At the end of the ensuing
orgy, an imbibed Costante, surrounded by
naked women, yells “Forza Italia!”—the name
of the political party founded by Silvio Berlus-
coni in 14. It is an unintentionally prophetic
bit that predates the notorious orgies hosted by
the septuagenarian Prime Minister during his
term in office. Interestingly, in a neat reversal of
conventions, it is in his beloved Northern Italy
that Nicosia is surrounded by monsters and
freaks, from the hunchback employee Peppino
to his octogenarian virgin maid, whereas the
Count—partly modeled upon the character of
the homosexual Count von Krolock in The Fear-
less Vampire Killers—is an effete character ac-
companied by beauties.
The vampirization—which is the result of
Costante’s homosexual seduction on the part of
the Count—has a weird effect on Nicosia. At
first he is scared of the implications, and his
quest (devoted to check his own masculinity)
has the effect of making him aware of the real
nature of the world and people who surround
him. As a capitalist vampire, once he has become
aware of his thirst for blood, he also becomes a
ruthless businessman, what he always wanted
to be but failed to because of his good-natured
Southern essence.
Eventually Costante detaches from his
roots: he stops giving away money to to Peppino,
who allegedly brought him good luck, fires his
good-for-nothing relatives, rejects the trade
union requests (all of them bloodsucking para-
sites in their own terms), and eventually draws
blood from his employees with the excuse of a
blood bank, thus exploiting them twice, both as
workers for his enterprise profit, and as human
beings for their blood. As in Jean-Paul Sartre’s
short story The Childhood of a Leader, where
Lucien’s one-time sexual encounter with a ho-
mosexual poet is followed by him becoming a
powerful member of the élite, Cavalier Costante
Nicosia has finally become what he so desper-
ately pursued. The transformation is complete.
Considering that Buzzanca had played a
trade unionist in Luciano Salce’s excellent po-
litical comedy Il sindacalista (172), Fulci’s film
offers a pointed commentary of class struggle
through the director’s mordant anarchist vision.
After Tempi duri per i vampiri’s Dracula cha cha,
it is up to yet another song to function as a sign
of the times: sung by Franco Nebbia, Vampiro
S.p.A. has lyrics that go as follows, “I have a slo-
gan that works in any circumstance / give blood
to your master, don’t let him without it by any
chance.” The director’s world view is as grim as
the one he depicts in his horror movies: in a so-
ciety where everyone is trying to suck each
other’s blood, only the ruthless survive—and
rule. The ending (which includes a nod to Rose-
 1975: Frankenstein
mary’s Baby, as Nicosia finds out that his new-
born son in a pram sports vampire fangs) pokes
bleak fun at the so-called “Compromesso storico”
(Historical compromise), the much rumored al-
liance between the Italian Communist Party
(PCI) and the Christian Democrat party (DC)
that was in talks since 173 and eventually be-
came factual in 176, and which led to an in-
crease in far-left terrorism, resulting in the kid-
napping and killing of DC leader and Prime
Minister Aldo Moro. In Fulci’s film, Nicosia per-
fects a “union compromise”: the workers give
their blood in exchange for a modest rise in their
pay, and the capitalist exploits them even more
than before. Power always triumphs in the end.
The gags are aplenty, and diverse in range.
Some are clever jokes (the association between
vampirism and a dental hygiene product is quite
amusing in retrospect), others are more blatantly
at the service of Buzzanca, who is typecast in
one of his usual virile Southern characters, and
focus on Nicosia’s superstition, a hint of his diffi-
culty in blending with the North and a revealing
sign of his Southern roots. Buzzanca is not a
subtle performer, but his energy is remarkable
in his duets with both Rossano Brazzi (well-cast
as Nicosia’s physician-cum-confidant) and Cic-
cio Ingrassia. The latter duo strike sparks on
screen in Ingrassia’s only scene in the movie, as
the “Wizard of Noto,” a charlatan psychic who
is supposed to cure Nicosia from the evil eye—
a moment constructed like one of those old
beautiful sketches that Fulci used to pen for co-
medians like Totò or Franco & Ciccio, allowing
the actors to rely on improvisation. As in Non si
sevizia un paperino, magic is seen as the expres-
sion of a backward culture, but played for
laughs. Fulci even throws in some in-jokes, such
as the scene where Costante is upset by the sight
of his basketball team players taking a shower
in the locker room, with close-ups of the naked
male butts, an ironic reference to All’onorevole
piacciono le donne.
Despite the presence of some luscious-
looking women, the sex scenes are played for
grotesque effect, from Nicosia’s assault on his
wife’s (Sylva Koscina) buttocks (a moment fea-
tured prominently in the Italian locandina), to
his disastrous encounter with a nymphomaniac
upper class man-eater (Valentina Cortese) who
craves sex with “monsters” and recites verses of
D’Annunzio’s poems; lastly, and more memo-
rably, the protagonist visits a monstrous domi-
natrix (Moira Orfei), whose elderly husband acts
141
as a butler and sex slave of sorts, preparing
coffee for the guests and boiling hot water for
extreme S&M practices.
With a total box-office grossing of about
one billion lire, Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoni-
aco ovvero: Dracula in Brianza did not do as well
as expected. Buzzanca was a declining name by
then, and homemade horror spoofs did not en-
counter the audience’s favor, as proven also by
Armando Crispino’s Frankenstein all’italiana.
However, it remained one of the director’s fa-
vorite films.
NoTeS
1. The working title was Il cavaliere del lavoro Costante
Bosisio indemoniato, ovvero Dracula in Brianza.
2. The scenes in the castle were filmed near Merano, in
Trentino Alto-Adige.
Frankenstein all’italiana—Prendimi,
straziami, che brucio di passion!
(Frankenstein Italian Style—Take Me, Tor-
ture Me, as I Am Burning with Passion!)
D: Armando Crispino. S and SC: Massimo
Franciosa, Luisa Montagnana; DOP: Giuseppe
Aquari (Telecolor); M: Stelvio Cipriani, con-
ducted by the author (Ed. C.A.M.); E: Angela
Cipriani; ArtD: Mario Molli; CO: Adriana
Spadaro; MU: Pino Ferranti; Hair: Corrado
Cristofari; AD: Franco Longo; C: Carlo Aquari;
AC: Filippo Neroni, Maurizio Mascoli; AE: Tina
Mastrolillo, Claudio Orecchia; Construction
managers: Alfredo Talusi, Alfredo Pacini; As-
stArtD: Mauro Passi; SE: Sergio Chiusi, Basilio
Patrizi; SO: Goffredo Potier; SOE: Luciano
Anzellotti; Mix: Romano Pampalone; SS: Flavia
Vanin. Cast: Aldo Maccione (The Monster), Gi-
anrico Tedeschi (Dr. Frankenstein), Ninetto
Davoli (Igor), Jenny Tamburi [Luciana Tam-
burini] (Janet McLynne), Anna Mazzamauro
(Maud), Lorenza Guerrieri (Alice), Alvaro Vitali
(Priest), Alessandra Vazzoler (Singer at wed-
ding), Aldo Valletti (Wedding guest); uncredited:
Alessandro Tedeschi (Wedding guest), Maria
Tedeschi (Wedding guest). PROD: Filiberto
Bandini for R.P.A. S.A.S. (Rome); PM: Claudio
Grassetti; GM: Carlo Cafiero; PSe: Vivien
Boden. Country: Italy. Filmed in Bomarzo
(Viterbo) and at R.P.A. Elios Studios (Rome);
Running time: 6 minutes (m. 2623); Visa n.
6747 (11.1.175); Rating: V.M.14. Release date:
11.23.175; Distribution: Euro International Film.
Domestic gross: 25,863,000 lire. Home video: n.a.
Also known as: Stringimi forte che brucio di
142 1975: Frankenstein
Dr. Frankenstein (Gianrico Tedeschi, left) and the Monster (Aldo Maccione) are about to perform a
transplant in Frankenstein all’italiana (1975).
passione (Italy—Alternate TV title), Franken-
stein a la italiana (Spain), Casanova Franken-
stein (West Germany; 7.23.176), Plus moche que
Frankenstein tu meurs (France).
Dr. Frankenstein returns to his castle with
his fiancée, Janet, but the wedding is interrupted
by the Monster, who wreaks havoc in the place
before falling victim to a rejection crisis. Franken-
stein decides to put him back in shape with the
help of his assistants: Maud, Alice and Igor the
hunchback. The experiment succeeds, but the
Monster flees across the countryside. Upon cap-
turing it, Frankenstein and his assistant discover
that the Monster has an insatiable sexual urge,
and Maud takes advantage of it to satisfy her ap-
petites. Alice (who is in love with Frankenstein)
attempts to have the Monster seduce the still-
virgin Janet, so as to win back the doctor’s heart,
but she ends up raped by the creature instead.
After finding the Monster in Janet’s bed, Franken-
stein decides to perform surgery on his creature
and transplant the latter’s penis onto himself, but
the intervention is a failure, and both are left im-
potent as a result. It will be Igor’s turn to satisfy
the women of the house.
Armando Crispino’s eighth and final film—
in an all-too-brief career that counted among
others the outstanding gialli L’etrusco uccide an-
cora (172) and Macchie solari (175), and the
nunsploitation drama La badessa di Castro
(174)—was commissioned by producer Filib-
erto Bandini, with whom Crispino was working
on a series of TV ads. Originally entitled Frank-
enstein diventa nonno (Frankenstein Becomes
Grandpa), Massimo Franciosa and Luisa Mon-
tagnana’s script was a farce blatantly “inspired”
by Young Frankenstein that ripped off as many
elements as possible from the model.
Despite being largely centered on one of
the recurring gags in Brooks’ film—the mon-
ster’s enormous schwanzstucker—the result is
only mildly vulgar, but more on the side of a
harmless, silly sex farce, with none of the polit-
ical undertones of Lucio Fulci’s Il cav. Costante
Nicosia demoniaco ovvero: Dracula in Brianza.
As noted by Crispino’s biographer Claudio
Bartolini, the director attempted to develop the
humor on three different levels: the verbal gags
range from vulgarity and double-entendres to
more refined “short-circuits between the scien-
 1975: Frankenstein
tist’s words and the images that the camera
brings to our attention,”1 such as the opening
scene where Frankenstein describes the sur-
roundings to Janet: “Sweet country, pleasant
place. Happy people, tied to the land,” under
shots of barren fields populated with skeletons
of peasants and oxes. A second level pertains to
the visual gags, which play on repetition and on
the character’s ineptitude. Bartolini points to a
third level, symbolic comedy based on the mix-
ture of genres, which is “by far the one in which
Crispino is more at ease, thanks to his knowl-
edge of genre cinema…. In the confluence of
genres lies in fact the demystifying strength of
a film which spoofs not only two pre-existing
texts … but a whole production system which,
in 175, had already started to show its cracks,
and toward which Crispino started to express a
severe disillusion.”2
The main problem with the movie is that
most of the gags just don’t work, starting with
the parody of the Gothic imagery and the Frank-
enstein myth, that gives away the sloppiness and
hastiness with which the film was made. The
“castle” is an embarrassing miniature, and the
sets—replete with papier-maché bats on strings,
secret passages and mumbo jumbo lab stuff—
are slapdash. The actors are left to deal with tire-
some vaudeville bits that seemingly go on
forever (the best, or least worse, might be the
breakfast scene, with the Monster hiding under
the table, stealing food, and ogling at legs, with-
out anyone noticing), Addams Family–style vi-
sual puns (such as Frankenstein’s car having a
skeleton as a hood ornament), and a few surreal
bits (Igor purchasing the gallons of blood
needed for Frankenstein’s experiment at a bar
attended by vampires).
As with a number of other farces of the pe-
riod (see for instance Marino Girolami’s 177
World War II spoof Kakkientruppen), Crispino
does not sway away from the macabre and gory,
albeit played for fun, such as a scene where a cat
steals the Monster’s tongue. Another marginally
interesting factor is the use of Bomarzo’s Parco
dei Mostri (seen in Il castello dei morti vivi) in
the scene where the Monster ends up at a pros-
titute’s shack and his “hidden qualities” are re-
vealed.
The cast is oddly assembled: Tedeschi, a
renowned stage actor with a British aplomb,
tries to give as much dignity as he can to his
character, while Maccione, a gifted comedian
who met a certain popularity in France after
143
starring in a couple of films directed by Claude
Lelouch (Le Voyou and L’aventure, c’est l’aven-
ture), is a caricatured monster that pales in com-
parison with Peter Boyle’s creature in Brooks’
film, and Davoli—Pier Paolo Pasolini’s favorite
actor—is miscast as Igor. The charming Jenny
Tamburi and Lorenza Guerrieri are a joy for the
eyes, but are given little to do except looking
great in négligées, whereas Anna Mazzamauro
is less effective than in Luciano Salce’s Fantozzi
(175). Electrician-turned-actor Alvaro Vitali—
a recurring face in Italian erotic comedies of the
decade after his early roles in Fellini’s films—
makes an all-too-brief appearance as a cross-
eyed priest who has trouble picking up com-
munion wafers during Mass. Aldo Valletti (one
of the four libertines in Pasolini’s Salò o le 120
giornate di Sodoma, and an easily recognizable
extra in a number of Italian films of the period)
here is given a few lines and even shows his bare
butt.
Submitted to the board of censors in No-
vember 175, Frankenstein all’italiana had a first,
very brief release at the end of the year and was
immediately withdrawn. It stayed in a limbo for
several months and was re-released in a re-
edited, shortened version in mid–176, after the
producers unsuccessfully attempted to have the
V.M.14 rating revoked, with the title Prendimi,
straziami, che brucio di passion!,3 to poor box-
office performance. The critics were ferocious:
“Eighty minutes of screening, at the average
price of 25 lire a minute. An enormity for this
amateurish display of vaudeville … which came
out last year in only one city. They tucked it away
immediately. Upon watching the new version,
we cannot imagine anything worse.”4
As Jenny Tamburi recalled, “That was a
bloodbath, literally…. It was an amusing film,
and the actors were all very good—Gianrico
Tedeschi was absolutely great—but it just didn’t
do well at the box office, perhaps because it was
badly distributed by Euro International.”5 The
director himself was trenchant about the results:
“Frankenstein all’italiana was undoubtedly a
compromise dictated by necessity, if not a mis-
take. It’s the only one of my films that was born
from a script in which I did not take part at
all…. Honestly I think I can say that the movie
was not completely shameful, at least in the first
part.”6
It was an unexpected and sad endnote to
the filmography of an interesting, eclectic and
often overlooked filmmaker. Crispino was
144 1975: Il medaglione
sucked down by the spreading economic crisis
of Italian cinema, and was not able to make any
more films. This also resulted in the shelving of
the third part in his giallo trilogy, Apparizioni—
originally titled Verrà un demone e avrà occhi
d’argento (There Will Come a Demon and It Will
Have Silver Eyes)—a story that mixed mystery
and supernatural with plenty of very violent and
gory scenes: it reached an advanced pre-
production stage in late 176/early 177 before
being aborted. Crispino died in 2003.
NoTeS
1. Claudio Bartolini, Macchie solari. Il cinema di Ar-
mando Crispino (Milan: Bloodbuster 2013), 17.
2. Ibid., 181.
3. A TV print carries yet another alternate title,
Stringimi forte che brucio di passione.
4. M. Po. [Maurizio Porro], “Mostruosa creatura,” Cor-
riere della Sera, June 16, 176. Incidentally, the article mis-
spells the title of the rerelease as Prendimi, saziami che bru-
cio di passione.
5. Gomarasca and Pulici, 99 donne, 14.
6. Bartolini, Macchie solari, 184.
Il medaglione insanguinato (Perché?!)
(The Night Child, a.k.a. The Cursed Medal-
lion)
D: Massimo Dallamano. S: Franco Marotta,
Massimo Dallamano, Laura Toscano. SC: Anto-
nio Troisio, Raoul Katz, Tonino Cervi; DOP:
Franco Delli Colli (Eastmancolor, Telecolor); M:
Stelvio Cipriani (Ed. Grandi Firme della Can-
zone); E: Antonio Siciliano; PD: Luciano Puc-
cini; CO: Liliana Galli; AD: Franco Cirino;
2ndAD: Riccardo Sesani; AsstD: Raffaele Do-
nato; C: Arcangelo Lannutti; AC: Giancarlo Gi-
annesi, Enrico Priori; APD: Pasquale Germano;
MU: Dante Trani; Hair: Rosa Luciani; AE:
Franca Silvi, Giuseppe Cino, Ugo Morelli; SO:
Luciano Wellish [Welisch]; B: Armando Bon-
dani; SP: Paul Ronald; SS: Beatrice Banfi; Mix:
Franco Ancillai. Optical effects: Biamonte-
Cinegroup; Painting: Antonello Geleng. Cast:
Richard Johnson (Michael Williams), Joanna
Cassidy (Joanna Morgan), Evelyne Stewart [Ida
Galli] (Jill Perkins), Nicoletta Elmi (Emily
Williams / Emilia), Edmund Purdom (The Doc-
tor), Riccardo Garrone (Police Inspector), Dana
Ghia (Emily’s Mother), Eleonora Morana
(Countess’ Maid), Lila Kedrova (Countess Cap-
pelli); uncredited: Aristide Caporale (Nazareno),
Massimo Dallamano (Man at Airport), Tom Fel-
leghy (Michael’s Boss at BBC). PROD: Fulvio
Lucisano, William Reich for Italian International
Film, Magdalena Produzione (Rome); GM: Al-
fredo Nicolai; PS: Michele Germano, Claudio
Cuomo; PSe: Giuseppe Ercolani; AP: Raffaele
Donato; ADM: Piero Speziali, Claudio Lazzari.
Country: Italy. Filmed in Spoleto (Perugia), Villa
Parisi (Frascati), Palazzo Chigi (Ariccia) and
London, and at Safa-Palatino Studios (Rome).
Running time: 5 minutes (m. 2466). Visa n.
6638 (4.17.175); Rating: V.M.18. Release dates:
5.22.175 (Italy); 3.176 (U.S.A.); Distribution:
I.I.F. Domestic gross: 178,075,227 lire. Also
known as: El medallón ensangrentado (Spain);
Emilie, l’enfant des ténèbres; Possédée (France).
Still upset by the death of his wife, who
plunged in flames from a window of their house,
TV documentarian Michael Williams leaves from
London to Spoleto, Italy with his little daughter
Emily and the nanny, Jill Perkins, to shoot a movie
on the presence of the devil in art. He is par-
ticularly interested in a painting kept in an 18th
century villa where a tragic event happened two
hundred years earlier. The painting—which
reproduces a scene eerily similar to the end of
William’s wife—is said to be the work of Satan.
Helped by the beautiful Joanna, with whom he
starts a relationship, Michael starts working on
the documentary, but finds out that a technical
flaw has ruined the footage that portrays the
painting. Against the advice of the elderly countess
Cappelli, who implores him not to deal with that
cursed item, Williams dedicates himself to his
work undaunted, but his skepticism will have
tragic consequences: Jill, who is unhappily in love
with him, is murdered, and Joanna almost ends
up dead too. It turns out that Emily, who is mor-
bidly attached to her father, is the reincarnation
of the little girl whose end is depicted in the paint-
ing…
Although often superficially associated
with the thread inspired by (or ripping off) The
Exorcist—a comparison the movie itself tries to
solicit with a final epigraph quoting none other
than Pope Paul VI, who explicitly mentioned
the devil during a general audience on Novem-
ber 15, 172, claiming: “From some fissure the
smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God….
He is the occult enemy who sows error and dis-
grace in human history”—Massimo Dallamano’s
only out-and-out Gothic film (originally to be
titled La bambina e il suo diavolo [Emily], The
Little Girl and Her Devil—Emily) actually takes
quite a different path from its peers.
Similarly to Marcello Aliprandi’s Un sus-
surro nel buio (176), the movie centers on a re-
 1975: Il medaglione 145

volt of the sons against the fathers, which here Whitmore a merciful incarnation of Death, Dal-
becomes violent and destructive. The script (by lamano leaves poor Emily at the mercy of evil
Dallamano and the husband-and-wife team of forces. Unlike Aliprandi’s film, which plays with
Franco Marotta and Laura Toscano) revolves the indecision between the actual existence of a
around the drama of a little child, Emily (Nico- supernatural presence, Il medaglione insan-
letta Elmi), morbidly jealous of her widower fa- guinato never puts the Fantastic element into
ther, the English film-maker Michael Williams question—as proven by the pleonastic flash-
(Richard Johnson), who has traveled to the Um- backs that identify Emily as the reincarnation
brian town of Spoleto for a documentary about of a witch, another element that draws back to
demonic art and is fascinated by a painting that early Italian Gothic—but uses it in an interesting
is said to have been painted by the devil.1 way, to highlight the sense of inevitability and
In addition to the element of the painting, announced tragedy that looms over the story
and in general of art as a means to let the darker from the early scenes, climaxing in a “downbeat
side of human nature loose, Dallamano depicts double-death tableau recalling the 171 Hammer
the clash between past and present through the film Hands of the Ripper,” as Jonathan Rigby
typically Gothic theme of the traveler in a noted.3 The incestuous implications (which at
foreign land, facing a mystery whose solution times predate Bava’s Shock) are surprisingly dar-
conceals his own fate, not dissimilarly to Pupi ing for today’s standards, and were the main
Avati’s masterful La casa dalle finestre che ridono. reason behind the V.M.18 rating on the part of
The script also echoes early classics such as the Italian Board of Censors, although the final
Mario Soldati’s Malombra (142),
openly quoted in the scene where
Countess Cappelli (Lila Kedrova)
sees Emily’s ghost play the piano
and hide her love letters inside it, as
Marina di Malombra’s ancestor Ce-
cilia did.
Debatably described by some
as “part Bava, part Freud,”2 Il me-
daglione insanguinato actually em-
ploys the style and language of
melodrama—soft-focus images, fig-
urative mannerisms, tourist foot-
age—and comes off like a perverted
rereading of the contemporaneous
tearjerkers centered on unhappy or
sick children, such as L’ultima neve
di primavera (173, Raimondo Del
Balzo), Il venditore di palloncini
(174, Mario Gariazzo) and Bianchi
cavalli d’agosto (175, Raimondo Del
Balzo), all of them starring the
blond Renato Cestié. In many ways,
Nicoletta Elmi was the dark half of
the doomed kids played by Cestié,
and her eerie looks, her red hair and
subtly malevolent freckled features
made her the ideal choice in a num-
ber of gialli and horror movies made
in those years.
Whereas Il venditore di pal-
loncini embraced a metaphysical ap-
proach to the tale, by making the Italian poster for Il medaglione insanguinato (Perché?!) (1975).
balloon vendor played by James Art by Tino Avelli.
146 1975: Le orme
epigraph introduces a blatant morality warn-
ing.
Formally, Il medaglione insanguinato is an
accomplished film, like all of Dallamano’s works.
Franco Delli Colli’s cinematography is elegant,
with a predominance of cold blues, greys and
violets that emphasize the decadent, autumnal
atmosphere (shooting took place in the fall of
1744), suitably enhanced by Stelvio Cipriani’s
music score. The overall mood brings to mind
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, perhaps the
film’s major influence, as noted also by critics at
the time of its release.5 The director (who briefly
appears in the airport scene, as the man who
comments on Joanna Cassidy’s beauty) makes
ample use of his trademark hand-held long
takes, achieving dynamic results, and empha-
sizing the beautiful Umbrian settings, such as
Spoleto and the nearby monumental Ponte delle
Torri; in an early scene Dallamano even uses
Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Bur-
ghers of Calais,” set in London, to introduce the
first flashback, cutting from Rodin’s hovering
faces to the angry mob that populate Emily’s vi-
sions—a testimony to the director’s eye for keen
visual ideas. The erotic interludes are also han-
dled expertly, showing one of the main charac-
teristics of Dallamano’s cinema, which imbued
such works as Le malizie di Venere (16), Das
Bildnis des Dorian Gray (170), Innocenza e tur-
bamento (174) and La fine dell’innocenza (176).
Still, the apt direction cannot overcome the
script’s many shortcomings and recycled ideas.
The wide-angle flashbacks featuring badly
made-up extras are disappointingly banal, the
mystery subplot about Jill’s murder does not re-
ally hold up, done away as it is with a couple of
rushed explicatory flashbacks, and the dialogue
ranges from banal to grating. Johnson, in full
physical decline, is pathetically miscast as the
love object of three unhappy women.
As a number of Dallamano’s films, Il me-
daglione insanguinato was conceived primarily
for the foreign market6 and benefitted from pop-
ular names in the cast: producer Fulvio Lu-
cisano’s money allowed for the casting of Rich-
ard Johnson, who had played the lead in Ovidio
Assonitis’ eerie Chi sei? (174), and Joanna Cas-
sidy, seen in Stuart Rosenberg’s The Laughing
Policeman (173) and John Flynn’s The Outfit
(173). The movie was originally released in Italy
as Perché?! (“Why?!,” possibly a nod to Chi sei?)
before reverting to Il medaglione insanguinato,
as proved by the 7" soundtrack record (featuring
Baby Death and Emily’s Studio) released by
Cinevox Records; it did mediocre business in
the director’s home country. It was Dallamano’s
second-to-last movie. He then directed La fine
dell’innocenza and the crime film Quelli della
calibro 38 before his untimely death on Novem-
ber 14, 176, at 5, of a pancreatic tumor.
NoTeS
1. It was actually the work of Antonello Geleng, who
would become one of Italy’s greatest art directors.
2. Calum Waddell, “A fistful of Dallamano,” booklet for
the U.K. DVD of The Night Child released by Arrow.
3. Jonathan Rigby, Euro Gothic. Classics of Continental
Horror Cinema (Cambridge: Signum 2016), 320.
4. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
filming began on October 28, 174.
5. R.P., “Demonio pittore macabro a Spoleto,” Corriere
della Sera, April 25, 175.
6. Some sources list the film as an Italian / British co-
production, but in fact the companies that officially pro-
duced it were Italian.
Le orme (Footprints, a.k.a. Footprints on the
Moon)
D: Luigi Bazzoni. S: from the short story
Las Huellas by Mario Fenelli; SC: Mario Fenelli,
Luigi Bazzoni; DOP: Vittorio Storaro (Techni-
color); M: Nicola Piovani (Ed. Nazional Music);
E: Roberto Perpignani; PD, CO: Pierluigi Pizzi;
MU: Giancarlo Del Brocco; Hair: Iole Cecchini;
AD: Umberto Angelucci; SD: Corrado Ricercato;
C: Enrico Umetelli, Gianfranco Turini; AC:
Giuseppe Alberti, Mauro Marchetti; SP: Agenzia
Pierluigi; AE: Piera Gabutti; 2ndAE: Carlo Bar-
tolucci; Color technician: Ernesto Novelli; MU:
Giancarlo Del Brocco; Hair: Jole Cecchini; SO:
Pietro Spadoni; Mix: Renato Cadueri; SE: Carlo
Ventimiglia; SS: Alma Luzzati; Press attache:
Lucherini-Rossetti-Spinola. Cast: Florinda
Bolkan (Alice Crespi / Alice Campos), Peter
McEnery (Henry), Klaus Kinski (Prof. Black-
mann), Lila Kedrova (Mrs. Helm), Nicoletta
Elmi (Paola Bersel / Paola Burton), Caterina Bo-
ratto (Boutique Owner), John Karlsen (Alfredo
Laurenti / Alfred Lowenthal), Esmeralda Rus-
poli, Evelyn Stewart [Ida Galli] (Mary), Myriam
[Miriam] Acevedo (Alice’s Supervisor), Rosita
Toros [Torosh] (Marie Leblanche), Luigi [An-
tonio] Guerra; uncredited: Franco Magno
(Member of the International Congress), Feri-
dun Çölgeçen (Hotel Concierge). PROD: Lu-
ciano Perugia for Cinemarte S.r.l. (Rome); EP:
Marina Cicogna; PM: Paolo De Andreis; PS:
Alessandro Mattei; PSe: Gabriela Butti; ADM:
 1975: Le orme 147

Fiorella Bologna. Country: Italy.

Filmed in Kemer and Phaselis (Tur-
key), EUR, Rome and at Safa Pala-
tino (Rome). Running time: 6 min-
utes (m. 2620). Visa n. 65760 (12.12.
174); Rating: V.M.14. Release date:
2.1.175; Distribution: Cineriz. Do-
mestic gross: 202,505,676 lire. Also
known as: Primal Impulse (U.S.A.—
video title), Huellas de pisadas en la
luna (Spain; 6.28.178); Spuren auf
dem Mond (West Germany); Mare-
ridt bli’r virkelighed (Denmark);
Mardröm blir verklighet (Sweden);
Slady (Poland); Mardrøm blir virke-
lighet (Norway—video title); Apa-
gogi ston planiti Z (Greece—video
title).
Alice, an interpreter, is haunted
by a recurring nightmare in which an
astronaut is abandoned on the moon
by a scientist named Blackmann—
actually a scene from a science fiction
movie, which she’d seen years before,
“Footprints on the Moon.” Alice is
shocked to find out that she has had
a blackout and does not remember
anything at all about the last two
days. The only clues are a postcard
from a seaside resort named Garma
where she does not remember ever
having been before, a missing earring
and a yellow dress, covered with
blood, that she finds in her closet.
Alice travels to Garma to find out
what has happened. Once there,
everybody seems to know her, and
further clues point out that she
indeed has spent the two days there,
under the fake name Nicole. Alice
meets a little girl named Paola, who
tells her she was looking for a myste-
rious house on an island. Eventually,
Alice finds out that her blackout was
triggered by the memory of an event
in her past, when she was abandoned
by her young lover Henry, which she
connected to the scene of the movie Italian locandina for Le orme (1975).
she saw…
One of Gothic’s fundamental elements is kinds of misadventures, but also the descents
the subjective dimension through which reality into the depths of paranoia and madness of
is filtered: not only the explosions of feelings Edgar Allan Poe’s characters. A famous poem
that characterized the virtuous heroines of by Emily Dickinson reads: “One need not be a
late 18th century novels, the victims of all chamber to be haunted, / One need not be a
148 1975: Le orme
house; / The brain has corridors surpassing /
Material place.”
One of the most interesting and original
variations of the so-called “female Gothic,” re-
visited in a psychoanalytic way, is Luigi Bazzoni’s
Le orme. It is a movie with auteur ambitions,
which only marginally flirts with popular cin-
ema, and does so in a strikingly original way,
bowing only in minimal part to the genre’s con-
ventions, and opting for a style and atmosphere
that are quite different from the paths of Italian
cinema, past and present. Nevertheless, Baz-
zoni’s film is influenced, in its theme and mood,
by the period it belongs to, and falls into the
realm of the “paranoid texts” analyzed by David
Punter.
Similarly to Francesco Barilli’s Il profumo
della signora in nero,1 but with a more subdued
narrative somehow akin to Robert Altman’s Im-
ages, Le orme centers on a contemporary descen-
dant of the Gothic’s fragile heroines, whose ap-
pearance of an independent woman hides a core
of traumas buried in her subconscious. With a
brilliant intuition, Bazzoni evokes the heroine’s
schizophrenia in the shape of snippets from a
black-and-white science fiction B-movie, com-
plete with a mad doctor of sorts (Klaus Kinski,
on screen in the film-within-the-film for a cou-
ple of minutes tops), which gradually takes over
reality, and assumes the traits of a conspiracy
against her.
Both Le orme and Il profumo della signora
in nero give new depth to the theme of the dou-
ble, an embodiment of the “return of the re-
pressed” that haunts the chamber / brain. Flor-
inda Bolkan is an Alice, by name and by fact,
whose uneven, difficult route to fill a hole in her
memory leads to the discovery of her alter ego—
Alice herself, who, wearing a red wig and a yel-
low dress, turns into the unfriendly, elusive
Nicole—whose footprints the heroine retraces,
in one of the film’s many elegant subtexts.
Through the looking glass, Alice comes across
her unresolved trauma, the fear of abandon and
loneliness: the fortress of independence and self-
affirmation she built around herself finally col-
lapses, and her repressed insecurity leads to an
act of violence, just like with Susannah York’s
character at the end of Images.
Paranoid texts are based on the ambiguity
of persecution, and Le orme is no exception. In
the movie’s final scene, Alice is chased and cap-
tured on the beach by two astronauts who in-
congruously appeared there: the sunny shore
turns into the livid lunar surface that haunted
the woman’s dreams. Are they merely mental
projections, or real presences (nurses, police
officers) which the schizophrenic woman asso-
ciates with those in her nightmares? The film
ends enigmatically, with the image of the moon,
a symbolic reference to the heroine’s tormented
duality, while a laconic inscription informs us
that Alice has been locked up in a psychiatric
hospital: like the astronaut in the movie, she has
been abandoned for good, and her life will com-
plete the ending of the film which she missed.
It is a stark and perturbing ending, which, while
stressing the protagonist’s madness, does not
dissolve the tale’s ambiguity.
The script was allegedly based on the short
story Las Huellas, by the Italian-Argentinian
Mario Fenelli, who attended film school in
Rome in the 150s and became close friends
with Manuel Puig, also enrolled at the CSC. He
and Puig wrote two scripts together, but Fenelli
enthusiastically supported Puig’s early writings,
and encouraged him to become a fiction writer
instead of a filmmaker.2 Together with Néstor
Almendros, Severo Sarduy, Juan Goytisolo and
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Fenelli was part of
the group Los Cinco de Oro (“Golden Five”)
which unconditionally supported Puig’s work
for publishing.3 Bazzoni and Fenelli had also col-
laborated on a number of short films, such as Di
domenica (163) and Immagini cortonesi, and on
the director’s giallo, Giornata nera per l’ariete,
based on a novel by D.M. Devine.
Fenelli and Bazzoni scattered the story with
psychoanalytic references (the neuropsychiatric
hospital of Kustnatz, where Alice is confined, is
a reference to the Swiss village of Küsnacht,
where Carl Gustav Jung died), and hinted at a
prominent issue of the period, antipsychiatry.
By comparing Alice’s final recovery into a
mental institution to the fate of the astronaut
left to die on the moon by an evil scientist, the
movie seems to hint at the necessity of a more
humane, empathetic way to cure mentally ill pa-
tients, a theme explored in a direct way in such
works as Nelo Risi’s Diario di una schizofrenica
(168).
The film’s strength lies in its visual choices:
the story takes place between the marble, geo-
metric buildings of Rome’s EUR district and an
elusive Middle-Eastern resort by the sea (the
imaginary Garma, recreated in Turkey), both
poles apart from the usual Gothic settings. And
yet the Mediterranean landscapes of Le orme be-
 1975: Le orme
come a striking catalyst for the typical Gothic
novel material: the journey and the arrival in a
strange (and therefore hostile in itself) land; the
imposing, out of time haunted house, here a di-
lapidated luxury hotel in Liberty style, which
bears traces of the previous, elusive occupant;
the presence of architectural ruins (an ancient
buried village) as a catalyst to repressed memo-
ries and feelings.
Bazzoni employs Vittorio Storaro’s lumi-
nous, gorgeous cinematography—which at
times brings to mind echoes of Resnais’ L’année
dernière à Marienbad—to portray Alice’s mental
void from the very beginning among the square
shapes and the blinding whiteness of her apart-
ment in Rome’s EUR district; the mysterious yel-
low dress stands out like a warning of the
woman’s suppressed desire, in turn opposed to
the warm and exotic Garma. The director here
draws from Sigmund Freud’s famous definition
of the subconscious as “the inner foreign coun-
try” as opposed to reality, the “outer foreign
country.” But the movie deals with other intrigu-
ing suggestions. In addition to Alice’s sexual
trauma, it explores modern-day alienation (see
the protagonist’s work in a highly competitive
environment) and subtly hints at apocalyptic
questions (the congress where Alice works as an
interpreter focuses on the possibility for man to
survive to world annihilation).
Shot in nine weeks between Rome and
Turkey in spring 174,4 Le orme benefits enor-
mously from Florinda Bolkan’s committed
performance as Alice. “It was a fascinating ex-
perience in which I immersed myself psycho-
logically and physically, and I even lost eleven
pounds’ weight,” the actress claimed. “If shoot-
ing hadn’t finished in time, I’d ended up getting
seriously ill. I already lost my sleep. In the end,
it proved that actors’ real nature is masochism.”5
Le orme was Luigi Bazzoni’s fifth and last
feature film as a director. Born in Salsomaggiore
Terme, near Parma, in 12, Bazzoni was the
elder brother of cinematographer and director
Camillo, Vittorio Storaro’s mentor. Formerly an
assistant director to Mauro Bolognini, on such
important works as Il bell’Antonio (160) and La
viaccia (161), during his wavering career Baz-
zoni had touched the mystery with his striking
debut La donna del lago (165, co-directed with
Franco Rossellini) and Giornata nera per l’ariete.
He also directed a couple of odd Westerns,
L’uomo, l’orgoglio e la vendetta (167, a version
of Mérimée’s Carmen starring Franco Nero) and
14
Blu Gang e vissero per sempre felici e ammazzati
(173, starring Jack Palance), that showed what
an interesting and underrated filmmaker he was.
Le orme received critical praise at the time of its
release: the renowned Giovanni Grazzini wrote
that “following Dario Argento’s exploits, Italian
cinema can count on another director who
knows how to make a thriller…. The movie nails
you to the chair, keeps you awake, sows in doubt
and curiosity, and eventually does not make you
regret the time and money spent.”6 However,
with just 202 million grossed, it was a box-office
disappointment.
Bazzoni’s final work was the multimedia
visual-audio event Roma Imago Urbis, which
underwent a sad and paradoxical fate. Con-
ceived in the 180s, it consisted of fifteen films
(one hour each) about Rome as a unique exam-
ple in the history of man, the cradle of modern
civilization and the place where the ideas of
State, religion, church, history and law took
shape; it was developed with the assistance of a
scientific committee (which included film di-
rector Carlo Lizzani and art critic Giulio Carlo
Argan), co-produced by Rai and shot in 24 dif-
ferent countries between 187 and 12. Ennio
Morricone wrote the music and Vittorio Storaro
took care of the cinematography: as Franco Nero
explained, “Vittorio said he’d do the film on one
condition, if they hire Luigi Bazzoni for the en-
tire program.”7 The budget was 3 million euros,
and the project also included a series of mono-
graphs with Storaro’s photographs, printed by
the State Mint. The episode Immortality, which
premiered in New York in 12, was labeled by
the magazine American Cinematographer as a
“beautiful visual poem about the ancient
world.”8 The project was officially premiered in
Italy at Rome’s Pantheon, in 14, in a worldwide
broadcast, at the presence of the then President
of the Italian Republic Oscar Luigi Scalfaro.
Then it disappeared. It resurfaced at the section
of Roman art of the Metropolitan Museum in
New York, but was not broadcast on Italian tel-
evision until April 2012, one month after Baz-
zoni’s death, at the age of 82, in his home village
of Salsomaggiore. One of the few who remem-
bered him was his old friend Francesco Barilli,
in a moving column for the magazine Nocturno
Cinema.
NoTeS
1. Barilli only saw Le orme in 2011, at the Trieste Science
+ Fiction festival: he called it “an intriguing, elegant,
150 1975: La pelle
suggestive film, very courageous and peculiar, very well
shot and with a beautiful photography by Vittorio Storaro.”
Francesco Barlli, “In Nero,” Nocturno Cinema #116, April
2012, 4.
2. Suzanne Jill Levine, Manuel Puig and the Spider
Woman: His Life and Fictions (Madison WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2001), 2.
3. Ibid., 182.
4. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on April 2, 174.
5. Anonymous, “La Bolkan a Milano: ‘Sono maso-
chista,’” Corriere della Sera, January 2, 175.
6. Giovanni Grazzini, “Sulle orme tragiche della memo-
ria,” Corriere della Sera, February 23, 175.
7. Tom Lisanti, Pamela Tiffin: Hollywood to Rome, 1961–
1974 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 20.
8. American Cinematographer, Vol. 75, 14, 72.
La pelle sotto gli artigli (The Skin Under
the Claws)
D: Alessandro Santini. S and SC: Alessan-
dro Santini; DOP: Luigi De Maria (Techni-
color—Techniscope); M: Francesco Santucci
(Ed. Fly Record); E: Otello Colangeli; AD: Fer-
nando Balmas; CO: Osanna Guardini; MU: Ul-
timo Peruzzi; AC: Luciano Ronconi; SO: Ignazio
Bevilacqua; SS: Ferdinando Merighi. Cast: Gor-
don Mitchell (Prof. Ernst Helmut), Geneviève
Audry (Dr. Silvia Pieri), Tino Boriani (Dr. Gi-
anni Dani), Ettore Ribotta (Commissioner Ri-
naldi), Agostino De Simone (Brigadier Tacconi),
Renzo Borelli (The Porter), Mirella Rossi (Pros-
titute), Franco Rossi, Ada Pometti; uncredited:
Mike Monty (Medical examiner), Goffredo Tri-
firò (Himself). PROD: Produzione San Giorgio
Cinematografica. GM: Vincenzo Matassi; PM:
Elio Ottaviani; PS: Tullio Dramis. Country: Italy.
Filmed at Cave Studio (Rome). Running time:
85 minutes (m. 231). Visa n. 65550 (12.3.174);
Rating: V.M.18. Release date: 5.10.175; Distribu-
tion: Produzione San Giorgio Cinematografica.
Domestic gross: 1,827,400 lire. Also known as:
Semillas de sangre (Spain); La piel bajo las uñas
(Spain).
Rome. A mysterious man, who has dug up
a dead body in a cemetery, savagely murders a
prostitute. The police find traces of decomposed
human flesh under the victim’s fingernails. Soon
another murder follows, and the victim is found
hacked to pieces in a suitcase. Meanwhile, a
tender romance blossoms between Dr. Gianni
Dani and his colleague Silvia Pieri. Both work at
a private clinic run by the friendly Dr. Helmut,
who claims he has perfected a method to preserve
body parts and increase life expectancy. The in-
vestigations are conducted by commissioner Ri-
naldi, who suspects Dani of being the mysterious
murderer. Following Helmut’s sudden death and
the mysterious disappearance of the professor’s
body, Silvia is abducted. The culprit turns out to
be Helmut, who faked his own death in order to
carry out his experiments with re-animation, with
techniques borrowed from the Nazis; his aim is
to make a living body have intercourse with a
dead one and breed a new living organism, and
the chosen victim is Silvia. The police stop Helmut
just in time, but Silvia is still under the influence
of the mad doctor’s will…
An obscurity in its own home country,
Alessandro Santini’s little-seen La pelle sotto gli
artigli is yet another example of the way the
Gothic paraphernalia were reprised and re-
worked in the early Seventies, in order to ac-
commodate ample erotic elements, according to
a recipe that had found its ideal fertile terrain
in the adult comics of the period. With its mad
hodgepodge of diverse elements, Santini’s script
looks like it was lifted almost verbatim from
such paperbacks as Oltretomba—not an unlikely
occurrence, since scriptwriters often recycled
unfilmed stories by selling the material to
adults-only publishers.
The basic premise is yet another variation
of the Frankenstein tale, one of the most fre-
quent blueprints for erotic-tinged horror flicks
during the decade, not the least because of the
sensation caused by the first heart transplant
performed on December 2, 167, by Christiaan
Barnard. As in Frankenstein ’80, with which San-
tini’s film has some elements in common (in-
cluding the presence of Gordon Mitchell as the
mad doctor) the story is set in the present day;
however, this time the doctor’s experiments on
artificial life have an even nuttier goal, which
leads to a trashy variation on the theme of
necrophilia. Dr. Helmut’s Promethean search is
focused on the possibility of having the dead
impregnate the living, and even more: “I want
to reach the breeding between two clinically
dead beings, so that even if one day a nuclear
explosion should destroy all humanity, we could
still store some dead specimens capable of re-
producing.” This leads to a demented climax in
which Silvia (Geneviève Audry), lying on the
mad doctor’s operating table, is surrounded and
groped by sex-crazed re-animated corpses.
The script never clearly explains how Hel-
mut’s method works: aside from talk of a mirac-
ulous serum, we must be content with the sight
of Gordon Mitchell applying some kind of elec-
tric tool near the heads of his victims, who are
 1975: La pelle
conveniently undressed on an operating table
in the mad doctor’s basement, and performing
a hypnotic ritual which deprives them of their
will. On the other hand, a typical Gothic theme—
the double—is only marginally touched upon in
the end, and the final revelation that Silvia is a
dead ringer to the doctor’s deceased wife, whom
he apparently wants to revive, comes out of the
blue at about one minute before the word “The
End,” and sounds like a silly throwaway to say
the least.
In order to give a pseudo-scientific basis to
the mad doctor’s re-animation techniques, the
script throws in a reference to the Third Reich’s
experiments which predates the so-called Nazi-
erotic subgenre: Helmut explaims that he has
perfected his technique from the Nazis, after
discovering shocking surgical footage upon his
arrival in Berlin at the end of the war with
South-African troops. Not a novelty, though: La
vergine di Norimberga had introduced a Nazi
subplot as the explanation for the mystery, and
adults-only comics such as the controversial
Hessa (published from 170 to 172) had already
dabbled with the Third Reich’s atrocities in quite
an unpleasant way.
More significantly, La pelle sotto gli artigli
hybridizes the Gothic motifs with elements of
the giallo by trying to pass off as a whodunit of
sorts, centered on a mysterious Jack the Ripper–
like figure in black gloves and shades who kills
prostitutes and unfortunate young women in
and around Rome, while the chain-smoking cop
on the case gropes in the dark for most of the
running time. But the suspense is non-existent,
as the murders invariably occur off-screen, and
the only gory moment has the first victim turn-
ing up in the nude and holding what are sup-
posed to be her exposed viscera—read: slaugh-
terhouse’s waste of the day; the same lousy trick
is repeated near the end where Mitchell pretends
to tuck some viscera into a dead woman’s torso.
Another nod to gialli is the villain’s very
first appearance, his face covered with a black
nylon mask, which brings to mind the faceless
entity of 6 donne per l’assassino. The script tries
hard to persuade the audience that the shy, well-
mannered and workaholic Dr. Gianni, who
clumsily courts his colleague Silvia (“I’ll put my
lips where you just put them … and it’ll be like
I’m kissing you” he says, while smoking her
same cigarette) in a syrupy romantic subplot, is
actually the culprit. But the camouflage all too
obviously gives away the killer’s identity right
151
from the start, as Gordon Mitchell’s peculiar fea-
tures, angular jaw and large nose can be easily
detected under the mask in the opening scene
at the cemetery, where the mad doctor digs up
a corpse, Dr. Hichcock-style, and carries it away
for his unspeakable experiments.
The fact that the opening exhumation,
which supposedly takes place at night, happens
in broad daylight without any day-for-night
filter is an early clue of La pelle sotto gli artigli’s
overall amateurishness, which the remainder of
the film proceeds to confirm. The story’s alleged
trash value is badly let down by its flat direction
and somnolent pacing, not to mention its shoe-
string production values. The movie was al-
legedly shot at Gordon Mitchell’s Cave Studio
Film, the cheapest in Rome, and the sets are
poor beyond belief: the police station is placed
in an anonymous basement, the clinic where
Mitchell lectures his colleagues on the necessity
to preserve human life is basically an empty
room, and so on. Continuity errors are the norm
(in a scene, the commissioner lights the same
cigarette twice), and the plot stumbles on with
no regard for narrative coherence, allowing
room for utterly gratuitous interludes.
One such is the scene in which Silvia and
Gianni visit a painter friend, whom Silvia labels
as “the Superman of color.” It is Goffredo Trifirò,
a self-taught Sicilian artist who exposed his
works at the 172 Biennale in Venice, as himself.
Trifirò enjoyed a short-lived popularity, due less
to of his art than to some publicity stunts that
depicted him as a “playboy painter,” such as the
alleged love stories with movie starlets1 or the
news that an American customer had paid for
one of Trifirò’s paintings by giving him his wife
in exchange for six months. 2 In the movie,
Trifirò sits comfortably on a sofa between two
naked models that were posing for his paintings
(which, incidentally, portray palm trees and veg-
etation, not human bodies…). He and his guests
have a chat while the bored-looking girls just
stay on the sofa, reading magazines and not even
bothering to cover themselves in front of the vis-
itors. The sequence, totally extraneous to the
plot, looks like an awkward plug that possibly
allowed the filmmakers to scrape up some
bucks.
The director’s own script sports some of
the worst dialogue ever committed to celluloid:
when the killer approaches a prostitute and has
her get in his car, the girl’s introductory line is
“Be nice! Let me see what color your eyes are
152 1975: La pelle
and I’ll show you what color my panties are!”—
which, incidentally, she does. Later on, when the
commissioner is told that the dead prostitutes
had fragments of decomposed skin under their
nails (hence the title), he wisely comments: “I
can’t believe that a putrefied corpse picks up
whores and then kills them!” Even worse are the
attempts at philosophical mumbo jumbo: “When
we travel on a crowded train, we don’t want any-
one to get on. In fact, we’d like people to get off.
Life is a miracle, but so is death,” Silvia claims
in a scene. After such pearls of wisdom, one is
tempted to read the opening credit sequence as
a metaphor of sorts: it takes place at a children’s
outdoor puppet theater, where Pulcinella is bat-
tling a skull-faced Death puppet. A thinly dis-
guised, symbolic commentary on the never-
ending moral struggle between Good and Evil,
perhaps? Never mind: the final twist, which
comes totally out of left field, is guaranteed to
have anyone’s jaw drop in disbelief and bury any
attempt at critical re-evaluation.
If Santini did not care much about plot,
pacing and filmmaking, he was very much pre-
occupied with piling up as much nudity as pos-
sible, including a squalid night club scene where
an African stripper performs some wannabe
tribal dance for a scant and very bored audience,
and having the second victim perform an en-
thusiastic striptease in front of her killer (“You
know I like all that is sex … it’s true, I’m a
nymphomaniac, but you’re a lecher!”)—not to
mention the sight of the mad doctor’s dungeon,
scattered with chained nude women (one
hanged upside down to a St. Andrew’s cross)
which openly flirts with sex comics’ sadistic im-
agery.
Gordon Mitchell overacts as expected and
sports his customary mad grin; when inter-
viewed by Christian Kessler, he recalled an ac-
cident which took place during shooting: “In the
end there is a scene, where I try to strike dead a
girl with a stone, but the police shoot me. Un-
fortunately the stunt boy messed up this scene.
He lost control over the car and drove over the
actress! I even tried to snatch her from the car,
but in vain. This story then brought her into
hospital for months, thus we had to use a stand-
in to finish the shooting.”3
The American ex-bodybuilder is the only
noteworthy presence in a cast of third-rate sup-
porting actors. The female lead Geneviève
Audry had appeared in a handful of movies, in-
cluding Tanio Boccia’s Il dominatore del deserto
(164) and La valle dell’eco tonante (164) and
Ruggero Deodato’s Zenabel (16); her last film
role would be in Fabrizio Taglioni’s abysmal ad-
venture/crime flick Gli uccisori (177). As the
commissioner, photonovel regular Ettore
Ribotta (a recurring presence in the fotoromanzi
published by Lancio and Grand Hotel) has per-
haps the most relevant role in a nondescript film
career, which consisted mainly of small parts in
such rubbish as La bambola di Satana (16,
Ferruccio Casapinta), Paolo Lombardo’s Dagli
archivi della polizia criminale and Ordine firmato
in bianco (175, Gianni Manera). Similarly, this
was former photonovel star Tino Boriani’s third
and biggest role, after bit parts in Luigi Bazzoni’s
L’uomo, l’orgoglio e la vendetta and Vittorio
Caprioli’s excellent Splendori e miserie di
Madame Royale (170). It was also his last movie
role to date.
La pelle sotto gli artigli had no small trouble
with the Italian board of censors. On first in-
stance, in November 174, it was denied the visa,
the board’s motivation being that “it is a contin-
uous display of shameless female nudity in a
context of conscious and absurd sadism which
offends any sense of modesty.” On appeal, the
commission demanded that the scene where the
second victim strips naked before the killer be
“sensibly cut,” and consequently gave the film a
V.M.18 rating. It was released theatrically in
spring 175, and soon disappeared into obliv-
ion.4
La pelle sotto gli artigli was Alessandro San-
tini’s third film as a director. A former produc-
tion manager whose career consisted of obscure
items such as the erotic flick Questa libertà di
avere … le ali bagnate (171), Santini remains
one of Italian cinema’s most obscure and over-
looked figures. His real place within Italian pop-
ular cinema can perhaps be somewhat clarified
by a news article dated early 177, about the up-
coming trial against the members of a couple of
phony production companies, “Cinema TV
2000” and “Globarfilm.”
According to the article, “Hundreds of per-
sons were deceived by a group of skilled crimi-
nals who used to perfection the insidious
weapon of the mirage of fabulous earnings in
the world of movies, television and photonov-
els.”5 The plan had taken shape in August 171,
in various Italian cities, through newspaper ads,
posters on buses, and so on. The ads announced
job offers for movie extras in “important Italian-
American productions,” often related to Spa-
 1975: La pelle
ghetti Western. The swindlers were setting up
phony auditions, and asked money to their vic-
tims to “cover the expenses.” During the screen
tests, the camera rolled with no film inside.
Those who protested were sometimes sent to
the sets of some down-to-heel productions as
extras, in order to divert suspicion. That the
swindlers managed to cheat about 500 individ-
uals is telling about the fascination that cinema
still exerted on many Italians.
The head of the organization was Gaetano
Ferri, who, together with Oddone Furia, pre-
sented himself as the head of the production
company. Among the eleven accused there was
Alessandro Santini, as the director: “He claimed
he was shooting some films in order to make his
role more believable…. While passing in review
a line of aspiring movie stars, he dwelled his at-
tention on one of them: ‘But you have features
worthy of a great actor! I absolutely suggest you
get in touch directly with my colleague Federico
Fellini. He will certainly have a role for you!’”6
Ferri, Furia, Santini and a couple of others were
arrested in February 172,7 and released soon af-
terwards. The trial took place five years later.
The article mentions the titles of several
Santini films, I sette amuleti, Al di là dell’odio,
Una forca per un vigliacco (possibly Una forca
per tre vigliacchi), Una vergine per Satana. With
the exception of Al di là dell’odio (which featured
Ferri as an uncredited extra) the others were un-
finished,8 which makes one suspect that these
productions were set up only to collect money,
without the intention of actually completing the
film (and therefore avoid paying for development,
print, submission to the censors board, etc.).
Una vergine per Satana, a horror film shot
in 171 about a satanic sect devoted to the god-
dess Selene and headed by a masked man who
calls himself “Satana,” was co-directed by Bruno
Vani, who had penned Al di là dell’odio, and who
was also among the accused in the trial. What
is more, the script for Una vergine per Satana
was in turn based on an unfilmed Renato
Polselli screenplay, Tilt. One of the would-be-
actors, a Vincenzo Bocarino, recalled that he
was given a Ku Klux Klan-esque hood to put on,
and he was filmed near a girl. “You are perfect
for this film!” the director told him.10
Polselli himself recycled the existing foot-
age for Una vergine per Satana and added to it
new scenes, shot in August 176: the result (pro-
visionally titled I torbidi misteri della sensualità)
was released in 178 as Casa dell’amore … la
153
polizia interviene. Polselli had also authored the
script for Questa libertà di avere … le ali bagnate,
and two of his regular actresses worked with
Santini: Mirella Rossi appeared in La pelle sotto
gli artigli as the first victim, and Rita Calderoni
would co-star in Santini’s subsequent work,
Dolce pelle di donna (178). There has been spec-
ulation that Vani and Polselli were somehow in-
volved in the making of La pelle sotto gli artigli;
however, there is no actual evidence of this.
Polselli’s involvement in the scam is any-
one’s guess, but some episodes are telling:
Polselli himself admitted that Mania was made
thanks to the financial efforts of leading man
Ettore Elio Aricò, a.k.a. Brad Euston; what is
more, the article reported that one of the cheated
aspiring actresses, Consolata Moschera, was told
to cut her long hair, which she was proud of, for
the role, “a sadistic component … which was in-
tended to make the scam more believable, and
which turned into an extra humiliation to
many.”11 Moschera’s only film role is in Polselli’s
Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento…
The trial ended with three convicted (Gae-
tano Ferri, Alessandro Mancini and Oddone
Furia); the others were acquitted.12
NoTeS
1. Ugo Naldi, “Non sono una fabbrica di ‘cuori in-
franti’!,” Corriere d’Informazione, May 10, 173.
2. Anonymous, “Dà in affitto la moglie per sei mesi in
cambio del quadro di un pittore,” Corriere d’Informazione,
January 14, 174. The article mentions a written deal be-
tween the painter and the American customer (a “Preben
Soresen”) signed by two witnesses: one of them is Gordon
Mitchell. The publicity scam was concocted around the
same time as the shooting of Santini’s film, which began
on December 3, 173
3. Christian Kessler, “Maciste und die Spaghetti aus
dem Weltall,” www.christiankessler.de. The German lan-
guage interview was published in a shorter, slightly
different (and not completely faithful) English translation
in the Video Watchdog magazine. Namely, the above quo-
tation is nowhere to be found in the VW version. Christian
Kessler, “Gordon Mitchell. Atlas in the Land of Cinema,”
Video Watchdog #48, 18, 47. Thanks to Gary Vanisian
for the new translation from the original German text.
4. La pelle sotto gli artigli was never released to home
video in Italy, and over the years it circulated in truncated
TV prints, whereas a couple of Spanish VHS editions
exists, titled respectively Semillas de sangre (Seeds of
Blood) and La piel bajo las uñas (a literal translation of the
Italian title).
5. Paolo Graldi, “Promettevano cinema e celebrità:
truffati in 500,” Corriere della Sera, January 10, 177.
6. Ibid.
7. Anonymous, “‘Con noi diventerete tutti divi’ così
hanno truffato un miliardo,” L’Unità, February 25, 172.
8. Una forca per tre vigliacchi (filming for which started
154 1975: La sanguisuga
in January 171) was eventually submitted to the board of
censors in June 17. A two-page article on the filming of
Una vergine per Satana, complete with a number of nude
set stills, appeared in the magazine Cinesex (#53, January
172).
9. Alessio Di Rocco, Una vergine per Satana nella casa
dell’amore, www.nocturno.it.
10. Paolo Graldi, “I divi a pagamento: ci hanno truffati,”
Corriere della Sera, January 16, 177.
11. Graldi, “Promettevano cinema e celebrità.”
12. Ferri, however, tried the same scam again, with sim-
ilar results, in the 180s. In 182 he was reported to the po-
lice for a similar scam, and in 187 he was arrested for the
same type of activity, this time related to the making of
pornographic films. See Piero Bongini, “Truffa di cellu-
loide,” Corriere della Sera, August 5, 187.
La sanguisuga conduce la danza (The
Bloodsucker Leads the Dance, a.k.a. The Pas-
sion of Evelyn)
D: Alfredo Rizzo. S and SC: Alfredo Rizzo;
DOP: Aldo Greci (Technicolor); M: Marcello
Giombini (Ed. Nazionalmusic); E: Piera Bruni,
Gianfranco Simoncelli; ArtD: Vanni Castellani;
CO: Maria Luisa Panaro; MU: Sergio Angeloni;
Hair: Vincenzo Cardella; AD: Roberto Izzo;
2ndAD: Claudio Bondi; SO: Pietro Spadoni; C:
Alfredo Senzacqua; AC: Emilio Bestetti; SP: Gi-
anfranco Filoni; W: Flora Baldassarre; SS: Luig-
ina Lovari; Color technicians: Carlo La Bella,
Nicola Tocci. French version—Dial: Yvon Ger-
ault; DubD: André Chelossi. Cast: Femi Benussi
(Sybil), Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Count Richard
Marnack), Krista Nell [Doris Kristanel] (Cora),
Patrizia De Rossi (Evelyn / Countess Catherine),
Luciano Pigozzi (Gregor), Mario De Rosa (Jefer,
the butler), Barbara Marzano (Miriam, the
maid), Caterina Chiani (Rosalind), Lidia Olizzi
(Penny), Susette Nadalutti (Carol), Pier Paola
Succi, Leo Valeriano (Samuel); uncredited: Luigi
Batzella (Police Inspector), Rita Silva (Mar-
garet), Mike Monty (Fisherman, Gregor’s son).
PROD: To. Ro. Cinematografica (Rome); PM:
Michelangelo Ciafré; PA: Mario De Rosa; PSe:
Luciano Pizzorusso. Country: Italy. Filmed at the
Piccolomini Castle in Balsorano (L’Aquila), Cas-
tle of Monte San Giovanni Campano (Frosi-
none), Lake Bracciano (Rome) and at Icet De
Paolis Studios (Milan). Running time: 86 min-
utes (m. 2358); Visa n. 66416 (4.2.175); Rating:
V.M.18. Release dates: 5.10.175 (Italy), 5.25.177
(France); Distribution: P.A.B. Film. Domestic
gross: 73,36,150 lire. Also known as: Il marchio
di Satana (Italy—video title); La marque de
Satan; L’insatiable Samantha (La sangsue)
(France—hardcore version); Danza macabra
(Spain); The Leaches Lead the Dance (Aus-
tralia—video title); O Drakoulas tou kastrou; O
vrykolakas sernei to horo (Greece—video title).
Ireland, 1902. Struck by the resemblance be-
tween a young actress named Evelyn and his dead
wife Catherine, Count Richard Marnack invites
her small theatrical company—which includes
Evelyn’s friend Cora, actresses Rosalind and
Penny, and stage hand Samuel—to his castle, lo-
cated on a solitary island. Once there, everyone
notices the strange atmosphere and the ambigu-
ous behavior of the service staff: the jealous house-
keeper Sybil, the ambiguous butler Jefer, the can-
tankerous gardener Gregor; what is more, a
legend tells how all the Marnacks have beheaded
their wives before throwing themselves into the
sea. Eventually a murderous hand strikes repeat-
edly: the first victim is Cora, followed by Penny
and Rosalind. The arrival of the police solves the
mystery: the culprit is Sybil, morbidly jealous of
the Count, who keeps Marnack’s crazed wife hid-
den and used her as her killing instrument…
Alfredo Rizzo’s work as a director was defi-
nitely shorter and less distinctive than his career
as an actor. A veteran of vaudeville, Rizzo (10–
11) performed on stage with his brother Carlo
as well as other popular comedians, especially
Erminio Macario, and made his film debut in
13 in Mario Mattoli’s Lo vedi come sei … lo
vedi come sei?, starring Macario. With over 100
film credits, he was one of those reassuring faces
that regularly popped up in Italian films: he
often played the antagonist in dramas, but his
peculiar features were also suited for comedy.
Fellini cast him no fewer than four times in
small but picturesque roles, most memorably in
La dolce vita and Toby Dammit.
But Rizzo turned up also in early Italian
Gothics, most memorably as the stingy impre-
sario of the female ballet company that finds
shelter at the sinister Castle Kernassy in Piero
Regnoli’s L’ultima preda del vampiro (160), a
role he reprised with minimal variations in Il
boia scarlatto. In L’ultima preda del vampiro
Rizzo was characterized as a dirty old man: in
the scene where the vampire’s victim enters her
impresario’s room, almost frightening him to
death, Rizzo is shown flipping through Frolic, a
U.S. girlie magazine with pin-up June Wilkinson
on the cover.
Somehow this characterization suited
Rizzo’s work as a director. For his debut he was
saddled with a World War II movie, I giardini
del diavolo (released in the U.K. as Heroes With-
 1975: La sanguisuga 155

out Glory) whose battle scenes became stock castle, the themes of the doppelgänger and the
footage fodder for such Eurociné dreck as family curse, and so on—mostly as an excuse to
Convoi de filles (178) and Jess Franco’s Oasis of cobble together some sex scenes.
the Zombies (181). However, for his subsequent The story (apparently concocted solely by
stints behind the camera, Rizzo aimed squarely Rizzo) is a potboiler of elements borrowed from
at the sexploitation market, with seven films L’ultima preda del vampiro and Il castello dei
shot between 174 and 178 which
veered between debauched comedy
(La bolognese, 174; Sorbole … che ro-
magnola, 176; I peccati di una giovane
moglie di campagna, 177) and turgid
drama (Carnalità, 174; Alessia … un
vulcano sotto la pelle, 177; Suggestion-
ata, 178). In addition to a very low
cinematic value, these had in common
a constant emphasis on eroticism.
The same can be said about
Rizzo’s only horror film, La sanguisuga
conduce la danza. Even though the al-
luring (and ridiculously absurd) title
features an animal—in the original
Italian title, “bloodsucker” is intended
as “leech”—in pure early Argento tra-
dition, and the posters attempted to
sell the movie as a modern-day
thriller, with the sight of a semi-naked
young woman pointing a gun at the
viewer (another, more intriguing lo-
candina featured a six-armed girl,
Kali-style, holding a flower with two
hands and assorted knives and guns
with the other four), the giallo’s typical
elements are very few and far between.
There is, indeed, a mysterious mur-
derer on the prowl, but the killings
take place off-screen, and we are only
treated to the aftermath, with the
grotesque sight of decapitated bodies
and/or severed heads that are either
very much attached to their bodies or
made with papier-maché, and as un-
convincing as those seen in Sergio
Bergonzelli’s Nelle pieghe della carne
(170). What is more, the crude mise-
en-scène is poles apart from the
giallo’s stylish depictions of death at
work: there is no sign of psychedelic
colors, weird camera angles and elab-
orate set pieces—and, most impor-
tantly, no black-gloved killer in sight.
La sanguisuga conduce la danza is ba-
sically a standard Gothic yarn, which
lazily assembles the genre’s parapher- The imaginative locandina for La sanguisuga conduce la danza
nalia—the period setting, the isolated (1975).
156 1975: La sanguisuga
morti vivi, as the charming Count Marnack (Gi-
acomo Rossi Stuart), smitten by a beautiful stage
actress named Evelyn (Patrizia De Rossi) who
performs in a shabby village theater, invites her
and the whole traveling company to his isolated
castle by the sea. What is more, the place is
haunted by a family curse, as all the Marnacks
have ended up slaughtering their unfaithful
wives before committing suicide, generation
after generation. And, as Evelyn finds out, she
is a dead ringer for the Count’s deceased wife.
The story throws in a little bit of Rebecca for
good measure, as Castle Marnack is run by a
stern housekeeper who, thanks to Femi Benussi’s
ravishing looks, is a much more pleasant sight
for the eyes than Mrs. Danvers, even if decidedly
more menacing; the other servants are a weird
bunch, and include a bigoted butler (Mario De
Rosa) and a manservant (the ubiquitous Luciano
Pigozzi) who’s a peeping tom and sexually black-
mails the housekeeper.
Having established the basic plot, Rizzo has
plenty of time to concentrate on the real thing:
sex. The small crew includes the dimwitted, un-
inhibited Cora (Krista Nell, in a role that basi-
cally reprises the one played by Maria Giovan-
nini in L’ultima preda del vampiro) and a lesbian
couple (Caterina Chiani, here credited under
her real name and not under the pseudonym
“Marzia Damon,” and the ebony-skinned Lidia
Olizzi), and the director wastes no time in
having each of them take off their clothes. For
almost one hour, almost nothing happens except
for the occasional intercourse: the Count and
Evelyn make love, the sex-hungry Cora wanders
near the castle and seduces an ugly-looking fish-
erman (an uncredited Mike Monty), the lesbians
spend most of their time in bed; in a ludicrous
scene, they keep caressing each other in the
presence of a naive maid, who then returns to
the room she shares with another girl servant
and asks the latter to fondle her breasts as she
saw them do. Sex scenes are not a bad thing in
themselves—unless they are shot with such a
lack of cinematic talent as Rizzo does: Cora’s en-
counter with the fisherman is especially grating,
and their frolicking wouldn’t be out of place in
one of those awful Bavarian sex comedies of the
period, with dialogue along the same lines (“I
have fished a fisherman,” Cora boasts upon re-
turning from her escapade).
The film’s ineptitude is jaw-dropping: the
Castle of Balsorano, which provides the exteri-
ors, is made to appear as if it was on an island,
courtesy of crappy editing: the “sea,” however,
is none other than the Bracciano lake, with its
typical cane thicketed shores. On top of that,
when a storm is required to take place, Rizzo
(and editor Piera Bruni) throw in black-and-
white stock footage of raging seas and cliffs. It
is hard to do worse than that.
When something finally happens, and the
first decapitated body turns up, one would
expect the film to finally shift into something
resembling a pacing, which it doesn’t. Two more
murders follow, and a police inspector (played
by film director Luigi Batzella) appears out of
nowhere to wrap up the case. The final expla-
nation occurs Agatha Christie–style, with the
main players sitting round in a room and Femi
Benussi delivering a torrential monologue in
melodramatic fashion, in one of the most uncli-
mactic endings ever seen in a horror movie—
well, sort of.
The Italian board of censors objected to the
erotic content, and demanded some cuts to be
performed, namely the removal of the lesbian
encounter between Rosalind and Penny, a short-
ening of the lovemaking session between Evelyn
and the Count, as well as the encounter between
Cora and the fisherman, and the one where Gre-
gor has sex with Sybil. The film was given a
V.M.18 rating for the “many sequences of exces-
sive sexual realism and for others that are par-
ticularly lurid,” and did very modest business in
its home country. The sex scenes were kept in
their entirety in the version that came out in
France in 177, L’insatiable Samantha (La sang-
sue), which also included hardcore inserts.
Filmed in November and December 174,1
La sanguisuga conduce la danza was Krista Nell’s
last film: the Austrian actress (real name Doris
Kristanel), who had debuted in Godard’s Pierrot
le fou (165) and had become a welcome pres-
ence in Italian and Spanish cinema, died of
leukemia on June 1, 175, just one month after
the film’s release. She was 28 years old, and actor
Ettore Manni’s partner in life. She was supposed
to play the lead in Rizzo’s film, but due to her
illness she turned in a secondary part. Femi Be-
nussi, who was good friends with her, recalled
how they used to go to the set together, and that
Nell justified her swollen lips and pale skin (the
result of chemotherapeutic treatment), pretend-
ing to be undergoing cosmetic injections.2 Nell
had been cast to play a role in Fellini’s Casanova.
The film was released in VHS in Italy in
two different editions, one under the title Il mar-
 1976: La casa
chio di Satana (Satan’s Mark), which is at least
more in tune with its mood and essence. The
VHS release featured the same poster image as
Jess Franco’s Demoniac.
1976
La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The
House with Laughing Windows)
D: Pupi Avati. S: Pupi Avati, Antonio Avati;
SC: Pupi Avati, Antonio Avati, Gianni Cavina,
Maurizio Costanzo; DOP: Pasquale Rachini; M:
Amedeo Tommasi; E: Giuseppe Baghdighian;
PD, CO: Luciana Morosetti; MU: Giovanni
Amadei; Hair: Francesco Musico; AD: Cesare
Bastelli; C: Giorgio Urbinelli; AC: Antonio
Scaramuzza; APD: Otello Taglietti; Painter:
Michelangelo Giuliani; AE: Maurizio Cucciola,
Piera Gabutti, Viviana Massi; SS: Vincenza
D’Amico; B: Rodolfo Montagnani; SOE: Mas-
simo Anzellotti; Mix: Venanzio Biraschi, Enrico
Blasi; SE: Giovanni Corridori, Luciano Anzel-
lotti; KG: Mario Pizzi; El: Francesco Rachini; W:
Teresa Lai. Cast: Lino Capolicchio (Stefano),
Francesca Marciano (Francesca), Gianni Cavina
(Coppola), Giulio Pizzirani (Antonio Mazza),
Bob Tonelli (Mayor Solmi), Vanna Busoni
(Teacher), Pietro Brambilla (Lidio), Ferdinando
Orlandi (Police Marshall), Andrea Matteuzzi
(Poppi), Ines Ciaschetti (Concierge), Pina Bo-
rione (Paraplegic Woman), Flavia Giorgi
(Poppi’s Wife), Arrigo Luchini (Grocer), Carla
Astolfi (Chambermaid at Boarding House), Lu-
ciano Bianchi (Franchini, the Librarian), Tonino
Corazzari (Buono Legnani), Libero Grandi; un-
credited: Cesare Bastelli (Car Driver), Gina Bona
(Woman Eating Pasta), Pietro Bona (Man at
Restaurant), Zora Kerova (Waitress), Eugene
Walter (Priest). PROD: Antonio Avati, Gianni
Minervini for A.M.A. Film; UM: Sergio Bollino;
PA: Alessandro Vivarelli. Country: Italy. Filmed
in Comacchio and Minerbio, Ferrara, Italy and
at Incir-De Paolis Studios (Rome). Running time:
110 minutes (m. 3000). Visa n. 6815 (8.16.176);
Rating: V.M.14. Release date: 8.16.176; Distribu-
tion: Euro International Film. Domestic gross:
722,135,201 lire. Also known as: The House of the
Laughing Windows (U.S.A.); La maison aux
fenêtres qui rient (France); Das Haus der lachen-
157
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on November 25, 174.
2. Franco Grattarola, Stefano Ippoliti and Matteo
Norcini, “Finalmente Femi Benussi,” Cine 70 e dintorni #2,
Spring 2002, 11–12.
den Fenster (Germany); A Casa das Janelas
Malditas (Portugal).
Northern Italy, some years after World War
II. A mad painter, Buono Legnani, has committed
suicide in the countryside near Ferrara, after
painting a fresco on the wall of a church which
depicts a variation of the martyrdom of Saint Se-
bastian, tortured by two grinning figures. The
local authorities, in the hopes of developing
tourism in the area, summon a young artist, Ste-
fano, to restore Legnani’s work. Soon Stefano is
haunted by strange and disturbing events. His
friend Mazza reveals to him that the village has
a terrible secret, whose details he cannot give
away, but some time later he is found dead, ap-
parently after committing suicide, and Stefano re-
ceives threatening phone calls. Despite the vil-
lagers’ silence, he finds out that Legnani
(nicknamed “the painter of agonies”) used to paint
scenes of real torture performed upon his unfor-
tunate models by his two mad sisters, with whom
he had an incestuous relationship. Could one of
the sisters be the elderly woman at whose house
he is staying? And what is the mysterious “house
with laughing windows” that somebody mentions
to Stefano? More deaths follow, and Stefano real-
izes that the nightmare is not over…
The concept of a folksy Gothic linked to a
rural environment in rapid extinction was
something rarely explored in Italian cinema of
the past. Brunello Rondi’s extraordinary Il de-
monio (163) dealt with superstition in Southern
Italy and portrayed an exemplary case of sexual
obsession and repression, whereas Bava’s I
Wurdalak and Operazione paura depicted su-
perstitious characters (respectively Gorka’s fam-
ily, and the “witch” played by Fabienne Dali) that
somehow recalled Italian mores, even though
the films were set in foreign countries and in
past times. On the other hand, Ferroni’s La notte
dei diavoli and Fulci’s Non si sevizia un paperino
took a more direct approach, and showed that
158
a contemporary Italian environment (or, in the
case of Ferroni’s film, just beyond the border)
could be an apt setting for a grim horror or mys-
tery story.
Italian poster for La casa dalle finestre che ridono (1976).
1976: La casa
Yet, there had also been unexpected flashes
of grotesque. In the comedy Bellezze in bicicletta
(151, Carlo Campogalliani), due to a comical
misunderstanding, a pair of dancers (Silvana
Pampanini and Delia Scala), who
are spending the night at an iso-
lated farmhouse, believe that their
hosts are actually a family of mur-
derers. Therefore, “the lights-and-
shade of the house, the knife used
to slice the ham, the shadows and
noises of the countryside—which
by then has started to become a
stereotyped reality in Italian cin-
ema (exactly because agricultural
Italy begins to disappear irresisti-
bly)—scare the two girls and push
them to flee as soon as possible.”1
This is the path that Pupi
Avati followed when making La
casa dalle finestre che ridono, the
first film produced with his com-
pany A.M.A. Film.2 Shot over the
course of five weeks in April and
May 176, on a very low budget in
the countryside around Ferrara,3
with a minimal crew and a cast of
mostly regulars led by Lino Capo-
licchio 4 and Francesca Marciano
(in a role devised for Mariangela
Melato), the director’s fifth directo-
rial feature was also his first out-
and-out Gothic horror movie.
Avati had already shaped a
personal approach to the Gothic in
his early films, Balsamus l’uomo di
Satana and Thomas … gli indemo-
niati: both were experiments, pro-
ductively (with the attempt to move
away from Rome and develop a
production center in Bologna, in
the Po Valley) and narratively, with
their emphasis on Fantastic and
magic elements. Avati’s third film,
the grotesque comedy La mazurka
del barone, della santa e del fico
fiorone, further underlined the di-
rector’s taste for offbeat, unusual
and slightly sinister types, as well as
his ear for dialectal language, while
depicting an unusual slice of coun-
try life with the story of a misan-
thropic, atheist Baron (Ugo Tog-
nazzi) who becomes a devout
 1976: La casa
Catholic after witnessing (or so he believes) a
miracle.
It is starting with La casa dalle finestre che
ridono, however, that the term “Po Valley
Gothic” acquires its full meaning in respect to
Avati’s work. The definition was provided by the
director himself, who explained: “The movie is
certainly Gothic, or at least it is in tune with my
idea of a Gothic tale: it must have a realistic be-
ginning…. Then the story progressively takes
on aspects that sometimes have a bearing with
the probable … and, ultimately, one ends up
considering plausible what is absolutely implau-
sible.”5
The first and foremost character of Avati’s
Gothic, as well as its most innovative trait, is the
way it is closely linked to a geographically local-
ized rural environment: that area of the Emilia
Romagna region which goes from the surround-
ings of Bologna to the Po delta. It is quite a
change from the Northern and Eastern Euro-
pean settings of the Italian Gothic horror movies
made in the previous decade, as well as from the
urban dimension of 170s gialli and thrillers. As
has been noted, “Avati delegates to the Po Valley
setting a reassuring function and proceeds to
frighten the audience with a dense network of
Gothic echoes and references that disrupt that
innocuous fragment of the world,” so that the
former acts as a “jarring container and sound
board”6 to the latter: an antithetical relationship
that shows how, to the director, anxiety and fear
come from the search for paradox and un-
settling antithesis.
The genre’s typical elements are therefore
revisited not from an aristocratic perspective,
but from a rural, peasant-like one. The haunted
castle or villa, typical of the Gothic novel, here
is replaced by country farmhouses or home-
steads; the story is set in the recent past (the im-
mediate post–World War II years); and the col-
lective memory is the keeper (and the source)
of an untold horror—legends, riddles, unsolved
murders, mysterious experiments—whose rec-
ollection is handed down in piecemeal fashion
through word of mouth, oral tales, rumors, gos-
sips, fairytales, popular songs. The most chilling
example is the Brazilian lullaby (“As flores do
amor, Flores lindas do meu jardim, para vocês…”7)
sung by the elderly bedridden lady, which be-
comes the leitmotif of unspeakable horrors.
Avati’s protagonists are outsiders to this en-
closed, secluded world: young city artists,
painters or writers (like Gabriele Lavia in Zeder)
15
who are gifted with an abnormal sensitivity to-
ward the macabre and the mysterious that will
take them to their ruin. The theme of horror as-
sociated with art recalls the words of Robert
Kiely: “The artist in terror novels is most often
depicted as the destroyer, the executioner, the
gatekeeper … the artistic process is seen … as
devil’s work.”8 Art is the symbolic place of choice
to hold the mystery: the fresco depicting Saint
Sebastian in La casa dalle finestre che ridono, the
novel in the making in Zeder, the old volume
that Carlo Delle Piane’s character is trying to sell
in Tutti defunti … tranne i morti and the whole
esoteric library of L’arcano incantatore.
In his horror films, which are strictly
related to his non-horror production (often ded-
icated to his youth years and to the area where
he was brought up), Avati draws from an oral
tradition of folk tales that forms part of the
truest Italian vision of the Fantastic, as displayed
by such works as the 17th century fairytale col-
lection Lo cunto de li cunti (1636, Giambattista
Basile) and the 183 short story anthology Nov-
elle della nonna by Emma Perodi. The latter vol-
ume consisted of a number of stories told by an
octagenarian granny to her family, gathered be-
fore the fireplace during the cold winter nights
in the countryside: the tone, the setting, the
characters showed how Gothic’s typical themes
and characters (ghosts, vampires, werewolves)
were also present in the Italian tradition, and
indeed benefitted from a pragmatic, trivial ap-
proach, which subtracted horror to the stale
conventions of the bourgeois Romantic tradition
and brought it back to the people, to the land,
to known and easily identifiable places.
The idea for La casa dalle finestre che
ridono came from a story Avati heard as a child
about the exhumation of the skeleton of a priest
in the little village of Sasso Marconi, which re-
sulted in a shocking discovery, even though the
final, extraordinary twist owes in part to
Georges Bernanos’ 135 novel The Crime. Avati
himself recalled another episode that helped
him focus on the idea for the movie.
I, my brother Antonio, Cesare Bastelli [author’s note:
Avati’s a.d.] and two or three others were at a small
train station in the Polesine area. We were waiting.
Then the train arrived, it stopped and a little man
with white hair, elegantly dressed, got off. Instead of
walking, he dragged his feet and came forward slowly
with a little purse in his hand. His name was Boccac-
cini and he spoke in a thin voice … he really was a
movie character. We drove him to his dilapidated
160 1976: La casa

Shooting the opening scene of La casa dalle finestre che ridono. Among the crew, we can see Gianni
Cavina, Bob Tonelli and Lino Capolicchio (the first three on the left), Francesca Marciano (center, in
the distance) and Pupi Avati (second from right) (courtesy Luca Servini).

house in the woods. A place with liberty decorations
at the entrance and on the façade. Upon entering this
house, with this little old man dragging his feet and
speaking with a stridulous voice, we felt an intense
fear. There started the idea for the movie, the idea of
a host who leads somebody into a house. It was an
encounter closely related to the Gothic genre, with
the train stopping and the only passenger getting off
and toward us…. We then used Boccaccini’s house
as the main location. It is the house where Stefano
moves in the film.10
An early draft of the script, Blood Relation
/ La luce dell’ultimo piano, dated back to the
early 170s, co-written by Antonion Troisio; it
was to be produced by Alfredo Cuomo, who
then backed out. Avati took up the old script
after the financial flop of Bordella and made sev-
eral important changes to the main characters
and the story, with outstanding results.11 The di-
rector displays a taste for storytelling, a compla-
cency in arousing surprise and marvel, a subtle
mockery of his own audience (that he likes to
string along, smiling about his own tricks) that
has lots in common with Perodi’s anthology.
Moreover, Avati’s film is characterized by a
macabre moral ending that is akin to folk tales:
those who dare too much and venture into
places, either metaphorical or real, which they
don’t know, will surely be punished.12
This is not to say that horror movies, con-
temporary or past, were totally absent in Avati’s
film universe. The director himself acknowl-
edged as influences Dreyer’s Vampyr (132) and,
for the grammar of fear, H. G. Clouzot’s Les di-
aboliques. In addition to that, La casa dalle fines-
tre che ridono pays toll to contemporaneous Ital-
ian gialli: Avati complained that he had to add
gruesome close-ups of stabbings (with ample
use of ox blood) due to distribution needs; nev-
ertheless, the result is chilling, due to the way
the director filmed these inserts, in low-angle
shots and with the knives descending directly
toward the camera. However, it is impossible to
reduce Avati’s Gothic to one of the threads in
vogue at that time. La casa dalle finestre che ri-
dono moves away from the mechanics of the jeu
de massacre according to Argento, certifying the
singularity and the authorial essence of a cinema
which, instead of leaning on visual excesses, de-
votes itself to a programmatic reticence, and
often assigns the main uncanny function to
sound rather than to image: think of the eerie
 1976: La casa
tape recording of Buono Legnani’s feverish
voice, that freezes the blood of the protagonist
and the viewer alike.
Moreover, a morbid voyeuristic feel—
bound not to eroticism but to the sacred, the
unknowable, not a surrogate of pleasure but an
extension of knowledge—characterizes the art
of Buono Legnani, the “painter of agonies,” fo-
cused on the attempt of fixing on the canvas the
moment of death, or perhaps the ecstasis of mar-
tyrdom: what a difference of perspective, com-
pared to Pascal Laugier’s pretentious Martyrs
(2008)! According to French film critic Frank
Lafond, “Legnani’s voyeurism and his morbid
impulses, which will eventually lead him to sac-
rifice himself with fire, are linked to a process
of contamination: the blood of victims and the
colors of his palette (which is symbolically re-
placed by the painter’s own arm) seem to merge
in the time of an almost mystical ecstasy that al-
lows the birth of a work of art.”13
The rural and period setting (approxi-
mately the late 140s / early 150s) serves also
to give a disturbing reading of Italy’s socio-
cultural reality, filtered through a peripheral,
oblique perspective. The dilapidated abandoned
hut in the countryside where Buono Legnani
painted his masterpieces, with its incongruous
laughing mouths painted around the windows,14
which seem to laugh at the horror the place has
witnessed over the years, is a modern equivalent
of the ruins in Gothic novels, and represents the
end of the rural civilization, as well as a memory
to be removed. The mirage of economic well-
being that came to the surface in the immediate
post–World War II years is embodied by the am-
bitious, bizarre, diminutive mayor Solmi (Bob
Tonelli), who dreams of turning Buono Legnani
into a famous figure like the naive painter An-
tonio Ligabue (18–165) so as to bring fame
and money to his little village. Ultimately, though,
Solmi too is seen as an outsider in such a suspi-
cious and retrograde small-town environment—
just like Stefano, who takes an opposite path
from the many young people who leave the
country for the city.
Through the casting of grotesque and de-
formed physical types, Avati depicts a mon-
strous daily parade of freaks, who look like
pathological manifestations of a sick micro-
cosm. Dwarfs, lunatics, cross-eyed intellectuals,
and dimwitted thugs are once again the coun-
tryside equivalent of certain figures of the
Gothic literature and film, such as the retarded
161
altar boy (Pietro Brambilla15), a perpetually grin-
ning Renfield type. At the same time, these types
certify the proximity of Avati’s vision to the
grotesque of so many commedia all’italiana
films, not to mention Fellini’s circus-like uni-
verse, for the choice of faces and bodies that are
weird, unusual, not photogenic at all. The mon-
strous is also evoked in the form of a natural en-
vironment that suddenly reveals disturbing and
frightening traits, such as the sound of the rats
locked in the coffin at the funeral of Stefano’s
friend (a nod to Lovecraft’s short story The Rats
in the Walls, perhaps?) and the snails in the
fridge in the dilapidated house where Stefano
moves after he has been driven out of the hotel
where he was staying; incidentally, like Harker’s
trip to the Dracula castle, the transition from
the relatively safe inn to the monster’s lair brings
the hero closer to the core of the mystery and to
perdition as well.
In the Gothic according to Avati, female
figures are a world apart, impenetrable, attrac-
tive and cruel. Alien and aerial, dreamed and
yet feared, bearers (or impersonations) of death,
like Olimpia in Le strelle nel fosso, and even the
sweet Anne Canovas in the ending of Zeder. In
this respect, La casa dalle finestre che ridono is
undoubtedly the point of arrival in the portrayal
of the female unheimlich in Italian cinema. Here,
normal, attractive female characters are destined
to oblivion (the “easy” schoolteacher with whom
Stefano goes to bed) or martyrdom (her substi-
tute, the angelic-looking Francesca), destroyed
by elderly, matronly figures whose ferociousness
is equalled only by their voracious appetites.
There is no trace of the beauty that got the
previous decade’s Gothic heroes lost under its
spell: and yet the focus of the anxiety that Buono
Legnani’s monstrous sisters convey is exactly
their abnormal, greedy, repeatedly underlined
sexuality. The incestuous relationship that
linked them to their painter brother, the ve-
nereal diseases contracted during the Brazilian
stay (the exotic becomes a symbol of perdition,
a typical belief in the closed-minded village
mentality), and especially the explosive mixture
of sexual ambiguity, repression and Catholic
symbology that characterizes the figure of the
parish priest, are all elements that form a picture
of creepy and contradictory feminity, sterile in
its maternal, oppressive opulence, familiar yet
extraneous.
If, as noted, in the countryside the parish
priests were “ambiguous figures, separated from
162 1976: La casa
the world of the living and able to put in com-
munication this and the other world,”16 the priest
of La casa dalle finestre che ridono is the chilling
link between the mythical “grande Mouna”
evoked in Fellini’s Casanova (176) and the
Catholic sexophobic sense of guilt. At the same
time, it is also a disturbing Pagan totem: the final
revelation is a moment of blinding, Lovecraftian
terror, which recalls the idea of “unmasking”
found in the climax of short stories such as The
Whisperer in the Darkness or The Dunwich Hor-
ror, where the apex of horror is given by the sud-
den disclosure of an unforeseen identity (and
reality) hidden under ordinary appearances.
Such a shocking unmasking is paired with the
disgusting revelation of an ugly, senile sexuality,
but Avati had previously alluded to such an am-
biguity, coloring it with a distinct Surrealist
touch, in the flashback that shows Legnani—in
the absence of a female model who agrees to
pose nude for him—paint a sensual naked
woman, whose face has the masculine and far
from Apollonian features of the painter himself.
The resort to an imagery linked with the
sacred, either deformed or with its meaning
overturned, is one of the main traits of Avati’s
approach to Gothic. Legnani’s fresco is a blas-
phemous version of the martyrdom of Saint Se-
bastian, and the film’s most horrific figure is a
priest, as will be the case with Zeder and L’arcano
incantatore. This is strictly connected with the
director’s relationship with death and the after-
life, which, in his own words, is intense and al-
most morbid as the one depicted in Henry
James’ short story The Altar of the Dead. And
the same can be said of his characters, who con-
tinually seek a way to communicate with the
dead, through unlikely magicians (Balsamus),
séances (Thomas … gli indemoniati) or blood
sacrifices, and keep horrid fetishes of the de-
ceased (if not their whole body in formalde-
hyde…) in the illusion to keep in contact with
them, and make them return to life. The afterlife
is constantly evoked, be it a result of the coun-
tryside traditions (“Death, which today is un-
thinkable, in that time and culture was instead
considered thinkable; death was brought back
to a knowable scope” 17) or the sign of a subter-
ranean anguish emanating from the Catholic in-
stitutions themselves, as is the case with the ruth-
less researchers hired by the Vatican in Zeder.
Eventually the dead return, but not like
Lazarus in the Gospels. They laugh and laugh,
as if they had seen something we don’t know, an
exhilarating atrocious mockery which they don’t
want to share with us: that is the case with the
demented grin of Buono Legnani’s skeleton in
formaldehyde in La casa dalle finestre che ridono,
the crystalline laughter of the ghosts of the
young lay-sisters Laura and Giulia in L’arcano
incantatore, the irrepressible sneer in Don Luigi
Costa’s toothless mouth at the moment of res-
urrection, and Alessandra’s enigmatic smile be-
fore her husband, who brought her back from
the realm of the dead like Orpheus in Zeder. It
is not by chance, then, that the belief in a mys-
terious, pre–Conciliar God is sided with esoteric
temptations and allusions, in a disturbing mix-
ture of Catholicism and pagan roots. Horror, to
Avati, is a matter of faith.
NoTeS
1. Stefano Della Casa, “Memoria di un cinema tra
utopia e ghetto,” Cineforum # 2, novembre 10, 38.
2. A.M.A. Film (the initials stand for Avati-Minervini-
Avati) would produce of all Avati’s works up to 183. It
would also finance movies by other directors, such as
Berlinguer ti voglio bene (177, Giuseppe Bertolucci,
starring Roberto Benigni) and Lamberto Bava’s debut
Macabro (180).
3. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on April 12, 176. The indication of the
Incir-De Paolis Studios in Rome in the credits was merely
bureaucratic.
4. Originally cast to play the protagonist in Profondo
rosso, Capolicchio was one of the most recognizable faces
of Italian immediate post–168 cinema, with such works
as Metti, una sera a cena (16, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi)
and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (170, Vittorio De Sica).
Capolicchio accepted the role after receiving a phone call
from his wife, who had read the script one night when she
could not get to sleep: “She told me she had just read the
most frightening story ever. So I read it too, and realized
that it was a kind of Gothic that had been never done be-
fore.” Claudio Bartolini, “La casa dalle finestre che ridono:
la paura,” in Adamovit, Bartolini, Servini, Nero Avati, 71.
5. Ruggero Adamovit, Claudio Bartolini, Il gotico
padano. Dialogo con Pupi Avati, Le Mani, Genova 2010,
138.
6. Ibid, 107.
7. “Flowers of love, beautiful flowers of my garden, for
you…”
8. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 172).
9. Lo cunto de li cunti, or Pentamerone, inspired two
adaptations: Francesco Rosi’s C’era una volta (167) and
Matteo Garrone’s Il racconto dei racconti—Tale of Tales
(2015).
10. Claudio Bartolini, “La casa dalle finestre che ridono:
la paura,” in Adamovit, Bartolini, Servini, Nero Avati, 70.
11. Ibid., 78. Alessio Di Rocci, Fabio Pucci, “La luce
dell’ultimo piano,” Nocturno Cinema #175, July 2017, 1.
12. Pupi Avati about the ending (SPOILER ALERT):
“The arrival of the police was not in the script. We added
the final shot, with the hand leaning on the tree—my hand,
 1976: La lupa 163

incidentally—because the distributors were afraid that the Aullidos de terror (Spain); La louve sanguinaire;
ending would be too negative. They wanted there to be the La louve se dechaine (France); La mujer lobo
hope that someone might save Stefano. But actually Stefano
dies.” Bartolini, “La casa dalle finestre che ridono: la paura,” (Mexico); Ulvekvinden (Denmark)
6. Daniela, the daughter of Count Corrado
13. Frank Lafond, Le cinéma de la peur selon Pupi Avati, Messeri, was raped when she was 15, and that ter-
in Frank Lafond (ed.), Cauchemars Italiens. Volume 1: Le rible experience caused her to hate all males.
Cinéma fantastique, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2011, 154–155.
14. The painted mouths were the work of Avati’s brother
What is more, she has inherited a family curse,
Antonio. and turns into a werewolf during nights with a
15. Brambilla, Ugo Tognazzi’s nephew, had appeared full moon. When her newlywed sister Irena
also in Bordella, and would be also in a couple other Avati arrives from the United States with her husband
pics, namely Jazz Band and Cinema!!! That same year he Fabian, Daniela seduces her brother-in-law and
played one of the Neofascist killers in Carlo Lizzani’s San
Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile. tears him to pieces. After being hospitalized, she
16. Adamovit, Bartolini, Il gotico padano, 68. kills a lesbian patient with a pair of scissors and
17. Ibid., 101. escapes, leaving more victims on her trail. The
meeting with the kind, understanding stuntman
La lupa mannara (Werewolf Woman) Luca Mandini, with whom she falls in love, seems
D: Rino [Salvatore] Di Silvestro. S and SC: to finally cure Daniela, but their idyll is tragically
Rino Di Silvestro; DOP: Mario Capriotti; M: broken when Luca is killed by three thugs. Mad
Coriolano Gori (Ed. Nazionalmusic); E: Angelo with anger, Daniela exterminates the gang and
Curi; ArtD: Arrigo Breschi. English version: escapes in the woods of Sales. There she is located
DubD: Tony [Anthony] La Penna. Cast: Annik by Commissioner Monica of the homicide
[Anne] Borel (Daniela), Howard Ross [Renato squad…
Rossini] (Luca Mondini), Dagmar
Lassander (Irena), Tino Carraro
(Count Corrado Messeri), Elio Za-
muto (Prof. Traven), Frederick
Stafford [Friedrich Strobel von
Stein] (Commissioner Monica), Os-
valdo Ruggieri (Fabian), Andrea
Scotti (Arrighi), Felicita Fanny
(Doctor in car), Isabella Rosa, Giu-
liana Giuliani, Anna Mallarini,
[Maria] Renata Franco, Salvatore
Billa (Gas station attendant—
Rapist), Pietro Torrisi (Alvaro—
Rapist), Vito Domenighini, Pino
[Giuseppe] Mattei (Daniela’s vic-
tim—The Would-be rapist in car),
Willy Pepe; uncredited: Umberto
Amambrini (Policeman), Rino Di
Silvestro (Doctor). PROD: Diego
Alchimede for Dialchi Film (Rome);
PM: Bruno Evangelisti. Country:
Italy. Filmed in Rome. Running time:
100 minutes (m. 2727). Visa n. 6726
(2.12.176); Rating: V.M.18. Release
dates: 3.18.176 (Italy); June 177
(U.S.A.). Distribution: Agorà (Italy);
Dimension Pictures (U.S.A.). Do-
mestic gross: 187,164,04 lire. Also
known as: Daughter of a Werewolf;
Naked Werewolf Woman; She-Wolf;
Terror of the She Wolf (U.S.); Legend
of the Wolf Woman (Australia); Danish poster for La lupa mannara (1976).
164 1976: La lupa
Rino Di Silvestro’s body of work was one
of the wildest and most extreme within Italian
low-budget cinema of the 170s, for its no-
holds-barred mixture of sociological and psy-
chological aspirations and the sheer exploitation
value of the results. Born in Rome in 132, from
a Sicilian family, Di Silvestro took his first steps
on stage, teaming up with a nobleman by the
name of Giovanni Maria Russo Camoli, Prince
of Cerami,1 for a number of would-be avant-
garde plays they co-wrote and directed. In the
early 170s Di Silvestro moved on to cinema,
working as a ghost writer prior to making his
debut as a director.
Since his film debut, the women-in-prison-
cum-crime-film hybrid Diario segreto da un
carcere femminile (173), Di Silvestro explored
the darkest side of genre cinema, from the erotic
giallo Prostituzione (174) to the Nazi-erotic Le
deportate della sezione speciale SS (176), up to
his output in the Eighties, with the Christiane F.
rip-off Hanna D.—La ragazza del Vondel Park
(184). The common denominator of Di Silve-
stro’s work was eroticism, invariably declined in
a lurid, sordid way, with ample room for the of-
fensive, the pathological, the shocking.
Such a tendency had already been in evi-
dence in his stage work: his first play, Op, bop,
pop, ip, staged at Rome’s Teatro delle Muse,
lasted for eight days before the theater closed it
down, whereas his version of Céline’s L’église
lasted only one night. The worst fate, however,
happened to Cerami and Di Silvestro’s adapta-
tion of Shakespeare’s Coriolano. In March 170,
in Milan, the police intervened and suspended
the theatrical performance: the female protag-
onist, Antonella Dogan, was completely naked
on stage, and covered only with cellophane. The
play (which featured, among others, Umberto
Raho) had gained notoriety since its first show-
ing, and was described as “a trivial doggerel” fea-
turing “apology of Nazism and racism, exal-
tation of crematoriums and homosexuality,
offensive lines toward some government per-
sonalities and the Pope” as well as “all sorts of
scurrilous noises,” and was labeled as a “defiant,
wretched mess.”2 It also included the slaughter-
ing of a live chicken on stage, whose blood was
poured over the naked actress’ shoulders (and
ended up on a female member of the audience
as well during the preview), and a “porcelain
Parliament” represented by four water-closets
with Italy’s main parties’ symbols on them.3 Di
Silvestro and the actors were denounced for ob-
scenity, and reviewers condemned the play’s
anti–Semite spirit.4
Filmed in September 175,5 La lupa man-
nara was originally titled La licantropa, a title
that according to the director was more scien-
tifically exact for “a tragic, terrifying pathology,
much discussed by Cesare Lombroso.”6 Di Sil-
vestro emphasized in interviews his attempt at
making a “serious” film about lycanthropy:
“When there is this monthly gravitational force,
like the menstrual cycle, this incredible explo-
sion of endoreactive energy due to a psychic su-
pernatural event, it reawakens the psychic ma-
terial in us, which is also affected by the moon’s
gravitational force. These stimuli which produce
unpredictable and incurable toxins within each
of us create a high tide in our body,” the director
explained vehemently when describing his take
on the subject, which he had spiced with refer-
ences to the folklore and to Gothic horror tales.
“I included this pathologically devastating event
within the context of the famous and popular
legend of the werewolf. So that’s why the title
was La lupa mannara. A strong, clear, decisive
title as cinema was meant to be at that time. You
couldn’t be very intricate or bizarre, because this
kind of film had to go straight to its fascination,
the amazement of the spectator…. It wasn’t easy
combining legend and psychiatric and patho-
logical culture: on the one hand I had to balance
the film’s marketability and on the other its im-
portant, cultural pathological essence.”
In discussing the movie, Di Silvestro erro-
neously claimed that it was the first to be cen-
tered on a werewolf woman: in fact, the theme
had been explored on the big screen as early as
in The Werewolf (113, Henry MacRae), a one-
reel film based on the short story The Were-
wolves, by Henry Beaugrand. Starring Clarence
Burton, Marie Walcamp and Phyllis Gordon and
released by Universal Studios, it was about a
Navajo woman (Walcamp) who becomes a
witch and teaches her daughter (Gordon) to
transform into a wolf in order to carry out
vengeance against the white men. It is now con-
sidered a lost film. In addition to that, there had
been famous movies that dealt with a sex-related
female pathology, such as Jacques Tourneur’s
Cat People (142) or Jean Yarbrough’s She-Wolf
of London (146). Anyway, Di Silvestro’s work is
unique in its way of blending diverse elements
into one over-the-top sexploitation potboiler.
The story has its share of Gothic reminis-
cences. Young Countess Daniela is obsessed
 1976: La lupa
with the figure of her ancestress, who not only
was her dead ringer but according to a legend
could turn into a female werewolf in the nights
of full moon. Hence the jaw-dropping opening
sequence, where Annik Borel is seen dancing in
the nude amid bonfires, sporting a werewolf
makeup that must be seen to be believed, with
ample fur, canine nose and pointed, giant-sized
nipples protruding from her chest. The doppel-
gänger theme is also emphasized by way of a
portrait of the woman which Daniela is said to
have discovered but is never actually shown in
the movie.
Soon Di Silvestro departs from the genre’s
staples. The theme of bestiality hiding under the
surface was possibly inspired by Walerian
Borowczyk’s La bête (175), and a scene has
Daniela face her ancestress, who is dressed in
an 18th century costume and wig that is sup-
posed to recall Lisbeth Hummel’s character in
Borowczyk’s film (yet the result looks more like
the Fairy with Turquoise Hair in Pinocchio).
Soon, however, La lupa mannara turns into a
succession of erotic encounters that almost in-
variably end up in crude splatter scenes that re-
call the cheap adults-only comics of the period
with their pairing of (often violent) sex and gore.
After her desire is awakened by the sight
of her sister making love with her husband,
whom she spies on while masturbating, Daniela
lures the man into the woods, seduces him and
slaughters him, before falling into a feverish state
that forces her father (Tino Carraro) to hospi-
talize her in a clinic. This would not be an Italian
erotic film if such clinic hadn’t at least one
nymphomaniac patient (see also Di Leo’s La bes-
tia uccide a sangue freddo), whom Daniela stabs
with scissors, fleeing from the clinic and leaving
more victims on the way.
About one hour into the film, though, Di
Silvestro drastically diverts from the established
body count scheme, and turns the third act into
a miniature rape-and-revenge tale, as the tender
love story which blossoms between Daniela and
a gentle stuntman called Luca (Howard Ross) is
tragically broken by the eruption of a trio of
thugs (including such recurring genre faces as
Salvatore Billa and Pietro Torrisi) who gang-
rape the girl and kill her lover—all this while a
hard-boiled commissioner (Frederick Stafford)
investigates the killings. The fact that these
scenes take place mostly in a deserted Western
village (where Luca apparently lives as a care-
taker of sorts) makes them an unintentional
165
commentary of sorts on the declining fortunes
of Italian genre cinema. On the other hand,
Daniela’s vengeance on the rapists, which takes
place in a junkyard where she (inexplicably)
tracked them, looks like a mad homage to Fer-
nando di Leo’s films.
Overall, even though the director claimed
he had depicted Daniela as a victim in a male-
oriented society, adding that “in her beastly es-
cape, in her fight against time and the authori-
ties, against a society which is completely ad-
verse to such a personality, every contact with
a man brings out her criminal instinct,” the
eponymous werewolf woman is yet another em-
bodiment of Italian Gothic’s deadly dangerous
seductresses, who lure the male and kill him:
therefore, the sexual humiliations she undergoes
are all the more debatable in their cheap ex-
ploitation value.
Di Silvestro had no formal training as a di-
rector. Even though his films were not techni-
cally poor as those by some of his peers, and at
times even featured attempts at stylistic precios-
ity—see the low-angle tracking shot which pre-
cedes Daniela in the first scene in the Western
village—his visual choices display naive and
often deranged rereading of stereotypes, as well
as heavy-handed symbolism and emphatic use
of film language. The overabundance of close-
ups, zooms and camera angles result in a con-
stant tendency toward the unintentionally
ridiculous. Take Daniela’s hallucination in which
she sees an iguana crawling between her legs, a
Freudian symbol hammered home in a most ob-
noxious way; the characterization of the rapists,
dressed as macho bikers with denim jeans, leather
jackets and shirts open on their bare chests, as
crude an epitome of masculine virility/brutality
as ever; or the sequence where the professor
(Elio Zamuto) discusses Daniela’s pathology
with the commissioner while playing billiards,
and using the balls to better explain the concept.
Incidentally, the dialogue (“Seems we’re sur-
rounded by the occult”) plays on a similar riff
as Udo Kier’s scene in Suspiria, but the mono-
logue touches the topic of metempsychosis in a
laughable way: “When the spirit of a dead person
penetrates somebody that’s obsessed, the latter
follows the destiny of that reincarnated spirit.”
The most revealing bit in this sense is the
ill-fated idyll betwen Daniela and Luca, filmed
as a tearjerker melodrama, complete with the
couple kissing on the beach in the sunset to the
sound of syrupy music, and featuring such awk-
166 1976: Un sussurro
ward moments as Luca throwing himself through
a fake window on a movie set, landing on a mat-
tress, getting up and kissing Daniela, which look
like they belong to a Mel Brooks parody. Scenes
like this show at once Di Silvestro’s utter com-
mitment to the story, his lack of irony, and his
hopeless ineptitude as a filmmaker.
As for the choice of the leading actress, the
beautiful yet somehow disquieting-looking
Annik (Anne) Borel, often in full frontal nude
scenes, Di Silvestro recalled: “I received hun-
dreds of photos of every typology, also from in-
ternational agents. I was struck by Annik Borel,
a Swiss girl who happened to be in Italy. I real-
ized that something was exploding within her,
in her psychic and cultural background…. I gave
her a number of ‘strong,’ almost devastating
screen tests to be certain that I had found my
‘werewolf woman’ … She told me: ‘I’m living in
the nightmare of this film.’” Borel was actually
French, born in 148 in Besançon; she had ap-
peared in such dreck as Blood Orgy of the She-
Devils (173, Ted V. Mikels) and The Last Porno
Flick (174, Ray Marsh), and Di Silvestro’s film
remained the crown jewel in her career, which
ended soon after with a couple of nondescript
sex flicks, Pavlos Filippou’s Black Aphrodite
(177), where she starred alongside Ajita Wilson,
and Jean-Marie Pallardy’s modern-day retelling
of the Odyssey, L’amour chez les poids lourds
(178), in the small role of a transvestite.
The rest of the cast was an odd bunch, fea-
turing prestigious stage actor Tino Carraro, sexy
starlet Dagmar Lassander, and Frederick Staf-
ford in his penultimate film: his last movie re-
leased theatrically in Italy was Melchiade Co-
letti’s Sfida sul fondo, co-starring Lassander,
which came out a month after Di Silvestro’s film.
Stafford died in a plane crash in 17.
Even though it passed almost unnoticed in
Italy, and was predictably ridiculed by critics, 7
La lupa mannara did surprisingly good box of-
fice abroad. It was distributed theatrically in the
States (by Dimension Pictures), Canada and
Australia, and developed a marginal cult status,
nurturing the director’s belief that his films “had
an international feel about them—they were un-
derstandable even without dialogue or music,
just by watching the images. This is what I
wanted. Films that were hard, cruel, merciless,
like the society which surrounds us, and like the
animal instinct which we have within, in that
ferocious dualism between good and evil, one
of them inevitably explodes.”
Di Silvestro’s subsequent works were not
nearly as successful but stuck with the director’s
obsession: the little-seen Baby Love (17), shot
entirely at Castle Piccolomini in Balsorano, was
a sex fable spiced with hardcore bits, followed
by the mild erotic comedy Bello di mamma
(181, starring Philippe Leroy and Jenny Tam-
buri), and the sleazy Hanna D.—La ragazza del
Vondel Park (completed by Bruno Mattei). His
final film was 185’s The Erotic Dreams of
Cleopatra, never even released theatrically in
Italy. Di Silvestro died of cancer in 200.
NoTeS
1. After his experience with Di Silvestro, prince Cerami
disappeared from the artistic world, even though he re-
mained a rather well-known figure in the Roman high so-
ciety. His only other credit was a script (co-written with
Giò Stajano) titled Biancaneve e i 7 sadici (Snow White and
the 7 Sadists), dated 177. In 17 he claimed he was
writing a book called Il manuale del genio: come si diventa
genio in 15 sedute (The Genius Handbook: How to Become
a Genius in 15 Lessons). Victor Ciuffa, “Sono principe,
cerco casa in un castello,” Corriere della Sera, January 18,
17.
2. L. Bar, “Nudo e sangue,” Corriere d’Informazione,
March 14–15, 170.
3. Another article reported that the abrupt interruption
was followed by a bustling scene, as part of the audience,
composed of Neofascists, started shouting “No to commu-
nist repression!” whereas other spectators applauded the
police, and a young man climbed on the stage and started
hugging and kissing the actors. Anonymous, “Sospeso uno
spettacolo osceno,” Corriere della Sera, March 15, 170.
4. [Giovanni] Mosca, “Il nudo espiatorio,” Corriere d’In-
formazione, March 16–17, 170
5. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on September 8, 175.
6. Interview with Rino Di Silvestro, extra in the U.S.
Raro Video Blu-Ray. All Di Silvestro’s declarations are
taken from said interview.
7. M. Po. [Maurizio Porro], “Licantropa porcacciona,”
Corriere della Sera, June 16, 176.
Un sussurro nel buio (A Whisper in the
Dark)
D: Marcello Aliprandi. S: Nicolò Rienzi,
Maria Teresa Rienzi; DOP: Claudio Cirillo
(Technospes); M: Pino Donaggio, conducted by
Natale Massara (Ed. Artisti Associati); E: Gian
Maria Messeri; PD: Giovanni Soccol; AD: Carlo
Montanaro; SD: Francesco Chianese; CO:
Francesca Terenzio; C: Oddone Bernardini; AC:
Maurizio Zampagni; SO: Franco Borni; MU:
Franco Schioppa; Hair: Sergio Gennari; AMU:
Massimo Camilletti; SS: Rosanna Seregni; AE:
Antonio Proia; 2ndAE: Aurelio Tirimagni; ChEl:
Bruno Angeletti; KG: Luigi Jetto; PropM: Gof-
 1976: Un sussurro
fredo Massetti; W: Anita Cavallari; SP: Giorgio
Schwarz Garibaldi; SE: René; Mix: Danilo Mo-
roni. Cast: John Phillip Law (Alex), Nathalie
Delon [Francine Canovas] (Camilla), Olga Bis-
era (Françoise), Alessandro Poggi (Martino),
Joseph Cotten (The Professor), Lucretia Love
(Susan), Zora Velcova (Camilla’s Mother), Su-
sanna Melandri (Milena), Simona Patitucci
(Matilde), Adriana Russo (Clara), Margherita
Sala; uncredited: Claudio Cirillo (Detective),
Pino Donaggio (Singer). PROD: Enzo Gallo for
Cinemondial S.r.l. (Rome). PM: Viero Spadoni;
PSe: Paola Simonetti. Country: Italy. Filmed in
Venice and Mogliano Veneto (Venice). Running
time: 102 minutes (m. 2772). Visa n. 6833
(8.10.176); Rating: none; Release date: 8.12.176;
Distribution: Lia Film. Domestic gross: 171,31,126
lire. Also known as: Un susurro en la oscuridad
(Spain).
A boy named Martino lives in a beautiful
villa in the Veneto countryside with his parents
Alex and Camilla, his sisters Matilde and Milena,
and the housekeeper, Françoise. On the surface,
it looks like a happy family, but their harmony is
disturbed by Martino’s “invisible friend” Luca,
whom the boy talks to and plays with. Convinced
that Luca is just a harmless figment of Martino’s
imagination, for a while Alex and Camilla
nourish their son’s claims, behaving as if Luca re-
ally exists; however, some strange unexplainable
events lead them to consult a psychiatrist. The
professor denies Luca’s existence and settles in the
villa to watch Martino’s behavior: a few days later,
though, he is the victim of a fatal accident in the
bathroom. But did it really go that way? Martino’s
grandmother blames him for murder, whereas
Camilla starts to really believe in Luca’s existence
and begs him to leave…
With a body of work consisting of only
seven feature films, all of them only marginally
successful or poorly distributed, Marcello
Aliprandi (134–17) is an often overlooked
filmmaker, even by Italian cinema scholars. He
certainly was not a genre director, which nowa-
days doesn’t make his name as palatable as that
of, say, Aristide Massaccesi. On the other hand,
his films were often too weird and artistically
compromised to make him a critically well-
appreciated auteur, even though Aliprandi’s past
as a theater director and as Luchino Visconti’s
assistant granted him respect. Aliprandi defi-
nitely didn’t have the gift of timing. His films
came out at the wrong moment and thus were
misappreciated or misunderstood. With the ex-
167
ception of the dreadful Senza buccia (17), all
were personal and technically competent works,
and often dealt with the Fantastic, even though
in original and idiosyncratic ways.
Born in Rome on January 2, 134, from an
Italian father and an Armenian mother, in the
mid–Fifties Aliprandi left Economy studies and
enrolled in Arts Academy “Silvio D’Amico,” to
study as a director. After graduation, he started
working in the theater with Luchino Visconti,
and was the assistant director on Il gattopardo.
For most of the Sixties Aliprandi worked on
stage, directing dramas and operas: he finally
made his feature film debut in 170 with La
ragazza di latta (originally Mellonta Tauta, a title
inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe short story), a
weird surreal sci-fi fable with blunt political
overtones which was Sydne Rome’s first film.
Even though he kept working as a script-
writer (such as on L’arma l’ora il movente, an odd
mystery directed in 172 by Francesco Mazzei),
it took four years before Aliprandi got behind
the camera again, this time with a very different
project, which nonetheless featured similar po-
litical overtones. Corruzione al palazzo di gius-
tizia (174), starring Franco Nero and Fernando
Rey, was an adaptation of Ugo Betti’s 144 stage
play in a contemporary setting. It would be
Aliprandi’s biggest box office result, but its prox-
imity to the then-in vogue crime genre pre-
vented the film from gaining the credibility
among critics to which it aspired.
Shot in early 176, 1 Un sussurro nel buio,
Aliprandi’s third film, is another hard-to-pin af-
fair: the script, by the husband-and-wife team
of Nicolò and Maria Teresa Rienzi, dealt with a
parapsychological theme by then in vogue, but
with a more refined approach. The result is an
unsettling ghost story à la Henry James, about
a rich, spoilt kid whose imaginary brother seems
to be less a product of the boys’ imagination
than a real malevolent presence, that causes
creepy accidents and even provokes a mysteri-
ous death.
From the opening sequence, a creepy sub-
jective shot of an unseen presence wandering
around the misty park surrounding the villa,
Aliprandi fully embraces the genre’s mood. And
yet, despite dealing with a typical Gothic prem-
ise, the director waters down the film’s horrific
potential by blending it with melodrama: Un
sussurro nel buio has much in common with the
so called “lacrima-movie” subgenre, the tear-
jerking dramas centered on unhappy children
168 1976: Un sussurro
that were so popular in the period. That lacrima
movies ended up merging with the Gothic and
the “demonic possession” cycle—see also Ugo
Liberatore’s Nero veneziano (178), which starred
the undisputed star of the genre, Renato Ces-
tié—says a lot about the way the Italian genre
industry worked in those frantic years.
In Aliprandi’s film, though, the problematic
parents/son relationships, a staple of the thread,
is overturned into a tale of child dictatorship
and a portrayal of a dysfunctional bourgeois
family, with distracted parents who leave their
children’s education to the housekeeper and in-
differently oblige to their offspring’s moods and
whims.
Here, the generational conflict between fa-
ther and son—a theme that crossed the genres
in the late 170s—has the ultimate effect of con-
solidating a family in a crisis, and underlies a
not-too hidden pro-life discourse. Luca, the “in-
visible child” that may or may not be the product
of Martino’s imagination, and who “would only
Italian poster for Un sussurro nel buio (1976).
like to be loved … by any means” is also the still-
born child that Camilla (Nathalie Delon) lost;
and the final reconciliation with her distracted
and likely unfaithful husband Alex (John Phillip
Law) climaxes in a love scene that perhaps will
lead to a new pregnancy.
Ultimately, the movie is more significant
for the context in which the story takes place
than for the mild twists of its anodyne script. A
sense of disruption, which has also symbolic
class meaning, can be detected: Martino is the
offspring of a privileged, haute-bourgeois family
that seems to live in a different era, in a splendid
villa, surrounded by luxuries, who give mask
parties similar to those held by the nobility in
past centuries. To Alex and Camilla, it is as if
time had stopped, and their daily routine, char-
acterized by a tangible boredom, makes them
look like living counterparts to the unhappy
ghosts condemned to live their past again and
again, in films like Danza macabra—although
the closest thing to blood they can spill are drops
of some precious vintage wine.
Aliprandi makes ample use of melo-
drama’s visual staples: soft-focus shots,
style preciosities, tourist footage in
Venice (with echoes of Nicolas Roeg’s
magnificent Don’t Look Now),2 and an
emphasis on the little protagonist’s sub-
jective dimension. The Fantastic angle is
dealt with in an ambiguous manner, so
as to stir uncertainty about the presence
of the little ghost: a balloon is carried
away by the wind, a ball kicked by the
boy during a football game is stopped by
an invisible force (…or perhaps a
stone?), a swing starts rocking by itself,
like in Mario Bava’s Shock.
Mostly, though, the director strives
for a poetic tone that is not always con-
vincing: the best moment in this sense
may be the scene of the “invisible kiss”
Luca gives to Camilla; elsewhere, he
relies on cultivated references, and su-
perfluous embellishments (like the re-
peated use of mirrors) and digressions.
In his review of the film, noted Italian
critic Tullio Kezich praised the bizarre,
Henry James–like atmosphere and Ali-
prandi’s interest for the Fantastic, but
also noted that the director “exceeds in
extravaganzas (including a masked ball
that even recalls Tiepolo’s paintings)
where it would have taken discipline of
 1977: Anima
choice.”3 Technically, however, the movie is first-
rate, with a luscious cinematography by Claudio
Cirillo (who also plays a bit role), an accom-
plished score by Pino Donaggio and an exquisite
setting in a luscious Venetian villa.
The leads look good, if not totally convinc-
ing: Delon and Law had just worked together in
Christian-Jacque’s Docteur Justice (175), and
the actor, who had just divorced from Shawn
Ryan—an act that enormously damaged his
work and personal life, closing many doors be-
hind him in Hollywood—was attempting to re-
build his career in Europe at this point.
Aliprandi’s film was the first of two produced by
Enzo Gallo in which he appeared, the other
being the interesting psychological thriller L’oc-
chio dietro la parete (177), also featuring Olga
Bisera. Joseph Cotten (stepping in for Fernando
Rey) is a bit hammy as the creepy, ambiguous
“Professor” who likes to drink icy cold vodka in
the bathtub and displays magician skills—an in-
teresting character that is perhaps dispatched
too early.
Overall, despite its aesthetic qualities,
which earned it moderate critical praise,4 Un
sussurro nel buio avoids to be an out-and-out
horror film, but also fails to be a convincing su-
1977
Anima persa (The Forbidden Room)
D: Dino Risi. S: based on the novel Un’an-
ima persa by Giovanni Arpino; SC: Bernardino
Zapponi, Dino Risi; DOP: Tonino Delli Colli
(Technospes, VistaVision); M: Francis Lai,
arranged by Christian Gaubert (Ed. C.A.M.); E:
Alberto Gallitti; PD, CO: Luciano Ricceri; AD:
Claudio Risi; MU: Giulio Natalucci, Alfonso
Gola; Hair: Giusy Bovino; ACO: Antonio Ran-
daccio; APD: Ezio Di Monte, Paolo Biagetti; C:
Carlo Tafani; SO: Vittorio Massi; AE: Anna
Napoli, Lidia Pascolini; B: Corrado Volpicelli;
AC: Sandro Battaglia; SP: Huguette Roux; SS:
Beatrice Banfi; Press attache: Maria Ruhle; Mix:
Romano Checcacci; SOE: Renato Marinelli.
Cast: Vittorio Gassman (Fabio Stolz), Catherine
Deneuve (Sofia Stolz), Danilo Mattei (Tino),
Anicée Alvina (Lucia), Ester Carloni (Annetta),
Michele Capnist (The Duke), Gino Cavalieri
(Versatti); uncredited: Angelo Boscariol (Man at
Casino), Aristide Caporale (Man at Casino),
16
pernatural drama, which probably caused it to
sink at the box-office, grossing a disappointing
160 million lire. Aliprandi’s next works were a
couple of TV movies, Quasi davvero and L’a-
mante fedele, both shot in 178, followed by the
disappointing Senza buccia. He returned to the
Fantastic with La mano assassina, an episode of
the TV series I giochi del diavolo, in 181.
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on February , 176.
2. John Phillip Law recalled that the film “was made be-
cause of the popularity of Don’t Look Now, it was almost a
copy…. It had great atmosphere, and it also has some
details that anticipated later successes like The Sixth Sense
and The Others.” Carlos Aguilar and Anita Haas, John
Phillip Law. Diabolik Angel (Pontevedra/Bilbao: Scifi-
world/Quatermass, 2008), 158–5.
3. Tullio Kezich, Il nuovissimo Millefilm (Milan: Mon-
dadori, 183), 382.
4. “Aliprandi has grown up. Without according too
much to the fashion of the irrational, he immerses himself
in the magic with some reference to the inhibition caused
by conjugal traumas and with warm memories of the Ve-
netian figurative culture. He still lacks a robust personality,
but he runs the show … with a vibrating imagination,
which blends the nightmarish with the playful.” Giovanni
Grazzini, “Luca, fantasma in famiglia,” Corriere della Sera,
September 18, 176.
Iolanda Fortini (Woman at Casino). PROD: Pio
Angeletti and Adriano De Micheli for Dean
Film (Rome), Les Productions Fox Europa
(France); PM: Mario D’Alessio; PS: Alberto Pas-
sone, Gastone De Mattia; PSe: Fausto Capozzi;
ADM: Roberto Mezzaroma. Country: Italy /
France. Filmed on location in Venice and at
Incir-De Paolis (Rome). Running time: 100 min-
utes (m. 2730). Visa n. 6446 (11.27.176);
Rating: none. Release dates: 1.20.177 (Italy);
3.23.177 (France); Distribution: Fox/Dean Film.
Domestic gross: 857,364,083 lire. Also known as:
Âmes perdues (France); Alma perdida; Almas
perdidas (Spain, 7.4.177); Verloren jeugd (Bel-
gium—Flemish title).
The 19-year-old Tino arrives in Venice to en-
roll at the art academy. He is a guest at the house
of his uncle Fabio Stolz—an engineer at the local
gas company, married to the blonde and sickly
Elisa, who is submissive in everything to her hus-
band. One night, Tino hears strange noises
170 1977: Anima

coming from the attic of the building in which was Elisa who caused her daughter to contract
pneumonia. But where is Beba’s tomb? There is
they live. The old maid reveals to him the cause,
no trace of it at the local cemetery. Increasingly
reluctanctly confirmed by his uncles: there, segre-
intrigued, Tino discovers another lie: his uncle
gated amid his old entomologist tools, lives Fabio’s
demented brother, who had gone mad after caus- does not go to work, but spends his days with
friends, squandering Elisa’s wealth in gambling
ing the death of his 10-year-old niece Beba, Elisa’s
daughter from her previous marriage, with whom rooms. Finally, one day, Tino finds the attic door
open, and discovers the mystery’s shocking expla-
he had fallen in love. However, there are conflict-
nation: there is no mad twin at all…
ing versions to the story: according to Fabio, it
In an interview in the literary
revue L’Europa Letteraria, near the end
of 164, novelist Giovanni Arpino de-
scribed the protagonist of the book he
was working on as “some kind of
Italian Dr. Jekyll.” The resulting novel,
Un’anima persa, published in 166,
reprised the theme of the doppelgänger
from Stevenson’s novelette—the main
character invents himself a demented
alter ego to whom he attributes his own
foibles, weaknesses and pathologies—
and set it in contemporary Turin: a city
with two faces, where the sultry daily
grayness (embodied by the gas factory
where engineer Serafino Calandra ap-
parently spends his working days)
leaves room to the nighthawks who
meet in cafes and gambling rooms on
the hills, or at the bus terminus.
Un’anima persa was a Bildungsro-
man narrated as a contemporary Gothic
tale. Arpino preserved and drained the
typical Gothic narrative structure: the
story, which takes place over the course
of one week, is told by the 16-year-old
Tino, a guest at his engineer uncle’s
house during the week preceding his
graduation exams, and is filtered
through the adolescent’s abnormal sen-
sitivity. Moreover, the writer developed
the main setting, the “haunted house”
where most of the novel takes place—
a labyrinthine, suffocating space which
represents a middle class version of the
mansions that populated the Gothic
imagery—and reinterpreted its mech-
anisms and stereotypes: the Engineer’s
portrait looming uneasily as a me-
mento, and the “forbidden room,” im-
possible to access, where the Professor,
the Engineer’s alleged mad twin, has
apparently been secluded for twenty
Italian locandina for Anima persa (1977). Art by Piero years. Arpino’s characters were also de-
ermanno Iaia. signed according to the typical Gothic
 1977: Anima
clichés, starting with the schizophrenic Serafino,
“corroded under his skin and bone by a myste-
rious disease”: a vampire who lives off his wife
and dissipates the family heritage gambling at
the roulette tables, and a victim of a world he
can no longer belong to, if not through a painful
fiction.
Ultimately, Un’anima persa shares the
Gothic’s typical view of the world as a repository
of an ineradicable evil. “I have always been
scared,” are Tino’s first words, and “I have no
more strength to fight my fear, now I am swim-
ming in it,” is his conclusion: his is a Bildungsro-
man that does not bring him to any real growth,
a passage to adulthood that does not carry any
progress but rather an adjustment, not a victory
but only the awareness of the impossibility of
winning. The paradoxical story of Engineer Ca-
landra, just like in Stevenson’s tale, reveals the
inner monstrosity of the contemporary bour-
geois society, the horror of waste and the fear of
collapse just round the corner.
One can see why, ten years later, 1 Dino Risi
chose to adapt this dark, flawed novel, as in-
triguing and mysterious as its elusive protago-
nist. Firstly, of course, there was the attempt to
repeat the commercial success of his previous
Arpino adaptation, Profumo di donna (175)—
which he did not manage to do. But there was
more: other characters depicted by the director,
such as Bruno Cortona (Vittorio Gassman) in
Il sorpasso (162) or Dino Versini (Walter Chi-
ari) in Il giovedì (164), lived above their possi-
bilities and pretended to be what they were not;
and those psychological dissociations that were
barely guessed, or hardly internalized, in the
previous works here come to the surface and ex-
plode through the film’s main character (re-
named Fabio Stolz) played by Vittorio Gassman.
In some ways, Anima persa is a horror-tinged
remake of Il giovedì. Meanwhile, as the decade
carried a smell of explosive brought by the
bombings and the terrorist attacks that plagued
the country, Risi’s film showed that “even escap-
ing from everyday life or shutting oneself up in
madness’ hedonism cannot be a solution: Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are doomed to the same
failure.”2
From the opening shots, at dawn, on Ven-
ice’s Grand Canal, with its barely lit palaces and
steamboats carrying ghostly shadows, it is clear
that Risi chose to emphasize the Gothic angle
of the story, working on a narrative structure
“similar to either a nightmare or the projection
171
of an unconscious fear.”3 Hence the intervention
of Bernardino Zapponi, a prestigious writer and
a renowned scriptwriter who had worked with
Fellini (Toby Dammit, Satyricon, Roma, Casa-
nova) Juan Buñuel (Leonor) and Argento (Pro-
fondo rosso), and who was well-versed in the
genre, as proved by his outstanding 167 short
story collection Gobal.
Zapponi brings to light the novel’s morbid
and sinister side: the decaying palace on the
Grand Canal where the story takes place (the
house-museum Palazzo Fortuny) and “where
the rooms form an intricate labyrinth and the
opening of each door leads to a new psycholog-
ical and moral space” 4; the prohibition to enter
the forbidden room and the mystery it conceals;
the ominous leitmotiv of the steps in the attic
and the piano melody linked to the presence of
the “ghost child” Beba, whose tomb cannot be
located and whose presence/absence becomes
central to the story.
Zapponi and Risi also introduced novelty
elements: the references to the German poet
Friedrich Hölderlin, whose work Stolz reads and
whose psychic problems somehow recalled his
own; the evocation of Mitteleurope as one of
Stolz’s favourite themes, which works as a geo-
graphic reference to the Gothic tradition; and
the surreal anecdote of the mad Professor’s pho-
bia, the fear that his features should slip away
from his face. On top of that, Risi addresses the
Gothic matter by making an extensive use of the
grotesque, similarly to the method he applied to
comedy. He films the Professor’s pantomimes,
spied by Tino through a peephole, with insistent
wide-angle shots, and turns the voyeuristic ten-
sion of Arpino’s pages into images, by empha-
sizing such details as the madman’s obscenely
exposed tongue, and making the Professor a dis-
turbing, ghastly clownish figure.
The decision to change the setting from
Turin to Venice (“An elderly lady with a bad
breath” as it is defined in the film) left a number
of critics—not to mention Arpino scholars—
perplexed, as did the many other changes in the
script. “It is as if the story was told by a confab-
ulating, distracted, unreliable witness,” Tullio
Kezich wrote, “and the truest significance of
Arpino’s novel, a flunked graduation exam, got
lost.”5
In addition to that, Risi and Zapponi lib-
erally changed the names, features and charac-
teristics of Tino’s uncle and the bovine aunt
Galla (who becomes Elisa): Stolz, in Vittorio
172 1977: Sette note
Gassman’s exquisitely over-the-top imperson-
ation,6 becomes a talkative aesthete who never
misses a chance to reaffirm his Austro-Ungaric
ancestry; Elisa, described in the book as plump,
adoring and obtuse as a big dog, becomes a sad,
mocked and humiliated prisoner, with the beau-
tiful features of Catherine Deneuve.7 A commer-
cial move for co-production needs? Sure, but
also a shift in direction. By duplicating the
novel’s doppelgänger theme and the madness
that comes with it, by way of the introduction
of the mysterious child that the Professor was
in love with, and who at the end is revealed to
be none but Elisa, Anima persa dives deep into
Gothic imagery, and at the same time it moves
into an even more disturbing territory than the
novel.
Whereas Arpino was interested in inserting
the pathology of the individual within the every-
day life of modern Italy, Risi and Zapponi turn
Venice into a symbolic setting, an out-of-time
frame to the family theater in which the Profes-
sor and his victim/accomplice/plaything culti-
vate their solipsistic obsessions. This way, they
bring to surface one of Italian Gothic’s most fer-
tile themes: the uncanny linked to eroticism.
Not only do they give shape to the troubles of
young Tino, who in the novel spied an anony-
mous female figure behind a window and here
falls in love with a nude model (Alain Robbe-
Grillet’s fetish actress, Anicée Alvina), but they
also deepen the theme of frustrated sexuality as
the key to penetrate the characters’ madness. In
this sense, a significant scene takes place near
the beginning, when the still-desirable Elisa
shows Tino the separate bedrooms where she
and her husband sleep, adding that “he comes
home later, he’d wake me up” as an unrequested
justification for her non-existent sexual life.
After all, Anima persa is a meditation on
the ghosts of Eros, not far from the work of
Vladimir Nabokov. Its main characters are a
Humbert Humbert who finally managed to split
himself into two, and an aged and faded Lolita,
that no Quilty has ever managed to steal from
him—both locked in their own private hell,
trapped in the costumes and behind the masks
they have chosen to wear, desperately clinging
to the characters they are condemned to play,
and ultimately defeated by the fading of desire.
In doing so, Risi masterfully grasps and de-
velops the intuition of the frozen, motionless,
circular time that characterized Danza macabra
and Lisa e il diavolo, here devoid of all the Fan-
tastic and supernatural overtones and related to
the theme of sexual obsession. The result is sur-
prisingly in tune with the themes of the Com-
media all’italiana of the mid-to-late 170s: in the
contemporaneous Un borghese piccolo piccolo
(177), Mario Monicelli depicts the chilling,
monstrous transformation of the typical Italian
“average man” as portrayed by Alberto Sordi,
whereas Risi mercilessly observes the death of
the Italian male’s sexual appetite. This way, he
finds the right key to portray the fear of old age
and physical decline, a theme that marks the
works of Italian greatest film-makers of the pe-
riod, from Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe
(173) to Monicelli’s Amici miei (175), and
Fellini’s Casanova.
Risi and Zapponi would team up again for
another Gothic tale, again derived from a
literary source: the evocative ghost story Fan-
tasma d’amore (181), starring Marcello Mas-
troianni and Romy Schneider.
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on April 25, 176.
2. Aldo Viganò, Dino Risi (Milan: Moizzi Editore, 17),
7.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Tullio Kezich, “Fatti perversi di gente perbene,” La
Repubblica, 177, quoted in Annamaria Licciardello, Luca
Pallanch (edited by) Arpino e il cinema (Bra: Centro Sper-
imentale di Cinematografia/Città di Bra/Fondazione Po-
liteama, 200), 3.
6. As the actor would comment, “Acting is not much
different from a mental illness: an actor does nothing but
sharing his personality with others. It’s a kind of schizo-
phrenia.”
7. An in-depth comparison between the book and the
film can be found in Luca Pallanch’s excellent essay Arpino,
Risi e la paura di crescere, in Arpino e il cinema, 44.
Sette note in nero (The Psychic)
D: Lucio Fulci. SC: Roberto Gianviti, Dar-
dano Sacchetti; DOP: Sergio Salvati (Telecolor);
M: Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera [Franco Bixio, Fabio
Frizzi, Vince Tempera] (Ed. Rizzoli Film); theme
music: Gil Ventura; the song “With You” is sung
by Linda Lee; E: Ornella Micheli; ArtD: Luciano
Spadoni; CO: Massimo Lentini; MU: Maurizio
Giustini; AMU: Antonio Maltempo; C: Franco
Bruni; AC: Claudio Farinelli, Maurizio Lucchini;
ChEl: Alfredo Fedeli; KG: Luciano Micheli; AE:
Mario D’Ambrosio, Bruno Micheli; AD: Roberto
Giandalla; ASD: Roberta Tomassetti; SO: Raul
Montesanti; B: Alfonso Montesanti; SOE: Renato
 1977: Sette note
Italian fotobusta for Sette note in nero (1977).
Marinelli; Mix: Gianni D’Amico; Props: Gof-
fredo Massetti; SP: Luciano Adiutori; W: Car-
men Pericolo; SS: Rita Agostini. English ver-
sion—DubD: Tony [Anthony] La Penna. Cast:
Jennifer O’Neill (Virginia Ducci), Gabriele
Ferzetti (Emilio Rospini), Marc Porel (Luca Fat-
tori), Gianni Garko [Gianni Garkovich] (Fran-
cesco Ducci), Evelyn Stewart [Ida Galli] (Gloria
Ducci), Jenny Tamburi [Luciana Tamburini]
(Bruna), Fabrizio Jovine (Commissioner D’Elia),
Riccardo Parisio Perrotti (Melli), Loredana
Savelli (Giovanna Rospini), Salvatore Puntillo
(Second Cab Driver), Bruno Corazzari (Cane-
vari), Vito Passeri (Caretaker), Franco Angri-
sano (First Cab Driver), Veronica Michelini
(Giuliana Casati), Paolo Pacino (Inspector
Russi), Fausta Abelli (Virginia as a Girl), Eliza-
beth Turner (Virginia’s Mother), Ugo D’Alessio
(Art Gallery Owner), Luigi Diberti (Judge).
PROD: Franco Cuccu for Cinecompany; PM:
Franco Cuccu; PS: Carlo Cucchi; PSe: Marco Gi-
annoni; ADM: Roberto Penna. Country: Italy.
Filmed in Arezzo, Florence and Siena, Tuscany,
Italy; Dover, Kent, England; and at Incir-De Pao-
lis Studios (Rome). Running time: 8 minutes
(m. 2665); Visa n. 7026 (5.18.177); Rating:
173
V.M.18. Release dates: 8.10.177 (Italy); March
17 (U.S.A.); Distribution: Cineriz (Italy);
Group 1 International Distribution Organization
Ltd. (U.S.A.). Domestic gross: 54,648,345 lire.
Also known as: Murder to the Tune of the Seven
Black Notes; Seven Notes in Black; Death Tolls
Seven Times (U.S.A.); Siete notas en negro
(Spain); L’emmurée vivante; Demoniac (France,
3.4.181); Sieben schwarze Noten (Germany);
Premoniçao (Brazil).
Virginia has had extraordinary gifts as a
clairvoyant since childhood, when she experienced
her mother’s suicide in Dover while she was in
Florence. While returning by car from the airport
where her husband, the wealthy Francesco Ducci,
has left on a business trip to London, she has a
vision of a crime which she finds out seemingly
happened in Ducci’s country villa, a few years ear-
lier; a young woman has been murdered and
buried behind a wall by a limping man. Fran-
cesco, who was the victim’s lover, is arrested and
accused of the crime, and Virginia sets out to clear
him, leaning on her confused vision. Putting to-
gether the pieces of the puzzle, with the help
of Francesco’s sister Gloria, her parapsycholo-
gist friend Luca and the latter’s secretary Paola,
174 1977: Sette note
Virginia discovers clues that point to Emilio
Rospini, an ex-equestrian who was implied in a
mysterious art theft and who seems to be the mur-
derer in her vision. Eventually, Virginia manages
to have Francesco released from jail. But she finds
out that her vision did not pertain to the past, but
to the future: the murder she “saw” has yet to hap-
pen, and she herself will be the victim…
The paranormal was one of the most dur-
able obsessions in 170s Italy. Much more than
in the previous decade, the interest in the occult,
Oriental philosophies and esotericism was a red
thread that accompanied a decade characterized
by the emergence of irrational forces as escapist
means—a way to leave the everyday violence be-
hind. This tendency was also evident in the arts:
fiction and comic book writer (and occasionally
film director) Pier Carpi published a number of
popular books about the history of magic, a bi-
ography of Cagliostro, the occult-themed novel
Un’ombra nell’ombra (174) which he then
adapted into the ill-fated movie of the same
name released in 17, and even a book of al-
leged prophecies of the late Pope John XXIII
which caused a sensation. Adults-only comics
(such as Oltretomba) often dealt with the theme,
spiced with plenty of erotic scenes. The 171 TV
mini-series Il segno del comando was a sensa-
tional hit, and was followed by other works
along the same lines, such as ESP (173), based
on the real-life character of the Dutch psychic
Gerard Croiset, and Il dipinto (174, Domenico
Campana). Movies as well explored the subject,
albeit often in a superficial way: an example is
Roberto Mauri’s far-fetched psychoanalytic
drama Madeleine—Anatomia di un incubo,
which includes an absurd scene of a character
(played by Silvano Tranquilli) experimenting
bilocation. Nevertheless, scriptwriters and film-
makers such as Riccardo Freda, Piero Regnoli,
Demofilo Fidani and Pupi Avati had a deep-
rooted interest in the subject matter. Fidani’s ex-
perience as a psychic even inspired the little-
seen Il medium (180, Silvio Amadio).
Occultism was everywhere, and it is not a
surprise that it gradually contaminated the
giallo: In Dario Argento’s 4 mosche di velluto gri-
gio (171), the protagonist (Michael Brandon)
has a premonitory dream that accompanies him
throughout the movie up to the shocking end-
ing. In his next giallo, Profondo rosso, Argento
developed the irrational and paranormal angle,
by opening the movie on a congress of parapsy-
chology where a medium (Macha Méril) “per-
ceives” the murderer’s presence in the audience,
and then meets a gruesome fate (which she fore-
sees moments before it happens). On a de-
cidedly lower level, Salvatore Bugnatelli’s trashy
Diabolicamente … Letizia (175) threw in a little
bit of psychokinesis and hypnotic powers in the
story of a college girl (Franca Gonella) who
wreaks havoc in the bourgeois family she has
been adopted by, and proceeds to seduce every-
one in sight, servants included, à la Teorema,
before the laughable final twist reveals her
agenda.
Usually labeled as a giallo, Lucio Fulci’s
Sette note in nero can more properly be consid-
ered as a “female Gothic” updated to contem-
porary times, which blends the mystery and the
paranormal. The film had a rather complex and
controversial genesis that dated back a few years.
Fulci claimed that it stayed in development
limbo for over a year, since producer Luigi De
Laurentiis was unsure what type of movie to
make out of it.1 Ernesto Gastaldi claimed that he
worked on the original outline, called Penta-
gramma in nero (Black Pentagram) or Sinfonia
in nero (Black Symphony) with the director and
producer Alberto Pugliese, about a woman who
dreams a murder and believes that it will take
place in real life, but does not realize she is the
designated victim. “I was asked to write a syn-
opsis and I came up with a dozen pages…. I was
paid for the story and then, I don’t remember
why, I did not follow the development of the
script and the movie.”2 A script called Incubus
(Pentagramma in nero), signed by Gastaldi, Ser-
gio Corbucci and Mahnamen Velasco and dated
March 172 is kept at the CSC library: however,
it is none other than an alternate early title for
La morte accarezza a mezzanotte (172), so it
might as well be that, unless Gastaldi got con-
fused, the idea for Fulci’s film actually drew from
the same subject. After all, the two films share a
very similar premise, although in La morte ac-
carezza a mezzanotte the heroine suffers an
LSD-induced hallucination, in tune with the
psychedelic trend of the period.
According to scriptwriter Dardano Sac-
chetti, he was summoned by producer Luigi De
Laurentiis and his son Aurelio to collaborate
with Fulci on a script based on an occult-themed
mystery novel, Terapia mortale, published in
172 by a young novelist (and later a prominent
film critic and distributor) named Vieri Razzini.
Fulci had been working on an adaptation for
some time with Roberto Gianviti, but to no
 1977: Sette note
avail. And, indeed, a denunciation of start of
production for a movie called Terapia mortale,
and with Fulci as director, was deposited at the
Ministry of Spectacle, with filming slated to
begin in November 175. However, the project
dated back to at least mid–174, and at one point
Barbara Bouchet was to star in it: in an interview
dated July 174, the actress mentioned that film-
ing would take place in Smirne.3
Still, the references to Razzini’s novel
(which is not even mentioned in the credits) are
minimal to non-existent in Sette note in nero.
Terapia mortale is a banal and rather poorly
written whodunit about a parapsychologist,
Patrick Gelli, who investigates the mysterious
death of a friend, Mark, with whose wife Veron-
ica he is in love. He finds out somebody has
pushed the man to death by way of psychic pow-
ers and is trying to get rid of Veronica as well.
The only reference to the book, besides the
theme of parapsychological powers, can be
found in the character of the “psychic investi-
gator” played in the movie by Marc Porel, who
is in love with the heroine.
It was allegedly Sacchetti’s intervention that
helped Fulci solve some dead ends: “I was called
mostly to add a touch of Argento to a traditional
mystery plot. The ‘touch of Argento’ were the
suspenseful situations in general, the modalities
of the deaths, especially the victim’s point of
view….” 4 The scriptwriter’s words underline
how Sette note in nero’s affiliation to the giallo
is, after all, marginal, even though the movie en-
compasses references to the director’s previous
work: Francesco Ducci appears to be yet another
innocent man unjustly in prison, like Jean Sorel’s
character in Una sull’altra, the theme of premo-
nition and the scene in the deserted church
bring to mind Una lucertola con la pelle di
donna, and the opening death of Virginia’s
mother recalls the murderer’s grisly demise in
Non si sevizia un paperino. However, the em-
phasis on the paranormal gives the plot and
main character a new dimension.
On top of that, Sette note in nero sports at
least three major filmic and literary references.
The most immediate ones are Nicolas Roeg’s
Don’t Look Now and Claude Chabrol’s Les magi-
ciens (a.k.a. Death Rite 175), both centered on
the theme of precognition. Roeg and Fulci’s
films have in common a tragic opening event (a
girl accidentally drowning, a woman commit-
ting suicide) and a cynical twist ending, whereas
Les magiciens—based on Frédéric Dard’s book
175
Initiation au meurtre, and about a couple in
crisis (Franco Nero and Stefania Sandrelli) who,
during a holiday in Tunisia, come across a clair-
voyant (Gert Fröbe) who had a premonition
about a murder taking place in the area—deals
with the theme of marriage as a wasps’ nest, one
of Chabrol’s favorite ways to explore and dissect
the phony charm of the bourgeoisie.
Sette note in nero offers a similar bitter take
on marriage. Whereas other “female Gothics”
of the decade (Il profumo della signora in nero,
Le orme) focused on a conspiracy (real or imag-
ined), linked to the heroine’s repressed past
trauma, that leads to her mental disintegra-
tion, Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) is an old-style
damsel in distress, who, alone in the castle, in-
stead of opening the forbidden door, breaks
down a “forbidden wall,” exhuming her hus-
band’s secret past—literally, his skeleton in the
closet. She herself becomes the cause of her own
ruin, by condescending to her own curiosity:
transgression leads to punishment, danger,
death. And it is bitterly ironic that she does so
by attempting to affirm her independence: being
an architect, she wanted to take the reins and
redecorate the house while her husband was on
leave.
In a way, Fulci’s film seems to comment on
woman’s growing self-awareness and autonomy
as opposed to a male-centered world which ul-
timately proves crushing: see also the characters
of the uninhibited Gloria Ducci (Evelyn Stewart)
as well as Luca’s secretary Bruna (Jenny Tam-
buri), both much more intelligent and dynamic
than most men in the story. Like in Freda’s Dr.
Hichcock diptych, happy marriage is an illusion
based on lies, disguise, and role playing: to Vir-
ginia, the biggest shock is to find out her hus-
band’s real nature, and realize that she never re-
ally knew the man she married. In the end, Sette
note in nero turns into a variation of the theme
of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat (which Fulci
will revisit a few years later) seen from the
female victim’s point of view, and graced by a
finely crafted open ending.
Another, and even stronger, source of in-
spiration is Cornell Woolrich’s 145 novel Night
Has a Thousand Eyes, adapted in 148 by John
Farrow, about a phony psychic who one day
foresees his own death. The sense of dread and
doom of Woolrich’s novel, where ordinary ob-
jects are given a sinister resonance, is very
similar to Fulci’s film, which embraces the para-
normal from the beginning and, in doing so,
176 1977: Sette note
reflects on whether we humans are prisoners of
our own fate or even help it happen. The
mystery plot becomes secondary to the growing
feeling of entrapment that the unfortunate hero-
ine feels, as the pieces of the puzzle that form
her vision are gradually revealed not to be
shades of the past but a glimpse of the future,
and pile up around her like the bricks of the wall
behind which the murderer buries his victim.
The script also partly borrows from another
Woolrich novel, The Black Angel, by making Vir-
ginia an amateur detective trying to clear her
husband from an unjust accusation and by end-
ing the movie with the heroine’s loss of her in-
nocence. It is likely that Fulci knew well the
American novelist’s work, as Una lucertola con
la pelle di donna borrowed the storyline from
the novelette Nightmare, albeit with an inge-
nious twist,5 and Una sull’altra reused the basic
plot of Phantom Lady.
Fulci often referred to Sette note in nero’s
“perfect structure,” but the plot has its share of
naïveté, in the way some facts are taken for
granted by the characters (including the police!),
or the awkward scene where Luca (Porel) con-
vinces two motorbike cops to follow him to
Ducci’s country house. What is more, the cast is
not always up to the task: Jennifer O’Neill’s per-
formance is convincing, but Gianni Garko (in a
role devised for Claudio Cassinelli) doesn’t
hit the right note, wavering uneasily between
forced meekness and artificial creepiness. On
the other hand, the score (by the trio Bixio-
Frizzi-Tempera) perfectly captures the mood of
the story, with the sinister waltz-time lullaby (re-
ferred to in the Italian title, which literally means
“Seven Notes in Black”) that becomes the film’s
diegetic and extra-diegetic leitmotif.
The director’s systematic use of zooms is
the film’s main stylistic trait and at the same time
its biggest issue. As Michel Foucault noted, “the
language of terror is dedicated to an endless ex-
pense, even though it only seeks to achieve a sin-
gle effect.”6 Here, Fulci employs the zoom lens
as the thread that unites each and every vision
to the person that experiences them and is ulti-
mately their object and victim: what Virginia
cannot understand is that what she sees (and we,
the audience, see as well) are not “objective” vi-
sions, but they are all from her own subjective
point of view, from the furniture in the room
where the premature burial takes place to the
sight of the cigarette in the ashtray—in a way,
she is yet another incarnation of Argento’s “im-
perfect witnesses” who miss the point of what
they see. Her refusal to come to terms with it
leads her to perdition, but Fulci’s camera never
stops warning us about such a link: before each
vision, the director zooms in on Virginia’s eyes,
and then to what she “sees,” establishing an in-
visible red thread. This way, the movie embraces
another key element in Gothic, the subjective
dimension through which reality is filtered by
the protagonist, and which here is not emotional
nor psychological, but paranormal.
As cameraman Franco Bruni recalled, “We
did a frantic use of the zoom in this film…. With
Lucio, we usually did a few long shots, many
medium shots and many close-ups. We often
used the tracking shot backwards, to reveal
things. The camera was moving all the time.
Whereas in Sette note in nero the zoom was an
effect we had to do, because Lucio asked for it
explicitly. To me, it was forced, having to under-
line it in such a marked way; it was a painful
duty. Lucio wanted the audience to believe it was
like some person’s point of view, he wanted it to
be an emotional, introspective effect, not a sim-
ple mechanical trick, an approach. So, we did
exactly half-zoom and half-tracking shot.”7
On the other hand, this relentless over-
reliance on visual repetition becomes grating
and almost unbearable at times. It is as if the di-
rector was trying to make the audience feel the
same sense of inescapability as Virginia does,
but this way the zoom is deprived of its effec-
tiveness, and becomes mechanic and monoto-
nous, the exact opposite of what Fulci wanted
to achieve. A less explored, but more interesting
aspect is the discrepancy between the images as
perceived by Virginia (and the viewer as well)
and their significance, and therefore between
appearance and truth: for instance, by showing
a close-up of Gabriele Ferzetti’s character, fol-
lowed by another close-up of limping male feet,
Fulci allows us to believe the latter belong to the
person we have just seen, which they do not. It
is a three-card trick by way of movie camera and
editing: and the latter factor is truly the most
impressive thing about Sette note in nero, so
much so that Fulci had to keep two script su-
pervisors on set in order to keep track of all the
complex interlocking of shots needed for the
movie.
Another key theme in Sette note in nero is
time. “I hate time: it is our slavery,” Fulci quipped.
“We are crushed by time, we cannot stop it. I
hate the idea that tomorrow will come, and I
 1977: Shock
don’t give a fuck about tomorrow…. If I could,
I would master time, making it move at my
leisure. Stop it when I feel like, make it go on-
wards, backwards…”8 He would indeed do so,
in La casa nel tempo; here, he shares Virginia’s
powerlessness against time: each move she
makes, each step she takes further into the mys-
tery, is like a clock hand getting close to the end.
But the final irony of the story is turning a time
watch into an extemporaneous deus ex machina:
when the movie is over, and all is seemingly lost,
here comes time itself as a savior, with the sound
of an alarm clock that nails the culprit and un-
covers the solution to the mystery. Is Virginia
still alive, or is she already dead? It does not mat-
ter: once again, time has won, because time al-
ways wins in the end.
Shot between September and November
176,10 with the working title Dolce come morire,
Sette note in nero was released in Italy only in
August 177, with nondescript (and therefore
disappointing) results. The era of giallo was
waning, and such an indecipherable movie, half-
mystery and half–Gothic, almost completely de-
void of blood and gore and ultimately downbeat,
was not the type of stuff moviegoers would run
to see. In many ways, it marked the end of a pe-
riod in Fulci’s filmography, and after the inter-
locutory Western Sella d’argento (178) and the
TV movie Un uomo da ridere (shot in 178,
broadcast in 180) a new era would begin for the
director, marked in deep red with blood and
gore, starting with Zombi 2 (17).
NoTeS
1. Robert Schlockoff, “Entretien avec Lucio Fulci,” L’E-
cran fantastique #16, 180.
2. Paolo Albiero and Giacomo Cacciatore, Il terrorista
dei generi. Tutto il cinema di Lucio Fulci—Seconda edizione
aggiornata (Palermo: Leima, 2004, 2015), 213.
3. “In a few days I’ll fly to Colombia where, directed
by Mauro Ivaldi, I will shoot L’amica di mia madre … then
I’ll move to Smirne to shoot a parapsychological film, Ter-
apia mortale.” Raffaello Mazzani, “Basta col nudo! Ora si
spoglino le attrici più giovani,” Corriere d’Informazione,
July 22, 174.
4. Albiero and Cacciatore, Il terrorista dei generi, 214.
5. In Woolrich’s story, a man dreams he commits a
murder, only to discover the clues that lead him to realize
that he has actually killed a man in real life. Signed with
the usual alias William Irish, first published in Argosy, on
March 1, 141, under the title And So to Death, and later in
the short story collection I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes
(143), the novelette was adapted for the screen twice by
the same director, Maxwell Shane, in 147 (Fear in the
Night, starring DeForest Kelley, the future Dr. McCoy from
Star Trek) and in 156 (Nightmare, starring Kevin Mc-
177
Carthy and Edward G. Robinson). It was also a major in-
fluence on Jess Franco’s script La noche tiene ojos, which
later became the movie Les cauchemars naissent la nuit
(16). Franco would reuse the same plot years later, in Mil
sexos tiene la noche (182).
6. Michel Foucault, Language to Infinity, in Language,
Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 180), 65.
7. Albiero, Cacciatore, Il terrorista dei generi, 217.
8. Michele Romagnoli, L’occhio del testimone (Bologna:
Granata Press, 12), 13.
9. The idea of the revealing carillon, albeit in a
different context, recalls the climax of Hitchcock’s The Man
Who Knew Too Much (134), where the presence of Peter
Lorre’s character, hidden behind a door in an apparently
empty room, is revealed by the tune from his pocket watch.
10. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on September 13, 176.
Shock (Shock, a.k.a. Beyond the Door II)
D: Mario Bava. Collaboration to the direc-
tion: Lamberto Bava. SC: Francesco Barbieri,
Lamberto Bava, Paolo Brigenti [Alessandro
Parenzo], Dardano Sacchetti; DOP: Alberto
Spagnoli [and Mario Bava, uncredited]; M: I
Libra [Dino Cappa, Alessandro Centofanti, Wal-
ter Martino]; E: Roberto Sterbini; PD, ArtD:
Franco Vanorio; SD: Pietro Spadoni; CO: Mas-
simo Lentini; MU: Maria Luisa Tilly; AD, As-
stPD: Nicola Salerno; SO: Pietro Spadoni; C:
Giuseppe Maccari; AC: Giuseppe Alberti; SP:
Giuliana De Rossi; G: Sante Federici; KG: Sergio
Serantoni; AE: Sandro Bruglio; 2ndAE: Mario
Recupito; SS: Rossana Rocchi. Cast: Daria Ni-
colodi (Dora Baldini), John Steiner (Bruno Bal-
dini), David Colin, Jr. (Marco), Ivan Rassimov
(Dr. Aldo Spidini); uncredited: Lamberto Bava
(Mover #1), Paul Costello (Obnoxious Man at
Party), Nicola Salerno (Carlo). PROD: Turi
Vasile for Laser Film (Rome); AP: Ugo Valenti;
PM: Giuseppe Mangogna; UM: Nando Tibbi.
Country: Italy. Filmed at Vides Cinematografica
Studio (Rome). Running time: 5 minutes (m.
2474). Visa n. 70737 (8.12.177); Rating: V.M.14.
Release dates: 8.12.177 (Italy); 3.14.17 (U.S.A.);
Distribution: Titanus. Domestic gross: 16,657,000
lire. Also known as: Schock (Transfert-Suspence-
Hypnos) (Italy); Shock (Spain; 1.1.181); Les dé-
mons de la nuit (France).
Dora, her second husband Bruno and her
son Marco, from her previous marriage, move to
the country house where Dora often went with
her husband Carlo, before the latter fell into a
deep depression crisis and allegedly committed
suicide. Strange events happen: Marco alternates
moments of childishness with others where he
seems possessed by a spirit that drives him to
178 1977: Shock
reject his stepfather and rage at his mother. Bruno,
an air pilot, is often absent, and Dora finds it in-
creasingly difficult to cope with her son’s unsettling
behavior. Eventually Dora remembers what hap-
pened: Carlo did not commit suicide in the sea,
but she killed him in a rampage caused by drug
abuse. Dora kills Bruno and is killed in turn by
Italian locandina for Shock (1977). Note the title’s misspelling who had played a similar role in a suc-
and the clumsy undertitle Transfert-Suspence-Hypnos, absent cessful Satanic horror flick produced
in the film.
Marco, who is now alone in the house … together
with his father’s ghastly presence.
Coming after the ill-fated Cani arrabbiati,
doomed to remain unseen for two decades, and
the humiliating La casa dell’esorcismo, Mario
Bava’s last theatrical feature film had a rather
troubled genesis. It was Lamberto’s insistence to
push his father back to directing, after
other projects (such as Baby Kong)
were abandoned, that eventually re-
sulted in Shock being made. The first
version of the script, written by Dar-
dano Sacchetti and Francesco Barbieri,
actually dated a few years earlier:
penned in the early 170s, soon after
Reazione a catena, it was titled Al 33 di
via Orologio fa sempre freddo, and was
loosely based on a crime novel by
Hillary Waugh, L’ospite di notte, pub-
lished in the Gialli Mondadori series
(one of Bava’s favorite bedside read-
ings, which would also provide him
with the short story that formed the
basis for Cani arrabbiati). During 173
Bava did pre-production work for pro-
ducer Fulvio Lucisano, and had Mimsy
Farmer do a screen test for the leading
role, but the project was shelved. Lam-
berto Bava resumed the script and
rewrote it drastically with the help of
Alessandro Parenzo, the latter under
the alias Paolo Brigenti.1 The film en-
tered production in spring 177 and
was shot over a period of five weeks.2
Accordingly, Bava let his son direct
many scenes based on his storyboards.
The definitive title underwent some
changes: Lamberto’s script was titled
La casa 8, but the movie was registered
in the Public Cinematographic Regis-
ter, on April 28, 177, as Suspense (per-
haps a nod to one of Bava’s favorite
films, The Innocents, released in Italy
as Suspense). It finally became Shock—
misspelled Schock on the Italian
posters, which bore the additional sub-
title (Transfert-Suspence-Hypnos).3
Bava’s film seemed to finally ma-
terialize as a late addition to the Exor-
cist-inspired subgenre, given the pres-
ence in a key role of David Colin, Jr.,
by Ovidio Assonitis, Chi sei? (174),
 1977: Shock
known overseas as Beyond the Door. This led to
Bava’s film being retitled Beyond the Door II for
its U.S. release—quite a diminishing fate for the
director’s swan song. The connection with the
paranormal was underlined by the cryptic tag-
line: Transfert-Suspence-Hypnos did not mean
much, but in the makers’ intentions was sup-
posed to emphasize the message and convey an
eerie mood.4 Another concession to the ongoing
trends was the music score by the jazz-rock
combo I Libra, and blatantly inspired by Gob-
lin. 5 Overall, it made for a rather low-key
farewell, given that Bava’s only other directorial
work, the made-for-TV La Venere d’Ille, co-
directed with Lamberto the following year,
would be broadcast only in 181, one year after
his death.
And yet Shock is something quite different
(and much more intriguing) than the ump-
teenth “possessed child” feature. It is a Gothic
ghost story devoid of the Gothic pulp, deprived
of its most blatant ingredients (transgression,
excess) and in which every element is covered
with a veil of everyday mediocrity. Compared
with Bava’s previous horror films, it is unusually
inconspicuous, and overall it conveys a sense of
emptiness comparable to the one that assaults
the eponymous heroine at the end of Lisa e il di-
avolo. Gone are the elegant light and color ef-
fects, the refined camera movements, the oth-
erworldly sets of the director’s previous work;
but the same can be said about the romantic
reverie of the typical Victorian ghost story.
Such a stylistic and narrative choice is first
and foremost a sign of the times, and a conse-
quence of budgetary restraints: Shock is a low-
budget film, with a handful of actors and only
one main location (Enrico Maria Salerno’s villa,
with the actor’s son Nicola playing Carlo, un-
credited). And yet this becomes a poetic, dis-
tinctive sign. Anxiety does not blossom from
the sublime, but comes out of the ordinary: the
haunted mansion is not a castle or a princely
palace, but an anonymous house in the suburbs;
Daria Nicolodi’s character is not a triumphant
princess of evil, but a quiet middle-class house-
wife who fixes sandwiches in the kitchen for her
friends; and the past that returns to torment her
is not a centuries-old curse, but a squalid drug
addiction.
Lamberto Bava stressed the influence on
the film of Maupassant’s short story Le Horla,
which suited Bava’s wish to “make a film in
which the objects were the actors.” 6 But the
17
story’s core—terror hidden in everyday life—
suggests other similarities as well, and the open-
ing images, as the camera wanders through the
garden, in the basement and around the empty
house, recall the hyperrealistic precision of one
of Anna Maria Ortese’s most beautiful ghost sto-
ries, La casa nel bosco. 7 Ortese, one of Italy’s
leading personalities in 20th century Fantastic
literature, imagined the insurgence of the un-
known and the supernatural out of minimal
cracks in everyday reality (as in the outstanding
story Sulla terrazza sterminata), and distilled
the uncanny from the trivial. So does Bava: one
of the director’s trademark themes, the inani-
mate which becomes animate, here is embodied
from time to time by a ceramic ornament, a
swing, a cutter, a wardrobe.
Horror, in Shock, arises from a momentary
mismatch of reality, and from the unexpected
perceptions it entails. At first sight, objects seem
to reveal a disturbing and metaphorical essence:
lowly epiphanies, shapeless presences revealed
by Bava’s customary out of focus shots, which
last the time of a shot/countershot, and then are
deleted by the banality of everyday life. But it is
precisely at that moment, in that split second
when a rose petal becomes a blood stain or a
rake takes the form of a hand protruding from
the ground, that reality as we know it is revealed
as a fragile, unreliable curtain that protects our
senses from what lies beyond. A line of Carmelo
Bene’s Salomè come to mind: “How red are these
petals, they look like blood stains scattered on
the tablecloth. But we must not look for symbols
everywhere, as life would become unbearable.”
Bava’s film also encompasses the theme of
the double, which is led back to the interiority
of the individual, in accordance with the so-
called “paranoid texts” of the decade (such as Il
profumo della signora in nero and Le orme), with
which Bava film has some affinities: Dora is both
a caring mother and a murderer, and the trauma
buried in her subconscious is coupled with a
walled corpse in the basement, in a clear nod to
Poe. The amazing sequence of Dora’s erotic
dream—in which Daria Nicolodi’s hair moves
around as if caressed by an invisible hand—
marks the nocturnal metamorphosis of this
woman who found refuge from madness in the
mediocrity of the damily routine. Whereas in
Danza macabra Elisabeth Blackwood lived only
when she loved, Dora Baldini, whose sexuality
has been suppressed by motherhood, lives (and
loves) only when she dreams.
180 1977: Suspiria
Shock’s tormented protagonist is a far less
glamourous replica of La frusta e il corpo’s
Nevenka, and Bava reprises from his earlier film
both the image of the spectral hand that caresses
Dora and her final “guided” suicide. Her “ghost
of love” is embodied, with a striking Oedipal in-
tuition, in her own son: the red-headed Marco
(David Colin, Jr.). The umpteenth menacing
child figure in Bava’s cinema, Marco is not just
an instrument of vengeance as Melissa in Oper-
azione paura, but an accomplice and an alter ego
of Dora’s revenant husband, who revives in him
and takes over his actions.
Such an identification evokes the ghosts of
family and social disintegration that roam across
the country. The Oedipal killing had taken the
place of the binding of Isaac, both in movies—
from Luigi Zampa’s Il mostro (177) to Dino Risi
Caro papà (17)—and in real life: the kidnap-
ping and killing of Prime Minister Aldo Moro,
one of the “Fathers of the Nation” who had cre-
ated the new Constitution in the immediate
Post-War years, on the part of the terrorist group
Brigate Rosse, in spring 178, was a symbolical
act of patricide that left the whole country at a
loss.
In Bava’s film, even more chillingly, it is the
mother who is sacrificed, leading once again to
the destruction of the family core. The son’s
identification with the father leads to a couple
of extraordinary moments: the disturbing image
of the kid lying on top of Dora and miming
coitus, where Bava plays with the inner gro-
tesqueness of children behaving like adults while
making the movie’s Oedipal core explicit; and
the chilling horrific scene where, in the same
shot, the son running toward his mother turns
into his late father, an effect accomplished on
camera, with no cuts, through an outstanding
use of framing.
After the Academy Award achieved by
Carlo Rambaldi for his work in John Guiller-
min’s King Kong (176: a film Bava had report-
edly turned down because he was scared to fly
overseas, although it was possibly because he
did not want to work with Dino De Laurentiis
again after Diabolik), special effects were the
rule. And yet, Shock resorts to out of fashion,
low-profile tricks which draw back to early cin-
ema and magic lanterns, even explicitly in the
scene where an alleged ghostly apparition turns
out to be a paper cut-out: in the nightmare se-
quence Bava uses exactly the same trick to create
the “hands of light” that glide over Dora’s sleep-
ing body. The overall effect is that of a director
who wanted to be called out of the game, simply
content on playing the tricks he knew best, for
a marginal audience, no longer aiming (if he
ever did that) at a major audience, and well
aware that his best years in Italian cinema were
behind him.
The idea of a blissful isolation emerges
without hesitation, in the film and from the film,
and leads to an ending which is a quiet domestic
apocalypse: once again, like in Reazione a ca-
tena, fathers and mothers pay for their sins by
the hands of their sons, and death is only a game,
more fun than the others.
NoTeS
1. See Lucas, Mario Bava—All the Colors of the Dark,
22, 77–82.
2. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on May 16, 177.
3. Even though the title Schock features prominently in
publicity material (even for the Spanish release), the on-
screen title is actually Shock, the same as featured in the
official papers, such as those submitted to the board of cen-
sors, as well as in ANICA’s listings.
4. On top of that, the Italian poster drew inspiration,
so to speak, from the cover image of the 163 paperback
edition of Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in
the Castle, designed by William Teason.
5. Libra recorded the score for the film (their last work
before disbanding) with the following line-up: Carlo Pen-
nisi (guitar), Alessandro Centofanti (piano, keyboards),
Dino Cappa (bass), and Walter Martino (drums). Martino
had played with Goblin.
6. Lucas, Mario Bava—All the Colors of the Dark, 77.
7. Included in the anthology In sonno e in veglia (Milan:
Adelphi, 187).
Suspiria (Suspiria)
D: Dario Argento. S and SC: Dario
Argento, Daria Nicolodi; DOP: Luciano Tovoli
(Technicolor); M: Goblin [Agostino Marangolo,
Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli, Claudio Si-
monetti] and Dario Argento; E: Franco Frati-
celli; PD, ArtD: Giuseppe Bassan; CO: Pier-
angelo Cicoletti; MU: Pierantonio Mecacci;
AMU: Pierino [Piero] Mecacci; Hair: Maria
Teresa Corridoni; AsstHair: Aldo Signoretti; AD:
Antonio Gabrielli; AsstArtD: Davide Bassan,
Maurizio Garrone; SD: Enrico Fiorentini; As-
stSD: Massimo Garrone; Set constructor: Aldo
Taloni; SO: Mario Dallimonti, Federico Savina;
SOE: Luciano Anzelotti [and Massimo Anzel-
lotti]; B: Corrado Volpicelli; SE: Germano Natali
[and Fabio Traversari]; C: Idelmo Simonelli; AC:
Riccardo Dolci, Enrico Fontana, Guseppe
Tinelli; KG: Mario Moreschini; Gaffer: Alberto
 1977: Suspiria
Jessica Harper (center) and Barbara Magnolfi (right) in a French lobby card for Suspiria (1977).
Altibrandi; SP: Francesco Bellomo; W: Bertilla
Silvestrin, Tiziana Mancini; 1stAE: Piero Bozza;
2ndAE: Roberto Olivieri; SS: Francesca Roberti;
Press attache: Nino Vendetti. English version—
dubbing director: Nick Alexander. Cast: Jessica
Harper (Suzy Banner), Stefania Casini (Sara),
Flavio Bucci (Daniel), Miguel Bosé (Mark), Bar-
bara Magnolfi (Olga), Susanna Javicoli (Sonia),
Eva Axén (Pat Hingle), Rudolf Schündler (Prof.
Milius), Udo Kier (Dr. Frank Mandel), Alida
Valli (Miss Tanner), Joan Bennett (Madame
Blanc), Margherita Horowitz (Teacher), Jacopo
Mariani (Albert), Fulvio Mingozzi (Taxi Driver),
Franca Scagnetti (Cook), Renato Scarpa (Prof.
Verdegast), Serafina Scorceletti (2nd Cook),
Giuseppe Transocchi (Pavlo), Renata Zamengo
(Caroline), Alessandra Capozzi (Dancer), Sal-
vatore Capozzi (Dancer), Diana Ferrara
(Dancer), Cristina Latini (Dancer), Alfredo
Raino (Dancer), Claudia Zaccari; uncredited:
Dario Argento (Narrating voice), Giovanni Di
Bernardo (Police Inspector), Daria Nicolodi
(Woman at Airport). PROD: Claudio Argento
for SEDA Spettacoli (Rome); EP: Salvatore Ar-
181
gento; PM: Lucio Trentini; UM: Federico Tocci;
PCo: Massimo Brandimarte, Federico Starace;
PAcc: Ferdinando Caputo, Carlo Du Bois. Coun-
try: Italy. Filmed in Freiburg, Munich (Germany
and at Incir-De Paolis (Rome). Running time:
100 minutes (m. 2730). Visa n. 6766 (1.26.177);
Rating: V.M.14. Release date: 2.1.177; Distribu-
tion: P.A.C.-Produzioni Atlas Consorziate. Do-
mestic gross: 3,376,22,267 lire.
Note: Mario Bava is given a “Special
thanks” credit.
The young American Suzy Banner travels to
Freiburg, Germany, to enroll in the prestigious
Tanz Akademie. On the night of her arrival she
witnesses a pupil, Patty, fleeing from the place.
The girl is later brutally murdered in a friend’s
house. More horrible and inexplicable events fol-
low. A few days later the blind pianist, Daniel, is
torn apart by his dog, and the Academy is invaded
by worms. Suzy is affected by a strange drowsiness
and unexplained illness. She can only confide in
Sara, Patty’s friend, and both girls try to find an
explanation for the strange events, but Sara too
meets an atrocious death. Suzy learns from an
182 1977: Suspiria
expert in magic that the academy was founded at
the beginning of the century by Elena Markos, a
witch with formidable powers…
“I wanted to detach radically from reality,
and try to embrace a fairytale-like tone,”1 Dario
Argento recalled about the genesis of Suspiria,
a movie whose roots can be traced, perhaps not
surprisingly, in the director’s upcoming second
paternity, with the birth of his daughter Asia.
“Her mother and I, who loved each other very
much, were developing a perfect dark fairytale
to tell her once she grew up.”2
During Daria Nicolodi’s pregnancy, Walt
Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(137) often came back to Argento’s mind, a car-
toon that had bewitched and upset him in equal
parts as a child. Around the same time the di-
rector had read Frank Wedekind’s 103 novelette
Mine-Haha oder Über die körperliche Erziehung
der jungen, where a group of young girls are
trained with severity to the education of the
body, as a preparatory stage to mundane life, in-
side a huge park separated from the outside
world. Both suggestions gave way to the idea of
a movie about witchcraft, in which little girls are
menaced and tortured by a witch like the one in
Disney’s film.3
A vital input came from Argento’s partner
in life, who was also fascinated by the occult.
Nicolodi’s grandmother, French pianist Yvonne
Müller Loeb Casella, used to tell her a sinister
story about her youth, when she enrolled in an
academy at the border between Switzerland and
Germany to perfect her piano studies. To this
day, the actress maintains that “Suspiria was
imagined and written by me, thanks to the fun-
damental inspiration of my grandmother’s story,
which I transcribed. Then, for the usual quibbles
related to the cinema industry, this story was
signed by both of us … it was a rather dramatic
experience, also because, up to the very last mo-
ment, I did not have the assurance that my role
would be recognized.”4
Traveling around Europe in search for in-
spiration and documentation for their next proj-
ect was also a way for the young couple to collect
some time for themselves; it was a honeymoon
and an adventure as well. As Argento recalled,
“We studied the most famous esoteric and al-
chemic texts of the 1th and early 20th century,
we investigated the theories of Rudolf Steiner,
we visited cathedrals that smelled like incense,
libraries that smelled like mold, and many places
that were considered ‘cursed.’ We gathered many
testimonies of alleged witches, necromancers or
people who witnessed paranormal phenomena
in the so-called ‘magic triangle’—the area at the
border between Switzerland, Germany and
France. Unfortunately, though, despite really
wanting to make acquaintance with one, we
never met a real witch. All that we saw together
… were episodes amenable to coincidences, or
to what Jung calls synchronicity.”5
The element that finally made the story gel
was Nicolodi’s idea to use Thomas De Quincey’s
book Suspiria de Profundis, one of the many
occult-themed texts that piled up in Argento’s
house at that time, as the basis for the title.6 “At
a certain point, as if struck by lighting, she put
a hand on the cover, over the last two words, and
finally the name we were looking for stood out,”
he recalled. “It was evident to all that Suspiria
was the right title for my next film.”7
Argento wanted to shoot the movie on lo-
cation, in Freiburg and Munich (although in a
previous version the story was set in Zurich), in
order to recreate the same mood as the German
expressionist cinema the director loved so
much, and to which he had already paid homage
in the past, such as with the “via Fritz Lang”
where Roberto Tobias lives in 4 mosche di velluto
grigio. But he had to drop the original idea of
centering the story on little girls, due not just to
commercial reasons, but also because of prac-
tical problems, as German unions would not
allow filming with underage actresses. A much
more painful choice was the casting of Jessica
Harper as Suzy, a role he promised to Nicolodi,
but was obviously more suited to an American
actress for distribution purposes. The decision
led to heated arguments and a deep fracture be-
tween them, which eventually resulted in a tem-
porary separation.
Filming for Suspiria began on July 5, 176;
it was an adventurous experience, that height-
ened Argento’s will to experiment. Some ideas
in the script were dropped, like a complex se-
quence shot that followed Suzy at her entrance
to the Academy, introducing all the other char-
acters, which the director wanted to look like a
Busby Berkeley choreography. Others that per-
tained to the visual and sound aspect of the
movie were perfected and led to outstanding re-
sults. In order to heighten the mood of dread,
Argento asked Goblin to write the music before
shooting started, so as to play it during takes.
The addition of Mediterranean folk music ele-
ments and instruments, such as the Greek
 1977: Suspiria
bouzouki (a reference to Elena Markos’ country
and to the Neo-Pythagorean school in Athens),
resulted in a wildly original score, that further
developed the approach the director had already
introduced in Profondo rosso. Even more chal-
lenging was the use of an old Kodak low-
sensitivity film, which meant the sets had to be
flooded with light, with huge 10,000 watt pro-
jectors all around, whereas for the close-ups
d.o.p. Luciano Tovoli filtered the light through
velvet panels that lit the actors’ faces with dense
color stains. The film would then be processed
via the obsolete Tri-Pack technique, which had
the purpose of creating a self-contained, unre-
alistic universe dominated by blue, red, green
and gold.
Despite the abundance of gory and grue-
some deaths, Argento pledged the board of cen-
sors to avoid a V.M.18 rating, which would have
had negative effects on box-office grosses. The
board obliged, decreeing that “the theme is un-
real (witches, magic) and the images, even in
their thrilling suspense, are affected by such ir-
reality.” And yet, when the movie came out, the
theme of witchcraft was interpreted by some
critics as a reference to the current feminist
movement, whose slogan was “Tremate, tremate,
le streghe son tornate!” (Tremble, tremble, the
witches are back!). But indeed Suspiria was, in
a way, also the attempt to detach from a present
characterized by blood and violence, much more
real than the bright red one spilled in the direc-
tor’s films. In a sense, Suspiria’s detachment
from reality mirrored the director’s gradual de-
tachment from politics: Argento had always
been a fervent Communist, and in his memoir
he recalled that he and Nicolodi had a red five-
pointed star (the symbol of far-left Communist
parties) on their bedroom wall, but he was
shocked like many of his peers by the violence
of terrorism; in Munich, during filming, he and
Tovoli were close witnesses of a Red Army Fac-
tion bombing which almost cost their lives.
Years later, before starting work on La terza
madre (2007), Argento would caress the idea of
making a film on the Brigate Rosse, Italy’s most
infamous left-hand terrorist group, in order to
finally settle the score with his past, but eventu-
ally abandoned the project.
Argento’s transition from thriller to horror
was also the necessary step along a path that
gradually detached itself from the rational bri-
dles imposed by the former, to an expressive
freedom devoid of any boundaries. In the early
183
170s the director had devised a script, together
with Luigi Cozzi, which transposed Mary Shel-
ley’s Frankenstein into early 130s Germany, just
before Hitler’s rise to power, and both 4 mosche
di velluto grigio and especially Profondo rosso
were open to eruptions of the uncanny. The Ser-
gio Leone-inspired recurring nightmare that
haunted Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon),
which turned out to be a foreboding of the
killer’s gruesome demise (and yet another clue
of Argento’s love for Cornell Woolrich novels),
was an early clue that the director was dissatis-
fied with the rational cage of the whodunit.
Profondo rosso represented the breaking of
that cage, with the emphasis given to the para-
normal angle, from Helga Ullman’s early
premonition to the theme of the “return of the
past,” not forgetting the key role of a haunted
mansion (the “House of the Screaming Child”)
and the chilling presence of an animated puppet
in one of the movie’s most effective murder
scenes.
With Suspiria, Argento clothed Italian
Gothic in a new style, bringing it to an unex-
pected commercial and artistic rebirth, and de-
veloped an irrational dimension where every-
thing, from the set pieces to the color and the
music, contributes to the construction of a inti-
mately coherent, impervious and self-sufficient
universe. In a sense, and in full Gothic tradition,
the movie is a journey to uncharted territories,
parallel to that of Suzy Banner, which starts at
the Freiburg airport, whose safety doors open
to the unknown, but which the script originally
synthesized in a discarded prologue (that Ni-
colodi labeled as unnecessary) in the form of
the metaphorical journey of a paper boat in a
gutter.
The movie had to start with the off-screen voices of
Suzy and her little sister. Suzy told her that she was
going to Europe to study, and would be away for a
couple of years, and she replied, ‘Oh, I’m sorry you’re
leaving!’ Meanwhile, the camera frames a very
narrow shot of a gutter, like those you see in court-
yards and end up in manholes. While the little girl
spoke, we saw her hands putting the paper boat in
the gutter and then—meanwhile she and Suzy kept
talking—the paper boat started moving faster in this
running water that became more and more whirling,
whirling, whirling. In the end it was caught in a
whirlpool and sucked into it. It was like an omen of
what would happen to Suzy.8
The house, the living space, regains a pri-
mary role: “Possessed house, haunted house,
184 1977: Suspiria
partly because owned by malevolent characters
… and partly because a place where a mystery
is hidden.” The Tanz Akademie in Freiburg (as
will be Varelli’s house in Inferno) is not simply
a passive agent of dread, but the architectural
emanation of an evil which is no longer confined
to a single villain character, but has become
ubiquitous, universal. Crossed by tunnels and
secret passages, they both are living bodies of
brick, wood and stone, that “breathe, mumble,
hide secrets … just like a living organism.”10
Whereas the manors, the palaces, the ruins of
literary and cinematic Gothic took their evoca-
tive power from their menacing, moldy, run
down appearance, Argento’s “houses of evil” are
an aesthetic triumph, a joy for the eyes, a spec-
tacle of blinding beauty, bathed in primary col-
ors, Art Nouveau and Art Deco design, the
visual outcome of the director’s post–Expres-
sionist approach. Their impossible nature is un-
derlined by Argento’s tricks: “I wanted to create
a game of visual illusions: not by chance I scat-
tered in the set pieces many drawings by M.C.
Escher….”11
With its impressive sets that look like the-
atrical backdrops—starting with the monumen-
tal façade of the Tanz Akademie, built at the De
Paolis studios in Rome on the blueprint of
Freiburg’s ‘Haus zum Walfisch’ (The Whale
House), formerly the abode of Erasmus of Rot-
terdam—Suspiria reaffirms another source of
Argento’s cinema, which recalls the Gothic ef-
forts from the previous decade: melodrama. “A
mannerist melodrama, if possible, even more
excessive and bombastic than already provided
by opera.”12 The filmmakers of 160s Gothic
found in the forms inherited from melodrama
the way to give to the audience a kind of never-
before-seen spectacle: for instance, Asa being
burnt at the stake in La maschera del demonio
was an extreme rereading of the burning of the
gypsy in Carmine Gallone’s 14 film version of
Il Trovatore. Argento went back to the mélo in
its etymology, adopting its blend of music and
scenic action, but reinventing and twisting it for
horrific purpose, a case in point being the open-
ing double murder of Pat (Eva Axén) and her
friend, constructed on a horrific crescendo that
is almost unbearable (“I wanted to push things
to the limit, make the audience scream, ‘Stop! I
can’t take it any more!’”).13
Next to melodrama, there is the recovery
of the Romantic tradition. Suzy Banner14 is a
classic ballet dancer: a soul voted to artistic ex-
pression, and therefore able to decipher phe-
nomenal reality and discover the hidden mes-
sage it conceals. She is a perfect damsel in dis-
tress, virginal and out of time, and with the same
morbid sensibility as an Edgar Allan Poe hero-
ine.
Whereas Italian Gothic was centered on
the female sensual body as an element of attrac-
tion and repulsion, Argento restores purity to
the bodies, reducing them to a fairytale macabre
dimension, and amplifying the fears of child-
hood. Suspiria reconnects to an idea of vam-
pirism as the prerogative of a senior élite that is
seen with diffidence and fear, but unlike I vam-
piri the accent is not on the social and political
dimension of horror, but on its individualistic
core: the movie is characterized by a pre-teen
vision where bogeymen and ogres are emana-
tions of the adult world, as opposed to child-
hood. Like a fairytale, Suspiria opens with Ar-
gento’s narration,15 the voice of a father telling a
scary story to the listener; a “Once upon a
time…” that takes us not to an idyllic realm but
to a ghastly ogre’s lair, and a common element
with Argento’s previous gialli, which alluded at
the act of storytelling via the use of a theatrical
space in the early sequences: the theater where
Roberto apparently kills the mysterious man in
4 mosche, the curtain raising to accompany the
entrance to the parapsychology conference in
Profondo rosso.
The teachers at the Tanz Akademie are eld-
erly and severe spinsters, embodiments of the
harassing aunt in Jane Eyre, and the climax re-
volves around the encounter with an octogenar-
ian authority figure, partially hindered in her
movements, who gives punishments to the dis-
obedients and insubordinate, and especially the
curious—a recurrent theme in Argento’s cin-
ema. The victims are punished for their curi-
osity, like disobedient children who snoop
where they are not supposed to. Suzy is only ex-
ternally an adult: in fact, she is an overgrown lit-
tle girl, naive and asexual, who must take her
bitter medicine like kids have to when they are
too sick to go to school; and the splendor of her
youth is menaced and absorbed by way of spells
and magic potions.
In a way, Argento remained faithful to his
original idea of making a movie peopled with
little girls. “I only changed the actresses’ chrono-
logical age, but their behavior has remained that
of children. The girls speak naively, they are
scary, they make faces and don’t know sex.”16
 1977: Suspiria
What is more, the sets feature elements that are
purposedly oversized, such as huge doors with
higher handles, so as to retain the same perspec-
tive of a child; even Sara’s behavior is that of a
clumsy kid, as she piles up suitcases in an un-
stable column, like a little child who plays with
bricks without being aware of the rules (the big
suitcase should be on bottom, instead that on
top…), with disastrous consequences.
Suzy’s journey then becomes a rite of pas-
sage, and the killing of the “mother witch” allows
her to become an adult. In Argento’s view, the
heroine’s final laughter can be interpreted as a
cathartic reaction, but also as a woman looking
back at the obstacle she faced in her journey to
maturity. “She fought a great battle and won it.
And so she goes away without running; she
slows down, walks slowly, and smiles, removes
the hair and the water from her face … she be-
comes a woman.”17
Consequently, the theme of the uncanny
related to the female figure is transformed in a
radical way. By taking inspiration from Wede-
kind’s novelette, Argento devises a sort of female
“concentrational universe” (to use the term
coined by Holocaust survivor David Rousset)
that contains in itself, a building-hive where the
male presence is secondary if not superfluous.
The males that roam at the Tanz Akademie are
either asexual ephebes (the dancer Mark, the
blond child Albert), foolish and monstrous ser-
vants (the brute Pavlo, labeled as “the Franken-
stein monster”) or eunuchs, as the blind pianist
Daniel (Flavio Bucci): Argento hints at blindness
as a metaphor for castration, as E.T.A. Hoff-
mann did in The Sandman, according to Freud.
On the other hand, Elena Markos does not have
an ounce of the morbid fascination that Gianna
Maria Canale or Barbara Steele’s characters ex-
uded, but is indeed a repulsive old woman, who
does not even have to conceal her true appear-
ance in order to seduce, since any relation with
the opposite sex is absent.
Argento even managed to recycle the ref-
erences to Nazism he had devised for his un-
made Frankenstein project, by setting a couple
of scenes respectively near the Bürgerbräukeller,
the brasserie where Hitler made his failed 123
coup attempt, the infamous “Beer Hall Putsch”
(the moment where Daniel and his dog pass
near a crowded brasserie) and in Königsplatz,
the site of Hitler’s speeches, where the unfortu-
nate pianist meets a gruesome demise.
Suspiria is characterized by a stark contrast
185
between the escatological nature of the menace
and the grotesque rawness of the acts of
violence. The victims meet their demise at the
hands of very material murderers, who use
knives and razors like the black-gloved killers
in Argento’s earlier films, or are slaughtered by
animals who become agents of evil (the dog in
Suspiria, the cats and rats in Inferno, the monkey
in La terza madre). On the one hand, this fur-
ther underlines the irrational core of the author’s
thrillers, and offers a first look at nature and the
animal universe as a source of dread (see also
the infamous “maggot rain” scene). On the other,
it reveals the unspeakable contradiction under-
lying the Gothic according to Argento, a meta-
physical tension continually sabotaged by an
inner pragmatism, or better still the tradition
opposed to secular rationality and cinephile ed-
ucation: “Witches always fascinated me; I don’t
believe in the devil, in the movies he always makes
me laugh…” 18 Argento himself would confess.
It is a matter of different generations, after
all. In Lisa e il diavolo Bava exorcised the devil-
butler played by Telly Savalas by having him
suck a lollipop and utter amusing lines: irony
was in some measure the result of an inner
dread caused by the director’s Catholic educa-
tion, the fear of facing too big issues for such a
cheap horror movie. Argento, an atheist and a
Communist, does not have such qualms: the su-
pernatural is staged as a show, terrible yet fas-
cinating, and one can understand the director’s
enthusiasm in forging his own mythology in-
stead of leaning on a pre-existing one (before
Suspiria the director toyed with the idea of
adapting Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cycle).
Suspiria (and, similarly, Inferno) recovers
the taste of cinematic Gothic as the result of a
past literary tradition, in a plethora of illustrious
references, from Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria
de profundis to Wedekind, from the Brothers
Grimm to the early Christian writers: the Latin
quote “Quoddam ubique, quoddam semper,
quoddam ab omnibus creditum est” uttered by
Udo Kier’s character pays reference to the 5th
century Gallic Vincent of Lérins.1 All this, how-
ever, is filtered through the Seventh art—a nec-
essary step for an ex–film critic and greedy
cinephile as Argento.
Whereas his gialli were the result of an
elaborate layering of cinematic and literary
sources, reshaped as to achieve their own form,
the author’s approach to Gothic has been defined
as a “Grand-Guignol Surrealist supermarket”20
186 1977: Suspiria
which passes its influences through the mincer
of media and Pop Art. The Brothers Grimm are
evoked via Walt Disney’s Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs; Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death
(the dancers rehearse in the Yellow Room, Miss
Tanner receives the classes in the Red Room,
and one of the teachers is named Madame
Blanc…) turns up in the movie by way of the
chromatic memory of Corman’s film adaptation;
Fritz Lang’s spirit is summoned via the casting
of actress Joan Bennett; and the famous pool
scene in Tourneur’s Cat People is recreated, as
an anticipation of an idea which Argento even-
tually discarded, where the witch would turn
into a black panther.21
But there are also unexpected homages (or
borrowings, or thefts?): the menacing eyes that
stare at Pat in the darkness, outside the window,
in an unsettling vision of terror that sets the tone
for the horrors to come (How could someone
human be there, suspended in mid-air? Is that
an immaterial presence, a Magritte-like vision
that can exist only in a surreal alternative uni-
verse?) has its surprising antecedent in the scene
where Nino Manfredi finds himself spied upon
by a mysterious presence in a closet, which turns
out to be the little son of the character played
by Anna Karina, in Franco Brusati’s masterful
Pane e cioccolata (174), also photographed by
Luciano Tovoli. Here, the reinvention of a
similar image in a totally different context—
there, a bittersweet drama on emigration; here,
an out-and-out horror movie—shows Argento’s
ability at recycling and mastering extraneous
material, be it plot points and twists, whole se-
quences, or visual ideas.
As a whole, Suspiria stages a neo–Gothic
imbued with a self-awareness that is not yet
post-modernist: instead of simply quoting the
past, the movie engulfs and reinvents it with a
virtuoso style that conceals, as it has been noted,
an “artisan and pre-modern pride”22 worthy of
Méliès. In this continuing drive to invent new
worlds and ways to show things, especially the
most terrible ones, so as to make them beautiful,
Argento reached a point of no return in the ex-
ploration of an original path to the Fantastic.
Suspiria grossed over 3,370 million lire in
Italy, ranking in the fifth place among the year’s
top grossing films, and became a hit overseas as
well. It was too complex and peculiar a model
to give way to a filone, especially given the suf-
fering state of popular cinema, although it defi-
nitely influenced foreign works such as The
Legacy (178, Richard Marquand) and Terror
(178, Norman J. Warren). However, someone
briefly considered the idea of a parody, as hinted
by the existence of a scenario registered at the
SIAE offices in March 177 by Sergio Garrone
and Sergio Chiusi, under the title Suspiriola.
NoTeS
1. Dario Argento, Paura (Turin: Einaudi, 2014), 15–
212.
2. Argento, Paura.
3. In his memoir Argento maintains that originally the
story had been devised for little girls between 11 and 14
years, whereas elsewhere he mentioned an even lower age
span. “I had thought the story to take place in a school at-
tended by girls between eight and ten years old.” Fabio
Maiello, Dario Argento. Confessioni di un maestro dell’-
horror (Milan: Alacrán, 2007), 112.
4. Davide Pulici and Marco Cacioppo, “Daria
Nicolodi: nostra signora degli orrori,” in Manlio Goma-
rasca and Davide Pulici (eds.) Le tre madri. Guida alla trilo-
gia di Dario Argento. Nocturno Dossier #64, November
2007, 13.
5. Argento, Paura.
6. At that time De Quincey’s name had regained a cer-
tain notoriety in Italy: for instance, in 173 the illustrious
literary critic Pietro Citati had praised Confessions of an
Opium Eater in the pages of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most
popular newspaper. Pietro Citati, “I baratri della memoria,”
Corriere della Sera, August 26, 173.
7. Ibid.
8. Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, “Dario Ar-
gento: nostro signore degli orrori,” in Gomarasca and
Pulici (eds.) Le tre madri. Guida alla trilogia di Dario Ar-
gento., 6. In the script, the little girl (Janet) is actually Suzy’s
niece, and she puts a miniature doll on the boat. The scene
was supposed to be shot with the Snorkel camera Argento
had employed to explore the killer’s fetishes in Profondo
rosso.
9. Simone Arcagni, “Architetture della paura. Le
Haunted Houses,” in Vito Zagarrio (ed.), Argento vivo. Il
cinema di Dario Argento tra genere e autorialità (Venice:
Marsilio, 2008), 161.
10. Ibid., 164.
11. Argento, Paura. Namely, the façade of the Academy
reflected in a puddle during Pat’s escape quotes Escher’s
152 woodcut print Puddle; the tapestry in the room of
Pat’s friend reprises Escher’s famous birds patterns,
Madame Blanc’s studio has a mural with a cityscape and
impossible staircases that recall Relativity (153), and a
trompe-l’oeil bas-relief dissimulates a retracted door that
leads to Helena Markos’ secret lair. And, last but not least,
the Academy is located in “Escher Strasse.”
12. Roy Menarini, “Tutto l’orrore che c’è. Argento
manierista,” in Zagarrio, Argento vivo, 81.
13. Argento, Paura.
14. In his memoir Argento spells the name as “Susy
Benner.”
15. Argento’s narrating voice at the beginning (an ele-
ment that will return in Inferno, Tenebre, Phenomena,
Opera and Due occhi diabolici) can also be seen as an au-
thorial sign, the reaffirmation of the director’s figure as the
master of ceremonies who accompanies the audience on
 1977: Tutti defunti
their journey, a role Argento had taken on himself since
his TV appearances to introduce the mini-series La porta
sul buio.
16. Fabio Maiello, Dario Argento. Confessioni di un
maestro dell’horror (Milan: Alacrán, 2007), 112.
17. Gomarasca and Pulici, “Dario Argento: nostro sig-
nore degli orrori,” 7.
18. Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors / Broken
Minds. The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (London: sun
tavern fields, 11), 12.
19. The original quote, referring to the Catholic
Church’s teaching, is: “In ipsa item catholica ecclesia
magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod
semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.” Reginald Stewart
Moxon (ed.), The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lérins
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 115).
20. Roberto Pugliese, Dario Argento, (Milan: Il Castoro
Cinema (186) 2011), 68.
21. Pulici and Cacioppo, “Daria Nicolodi: nostra
signora degli orrori,” 13. The idea was not explicitly put
down in the script, but only hinted at in annotations. What
is left of it in the finished film is the ceramic panther that
explodes when Elena Markos dies.
22. Alberto Pezzotta, “La modernità imperfetta,” in Za-
garrio, Argento vivo, 87.
Tutti defunti … tranne i morti (All De-
ceased…. Except the Dead)
D: Pupi Avati. S and SC: Pupi Avati, Anto-
nio Avati, Gianni Cavina, Maurizio Costanzo;
DOP: Pasquale Rachini (LV-Luciano Vittori);
M: Amedeo Tommasi (Ed Eurofilmusic); E:
Maurizio Tedesco; PD, CO: Luciana Morosetti;
MU: Gianni Amadei, Giovanna Manca; AD: Ce-
sare Bastelli; C: Giorgio Urbinelli; AC: Francesco
Sterpa; SO: Raffaele De Luca; SOE: Massimo
Anzellotti; Mix: Venanzio Biraschi; SE: Giovanni
Corridori, Luciano Anzellotti; KG: Vittorio Ni-
colosi; ChEl: Francesco Rachini; W: Teresa Lai;
AE: Piera Gabutti; 2ndAE: Carlo D’Alessandro;
SS: Cesare Bornazzini. Cast: Gianni Cavina
(Martini), Francesca Marciano (Ilaria), Carlo
Delle Piane (Dante), Greta Vayan (Hilde),
Michele Mirabella (Buster), Flavia Giorgi (Le-
tizia), Giulio Pizzirani (Giulio), Bob Tonelli [Ar-
iano Nanetti] (Ariano), Luciano Bianchi (Ot-
tavio), Carla Astolfi (Isabella), Pietro Bona
(Donald), Ferdinando Orlandi (Typographer),
Valentino Macchi (Priest), Andrea Matteuzzi
(Ignazio); uncredited: Cesare Bastelli (Gravedig-
ger), Armando Sorrentino (Rosa, the Maid).
PROD: Gianni Minervini and Antonio Avati for
A.M.A. Film S.r.l. (Rome); PS: Francesco Guer-
rieri; PSe: Alessandro Vivarelli; ADM: Raffaello
Forti. Country: Italy. Filmed on location in
Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna) and Massa Fi-
nalese (Modena), and at Incir-De Paolis (Rome).
Running time: 103 minutes (m. 2843). Visa n.
187
685 (3.8.177); Rating: V.M.14. Release date:
3.10.177; Distribution: Euro International Film.
Domestic gross: 27,708,450 lire. Also known as:
Neun Leichen hat die Woche (West Germany).
Emilia-Romagna, late 1940s. The naive
Dante is hired by a typographer to sell a book on
legends about the noble families of the area to
their descendants. Dante arrives at castle Zanotti,
where the family head, Marquis Ignazio, has just
passed away. Despite the unfriendly atmosphere
and the eccentric characters that form the Zanotti
family, Dante is forced to stay—not the least be-
cause of the advances on the part of the Marquis’
daughter, the lovely Ilaria. A horrible discovery
takes place at the funeral: the butler, Giulio, has
been killed with a stake in the heart and buried
in the coffin in Zanotti’s place. What is more, the
chambermaid, Rosa, has disappeared. From there
on a series of murders ensue: all the members of
the Zanotti family are killed one by one, in bizarre
and horrible ways, and the murderer seems to fol-
low an old prophecy in Dante’s book, which will
lead to the discovery of a treasure. The inept de-
tective Martini shows up to investigate, but to no
avail…
After the out-and-out descent into horror
of La casa dalle finestre che ridono, Avati medi-
tated a challenging gesture: “I was a bit nervous,
because I had been labeled as the ‘Polanski of
the Po Valley,’ and I didn’t like this definition. I
did not want to be imprisoned in the genre for
the rest of my career. As it always happen with
me, I tried to get rid of it, and distance myself
through a different proposal that nonetheless
stayed fully in the genre.”1 Thus came Tutti de-
funti … tranne i morti, a no-holds-barred spoof
that mixed together elements from the old dark
house Gothic, the plot of Agatha Christie’s Ten
Little Indians and tongue-in-cheek references to
the giallo, in an over-the-top, paradoxical, pro-
vocative way—starting with the very title, which
means “All Deceased…. Except the Dead.”
The whodunit element has had many
critics label Tutti defunti … tranne i morti as a
giallo, or a giallo parody of sorts, and yet the
sight gags (such as the demystifying use of
giallo’s typical iconography and style—the black
gloved killer, the fetish for weapons, the killer’s
POV) only represent the surface of the film, and
can be read as a footnote to Avati’s discomfort
with the knifings he had to add to La casa dalle
finestre che ridono in order to make the movie
more commercial. Here, the gory scenes are sur-
prisingly played straight (see the knifing of the
188 1977: Tutti defunti
typographer in one of the early scenes), and
their unpleasantness add to Tutti defunti …
tranne i morti’s overall grotesque feel.
However, the core of the movie is unmis-
takably Gothic, whose setting, themes and aes-
thetics are systematically ridiculed. The genre’s
main staples are all there: the gloomy manor
(with its own cemetery) where the story takes
place; the insistence on the “return of the past,”
with the volume on old popular legends and the
cryptic nursery rhyme that foretells the fate of
the Zanotti family; the emphasis on monstrosity
Italian poster for Tutti defunti… Tranne i morti (1977).
and sexual deviation, albeit in a humorous way
(the hirsute yet effeminate typographer who
puts bright red nail varnish on his fingers; the
character of cousin Donald, “The masturbator”;
the nymphomaniac Ilaria); the presence of a
damsel in distress as well as of a proper “dark
lady” revealed in the final twist. The plot unfolds
like a macabre fairytale for adults, as every death
is structured like a retribution, and each victim
is punished for his or her own sins, weaknesses
or idiosyncrasies. Avati deconstructs the ma-
terial in a comic way, and still manages to make
the movie truly scary at times, with
some top-notch macabre images,
such as the growing number of dead
bodies put together, one next to an-
other, on the huge master bed, an
image worthy of Bava at his most cyn-
ical.
All this is once again deeply
rooted in a precise regional and his-
torical environment: Avati’s region,
Emilia Romagna, a land isolated from
the big commercial arteries, and
haunted by old and creepy popular
legends. The time setting is also im-
portant: the story takes place during
an economically depressed period—
the immediate post–World War II
years—and its characters ape the lan-
guage and clichés of the American
movies that were flooding the the-
aters: over 600 U.S. films were re-
leased in the first months after the
Liberation of Rome, and in 146
American films collected 87 percent
of the total grosses. Hence, Avati’s
portrayal of his unlikely heroes, Dante
and the private eye Martini, can be
better appreciated as a spoof of the in-
fluence that American cinema had in
Italian post-war culture, and the com-
edy is the result of the jarring clash
between the way these characters be-
have in accordance to what they
learned from movies and the down-
to-earth reality in which they act. The
ugly-looking, awkward Dante wears
a Humphrey Bogart–esque coat and
hat, behaves like a romantic movie
hero, and his favorite catchphrase is
“Okays”—a blatant mispronunciation
of English language’s most simple say-
ing; the dimwitted Martini acts like
 1977: Tutti defunti
the private detectives he has seen in black-and-
white B-movies, even though he is comically in-
capable of making the simplest deduction.
Avati gives his repertoire company full rein,
and makes the most of the unusual-looking, ec-
centric stock players, including Michele Mira-
bella—the unfortunate librarian in Fulci’s L’al-
dilà, nowadays a famed TV personality—as the
Bari-born cowboy (!) Buster, a role originally
devised for Luigi Montefiori and yet another
stab at Italy’s provincial mimicry of American
culture. The most memorable of the lot are
cousin Donald “The masturbator” (Pietro Bona,
another of Avati’s non-actors), who meets one
of the movie’s most hilarious deaths, and Bob
Tonelli (as the provocatively named Ariano,
“Aryan,” actually Tonelli’s real name), who be-
comes the object of a side-splitting post-mortem
gag, whereas the film’s most freakish presence
is that of the dwarfish maid Rosa, played by a
man in drag (yet another of Avati’s “discoveries,”
a mentally ill little man with a tiny voice by the
name of Arnaldo Sorrentino), in a bout of gen-
der bending that recalls a key character in La
casa dalle finestre che ridono.
The most significative presence in the cast
is Carlo Delle Piane, a bit part actor who had
debuted at 12 in Cuore (148), co-directed by
Duilio Coletti and Vittorio De Sica. “Coletti and
De Sica asked their assistants: ‘Go, spread out
all over Lazio, and bring me the ugliest boy you
can find.’ They checked all the schools, all the
boarding schools, all the summer camps, they
went everywhere and eventually Delle Piane
won,” Avati recalled. “They called him ‘the little
monkey.’ Think of a boy who wins such a
contest: Delle Piane’s film debut happened be-
cause of this, he was chosen because he was the
ugliest.”2
Having been confined for almost three
decades in bit parts (including, among others,
Polanski’s Che?) because of his peculiar features
and voice, Tutti defunti … tranne i morti was
Delle Piane’s first starring role: the actor imme-
diately became one of Avati’s favorite players,
and reached a well-deserved notoriety, starting
with the 178 TV mini-series Jazz Band: he won
an Italian Golden Globe for Best Breakthrough
Actor in 184 with Gita scolastica (183), and the
Coppa Volpi award as Best Actor at the 186
Venice festival with Regalo di Natale, one of
Avati’s finest works.
Overall, Tutti defunti … tranne i morti is
the movie where the author’s microcosm feels
18
complete and totally self-sufficient: Avati’s typ-
ically naive, childish, inhibited (or sexually am-
biguous) losers and assorted freaks are united
not only by their defeatist attitude toward life
and love (“I’m a cuckold, did you know that? All
women end up betraying me!” is Martini’s catch-
phrase to impress a woman), but also by their
common physical diversity—with the blatant
exception of the film’s female leads, Ilaria (Fran-
cesca Marciano) and Hilde (Greta Vayan), both
sexually active and provoking, queen bees of
sorts who choose and dominate their man-child
servants, tease and eventually exploit them.
The humor (often influenced by Mel Brooks’
comedy style) is surreal, puerile, vulgar, cartoon-
ish, absurd, nonsensical, hyperbolic—and most
of it simply irresistible. The screenplay was co-
authored by Avati, his brother, Cavina and Mau-
rizio Costanzo (later a famed talk show host),
but, as Avati recalled, “Whereas in the script for
La casa dalle finestre che ridono, signed by sev-
eral people, most ideas were mine, Tutti defunti
… tranne i morti … was written to all effects by
many hands…. We did not follow a real method:
simply, we were trying to outdo each other on
who managed to reach the most absurd terri-
tory. The more we went toward the bizarre and
crazy provocation, the more we had fun.”3 As
actor Giulio Pizzirani noted, “Tutti defunti …
tranne i morti is a movie that wants to find the
grotesque in its own intimate essence. In that
period there were not many grotesque movies,
and Pupi’s challenge was unusual within a cin-
ema that used to take itself very seriously.”4 Still,
it is amazing that such a project, so distant from
the typical paths of Italian comedy, ever got made.
Tutti defunti … tranne i morti was shot on
a low budget, on the hills near Bologna and
Modena, in the cold winter of 176, with a min-
imal crew that operated inside a real castle: a
fake Medieval manor built in the early 20th cen-
tury near the village of Massa Finalese, which
belonged to a crazy rich old man who owned a
funeral parlor in Bologna.5 It got a V.M.14 rating
because of some vulgar lines and, incredible but
true, because of the hilarious scene where cousin
Donald begins to masturbate while watching
Martini and Hilde making love—a grotesque re-
visitation of the typical “peeping tom” moments
in Italian sex comedies of the period, which
leads to the character’s hilarious death. The
movie did mediocre business, but represented a
further step in the author’s peculiar vision of
Gothic.
10 1978: Enfantasme
NoTeS
1. Claudio Bartolini, “Tutti defunti … tranne i morti: la
provocazione,” in Adamovit, Bartolini, Servini, Nero Avati,
100.
2. Abramovit, Bartolini, Il gotico padano, 137.
3. Bartolini, “Tutti defunti … tranne i morti: la provo-
cazione,” 102.
1978
Enfantasme
D: Sergio Gobbi. S: based on the novel En-
fantasme by Georges-Jean Arnaud; SC: Ugo
Pirro, Sergio Gobbi; Dial: Ugo Pirro; DOP:
Ennio Guarnieri (Eastmancolor, Telecolor); M:
Stelvio Cipriani, conducted by the author (Ed.
Nazionalmusic); E: Ruggero Mastroianni; PD,
CO: Elio Micheli; AD: Francesco Longo; SS:
Anna Maria Bifarini; C: Renato Ranieri; AC: An-
tonio Scaramuzza; SP: Enrico Appetito; MU:
Franco Schioppa; Hair: Sergio Gennari; CO:
Serenilla Staccioli; ACO: Milena Guarinoni; AP
D: Mauro Passi; SO: Carlo Palmieri; B: Piero
Fondi; Mix: Gianni D’Amico; AE: Adriana Ola-
sio, Elsa Natali. Cast: Agostina Belli (Claudia
Lanza), Stefano Satta Fores (Andrea Lanza),
Sergino [Serge Youssoufian] (Nino), Jean-
Claude Bouillon (Dr. Sisti), Gérard Menigou,
Antonio Cantafora (Flavio, the Hippy), Brigitte
Skay (Flavio’s Wife), Aïché Nana [Kiash Nanah]
(Gypsy woman), Mario Mattia Giorgetti, Elisa
Pozzi (Armida), Lorenzo Logli, Anna Canzi, En-
rica Randi, Giovanni Rubens, Giuseppe Nava,
Isabella Guerrato, Mara Palvarini, Mario Mer-
calli, Elena Pantano, Mario Mariani, Giusy
Moschella. PROD: Ark Cinematografica (Rome),
Paris Cannes Production A.A. (Paris); EP: Mario
Saragò; GM: Livio Maffei; PS: Anselmo Par-
rinello; PSe: Antonio Saragò; ADM: Angelo
Saragò; Cashier: Franco Penna. Country: Italy /
France. Filmed on location in Bormio and at
Icet-De Paolis Studios (Milan). Running time:
104 minutes (m. 2850). Visa n. 72187 (8.10.178);
Rating: V.M.14. Release dates: 11.5.178 (Italy);
11.8.178 (France); Distribution: Battistelli. Do-
mestic gross: ,157,000 lire. Also known as:
L’enfant de nuit; Les inconnus aux petit pieds
(France).
Claudia Lanza, who lost her son Marco in
a car accident for which she blames her husband
Andrea, returns to her cottage in the Alps, in
4. Ibid., 101.
5. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on November 15, 176. In order to conform
to Italian laws, which demanded that a film be shot at least
partly inside a film studio, after wrapping principal shoot-
ing Avati and his brother Antonio shot a few unimportant
scenes (which they knew they would later cut) at the De
Paolis studios.
search of tranquility. Her solitude is broken only
by the visits of the ungraceful maid Armida, but
one day Claudia is approached by a mysterious
child orphan, Nino, who asks her for food. When
Claudia’s husband Andrea unexpectedly reaches
her, Nino, seemingly jealous, disappears. Claudia,
who has become affectionate to the child and
identifies him with her dead son, starts looking
for him desperately, afraid that he might starve
or freeze to death. Andrea, convinced that his wife
has become neurotic, brings over a psychiatrist,
Dr. Sisti. The villagers are concerned and per-
plexed, and only the hippies who live in an iso-
lated farmhouse believe in Claudia’s statements.
One day, while Andrea and the villagers are busy
hunting wolves, Claudia is left alone and Nino
reappears. Claudia convinces her husband to
meet the orphan in the cemetery chapel where he
usually hides, but Andrea is found dead,
seemingly killed by Nino. Claudia’s cottage is
burned down by the kid, who apparently dies in
the fire. The woman returns to town, and Nino
is in the car with her….
For his fourteenth movie as a director, Ser-
gio Gobbi (born in Milan in 137 but a resident
of France, where he primarily acted as a pro-
ducer) chose to adapt a mystery novel by the
prolific French writer Georges-Jean Arnaud,
winner of the 177 “Mystère de la critique” prize,
and centered on the encounter between a
woman, still in mourning for the death of her
only son, and a child who may or may not be a
ghost.
As Gobbi explained, the Italian title is a
wordplay between the French words “enfant”
(child) and “fantasme” (ghost) and the verb “en-
fanter” (to conceive a child),1 and the movie sim-
ilarly blends different genres in an offbeat, in-
teresting mixture. First and foremost, it is a
psychological study, centered on a woman on
the verge of a breakdown, who desperately clings
 1978: Enfantasme 11

to the memory of her dead offspring; it is, albeit disturbing mood, as in the confrontations be-
marginally, a drama involving a misunderstood, tween Claudia and the villagers, depicted as
embittered child, not dissimilar to the “lacrima- narrow-minded, greedy or downright hostile;
movies” centered on syrupy parent-child rela- and he scatters unsettling touches here and
tionships. But it is also an offbeat ghost story of there, such as the character of the witch-like
sorts. housekeeper Armida, who performs a grisly
Is Nino—the scared, hostile
and elusive kid that only Claudia
can see—a ghost or a product of her
imagination? Is he a supernatural
presence or the projection of the
woman’s frustrated need for affec-
tion after the traumatic death of her
only son in a car accident caused by
her husband? Or is he a real boy
after all? The clues are contradictory,
and the script (by Gobbi and the
renowned Ugo Pirro) keeps the am-
biguity about Nino’s existence and
nature until the very end, even after
the mystery has seemingly been
solved via a rational explanation.
However, the story moves away
from the horror film clichés, and
opts for a subdued, psychological
approach. “I don’t care if I’m not in
tune with the fashion,” Gobbi stated;
“Enfantasme, if one was willing to
accept certain commercial rules,
could be turned into a product of
the Exorcist thread, or a paranormal
film, Audrey Rose-style. Whereas I
don’t want to be conditioned or stick
to formulas.”2 The result recalls a
quieter, dampened version of Roman
Polanski’s Repulsion, especially since
the last scenes—after the offscreen
murder of Claudia’s estranged hus-
band—leave room to a different in-
terpretation than the one which is
seemingly accepted in the film; it is
also an anticipation of themes de-
veloped, albeit in an explicit Fantas-
tic manner, by Dino Risi’s fascinat-
ing Fantasma d’amore.
Actually, the direction has its
share of flaws: the depiction of a
comprehensive hippie commune is
a tad banal and possibly suffers from
the attempt at squeezing in a politi-
cal discourse, and the role of a psy-
chiatrist called in to “cure” Claudia
is only marginally sketched. Still,
Gobbi succeeds in building a subtly Italian locandina for Enfantasme (1978).
12 1978: L’osceno desiderio
superstitious ritual by slashing a rooster’s throat
and spraying its blood in the kitchen to “purify”
it from the evil eye. As the director explained,
“What I sought to portray, keeping aside any
parapsychological temptation, is the confronta-
tion between two lonely beings, marginal from
the others, but with a notable potential
regarding their feelings…. Whereas the second-
ary characters—the dead kid’s father, the vil-
lagers etcetera—are all over the top, only the
woman and the kid have a linear attitude.”3
Despite all its shortcomings, Enfantasme is
a fascinating film. Shot in five weeks in the
Alpine village of Bormio,4 it benefits from Ennio
Guarnieri’s striking cinematography and Rug-
gero Mastroianni’s expert editing. Nino’s first
apparition, his pitch-black coat standing out in
the snowy landscape, is particularly impressive,
and Guarnieri even manages to make passing
references to the extraordinary black-and-white
images of photographer Mario Giacomelli (see
the scene where the black-coated kids are
playing outside the church, almost an exact ren-
dition of one of Giacomelli’s most famous
works). Scenes in interiors have a pictorial qual-
ity that hints at Bruegel and Rembrandt.
As Claudia, Agostina Belli gives one of the
most convincing performances in her career,
while the excellent Stefano Satta Flores is some-
how sacrificed in a small role. The rest of the
cast features a couple of fading beauties such as
the German Brigitte Skay (the sexy titular hero-
ine in Bruno Corbucci’s Isabella, duchessa dei
diavoli, 16, and one of the many victims in
Reazione a catena) and the Turkish-Lebanese
belly dancer Aïché Nana (136–2014), whose im-
promptu strip-tease at Rome’s restaurant Rugan-
tino, during a wild party, caused a scandal, and
inspired a famous scene in Fellini’s La dolce vita.
Enfantasme gained some attention from
the press, due to Belli’s popularity at the time
after Dino Risi’s Profumo di donna and Telefoni
bianchi (176, which earned her a David di Do-
natello Award as best actress), and her roles
alongside Kirk Douglas—in Alberto De Mar-
tino’s Holocaust 2000 (177)—and Fred As-
taire—in Yves Boisset’s Un taxi mauve (177).
Surprisingly, Gobbi’s film was given a V.M.14
rating because of its disturbing depiction of the
child and the “morbidness and deviousness of
the mother.” In a way, this attitude predated the
attention on film’s “negative educational impact”
that would characterize the work of Italian
board of censors during the following decade.
Box-office results were poor, though, and critical
reception was mixed. Belli’s star was fading too:
her next film, Manaos (180, Alberto Vázquez
Figueroa), was a flop, and she returned to the
big screen only in 182, with the comedy Vai
avanti tu che mi viene da ridere, alongside Lino
Banfi.
Arnaud’s novel was adapted again for the
screen in 200, with Jean-Paul Guyon’s Sommeil
blanc.
NoTeS
1. Mirella Acconciamessa, “Il cinema francese? È
morto,” L’Unità, March 16, 178
2. s.c. “La Belli madre impazzita in un film-sfida
francese,” La Stampa, March 17, 178.
3. Ibid.
4. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on November 14, 177.
L’osceno desiderio—Le pene nel ventre
(The Obscene Desire—The Pains in the
Belly)
D: Jeremy Scott [Giulio Petroni] [Spanish
version: Giulio Petroni]. S: Giulio Petroni; SC:
Piero Regnoli, Giulio Petroni [Spanish version:
S: Joaquín Dominguez; SC: Giulio Petroni];
DOP: Leopoldo Villaseñor (Eastmancolor, Tele-
color); M: Carlo Savina (Ed. Nazionalmusic); E:
Marcella Benvenuti [Spanish version: G. Peroni
(sic!)]; ArtD: Mimmo Scavia; SD: Vincenzo
Medusa [Spanish version: Aurelio Gallego]; MU:
Sergio Angeloni [Spanish version: and Mercedes
Guillot]; Hair: Placida Crapanzano [Spanish ver-
sion: Mercedes Gomez]; AD: Pedro Rosado;
2ndAD: José Peris; C: Manuel Mateos; AC: Sat-
urnino Pita; W: Renata Morroni [Spanish ver-
sion: Isabel Perales]; AE: Rita Di Palo; SO: Pietro
Ortolani [Spanish version: Miguel Ángel Polo];
B: Benito Alchimede; SE: Antonio Molina; SS:
Maria Luce Faccenna; Mix: Renato Cadueri.
Cast: Marisa Mell [Marlies Moitzi] (Amanda
Holbrook Orsomandi), Lou Castel [Ulv Quar-
zéll] (Father Peter Clark), Chris Avram (Andrea
Orsomandi), Laura Trotter (Rachel), Javier Es-
crivá (Fabio), Víctor Israel (Giovanni), Paola
Maiolini (Prostitute). PROD: Cineiniziative
S.R.L. (Rome), Triton P.C. (Madrid); PM: Fabio
Diotallevi [Spanish version: Joaquín Domin-
guez]; PS: Augusto Dolfi; PA: José Rincon; AP:
Carlos Galan, Fernando Vidal Campos. Coun-
try: Italy / Spain. Running time: 8 minutes (m.
266); Visa n. 72161 (7.25.178); Rating: V.M.18.
Release dates: 11.4.178 (Spain), 12.28.178 (Italy);
 1978: L’osceno desiderio 13

Distribution: SIDA (Italy), Cinema 2000 S.A. tori a Milano, 163), Petroni then became one
(Spain). Domestic gross: 116,165,22 lire. Also of the leading Spaghetti Western directors with
known as: Poseída (Spain). such outstanding works as Da uomo a uomo
Note: in the opening credits for the Spanish (167, starring Lee Van Cleef and John Phillip
version Lou Castel becomes “Castell,” Laura Law), Tepepa (16, co-starring Tomas Milian
Trotter becomes “Troters.” and Orson Welles), E per tetto un cielo di stelle
The beautiful Amanda, just mar-
ried to the wealthy nobleman Andrea
Orsomandi, arrives at her husband’s ex-
travagant Gothic mansion. There, she
soon finds herself uncomfortable, partly
because of the place’s sinister atmosphere
and scary housekeeper Giovanni, partly
because of her husband’s strange behav-
ior. Andrea is the victim of a centuries-
old curse related to his family, and it soon
transpires that he is killing prostitutes in
order to exorcise it. Amanda, who is
pregnant with Andrea’s child, seeks com-
fort in her friends Fabio and Rachel, but
it turns out that they are part of a
devilish conspiracy against her and her
baby. Only a priest, Father Clark, seems
able to help Amanda. But the demonic
forces are too strong…
“L’osceno desiderio is not signed by
me, it is not mine and therefore I know
very little about it, and what appears in
that film is not of my concern. And I
don’t even think it is appropriate to talk
about the end of popular cinema or
something else in relation to it. It is only
an awful pecionata [author’s note:
botched job], of which I am not respon-
sible.”1
Giulio Petroni was always ada-
mant in denying his involvement in this
obscure Gothic film, shot between Italy
and Spain under the title La profezia 2
and released to an indifferent audience
in late 178 with a decidedly more
vulgar title, complete with the allusive
subtitle Le pene nel ventre (The Pains in
the Belly, which played on the double
entendre of the word “pene,” also stand-
ing for “penis”) and signed under the
pseudonym “Jeremy Scott.” However,
the movie is indeed the work of Petroni,
one of the most interesting genre film
directors of the previous decade. Hav-
ing started his career with a number of
amiable comedies (La cento chilometri,
15; I piaceri dello scapolo, 160; Una Striking Italian locandina for L’osceno desiderio (1978). Art
domenica d’estate, 162; I soliti rapina- by enrico De Seta.
14 1978: L’osceno desiderio
(168, starring Giuliano Gemma) and La notte
dei serpenti (16).
In the 170s Petroni’s career became more
erratic: he abandoned the Western (save for
172’s La vita, a volte, è molto dura, vero Provvi-
denza? starring Tomas Milian), became the pro-
ducer of his own movies, and took a different
path, characterized by the exploration of eroti-
cism and social satire in such works as Non com-
mettere atti impuri (171) and Crescete e molti-
plicatevi (173). However, his 175 film Labbra
di lurido blu, an intense drama about a woman
(Lisa Gastoni), who has become a nymphoma-
niac after a childhood trauma, and is unhappily
married to a homosexual (Corrado Pani), was
a bitter critical failure, condemning the director
to a three-year hiatus. L’osceno desiderio—co-fi-
nanced by Petroni himself with his company
Cineiniziative, which went bankrupt soon
after—was an attempt to cash in on the Satanic
horror trend, and the emphasis on eroticism
aimed at the relaxation of the Iberian censors
after the death of Francisco Franco; the Spanish
version, titled Poseída (Possessed), was given the
rating “S,” designating movies with an adult con-
tent. What happened during the filming is not
clear, but Petroni chose not to sign the movie
under his real name.
L’osceno desiderio had a shady genesis. The
script kept at Rome’s CSC, titled La profezia (The
Prophecy) is signed by Petroni and “Dean
Craig,” that is Piero Regnoli, whereas the open-
ing titles for the Spanish version Poseída (Pos-
sessed) credit the original story to the co-
producer Joaquín Domínguez Riesgo and the
script to Petroni, who is also credited with the
editing; what is more, in the foreign print the
director does not hide behind the alias Jeremy
Scott. The Spanish cut is some minutes longer
than the one available on Italian VHS, and,
clocking in at 3 minutes, seem to correspond
to the version submitted to the Italian Board of
censors.3 Rumors that the music for the Spanish
version was written by none other than Jesús
Franco are not true, as both prints share the
same score by Carlo Savina: although in the
Spanish copy the composer’s name is uncred-
ited, thus leaving room for speculation, the ex-
istence of a soundtrack album including Savina’s
music for L’ingenua (175, Gianfranco Bal-
danello) and Petroni’s film dispels any doubt.4
The story vaguely recalls Rosemary’s Baby,
as the female lead played by Marisa Mell finds
herself the victim of a diabolical plot to give
birth to the Antichrist.5 Still, the mood and char-
acters draw back to the Gothic horror films
made in Italy during the previous decade. The
opening sequence, which shows Amanda (Mell)
and her troubled husband Andrea Orsomandi
(Chris Avram) returning to the dilapidated Or-
somandi mansion, immediately gives the viewer
a feeling of déjà-vu: despite the present-day set-
ting, it very much recalls old classics such as L’or-
ribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock. What is more,
Avram’s character—a nobleman persecuted by
a family curse and a serial killer who slaughters
prostitutes “to free the world from sin”—is a
contemporary variation of the lords of the castle
who hid horrible secrets, whereas Amanda is a
descendant of the damsels in distress played by
Barbara Steele. Abandoned in a hostile environ-
ment by a distant (and at first sexually ineffec-
tive) husband, and at the mercy of a creepy and
intrusive housekeeper (the grotesque-looking
Iberian character actor Víctor Israel), Amanda
looks like a survivor of a world that no longer
exists. In Petroni’s slapdash movie such a feeling
is also evoked by the state of abandon and care-
lessness that hovers on the sets and on the film
itself, despite the director’s occasional attempts
at giving the movie a stylish mood, via long
takes and careful framing and lighting.
The presence of Lou Castel as Father Clark
(Father Potters in the script) is equally signifi-
cant and unwillingly symbolic. The Swedish,
Colombian-born Castel (real name Ulv Quar-
zéll) became one of the icons of the new season
of Italian cinema, starting with Marco Belloc-
chio’s masterpiece debut I pugni in tasca (165).
Castel quickly became the face of revolution, no
matter whether he played a rebel—as in Liliana
Cavani’s Francesco d’Assisi (166, as the epony-
mous saint), Carlo Lizzani’s Western Requiescant
(166), or Salvatore Samperi’s psychological
drama Grazie zia (168)—or a reactionary, as in
Damiano Damiani’s Quien Sabe (166). Despite
appearing in auteur movies—such as Rainer
Werner Fassbinder’s Warnung vor einer heiligen
Nutte (a.k.a. Beware of the Holy Whore, 171),
Marco Bellocchio’s Nel nome del padre (172),
and Claude Chabrol’s Nada (174)—Castel never
reached stardom, and did not care about it
either; he used to give most of his money to the
Far Left Maoist party “Servire il popolo” (To
serve the people), and in 172 his political views
led to his expulsion from Italy.
Upon his return to Rome in 175, Castel’s
popularity had dropped, and he accepted roles
 1978: L’osceno desiderio
in genre flicks of little importance in order to fi-
nance the political cause. Such, obviously, was
the case with Petroni’s film, where the actor
plays an idiosyncratic priest who never wears a
cassock and looks more like a trade unionist, al-
ways hanging around in a seedy bar. “I remem-
ber that we filmed it in Spain and that I was not
paid: they still owe me five million lire,” he re-
called. “The producer was a woman, a very se-
rious one, who worked at Il Manifesto,6 but….
Those were extreme contradictions, which we
used to live back then. As an actor, to me the
movie was zero. All the working experience of
that period was like that.”7
The way Petroni deals with Castel’s char-
acter hints at a not-so-subtle anticlerical mood,
especially with the way the director stages the
failed exorcism and the ensuing, grotesque scene
where the frightened priest runs away to a mis-
erable death, running past a prostitute who ad-
dresses him mockingly. According to Spanish
critic Carlos Aguilar, “the core of the film lies in
a deliberate identification between Satanism and
Catholicism, seen as the sides of the same, re-
pulsive coin; on the one hand, three lustful Sa-
tanic conspirators … on the other, the adversary
complicity between a shady priest and a theistic
psycho killer, who kills prostitutes with the for-
mer’s philosophical condescension.”8
This nevertheless gets lost in the general
mess that L’osceno desiderio soon becomes, be-
tween one erotic scene and the next. Mell, Laura
Trotter and Paola Maiolini all willingly take their
clothes off, leaving little room for imagination,
whether it be Amanda masturbating on the bed
or a threesome seduction sequence featuring
Amanda’s friends (Trotter and Javier Escrivá).
The subplot involving the prostitute killings is
particularly grating, with an extended scene in
which the victim (Maiolini) asks her murderer
what kind of sexual practice he would like to en-
gage in with her, a moment more in tune with
the Spanish “S” movies of the period than with
the Gothic genre to which the movie is supposed
to belong. Incidentally, in the script not only is
Andrea immediately revealed as the prostitute
killer (whereas in the movie the murderer’s
identity is kept secret and the scene plays like
some sort of Argento rip-off), but the prostitute’s
embarrassing monologue is missing: such an ad-
dition was probably the kind of thing that made
Petroni disown the movie.
The apocalyptic ending, which implies that
the Antichrist is going to spread evil overseas
15
(“In America there was really need of such a
beautiful baby…”), reconnects to The Omen,
and feels like a botched job indeed. L’osceno
desiderio was Petroni’s penultimate work. In
185 he directed the little-seen Il rivale, and then
dedicated himself to writing, publishing a num-
ber of books with his own publishing company
Dalia, including the autobiographical Le passeg-
giate nelle sabbie mobili (2001) and the vitriolic
pamphlets Le ceneri del cinema italiano (2001)
and Le ceneri del cinema italiano: tragico aggior-
namento (2002). He died in 2010.
NoTeS
1. Alberto Pezzotta, “‘Non sono mai stato un cinefilo.’
Intervista con Giulio Petroni,” Segnocinema #121, May/June
2003.
2. G.Z., “Marisa Mell parla,” Corriere d’Informazione,
January 28, 178. According to the Public Cinematographic
Register, shooting began on November 14, 177.
3. The Spanish cut includes some atmospheric passages
that are absent in the Italian version: a brief scene of
Amanda in the villa’s garden (26s), a long take of Amanda
walking around the chapel (36s). It also features a couple
of extra shots before the murder of the prostitute, namely
the victim asking “Where the hell did you take me to?”
and Amanda walking around the park at night (1m07s).
The Spanish version anticipates the first diabolical invo-
cation held by Fabio, Rachel and Giovanni, which takes
place just before Amanda’s erotic nightmare (thus giving
it more sense). Amanda’s vision of the dead man rising up
from the coffin is longer (12s) and the scene features a
visual filter that is absent in the Italian version. Similarly,
Amanda’s vision of Fabio taking off Rachel’s dress (before
Orsomandi joins them in a threesome) runs a minute
longer, and the whole sex scene is shown through a jelly
filter that makes it look like a nightmare. The Italian cut
does away with a couple of brief moments near the end:
Father Clark’s laughter after reading the prophecy found
in the witch’s coffin, and a close-up of Rachel laughing (15s)
after Amanda spits the holy wafer in Father Clark’s face.
Lastly, the Spanish cut includes a longer version of Andrea’s
death, where it is shown that it is Giovanni who sets him
on fire with a tank of gasoline (38s), whereas the Italian
cut makes it look like spontaneous combustion. In the
script, it is Andrea who sets himself of fire.
4. The CD was released in 2015 on the label Quartet
Records (QR188).
5. Mell herself name-dropped Polanski’s film in inter-
views: “It is a disturbing story, along the lines of Rosemary’s
Baby. In the movie, I too am expecting a child, and from
beginning to end I appear on screen with a big belly. “ G.Z.,
“Marisa Mell parla.”
6. Il Manifesto is a militant left-wing Italian newspaper
founded in 170.
7. Manlio Gomarasca, “Professione ribelle. Intervista a
Lou Castel,” in Eroi & antieroi del cinema italiano, 44.
8. Carlos Aguilar, “Poseída,” in Javier G. Romero (ed.),
Antología del cine fantástico italiano. Quatermass #7, No-
vember 2008, 283–284.
16 1978: Pensione paura
Pensione paura (Hotel Fear)
D: Francesco Barilli. S: Barbara Alberti,
Amedeo Pagani; SC: Barbara Alberti, Amedeo
Pagani, Francesco Barilli; DOP: Gualtiero
Manozzi (Technospes); M: Adolfo Waitzman
(Ed. C.A.M.); E: Amedeo Salfa; PD: Vincenzo
Dazzi; ArtD: Nello Giorgetti; SD: Franco [Fran-
cisco] Canet; CO: Paola Rossetti; MU: Franco
Schioppa; Hair: Sergio Gennari; AD: Ignazio
Acosta; C: Giorgio Aureli; AC: Francesco Stefano
Gagliardini, Ramiro Sabell; AE: Anna Maria
Rocca; Props: Roberto Magagnini; SO: Lucio
Maniscalchi; B: Marco Colantoni; Mix: Renato
Cadueri; ChEl: Alfredo Colantoni; KG: Luciano
Spina; SP: Angelo Samperi; W: Isolina Bensi; SS:
Giulia Fanara. Cast: Leonora Fani [Eleonora
Cristofani] (Rosa), Luc Merenda (Rodolfo),
Francisco Rabal (Marta’s lover), Jole Fierro
(Rodolfo’s lover), José María Prada (Hotel
guest), Lidia Biondi (Marta), Massimo [Máx-
imo] Valverde (The Stranger), Francesco Impe-
ciati (Guido), Luigi De Santis (Parish Priest),
Carlo Totti (Second Fascist), Maria D’Alessandro
(Prostitute), Arnaldo Caivano, Diala Caruso
(Prostitute), Wolfango Soldati (Fascist). PROD:
Tommaso Dazzi, Paolo Fornasier [and Tadeo
Villalba, José Gutiérrez Maesso] for Aleph Cin-
ematografica (Rome), Alexandra Films S.A.
(Madrid); PS: Pietro Sassaroli; PSe: Giulio Dini;
PA: Sergio Forcina; Adm: Oreste Tiraterra; UP:
Lucherini, Rossetti, Spinola [Enrico Lucherini,
Margherita Autuori, Matteo Spinola]. Country:
Italy / Spain. Filmed at Bracciano Lake and at
Terme di Stigliano, Canale Monterano (Rome).
Running time: 100 minutes (m. 2740). Visa n.
71508 (2..178); Rating: V.M.18. Release date:
2.16.178 (Italy); Distribution: Euro International
Film (Italy). Domestic gross: 82,645,242 lire. Also
known as: La violación de la señorita Julia (Spain).
Northern Italy, early 1945. As war is nearing
the end, a few guests are staying at the inn “Pen-
sione delle sirene,” managed by the middle-aged
Marta with the help of her young daughter Rosa.
Even though she knows that Marta keeps her lover
hidden in the attic, Rosa awaits the return of her
father, at war as an aviator, and spends her free
time with Guido, the parish priest’s nephew. One
of the guests, Rodolfo, the lover of a mature rich
woman whose jewels he wants to steal, keeps ha-
rassing the girl. One night Marta dies accidentally
after falling down the stairs, and Rosa has to take
over the hotel’s management alone. Soon she is
attacked and raped by Rodolfo with the coopera-
tion of the latter’s lover, but then a stranger kills
them both with an ax, and Rosa hides the bodies
in the basement. A few days later a mysterious
friend of Rosa’s father shows up at the inn, looking
for the man who betrayed them and caused the
death of 15 people: Marta’s lover…
With Il profumo della signora in nero,
Francesco Barilli seemed the next big thing of
Italian horror cinema, a young auteur with an
original, sharp vision of the genre and the ability
to turn his ideas into effective products that
could please genre fans and critics alike, as
proved by the unusually favorable response to
such an unpleasant, uncompromising work.
And yet, it took four years for Barilli to return
behind the camera. The reason, he explained,
was quite simple: “They wouldn’t let me make
the films I wanted to. After Il profumo della sig-
nora in nero, for years I’ve been offered scripts
in which somebody ended up eating someone
else. (laughs) It was a nightmare: there were sto-
ries set in the Middle Ages, others were political
horror movies in which Commies ate Fascists
and vice versa … (laughs).”1
Whereas Barilli wanted to do something
quite different:
I wrote a love story set in Tangier in the 120s, in-
spired by an old film starring Jean Gabin, Pépé le
Moko, mixed with other things. And it was a tremen-
dous disappointment, because producers thought we
needed U.S. backers. It had to be a big-budget copro-
duction, with American actors…. I spent a whole
year of my life working on that movie, until a day
Euro International Film bankrupted. Pity, because I
really wanted to do this film, which was to be called
Vento rosso (Red Wind). I never sold the script, God
knows whether I’ll do it or not, someday. As you see,
I always had a strange relationship with movies.
There are directors who make one film a year, some
of them good, other just plain bad. Whereas I want
to do the films I like: either they give me the money
and let me do my job, or I quit. I know I’m a crazy
guy.
At one point his name was also attached to
the comedy …E vai con il liscio, written by
Roberto Leoni and Gianfranco Bucceri, which
was eventually directed by Giancarlo Nicotra,
and titled Vai col liscio (176), starring Janet
Agren.
Another project, closer to the horror genre,
that ended up bitterly was L’occhio.
That was one I really cared about. I wrote it to show
people that you can do a movie on a shoestring
budget, and make good money out of it. The idea
 1978: Pensione paura 17

came to me because of a guy I knew, who lived in a sisted it would be too expensive. Same old story.
house in Rome that no art director in the world could What is more, I didn’t like the original story of Pen-
ever dream of. It was a huge abandoned villa which sione paura that much. But since I needed money, I
this hippie had transformed into a beautiful night- said: “OK, let’s do it.” But I liked the idea of this
mare. It was haunting, stunning and gloomy at the gloomy hotel where the whole movie takes place, I
same time. All windows were sealed
with tape and so on. By the way, I have
used that house on Il profumo della
signora in nero: it’s Mario Scaccia’s
apartment. I wrote L’occhio thinking
of that particular house. It was the
story of a horrible old hag—I wanted
renowned painter Novella Parigini for
the role—who lives secluded in this
incredible place. One day, looking out
the window, she sees a beautiful
young man passing by. She lures him
into the house and never lets him go.
It was not a completely original story,
as William Wyler had done some-
thing similar with The Collector, but
Stephen King hadn’t written Misery
yet. I showed the script to a producer
and he told me: “Hey, this is going to
be expensive, we need a U.S. copro-
duction!” “Look, it’s a very low-budget
thing, I’m even going to shoot it en-
tirely with a hand-held camera! It’ll
make lots of money….” I had planned
to make it a low-budget, minimalist
horror movie—L’occhio would cost
240 million lire, which was a ridicu-
lous sum—but they wanted Shelley
Winters in the lead…. I couldn’t
believe my ears. So I eventually
dropped the project. Then one day
Patroni Griffi phoned me and said:
“Well, I read your script and really
loved it. I’d like to make a movie out
of it.”2

The chance to return behind

the camera eventually came in 177,
by sheer chance. As Barilli ex-
plained,

in that period I wanted to do L’occhio.

Then one day a producer, Dazzi, came
to me and said: “I want you to make
this film.” And he handed me the
treatment. I read it and said: “Come
on … it’s going to cost a lot of money,
the story is so complex…. Listen, I
have a script which is just perfect for
you, it’s all set inside an apartment,
and we even have the whole set ready
without spending a single lira.” So he Italian locandina for Pensione paura (1978). Art by Piero
read L’occhio, but once again he in- ermanno Iaia.
18 1978: Pensione paura
wanted to do something really claustrophobic the
way L’occhio was intended to be.
The script, originally titled Lago nero, was
written by Barbara Alberti and Amedeo Pagani.
It was a gloomy drama set during World War II,
in an isolated hotel by a lake, where an underage
girl has to manage the place alone with her
mother, and must avoid the attentions of a slimy
gigolo in league with the Fascists. Barilli tried
to emphasize the elements of the story he liked
the most, such as the claustrophobic setting and
the mystery side, as the young Rosa finds herself
protected by a mysterious stranger who kills all
those who have harmed her. The result is a one-
of-a-kind work, which does not fit into the
Gothic, the giallo or the psychological drama,
but encompasses all of these, and more.
As with his debut, Barilli blends references
to classic Gothic yarns. The imposing titular inn
is yet another variation of the Gothic mansion,
and becomes a character on its own, complete
with dark corridors suddenly lit by bouts of
lighting, forbidden rooms, and menacing crypts.
Moreover, it is populated with ghost-like char-
acters, refugees from an apocalyptic world that
is collapsing all around them—145’s Northern
Italy, a country plagued by the civil war between
the Fascists and the partisans, amid Allied
bombings and Fascists on the run. Like the fig-
ures in an absurdist stage play, they are waiting
for something—death—which does not show
up, but which accompanies their every move,
word and thought. There is even a mysterious
presence in the attic, Rosa’s mother’s cowardly
lover (Francisco Rabal), who hides like a rat for
fear of the Fascists.
On the other hand, the movie’s core relates
to the so-called “female Gothic,” by focusing on
a central character of the weaker sex on the
verge of a mental breakdown. Rosa is a damsel
in distress, harassed by ruthless individuals who
do not want her blood, but her body. She is a lit-
tle girl forced to grow up too soon, and like Il
profumo della signora in nero’s Silvia, her coming
of age takes place in the form of a traumatic sex-
ual experience. As in his debut, Barilli explores
the psychoanalytic nuances of the story and its
incestuous undercurrent, with Rosa’s adoration
(and idealization) of her absent father, like
Mimsy Farmer’s character did. The craving
ghouls that menace Rosa, starting with the slimy
gigolo Rodolfo (Luc Merenda) are like vampires
of sorts, who attempt to suck her youth and will
of life, in the desperate attempt to continue their
non-existence: these sex-obsessed guests em-
body an ugly, desperate sexuality, as if inter-
course was the only thing that keeps them alive.
The relationship between Rodolfo and the
middle-aged woman (Jole Fierro) who pays him
for his sexual favors is a degenerate variation on
the theme of the necrophile passions that turn
up so often in the Gothic horror films made in
the 160s, and overall the movie is characterized
by a malevolent, repulsive eroticism, which cli-
maxes in one of Italian cinema’s most unpleasant
rape scenes (in a decade that featured plenty of
them). Barilli changed it from the script, adding
the bit where Rodolfo’s lover lures Rosa in the
room where he awaits, and takes part in the rape
as well, in a grotesque attempt to give some
pleasure to her man, too. It was not the only part
that the director changed or added during film-
ing, in order to improve upon a script he was
not happy with, and which he considered “a bit
phony.”3 One of the things that were dropped
was the original beginning, which shows the
protagonist (named Viola in the script) swim-
ming in the titular “black lake” and diving to
some sort of “house at the bottom at the lake”
composed of old furniture—chairs, tables and
the like—, a surreal image which symbolizes her
ideal, lost family nest and, in a way, predates the
underwater scene in Argento’s Inferno. The
“house at the bottom at the lake” returns in a
key passage of the script and in the ending: one
senses that Barilli’s decision was mostly caused
by budgetary reasons.
Shooting took place in Manziana, near the
Bracciano lake in Lazio (posing as Northern
Italy), starting late August 177,4 and was not a
pleasant experience for everyone involved.
Barilli was very vocal in blaming Dazzi, whose
intrusive presence on the set and ill-fated
choices as a producer resulted in a tense climate.
“On the set of Pensione Paura we often had these
arguments, because I was being told: ‘We’re not
going to shoot this scene, as it’s not in the script!’
I didn’t even listen. I just placed the camera and
shot it. And I edited the film the way I wanted
to.”
In order to save the day, the director paid
great care to the visuals. Barilli’s painterly eye is
evident throughout, with beautiful pictorial im-
ages such the opening shot of Rosa slowly ad-
vancing on a boat, filmed with a zoom lens
through tree branches—an idyllic, deceptive
image that turns eerie as the camera rises on a
 1978: Pensione paura
dolly and shows the girl’s arrival in a dilapidated
landing stage. Whenever possible, the director
managed to emphasize the claustrophobic qual-
ity that struck him when he first read the story:
take, for instance, the extraordinary air raid
scene, where the guests, all gathered for dinner,
are frozen by the sound of the aircraft approach-
ing and the bombs dropped in the distance.
Some scenes, bathed in deep blues and reds,
look patently inspired by Suspiria, but Barilli’s
use of color is more nuanced, even though it
similarly emphasizes the essence of the movie
as a dark fairytale. This quality is also hinted at
by the dialogue (“You are such a scared little girl
that I would almost like to tell you a story”) as
well as by the director’s accurate choice of cos-
tume and set props: during the course of the
movie, Rosa’s character gradually dresses more
and more like an adult woman, having to wear
her mother’s clothes; her lost childhood is sym-
bolized by the magic lantern by her bed, as well
as by the scene in which Rosa and her friend
Guido play shadow puppets on the wall, as if to
recover the innocence they both have lost.
Pensione paura works best in its middle
Italian fotobusta for Pensione paura.
1
section, as the hotel becomes more and more
the reflection of the young heroine’s mind, and
its corners and corridors are charged with men-
ace and mystery. Tension explodes in a savage
murder scene and its hallucinating aftermath,
as Rosa gets rid of the victims’ bodies in the hot
mud baths of the hotel’s basement (whereas in
the script she throws them into the lake, to the
“underwater house”). It is an eerie reinvention
of Gothic’s crypts and subterraneans, and a fur-
ther element that ties the story to Italian geog-
raphy and culture. At times, the movie looks
very much like Pupi Avati’s early efforts, not
only because of the common cultural roots (Bar-
illi was born in the same region as Avati, and
only a few year later), but also due to its use of
the grotesque, as the director had done in Il pro-
fumo della signora in nero. Take, for instance,
the depiction of minor characters like the crazed
guest (played by the great Spanish actor José
Maria Prada, who died a few months after the
Italian release) who continually whispers at
Rosa’s ear and keeps talking about his dead fam-
ily, or the enigmatic parish priest who plays con-
juring tricks with coins. “I invented that thing
200 1978: Pensione paura
on the set,” Barilli explained. “The actor was a
real-life usurer who lived in Manziana, where
we were shooting. I saw him doing those tricks
with a coin during lunch break, so I told him:
‘Get yourself dressed as a priest and come with
me.’ In the original script the character was just
a priest, whereas I wanted him to be obscene,
slimy, repellent…”
Barilli had a strong cast at hand. The movie
revolved around the porcelain, fragile beauty of
Leonora Fani, whose willingness to take off her
clothes in front of the camera had made her one
of the stars of 170s erotic cinema, but who
proved a good actress in a difficult role. On the
other hand, Francisco Rabal was not quite as
convincing, whereas Barilli’s childhood friend
Wolfango Soldati (the son of the great writer and
director Mario Soldati) turned up in a small role
as a cruel Fascist.
The casting of Luc Merenda as the slimy
Rodolfo was one of the film’s assets. After his
sudden rise as a star of the poliziotteschi, the
French actor was attempting not to be typecast
as the tough cop, and Pensione paura gave him
the chance to play an interesting villain role.
“Luc was just perfect. He thanked me when he
saw the finished film, because I’d let him play a
character that was quite different from his usual
roles. He had this black mustache, hair smarmed
down … a perfect Italian gigolo of the Forties.”
Merenda himself rated Barilli, the film and his
female co-star highly: “Eleonora was marvelous,
and so was the director: crazy but intelligent. I
tried to make two or three movies with him, in-
cluding a remake of Casablanca. I went to Mo-
rocco, to meet some of my father’s friends,
who had money and could be very good co-
producers, but when they heard that the movie
was Italian they said: ‘Italians, never!’ And so
the movie, which had a marvelous script, never
got made.” 5
Despite its many qualities, not everything
in Pensione paura works well, and the climax is
particularly disappointing, a fact Barilli agrees
upon. This is not just because the not-so-
surprising revelation of the murderer’s identity
(despite the scene where a mysterious figure in
black hat and raincoat massacres Rodolfo and
his lover with a hatchet, the film never tries to
pass off as a giallo, anyway), but because of the
introduction of the character played by Máximo
Valverde, which leads to a half-baked and un-
convincing denouement. However, the film ends
with a powerful closing image: Barilli (who shot
the epilogue despite Dazzi’s insistence that the
movie was finished) attempted to recreate part
of the atmosphere of Il profumo della signora in
nero’s sad ending (note the luminaries around
the hotel, just like in Silvia’s house) as Rose
finally succumbs to madness and isolates herself
from the world, shutting herself in the deserted
hotel.
The emphasis on a dark and unpleasant
sexuality earned Pensione paura a V.M.18 rating,
and the board of censors demanded some cuts
to be performed, namely “1) Shortening of the
oral intercourse between the protagonist’s
mother and her lover; 2) Shortening of the rape
scene; 3) Elimination of the oral intercourse be-
tween two hotel guests,” for about 18 seconds
overall.6 The film came out in February 178,
and was a commercial flop. Undoubtedly it suf-
fered from bad distribution. Barilli commented:
“You see, the main problem was the producer,
who was inept. I told him not to sell Pensione
paura to Euro (which was about to go bankrupt)
but to some other distributor, which would pay
less but would guarantee the movie ample dis-
tribution all over Italy. But he didn’t listen to me,
and just when the film was ready, Euro went
bankrupt. That’s why Pensione paura came out
just in a couple of major towns, like Turin, for a
couple of days, then it disappeared. I abandoned
it to its destiny, because I had had enough of
quarrelling with Dazzi.” What is more, as the di-
rector observed, who would go and see such a
grim and downbeat movie, which refused to
play according to the rules of the genre?
Pensione paura was also released in Spain,
advertised as an erotic movie, under the ex-
ploitative title La violación de la señorita Julia
(The Rape of Miss Julia—note that there is no
character named Julia in the film.) It would re-
main Barilli’s last theatrical feature film as a di-
rector, as he mainly dedicated himself to paint-
ing. His next works would be TV movies—such
as Una mattina come le altre (181) and the au-
tobiographical Giorni da leone (2002), starring
Luca Barbareschi—and documentaries centered
on places and famous personalities in his home-
town Parma (Casa Barilli, 17; Erberto Carboni,
18; Giuseppe Verdi, 2000; Poltrone rosse—
Parma e il cinema, 2014), plus the episode Le
chiese di legno in the anthology film La domenica
specialmente (11), written by Tonino Guerra
and co-directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci, Marco
Tullio Giordana and Giuseppe Tornatore. He oc-
casionally dabbled as an actor, with convincing
 1979: Buio omega
results, such as in the interesting low-budget in-
dependent horror film La casa nel vento dei
morti (2012, Francesco Campanini), which
closely resembles his own work. Still, with a
legacy of only two movies, Francesco Barilli’s
status as one of Italy’s most talented and original
filmmakers in the realm of the horror and fan-
tastic genre is undoubted, and only heightens
the regret for what could have been, had he been
able to pursue and develop his vision.
NoTeS
1. Curti, “Francesco Barilli interview.” Unless noted oth-
erwise, Barilli’s statements come from this interview.
2. The script was rewritten by Lucio Fulci, with the col-
laboration of Roberto Leoni, and became La gabbia (185),
1979
Buio omega (Beyond the Darkness)
D: Joe D’Amato [Aristide Massaccesi]. S:
Giacomo Guerrini; SC: Ottavio Fabbri; DOP:
Aristide Massaccesi (Eastmancolor, Telecolor);
M: Goblin (Ed. Grandi Firme della Canzone);
E: Ornella Micheli; PD: Ennio Michettoni; AD:
Donatella Donati; SS: Marco Rossetti; C: Enrico
Biribicchi; AC: Renato Palmieri; SO: Roberto
Alberghini, Marco Donati; BO: Guglielmo
Smeraldi; AE: Bruno Micheli; MU: Cesare Biseo;
CO: Mario Paladini; PDA: Franco Gaudenzi; SP:
Giuseppina Di Cola; SOE: Renato Marinelli.
Cast: Kieran Canter (Francesco Koch / Frank
Wyler), Cinzia Monreale (Anna Völkl / Teodora
[Elena] Völkl), Franca Stoppi (Iris), Sam Mo-
desto (Cossuto / Mr. Kale), Anna Cardini (Girl
doing jogging), Lucia D’Elia (Lucia, the hitch-
hiker), Simonetta Allodi (Girl in disco), Klaus
Rainer (Doctor), Edmondo Vallini (Detective
#1), Mario Pezzin (Priest), Walter Tribus (Han-
dyman). PROD: Dario Rossetti for D.R. Per le
Comunicazioni di Massa (Rome) [and Ermanno
Donati]; PM: Oscar Santaniello; PS: Silvio
Colecchia; PSe: Ermanno Mardessich; ADM:
Maria Spera. Country: Italy. Filmed in Bres-
sanone and Campo Tures (BZ) and at Cine In-
ternational (Rome). Running time: 4 minutes
(m. 2585; 255). Visa n. 74247 (10.31.17); Rat-
ing: V.M.18. Release dates: 11.15.17 (Italy);
6.1.184 (U.S.A.); Distribution: Eurocopfilms.
Domestic gross: 153,700,000 lire. Also known as:
Buried Alive (U.S.A.); Blue Holocaust; Folie
201
starring Tony Musante and Laura Antonelli, which Barilli
did not like the least bit: “Let’s talk frankly here, that movie
sucks. Instead of a macabre story it looks like a third-rate,
soft porn version of Death in Venice. It was squalid. And
it flopped.” Ibid.
3. Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, “L’albergo
degli orrori,” extra in the Italian DVD release of the film.
4. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on August 2, 177.
5. Manlio Gomarasca, “Senza compromessi. Intervista
a Luc Merenda,” in Eroi & antieroi del cinema italiano, 13.
6. Further cuts were performed in 186. “Il profumo
della signora in nero and Pensione Paura were both cut for
TV broadcasting. On Il profumo della signora in nero I was
allowed to operate the cuts myself, whereas Pensione Paura
was butchered without them even asking me.” Curti,
“Francesco Barilli interview.” The uncut version surfaced
only in 2007, in the Italian DVD release.
sanglante (France; 6.30.182); In quella casa Buio
omega (Italy; 187 re-release); Sado–Stoss das
Tor zur Hölle auf (Germany; 11.14.180); Demen-
cia (Spain; ..185); Para Além da Escuridão
(Portugal).
Francesco, an orphan who has inherited a
house in the woods and other property, lives alone
with the housekeeper, Iris, to whom he is morbidly
tied. Determined to become the owner of the
place, even though the young man is in love with
Anna, Iris has a local witch perform a black magic
rite on the girl, who is sick at the hospital. Anna
dies, and the heartbroken Francesco steals the
corpse from the cemetery. He then proceeds to em-
balm the body, but is discovered in the process by
a hitchhiker to whom he has offered a ride.
Francesco murders the girl and Iris helps him get
rid of the body, which they dismember and
dissolve in acid. The young man kills another girl,
whom he has taken home and seduced next to
Anna’s body. Meanwhile, a local undertaker in-
vestigates on his own. Francesco agrees to marry
Iris, but reacts violently when she tries to get rid
of Anna’s twin sister Teodora, who has shown up
at the villa. After a savage struggle, Francesco kills
Iris but is mortally wounded too. The undertaker
arrives and finds the unconscious Teodora, whom
he mistakens for Anna…
At the turn of the decade, in a country al-
ready on the way to mass addiction to television,
the last fireworks exploded in the realm of
Italian popular cinema, under the sign of blood
202 1979: Buio omega
and gore. Even though the race to graphic vio-
lence on screen was inspired by American mod-
els (such as the Euro cut of Romero’s Dawn of
the Dead, courtesy of Dario Argento), the made-
in-Italy rip-offs seemed to grab the most sensa-
tional elements, while evading the other aspects.
Whereas American splatter films (Romero,
Hooper, Craven) were often born as political
horrors, a cathartic relief and an expression of
a deep malaise, for the Italians they represented
a last remnant of freedom—both thematic and
iconographic—before the meltdown. This was
mirrored by comics, where the depiction of sex
and violence reached perturbing heights of sav-
agery, not only in cheap paperbacks such as Sto-
rie Blu, but also in more refined material such
as Magnus’ Lo Sconosciuto and Necron, and the
magazine Frigidaire, which included Stefano
Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore’s Ranxerox.
Italian blood and gore was the last example
of an average-to-low-budget cinema that still
lived above its means, bragging of a wealth it did
not have. The kind of movies where a couple of
days’ shoot on location in the U.S., resulting in
a 30-second scene under the opening credits,
could still convey a façade of internationality;
the kind of movies that substituted the Circeo
park for the Maluku Islands (Zombi Holocaust,
180, Marino Girolami) or Catalunya for New
Guinea (Virus, 180, Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fra-
gasso); the kind of movies where special make-
up effect technicians used to compete with their
U.S. homologues by using baby calf intestines
and pig skin instead of latex. The kind of movies,
in short, which got rid of taboos with irrespon-
sible recklessness, by portraying them on screen
in their most literal, tangible, prosaic form.
Shot in just two weeks in Bressanone and
Campo Tures, near Bolzano (which makes for a
convincing Austrian setting: a taxi driver is paid
in shillings, not lire), in late June/early July 17,1
and produced by a certain Dario Rossetti and
(uncredited) Ermanno Donati, who died a few
days after filming was wrapped, Buio omega
marked Aristide Massaccesi’s return to out-and-
out horror, six years after La morte ha sorriso al-
l’assassino. It was a remake of Mino Guerrini’s
impressive Il terzo occhio (166) which devel-
oped the original’s most unpleasant bits into a
frantic gorefest. Massaccesi and Guerrini were
close friends and had written a number of un-
filmed stories together: “He was a genius, in my
opinion … a loose-living, true genius, an out-
sider,” the director recalled.2
Written by Ottavio Fabbri—the helmer of
the offbeat, thought-provoking comedy Movie
Rush—La febbre del cinema (176) and a pair of
interesting documentaries, respectively on F1
races (Formula 1—La febbre della velocità, 178)
and on the tour of singer-singwriters Lucio
Dalla and Francesco De Gregori (Banana Re-
public, 17)—the new script reshaped the rela-
tionship between the young protagonist and his
malevolent housekeeper, doing away with the
character of the oppressive mother. The schem-
ing and superstitious Iris became a feral and un-
pleasant presence, surrounded by a cohort of
freaks.
However, whereas Guerrini played on the
contrast between life inside the protagonist’s di-
lapidated mansion, which looked like a remnant
of the past, and the outside world, Massaccesi
did not have the intention (nor the time) to
focus on such peripheral themes. His goal was
to shock and disgust the audience, as actress
Franca Stoppi recalled: “When we filmed Buio
omega, Massaccesi told us, ‘We’re making a
movie to make people throw up. We must make
’em vomit!’ and indeed he succeeded.”3
The over-the-top gore scenes, starting with
the infamous, detailed autopsy which ends with
Francesco (Kieran Canter) kissing and then bit-
ing his dead fiancée Anna’s (Cinzia Monreale)
heart, deliver the goods in a way that is still quite
impressive today, despite the scarce means at
hand: in typical Massaccesi style, the effects were
obtained by way of animal intestines, pig skin
and a sheep’s heart, all graciously provided by
the nearest abattoir.
Massaccesi’s new incarnation of the so-
called “cinema of attractions” is characterized
by the martyrdom of the body, at the expense of
more subtle anxieties and perturbing elements.
Unlike the character played by Franco Nero in
Il terzo occhio, an antihero worthy of Poe, Fran-
cesco is a childish figure, sexually immature,
who plays with a life-sized human doll, punishes
his victims by way of cruel, spiteful retributions
(like ripping out the nails that scratched him)
and finally suffering one himself, when he is
bloodily injured in the groin.
Still, Buio omega manages to explore some
of Gothic’s staples, both in the locations (Anna’s
nightly exhumation at the cemetery) and in the
narrative. The theme of the double is only su-
perficially touched in the climax, when Fran-
cesco comes face to face with Anna’s twin Teo-
dora, and in the shocking twist ending, whereas
 1979: Buio omega 203

the duality between animate and

inanimate offers some interesting
moments, as Anna’s lifeless body be-
comes a sad human doll, dressed and
undressed, made-up, hidden in a
closet like an old toy and eventually
burned.
Interestingly, Massaccesi does
not depict necrophilia in a graphic
way (as, say, Paul Morrissey had done
in the infamous “fuck death in the
gall bladder” gag in Flesh for Franken-
stein), but portrays Francesco’s love
for Anna in a romantic, desperate
manner, from the tearjerking early
scene in the hospital (where we learn
that the couple has never had sex) to
the young man’s passionate embalm-
ing of the corpse.
Eroticism is mortuary, depress-
ing, solitary, and never destined to
reach a satisfactory climax. Fran-
cesco’s love object remains pure and
untouched, even when he has total
control of her nude and dead body;
on the other hand, the easy girls he
picks up without even trying to and
who willingly take off their clothes
for him are the victims of ill-fated at-
tempts at “normal” sex, and provoke
his savage fury. The jarring contrast
between romanticism and wall-to- Italian poster for Buio omega (1979).
wall violence remains one of the keys
of the film’s uniquely uneasy atmosphere: the tings, and are characterized by their leading
scene where Francesco makes love with the character’s self-seclusion, the same choice that
hitch-hiker while caressing his dead fiancée’s little Marco and young Rosa take at the end of
body nearby recalls a notorious moment in Lisa Shock and Pensione paura: the world is such a
e il diavolo. What is more, Massaccesi also em- scary place that the horror of loneliness is
phasizes morbidness and superstition: see the preferable to any human interaction.
old witch who turns up at the beginning and And yet there is more than that, as Massac-
near the end, performing a voodoo rite that may cesi adds interesting cinephile nods to the bare-
or may not cause Anna’s death and reciting an bones plot. First there is Hitchcock (openly
obscurely ominous doggerel about dead bod- mentioned in posters at the time of the film’s re-
ies.4 lease, in a typical gimmick on the part of Italian
In some ways, Buio omega is akin to Lam- distributors: “Il film che anche HITCHCOCK
berto Bava’s film debut Macabro (180), and avrebbe paura di vedere!” “The movie that even
both movies revisit a kind of middle-class dread Hitchcock would be scared to watch”), and not
concealed in the family, whose symptoms can merely because of the similarities between
be detected in an abnormal sexuality, be it Francesco and Norman Bates. Massaccesi re-
Francesco’s desperate attachment to his fiancée stages almost verbatim the scene in Psycho
in Massaccesi’s film or Jane Baker’s (Bernice Ste- where Lila Crane (Vera Miles) discovers Mrs.
gers) necrophiliac passion in Macabro. Both Bates’ mummified corpse in the basement and
movies are ultimately bourgeois dramas that is attacked by Norman in drag: here it is Teodora
take place in ordinary and claustrophobic set- who comes across her twin sister’s embalmed
204 1979: Buio omega
body and has to face the furious Iris (Franca
Stoppi). Perhaps it was an expected move, given
the film’s theme. But what about the scene where
Francesco and Iris dissolve a dismembered body
in acid, which reprises a similar one in Le trio
infernal (174, Francis Girod), starring Michel
Piccoli and Romy Schneider? Or the burning of
an unfortunate girl in an oven, a nod to Buñuel’s
Ensayo de un crimen? Weirder still is the se-
quence of Francesco and Iris’ engagement party,
where the man is welcomed by a parade of
freakish guests who make a toast to him—a mo-
ment that brings to mind the celebrated “Gobble
gobble one of us” scene in Freaks (132, Tod
Browning). On top of that, the morbid, vaguely
incestuous interludes between Iris and Fran-
cesco, with the woman breast-feeding and mas-
turbating him, recall a notorious scene between
Andréa Ferreol and Ugo Tognazzi in La Grande
Bouffe.
Anyway, these are not signs of any self-
reflective whim or post-modernist awareness on
the part of Massaccesi and Fabbri, as is the case
in the works of the new generation of American
splatter filmmakers; rather, in such a dilapida-
tion of ideas (even recycled ones) one can read
the director’s instinctive ability to manipulate
other filmmakers’ nightmares, as well as a ten-
dency to excess and waste which is perhaps the
last bastion of a way of making movies still tied
to the Boom of the 160s, and to a notion of
competition that forcibly passes through exhi-
bition and ostentation. Similarly to what was
happening with explicit sex, now it was time for
atrocities and graphic violence.
Buio omega is by no means a formally re-
fined film: Massaccesi (who also acted as d.o.p.)
employed lots of hand-held camera shots, and
filmed the scene in real interiors, mostly in
Francesco’s eerie villa, with a tendency to use
soft-focus that sometimes seems at odds with
the story itself. And yet the ordinary-looking
sets and lack of any formal embellishments con-
vey a creepiness that makes the horrors on dis-
play even more effective—not forgetting the
haunting synth-driven score by Goblin (re-
cruited courtesy of Rossetti, and in the line-up
without Claudio Simonetti and Massimo Mor-
ante), partly recycled in Contamination5 (180,
Luigi Cozzi) and Virus. Here and there the di-
rector catches the audience off-hand with some
unexpected surreal bits, most notably the sud-
den appearance of the dead white baboon (the
animal was actually sedated) on Francesco’s op-
erating table. Some of the acting roles were en-
trusted to non-professionals, such as the elderly
hag who performs the voodoo rite, and the mor-
tician (Sam Modesto), a Venetian entrepreneur
who dreamed of becoming a film actor.
The minimal but rather effective cast is
headed by the green-eyed, Turkish-American
Kieran Canter, the grandson of an opera singer
who (according to actress Anna Cardini6) lived
at Rome’s Hilton hotel with his uncle, a rather
well-known genre film actor; he had previously
made only one movie appearance, as a Nazi offi-
cer in Lorenzo Gicca Palli’s abysmal Liebes lager
(176). With the exception of Lonely Lady (183,
Peter Sasdy), his following films all fell into the
realm of hardcore, starting with Pensieri morbosi
(180, Jacques Orth), where he played the lead
and performed an imitaton of John Travolta’s fa-
mous dance scene in Saturday Night Fever
(177). In Erotic Flash (181, Roberto Bianchi
Montero), Canter starred alongside the debuting
Moana Pozzi, but his issues in performing sex
scenes before the camera resulted in him being
replaced by a body double; he showed up in a
handful more porn flicks during the decade, in-
cluding Carne bollente (187, Riccardo Schicchi),
which teamed up Cicciolina and John Holmes,
and Supermaschio per mogli viziose (187, Gior-
gio Grand), again starring Holmes alongside
Karin Schubert, where Canter played the Devil.
His last appearances, both in non-sex roles, were
in a couple of erotic flicks directed by Frank De
Niro (Pasquale Fanetti), Malù e l’amante and
Una donna per tutti (both 11) under the a.k.a.
Mack Kilan (or Kiran).
Cinzia Monreale enjoyed a brief bout of
popularity at the end of the 170s, appearing in
such films as Vittorio Sindoni’s Per amore di Ce-
sarina (176) and Lucio Fulci’s Sella d’argento.
She worked with Fulci again on several occa-
sions, most memorably in L’aldilà, where she
played the blind Emily, and in the 10s she
showed up in another Massaccesi-directed hor-
ror film, Frankenstein 2000—Ritorno dalla
morte (11) and in Dario Argento’s La sindrome
di Stendhal (16).
The most impressive performance in the
film belongs to Franca Stoppi, who replaced an-
other actress at the eleventh hour. Her career in-
cluded Peter Skerl’s Bestialità (176) and a hand-
ful of Mattei/Fragasso films, such as La vera
storia della monaca di Monza (180), L’altro in-
ferno (180) and the WIP diptych Violenza in
un carcere femminile (182) and Blade Violent—
 1979: Dottor Jekyll
I violenti (183). A vegetarian and animal rights
activist, after giving up acting Stoppi created a
center for the sheltering and protection of aban-
doned pets. She passed away in 2011.
As the director recalled, in those days a
V.M.18 rating was held up as a medal to the pub-
lic, and Buio omega obviously got one (newspa-
per ads called the film “vietatissimo”). The board
of censors requested a number of cuts for a total
of 1.60 metres (about 43 seconds), namely: “1)
The scene where the protagonist, while embalm-
ing Anna, scoops out several organs from her
body; 2) The scene where the protagonist kills
Lucia; 3) The scene where the protagonist kills
the housekeeper.” Buio omega came out in the-
aters in mid–November: by then, Massaccesi
had already shot seven more films during a three
months’ stay in the Caribbeans.7
Buio omega performed rather poorly at the
Italian box-office, despite its aggressive promo-
tional campaign, but was sold well abroad and
soon reached cult status, under a myriad of
titles, the best known being Beyond the Dark-
ness.8 The version initially released in the U.S.
as Buried Alive gave the characters Anglicized
names (Francesco Koch becomes Frank Wyler,
for instance) and was missing some bits, namely
the undertaker’s failed attempt to spy on Fran-
cesco at his house, the protagonist picking up
the girl in a disco and the scene of the old witch
mumbling the ominous rhymes at him.
The movie was re-released in Italy in 187,
under the title In quella casa Buio omega, in the
attempt at exploiting the ongoing success of Sam
Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, which
had been released in Italy as La casa and La casa
2, resulting in a number of spurious “sequels.”
Once again the poster featured a reference to the
late Alfred Hitchcock, in the form of a blatantly
phony quote: “Solo a pensare a questo film mi
sento ancora i brividi addosso!” (“Just thinking
of this film still gives me shivers!”).
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on June 18, 17.
2. Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, “Buio omega,”
in Joe D’Amato. Guida al cinema estremo e dell’orrore, 2.
3. Franca Stoppi, interview included in the French Neo
Publishing DVD, Blue Holocaust.
4. It goes as follows: “Corpo di vacca, sangue di bal-
dracca. Corpo dentro un letto, sangue maledetto. Corpo in
una tomba, non farà più ombra. Corpo di una morta, la
vita ti andrà storta. Se dritta vuoi che vada, devi seguir la
strada. La strada della vita. E se ti è ancor cara, porta pace
205
nella bara.” (“Body of a cow, blood of a whore. Body in a
bed, cursed blood. Body in a grave, will not make shade.
Body of a dead woman, life will go wrong. If you want it
to go straight, you have to follow the road. The road of life.
And if it is still dear to you, bring peace in the coffin.”)
5. The recycled numbers from the Buio omega sound-
track in Cozzi’s film are Quiet Drops, Pillage, Rush, Bikini
Island.
6. See Manlio Gomarasca, Omega Syndrome, extra in
the Italian DVD Buio Omega (Next video).
7. Gomarasca and Pulici, “Buio omega,” 30.
8. It was released in Spain as House 6: El terror continua
and in Mexico as Zombi 10.
Dottor Jekyll e gentile signora (Dr. Jekyll
Likes Them Hot)
D: Steno [Stefano Vanzina]. S: Castellano
e Pipolo [Franco Castellano, Giuseppe Moccia],
“loosely inspired by Stevenson’s story”; SC: Leo
Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Steno; collabora-
tor to the script: Giovanni Manganelli; DOP:
Ennio Guarnieri, Sergio Salvati (Panoramic,
Staco Film); M: Armando Trovajoli, conducted
by the author (Ed. Clitumno-April Music); E:
Raimondo Crociani; PD: Luciano Spadoni; SD:
Massimo Tavazzi; CO: Maria Rosaria Crimi,
Elisabetta Poccioni; MU: Gianfranco Mecacci,
Franco Schioppa; Hair: Sergio Gennari, Mirella
Ginnoto; AD: Giovanni Manganelli; C: Franco
Bruni, Renato Ranieri; AC: Maurizio Lucchini,
Antonio Scaramuzza [and Roberto Benvenuti];
SS: Marina Mattoli; AE: Pina Triunveri; SP:
Francesco Narducci; SO: Massimo Jaboni; Mix:
Bruno Moreal.; Dubbing manager: Marcello
Prando. Cast: Paolo Villaggio (Dr. Jekyll / Mr.
Hyde), Edwige Fenech (Barbara Wimply), Gi-
anrico Tedeschi (Jeeves), Gordon Mitchell (Pre-
torius), Paolo Paoloni (Professor), Guerrino
Crivello (Student), Eolo Capritti (Henchman),
Francesco Anniballi (Henchman), Walter
Wright Williams (PANTAC Top President),
Clemente Ukmar (Henchman), Geoffrey Cople-
ston (Archibald Gold), Paola Arduini (Stew-
ardess); uncredited: Angelo Boscariol (PANTAC
Board Member), Luciano Foti (Class Member),
Alfonso Giganti (Industrialist), Giuseppe Mar-
rocco (PANTAC Board Member), Fulvio Min-
gozzi (PANTAC Board Member), Alessandro
Tedeschi (Professor introducing Jekyll), Luciano
Zanussi (PANTAC Board Member). PROD:
Medusa Distribuzione (Rome); EP: Renato
Jaboni; PM: Carlo Bartolini; PS: Lamberto
Palmieri; UMA: Stefano Spadoni. PSe: Lucia
Nolano; PAcc: Leonardo Curreri. Country: It-
aly. Filmed on location in London at at Incir-
De Paolis Studios (Rome). Running time: 107
206 1979: Dottor Jekyll
minutes (m. 240). Visa n. 7334 (8. 25.17);
Rating: all audiences. Release date: 8.31.17
(Italy); Distribution: Medusa (Italy). Domestic
gross: 427,000,000 lire. Also known as: Al Doctor
Jekyll le gustan calientes (Spain; 10.5.181); Dr.
Jekylls unheimlicher Horrortrip (West Germany).
The counselor of the powerful (and ruthless)
multinational PANTAC, which has invaded the
world with all sorts of pollutants and products
harmful to human health, the evil Dr. Jekyll con-
cocts a plan to launch a chewing gum that has lethal
side effects. However, things change radically for
him when Jekyll discovers his octogenarian grand-
father hidden in a basement lab, and has a taste
of a mysterious serum that should make him even
nastier than before. The potion is actually a
“serum of goodness” which turns Jekyll into an
angelic-looking, placid Hyde, whose only goal in
life is to make good triumph over bad. Hyde ruins
Jekyll’s plan to involve the Queen in the launch of
the chewing gum; the leaders of PANTAC, un-
aware of his real identity, try to dispatch him. To
save himself, Hyde drinks the antidote and turns
into Jekyll again, but is forced to return to his own
angelic alter ego in order to seduce his secretary
Barbara, who has fallen for Hyde. Eventually,
Barbara too drinks the potion: she and Jekyll con-
ceive a plan to spray the “serum of goodness” all
over the Earth, and defeat evil for good…
As he did with his 15 vampire spoof
Tempi duri per i vampiri, twenty years later Steno
turned to another classic Gothic character for a
satire deeply imbued with the sign of the times.
The choice of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic
story was not a novelty, though, having provided
the basis for Il mio amico Jekyll (160, Marino
Girolami); what is more, the existence of a 175
unfilmed scenario signed by Mario Amendola
and Bruno Corbucci, Attento dottor Jekyll, arriva
Mister Hyde!, suggests that it was also con-
sidered as the subject for a horror spoof in the
wake of Young Frankenstein. In Steno’s film, the
Jekyll/Hyde duality is first and foremost a
vehicle for Paolo Villaggio, Italy’s most popular
comedian of the period. The phenomenal suc-
cess of Luciano Salce’s Fantozzi and its follow-
up Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (176)—based on
Villaggio’s books about a sad, awkward and un-
fortunate accountant who is bullied by his
bosses, colleagues and practically everyone he
meets—provided Italian audiences with a
working-class antihero whose non-stop humil-
iations hinted at the dark side of the economic
Boom.
Villaggio followed the Fantozzi films with
more of the same, churning out variations on
the same basic scheme and revisiting their most
exhilarating gags over and over in a series of
follow-ups and similar projects (which even in-
cluded an unfilmed sci-fi comedy, Il vagabondo
dello spazio, to be directed by Mario Bava and
based on Philip José Farmer’s novel Venus on the
Half-Shell). 1 The scheme quickly grew tired,
mainly because the other directors were not up
to Salce’s skills when it came to portray Fantozzi
as an ultimately tragic character, a sad clown
whose faults and defeats are our very own: by
laughing at him we are laughing at our own mis-
ery. This was soon lost in favor of repetitive sight
gags, mediocre filmmaking and lazy scripts,
which often drew from early classics: Fracchia
la belva umana (181, Neri Parenti) reprised the
same story as John Ford’s The Whole Town’s
Talking (135), Sogni mostruosamente proibiti
(182, Neri Parenti) was a rehash of The Secret
Life of Walter Mitty (147, Norman Z. McLeod,
released in Italy as Sogni proibiti), and Steno’s
own Bonnie e Clyde all’italiana (182) spoofed
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (167).
On the surface, Dottor Jekyll e gentile sig-
nora (originally to be titled Il dottor Jekill [sic]
Junior) is merely an unpretentious comedy that
exploits Villaggio’s taste for exaggerated mimics
and nasty childish behavior. Steno and his
scriptwriters wisely overturn the Jekyll/Hyde
duality for comic effect: Jekyll is evil (and there-
fore perfectly at ease in an inhuman company
which only considers profits), grotesquely ugly,
hairy and horny, and displays a puerile relish in
teasing and making mischief (with Villaggio
here reprising one of his TV characters, the
comically evil Professor Kranz), whereas Hyde
is angelic, naive and asexual, speaks in a funny
Venetian accent and wears a blond curly wig that
makes him look like Harpo Marx. Compared
with other Villaggio efforts of the period, Dottor
Jekyll e gentile signora includes very few cine-
phile references to its models: a portrait of
Jekyll’s grandfather shows Fredric March in
Rouben Mamoulian’s 131 film version, and the
transformation scene is rendered via a couple of
quick cross-dissolves showing Jekyll’s hand turn-
ing hairless.
And yet, Dottor Jekyll e gentile signora is
more interesting than it seems at first glance.
Like in Tempi duri per i vampiri, the director sets
his hero (or rather, the latter’s double) against a
capitalistic enemy: in the 15 spoof Baron Lam-
 1979: Dottor Jekyll 207

bertenghi (Renato Rascel) was

forced to sell his castle to a com-
pany that converted it into a lux-
ury hotel, whereas here Hyde
fights against a vampiric cor-
poration (headed by a Dr.
Strangelove–like type, played by
Walter Wright Williams) whose
acronym PANTAC stands for
“Petrol Aero Nuclear Transport
Acricultural [sic] Chemic [sic]”
and whose only aims are profit
and power. In this sense, Steno’s
film is ideally along the same
lines as other spoofs, such as Il
Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco
ovvero: Dracula in Brianza, in its
satire of capitalism. “For us, the
ruling class, goodness is a
tragedy,” one character says; and
when Jekyll describes to his but-
ler Jeeves (the reliable Gianrico
Tedeschi) the first symptoms of
goodness, and asks the latter
what type of illness could it be,
the other curtly replies, “Social-
ism.”
That said, the direction is
lazy, with some footage of Villag-
gio running around on location
in London2 to make for the re-
quested “local color,” the sets
look slapdash (Jekyll’s old lab is
particularly threadbare) and the Italian poster art for Dottor Jekyll e gentile signora (1979).
gags are déjà-vu, as are Villag-
gio’s slapstick antics. However, Steno’s vision of est unhappy endings ever seen in an Italian com-
the Jekyll/Hyde duality is interesting nonethe- edy. The corporation leaders (who escaped the
less. On the one hand, Hyde is usually labeled “serum of goodness”) exploit its effects to set up
as a “faggot” by his enemies, and that same year an economical dictatorship, characterized by
Steno directed one of the first most popular their economic monopole of all consumer
satires of homophobia in Italian cinema, La goods, and exploit the masses, that have now
patata bollente (17), starring Renato Pozzetto, turned into “good customers and good employ-
Edwige Fenech and Massimo Ranieri. Still, as ees.” Hyde and Barbara have become TV per-
Jeeves rightly points out, Hyde’s goodness is sonalities and act as spokespersons for the new
“bigot, puritan, deadly boring,” and similarly, world order, reading news reports where noth-
after drinking the potion, the dark-haired, feline ing really happens and advertising all sorts of
and sex-hungry Barbara (Fenech, ravishing as products with the label PANTAC. And the final
ever) becomes pure, virginal, and disgusted by images show workers on strike, protesting be-
sex—and yet the director offers a glimpse of cause their pay is too high and their working
Fenech’s naked breast right after the transfor- hours are too short, blaming their masters for
mation, wisely mirroring Jekyll’s frustration for being “too good.”
the impossibility of having sex with her. It’s a biting sting at the end, which sums up
What is more, Hyde ends up unwillingly the director’s cynical view. The movie can there-
favoring the triumph of evil, in one of the nasti- fore be linked to the political undercurrent that
208 1979: Malabimba
crosses Steno’s cinema, and which was usually
hidden in the form of broad comedy—the odd
exception being the grim crime film La polizia
ringrazia (172). A good example was the satire
Il mostro della domenica, starring Totò, in the
anthology comedy Capriccio all’italiana (168),
which depicted the generational conflict
between the “longhairs” and their intolerant fa-
thers, but also hinted at the police’s reactionary
behavior towards the younger generations,
whereas L’Italia s’è rotta (176) adopted a philis-
tine approach in its depiction of a country in
(metaphorical) ruins. Here, Steno’s satire targets
the sociopolitical reflux that characterized
Italian society in the decade, after the decline of
the 168 ideals and the exhaustion of the 177
“Movement” which criticized parties and trade
unions alike and lost its initial spontaneous mo-
mentum, not the least because of such events as
the Moro kidnapping. In this sense, the dys-
topian ending of Dottor Jekyll e gentile signora
becomes a fit punchline to a decade where the
rereading of Gothic as means of political
allegory led to a disenchanted, pessimistic
vision.
NoTeS
1. See Roberto Curti and Alessio Di Rocco, “Mario the
Wanderer,” in Troy Howarth, The Haunted World of Mario
Bava (Parkville, MD: Midnight Marquee Press, 2014), 158
ss.
2. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
filming began on July 31, 178.
Malabimba (Malabimba—The Malicious
Whore)
D: Andrew White [Andrea Bianchi]. S and
SC: Piero Regnoli; DOP: Franco Villa (Micro-
stampa); M: Elsio Mancuso, Berto Pisano; ArtD:
Giovanni Fratalocchi; MU: Mauro Gavazzi; AD:
Roberto Silvestrini; AC: Giovanni Marras; SS:
Mirella Cavalloro. Cast: Katell Laennec [Cornely
Pascale Sylvie] (Bimba Caroli), Patrizia Webley
[Patrizia De Rossi] (Nais), Enzo Fisichella (An-
drea Caroli), Giuseppe Marrocu [Marrocco]
(Adolfo Caroli), Elisa Mainardi (The Medium),
Giancarlo Del Duca (Giorgio), Pupita Lea
[Pupita Lea Scuderoni] (Bimba’s Grandmother),
Maria Angela Giordan [Mariangela Giordano]
(Sister Sofia); uncredited: Claudio Zucchet
(Party Guest). PROD: Gabriele Crisanti for Fil-
marte (Rome); PS: Marcello Spingi, Carlo Papa;
PSe: Gianfranco Fornari. Country: Italy. Filmed
at the Castle Piccolomini in Balsorano (L’Aquila)
and at Icet-De Paolis (Milan). Running time: 84
minutes (m. 2321)—actually 87 minutes / 6
minutes. Visa n. 7346 (.21.17); Rating:
V.M.18. Release date: .22.17; Distribution: Ste-
fano Film. Domestic gross: unknown. Also
known as: Possession of a Teenager; Posesión de
una adolescente (Spain; 4.23.181), Komm und
macht’s mit mir (West Germany).
At the castle owned by the wealthy Caroli
family, a séance is taking place. A medium evokes
the spirit of an ancestress, Lucrezia, who attempts
unsuccessfully to take possession of Sister Sofia,
the nun who looks after the wheelchair-bound
owner of the manor, Adolfo. The ghastly presence
then attacks a more gullible prey: the 16-year-old
Bimba, the only daughter of Adolfo’s brother An-
drea. In the following days Bimba’s attitude
changes radically, and she unconsciously high-
lights the family members’ sexual and perverse
vices. Due to her strange behavior, Bimba is en-
trusted to the care of Sister Sofia. The relationship
between the teenage girl and the nun becomes
more and more affectionate: eventually Bimba,
subjugated by Lucrezia’s will, seduces Sister Sofia,
and the evil spirit manages to get hold of the nun’s
body. Bimba is saved, but Sister Sofia, upset for
having yielded to temptation, commits suicide.
“Doors opening and closing, maneuvered
by invisible and unknown forces; embalmed
birds that suddenly return to life in the gloomy
crypts where they had stayed motionless for
centuries; servants as decrepit as the walls of the
castle they are imprisoned in; creakings, rattling
of chains, dismal night howls, demoniac ‘pres-
ences’ are the obligatory outfit for 1th century
horror stories. An outfit which director Andrew
White did not do without for his Malabimba,
even though the story takes place in the present
day.” 1 Thus wrote the anonymous pen that re-
ported from the pages of the prestigious Corriere
della Sera about the shooting of Andrea Bian-
chi’s film at Castle Piccolomini in Balsorano.2
Were it not for the columnist frankly ad-
mitting the story’s emphasis on sex, the casual
reader might well have thought of a renaissance
of classical Gothic taking place inside the walls
of one of the genre’s most instantly recognizable
locations. But by 17 the Gothic paraphernalia
had been indissolubly hybridized with eroti-
cism, a component that was more or less subtly
present even in the past (see L’amante del vam-
piro, or L’ultima preda del vampiro, for instance)
but which had gradually taken over during the
course of the decade.
 1979: Malabimba
Malabimba was the offspring of the prolific
Piero Regnoli, whose output as scriptwriter from
the early 170s was often characterized by large
doses of eroticism liberally added to the stories.
Here, Regnoli took a standard Gothic setting
and premise (the castle, the wealthy family with
a shady past, the séance, the vengeful spirit) and
added disparate elements to it. Firstly, the title
nods to the succès de scandale of Pier Giuseppe
Murgia’s scabrous teenage drama Malado-
lescenza (177)3 and the script is centered on an
underage girl, the maliciously named Bimba,
who is possessed by the spirit of her ancestress,
like the heroines of Malombra or Un angelo per
Satana believed to be. Here, though, the super-
natural aspect is fully embraced instead of being
the cause of self-suggestion or hypnosis, and the
evil spirit of the deceased Lucrezia (like, say, that
of Lady Sheila Marlow in Qualcosa striscia nel
buio) aims at exposing the hypocrisy of all
family members: it first manifests during a
séance, in a blatantly obscene way, by pulling
open a trousers’ zipper and caressing a man’s
private parts, and by exposing a woman’s breasts.
Regnoli nods to the by-then waning Exor-
cist-inspired thread, imagining a possession that
takes on sexual overtones, as in L’ossessa and Un
urlo dalle tenebre: the possessed teenager talks
dirty and behaves in an inappropriate, obscene
way. Not only does Regnoli restage a notorious
moment in The Exorcist (the dinner scene where
Regan pees herself) by having Bimba exposing
her private parts in front of the guests, but he
centers the whole movie on the naive 16-year-
old girl’s transformation from overgrown child
to ravenous nymphomaniac: in doing so, her in-
duced obsession seems to infect the whole fam-
ily, allowing the members’ repressed sexuality
to come to the fore.
Not that Regnoli was aiming at any socio-
logical hidden meaning. Rather than the ump-
teenth stab at Teorema, here we are in full adults-
only comics territory. A case in point is the char-
acter of the sex-hungry, exhibitionist Nais (the
stunning Patrizia De Rossi), a clichéd maneater
who boasts about her sluttiness (“She said I’m a
whore. She was absolutely right, but all women
are whores, more or less!”) and pursues Bimba’s
father (Enzo Fisichella) in a comically obstinate
way, sneaking into his bedroom with some pre-
text and repeatedly exposing herself to him
(“Your eyes are full of my body, you won’t be
able to avoid thinking of it when you’re alone!”).
The plot is actually a feeble thread that ties a
20
number of sex scenes together, the most noto-
rious being Bimba’s deadly fellatio of her
crippled uncle Adolfo, who awakens from his
vegetative state only to fall victim of a stroke
when reaching orgasm, and the girl’s seduction
of the pious Sister Sofia (Mariangela Giordano),
which climaxes in the nun being deflowered by
the girl’s fist.
With such scenes as Bimba masturbating
with her stuffed animal toys and lines of dia-
logue like “Bimba has a delayed puberty which
causes her some sexual morbidity, that’s all!”
(after the adults discover the girl’s teddy bear
with a phallic candle stuck in its groin), it is ob-
vious that Regnoli had his tongue firmly in his
cheek, and the Catholic symbols (the tempting
spirit taking the form of snakes which only
Bimba can see; the cross-like shadow of the pos-
sessed girl’s arms on the wall) seem to poke fun
at Regnoli’s own past as the film critic of the
Vatican-based newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
On the other hand, the character of Sister
Sofia—essentially a female version of Father
Karras who meets a similar end, sacrificing her-
self after being possessed in turn (via sexual in-
tercourse, it must be underlined) by the evil en-
tity—was a nod to the so-called “nunspoitation”
subgenre, which was quite popular in that
period and included such varied works as
Giuseppe Vari’s Suor Emanuelle (177), Walerian
Borowczyk’s Interno di un convento (178), and
Aristide Massaccesi’s Immagini di un convento
(17).
Regnoli’s interest in the occult was genuine,
though: in the mid-to-late 170s he had worked
on some occult-based horror movie scripts to-
gether with his longtime friend Riccardo Freda.
Regnoli and Freda had much in common, in-
cluding their passion for ancient Egypt, esoteri-
cism and séances. It is not surprising, then, that
at a certain point the director was attached to a
couple of unfilmed projects written by his
friend: the mysterious Thanat 82 (to be pro-
duced by a cooperative presided over by Freda
and based at Regnoli’s house) and Qualcosa pen-
etra in noi (Le notti di Satana).
On Malabimba, Regnoli’s script found a
much less accomplished filmmaker than Freda:
Andrew White, alias Andrea Bianchi. The di-
rector of such sleaze classics as Quelli che
contano (174, also scripted by Regnoli), Nude
per l’assassino (175) and Cara dolce nipote (177)
does little to enhance the Fantastic mood,
besides some laughable shaky POV shots to
210 1979: Malabimba
suggest the supernatural presence, and focuses
on delivering the goods—i.e. nudity and sex ga-
lore. On the other hand, Franco Villa’s photog-
raphy is suitably elegant at times, whereas the
score recycles bits from Berto Pisano’s music for
La morte ha sorriso all’assassino. The cast en-
compasses Crisanti regular Giordano, producer
Gabriele Crisanti’s then–partner in life, and a
couple of regulars of cheap erotic productions,
De Rossi and Fisichella. The titular Bimba is
played by Katell Laennec (real name Cornely
Pascale Sylvie), “a French photomodel at her
debut on the screen, whom the director Andrew
White discovered in Paris, and found in her the
type he was looking for: an unusual and fresh
face, but capable, at the right moment, of un-
leashing a magnetic satanic attraction,”4 accord-
ing to newspapers. This was to be Laennec’s one
and only film role, but the enthusiasm which she
displays in her many nude and sex scenes is
nothing short of admirable.
On her part, Giordano recalled how the
movie was shot in just twelve days, “working day
and night through the weekends…. We shot the
movie in March 17 and it was freezing. I re-
member when we came to shoot the scene
where the ghost enters Sister Sofia’s room. Wind
was howling through the corridors and it was
cold, mouldy and damp. I got very ill that day
what with all the dust and filth flying every-
where…. But Gabriele hadn’t taken out any in-
surance policies on the film and was scared I
wouldn’t be able to complete it. So I couldn’t go
to hospital until after everything was finished.
That’s why I’m leaning on walls a lot of the
time—I was so sick, I literally couldn’t stand
up!”5 The actress claimed she liked the character
very much (“She was like a saint, she sacrifices
herself to save a young girl”) and commented
on her ensuing works with Crisanti such as Gi-
allo a Venezia (17) and Patrick vive ancora
(180), all characterized by her characters suf-
fering grim and gory comeuppances, as follows:
“Looking back I shouldn’t have done them. But
I was in love with Gabriele, I would have done
anything for him. Now I can see how the in-
creasingly gruesome ways he had me killed in
them was a reflection of the breakdown in our
own relationship.”6
The copy submitted to the Italian Board of
Censors ran about 84 minutes and 35 seconds,
but a longer version of Malabimba was actually
distributed, as was one with explicit sex inserts.
By then the board of censors was still rejecting
hardcore porn, even though after the creation
of a proper “red light circuit” specialized in
screening sex movies (the first “red light” theater
opened in Milan in November 177, and in 180
the number had grown to 50) the censorship
committees were beginning to loosen their grip.
The common practice was to add extraneous in-
serts to the movie, even though a number of di-
rectors, such as Aristide Massaccesi, were
already shooting explicit sex scenes for the for-
eign versions of their movies. Soon the bridge
would be officially crossed, and in 17 Italian
producers started shooting out-and-out hard-
core porn, the first being I porno amori di Eva
(17, Giorgio Mille) and La parte più appetitosa
del maschio (17, Lorenzo Magnolia). Tamer
versions were submitted to the board of censors,
in order to obtain the visa, whereas the hardcore
cut was the one that ended up in theaters.
Regarding Malabimba, director of photog-
raphy Franco Villa denied having filmed hard-
core footage specifically for the film: “We never
shot explicit sex sequences. If there’s some hard-
core sequence in the movie it doesn’t come from
our footage. Maybe it’s been inserted from old
porn movies…. They are just inserted se-
quences, there’s not even need of direction.
Faces are not shown, just details of the bodies
so anyone could do it.”7 Giordano was also
adamant: “There wasn’t anything that had to be
censored. I’m talking about what we shot.”8 Still,
no stand-in for Laennec was apparently used for
the infamous fellatio to uncle Adolfo. Other h/c
bits included two sex scenes featuring Patrizia
Webley with brief graphic details, and two more
scenes with Katell masturbating, with close-ups
on her private parts.
Andrea Bianchi and Crisanti teamed up
again for the gory zombie flick Le notti del
terrore (another Regnoli screenplay, also starring
Giordano), while the producer would basically
remake Malabimba three years later, with yet
another horror/hardcore porn hybrid, La bimba
di Satana, directed by Mario Bianchi (Roberto
Bianchi Montero’s son) and scripted by Regnoli,
released in 183.
NoTeS
1. Anonymous, “Terrore ed erotismo per la ‘Mala-
bimba,’” Corriere della Sera, August 17, 17.
2. The credits also list the De Paolis Studios in Milan
due to bureucratic reasons—not an uncommon occurrence
at that time (see also entry for Tutti defunti … tranne i
morti, note 5).
 1979: Sensività
3. Regnoli had already penned the similarly titled com-
edy Malabestia (178, Leonida Leoncini), and would later
script the erotic drama Maladonna (184, Bruno Gaburro).
4. Anonymous, “Terrore ed erotismo per la ‘Mal-
abimba,’.”
5. Alan Jones and Mark Ashworth, “Diva Divina. The
Mariangela Giordano Story,” in Stefan Jaworzyn (ed.),
Shock Xpress #2 (London: Titan Books, 14), 70. Gior-
dano’s recollection about the movie being shot in March
are contradicted by the Public Cinematographic Register,
which lists May 7, 17 as the first day of shooting.
6. Ibid.
7. Federico Caddeo, Malabimba Uncensored, extra fea-
turette in the U.S. Severin DVD.
8. Ibid.
9. The U.S. “unrated” Severin DVD features two cuts,
one running slightly less than 87 minutes, and another
clocking in at about 6 minutes and 30 seconds, whereas
the “X-Rated” version (with hardcore footage) runs 88
minutes and 13 seconds (without inserts) and 7 minutes
and 54 seconds (with the inserts).
Sensività (The House by the Edge of the Lake)
D: Enzo G. Castellari [Enzo Girolami]. S:
José María Nunes; SC: José María Nunes, Leila
Buongiorno; DOP: Alejandro Ulloa (Eastman-
color); M: Guido and Maurizio De Angelis; E:
Gianfranco Amicucci; PD: Corrado Ricercato
[Spanish version: León Revuelta]; ArtD: Jaime
Pérez Cubero; C: Giovanni Bergamini; AC: Gio-
vanni Bonivento; MU: Gregorio Mendiri; Hair:
Fernando Pérez Sobrino; AD: Rocco Lerro, Fed-
erico Canudas; 2ndAD: José Malla, Francisco
Gutiérrez; AMU: Carmen Menchala, Lina Querol;
AE: Alessandro Gabriele [and Maria Luisa
Pino]; 2ndAE: Roberto Amicucci, Stefano Curti;
SE: Alfredo Segoviano; Carpenter: Agustín Gas-
par; SO: Pietro Ortolani; Mix: Gianni D’Amico;
SS: Isabel Mulá, Maria Pia Rocco; Titles: Alfio
Menichini. Cast: Leonora Fani (Lilian), Patricia
Adriani (Lilith), Vincent Gardenia (Old
painter), Wolfango Soldati (Edoardo), Caterina
Boratto (Kira), Antonio Mayans (Miguel, the
writer), Marta Flores (Marta), Massimo Vanni
(Alex), Luis Induni (Manuel), José Sánchez (Jac-
into), Mónica García, Enzo G. Castellari (De-
tective), Alberto Squillante (Javier), Francisco
Porcel (Carlos), Bernard Seray (Carlos), Juan
Trujillo (Enrique), Luis Molina (Parish priest),
Xavier Sala (Xevi). PROD: Rodolfo Putignani
for Cinezeta (Rome), Este Films (Barcelona);
EP: Enrique Esteban Delgado; PM: Diego
Alchimede [Spanish version: Luis Herrero]. PA:
Jaime Fuentes. Country: Italy / Spain. Filmed in
Santa Cristina De Ano, Solius, Pais and Ro-
manyá (Costa Brava, Spain). Running time: 6
minutes (m. 2650). Visa n. 7266 (4.12.17);
211
Rating: V.M.18. Release dates: .28.17 (Italy),
7.11.180 (Spain); Distribution: Alpherat (Italy).
Domestic gross: unknown. Also known as:
Diabla (Spain); L’ultima casa vicino al lago; Kira
(Italian re-release); Devil’s Encounter (U.S.A.—
reissue title); The Last House Near the Lake; Kira:
The House Near the Lake (U.S.A.), Witch of the
Lake (U.K.).
Note: The 186 re-release features addi-
tional scenes shot by Alfonso Brescia (uncred-
ited), and the editing is credited to “Jeffrey Bog-
art.”
Lilian returns to her hometown after many
years, to work on her thesis on Medieval history.
She moves to the family house, an old mansion
by a lake where her mother died when she was a
child, which is still inhabited by two elderly ser-
vants; unbeknownst to Lilian, another young girl
named Lilith lives in the house. The village is im-
bued with superstition, and the inhabitants are
still haunted by the memory of an elderly witch
named Kyra. Lilian gets acquainted with some
local youths: she makes love with Julien, and then
Miguel, both descendants of the witch, and passes
out at the moment of orgasm; meanwhile Lilith
experiences the very same feeling. Soon after, both
her lovers meet inexplicable deaths, and the vil-
lagers blame Lilian, accusing her of having put a
spell over the community. A commissioner inves-
tigates, but Lilian discovers the truth thanks to
an old painter, who reveals to her a secret about
her past: she and Lilith are sisters, and are men-
tally linked. Lilian’s boyfriend Edoardo arrives in
the village, but he cannot save his beloved from a
terrible destiny…
Released in Italy in summer 17 between
two better-known works, Quel maledetto treno
blindato (178) and Il cacciatore di squali (17),
Sensività represents a weird occurrence in Enzo
Castellari’s filmography: his only attempt at a
horror movie, albeit a sui generis one.
As the director recalled, Sensività was born
from his friendship with a young Spanish aspir-
ing filmmaker called José Sanchez.
My doctor was friends with this kid, a movie buff,
who could not manage to get into the movie biz. So
I told him to send the kid to Safa Palatino, where I
was editing a film. Sanchez was very cute, very polite,
intelligent, cultured, and so I started teaching him
how to write a story, a script, and took him as my as-
sistant. One day he brought me a story that I had
asked him to write—since he was very good at that—
and told me he was finishing a script for a Spanish
producer, a movie to be shot in Costa Brava. “What’s
212 1979: Sensività
it about?” “Well, it’s a story about spiritism…” “Who’s
directing it?” “A Spanish guy…” “Please, I’m shooting
it! I won’t sign it but I’m going to shoot it! I’m coming
to Costa Brava!” … It was a beautiful holiday…1
Castellari’s recollections are at odds with
the opening titles, which credit the story and
script to José María Nunes (130–2010), a writer
and director who had been in the movie busi-
ness since the 150s. In fact, Sanchez only
appears in the movie as an actor, in a minor
role.
The director assembled a capable cast
around the female protagonist Leonora Fani,
then at the height of her short-lived fame as a
sexy starlet. He chose Vincent Gardenia, with
whom he had already worked in Il grande racket
(176), Wolfgango Soldati, and the Spanish Pa-
tricia Adriani and Antonio Mayans. He even
played a rather important role, the commis-
sioner. Shooting started in August 178, in Costa
Brava, but the money ran out and the movie was
interrupted. Filming was resumed a while later,
and distributor Rodolfo Putignani, who had
invested in the film with his company Cine-
zeta, came up with the absurd title Sensività,
a word that does not even exist in Italian (the
correct term would be Sensitività, Sensitiv-
ity). Castellari, who initially did not want to sign
the movie, was told that his name was needed
in order to gather the necessary funds. He
obliged, with the mutual agreement that he
would take care of post-production, but after
wrapping the shooting, further issues arose.
“When I started editing the film there were
problems with the distribution and everything
was interrupted for good … afterwards they
continued working on it, I mean Putignani and
his associate Curti [author’s note: no relation],
and finished it their own way. But my name as
director stayed.”2
Actor Bernard Seray, who played a small
role in the film, recalled: “There were many
problems during filming … it was a continuous
fight.” The Catalonian actor did not have a par-
ticularly good memory of the director: “It was
very unpleasant for me, as he offended us and
screamed a lot during shooting. He always had
bad words in his mouth, you know? He did not
realize that, even though the movie was filmed
in English, we actors only have a conversation
level only, so if we had a lapse with the script,
first we had to think in our language how to
muddle through and then correct it.” 3
Sensività is a curious reinterpretation of is-
sues and themes typical of the Gothic, reread in
an erotic key, no doubt designed to exploit the
relaxation of Spanish censorship. Lilian, who re-
calls the motorbike riding heroine in André
Pieyre de Mandiargues’ 163 risqué novel The
Motorcycle (adapted for the screen in Jack
Cardiff ’s The Girl on a Motorcycle, 168), loses
consciousness at the moment of orgasm in a fe-
male paraphrasis of what Georges Bataille called
“la petite mort” (“little death”), and unintention-
ally provokes her lovers’ demise. She is an inde-
pendent, reckless mantis, who takes the male to
ruin (“You die and return to life … it’s your own
nature that protects you from procreation,” says
the painter played by Vincent Gardenia), in an
interesting variation of the theme of the vagina
dentata, which brings to the surface a latent mi-
sogyny.
The core of the movie is centered on the
theme of double, and focuses on the duality be-
tween the two main female characters: whereas
Lilian is civilized and uninhibited, Lilith (named
after the female demon in Jewish mythology,
who brings disgrace, disease and death) is bestial
and primitive. They are complementary to the
point of sharing orgasms, and their final con-
frontation leads to a Sapphic embrace which
ends with the two halves reuniting into one, also
physically, by means of a bizarre phallus-like
wooden object.
The plot bizarrely echoes that of Jess
Franco’s Doriana Grey (175), and in this regard
there has been some confusion on whether the
Spanish filmmaker was actually involved in the
shoot. It was Seray who brought up Franco’s
name: “What I can tell you is that there was
often around, and, in certain moments, if he did
not direct it he had to do with it, a very well-
known Spanish director: Jess Franco. Therefore
it was not very clear what he was doing around
there, suddenly as a producer, or suddenly….
Anyway. However, of course, in all the three se-
quences which I did, as my character was very
minor, Castellari directed me.” 4 When asked
about it by this writer, Seray added: “I think he
acted both as co-director and assistant.”5
However, it seems that Seray’s memory
failed him. The actor claimed that “Part of the
film was shot in the Canary islands, in Tenerife
to be exact, even though I don’t remember
whether it was in Santa Cruz or in La Laguna,”6
but there are no scenes shot in Tenerife in the
film. Jess Franco’s presence on the set seems also
 1979: Sensività
very unlikely. Antonio Mayans, who would soon
become Franco’s right hand man on a huge
number of films made after the director’s return
to Spain, was adamant: “We shot in Barcelona,
at San Feliu de Guixols, but I do not believe that
Jesús was there shooting with Enzo, to my
knowledge they did not even know each other,
and I don’t see Jesús filming scenes with a direc-
tor that had nothing to do with his cinema.”7
Castellari’s assistant was most likely José María
Nunes himself, a transgressive, anarchist film-
maker who was a member of the avantgardist
“Escuela de Barcelona,” the group of directors
who revolutionized Spanish cinema in the 160s.
Following the ban on the part of the Spanish
censorship of his 167 film Sexperiencias, Nunes
could not make another movie for nine years,
and returned behind the camera only in 176,
with Iconockaut.
That said, Sensività bears Enzo Castellari’s
style from the opening sequence, with the mo-
torbike race on the beach and in the woods fea-
turing Lilian and the young villagers, which
looks like it was lifted from one of the director’s
poliziotteschi, not the least because of the use of
slow motion. The latter trick can also be found
in the soft-focus flashbacks involving Lilian as
a child, which look very similar to the intimate
scenes between Belli (Franco Nero), his lover
and his young daughter in La polizia incrimina
la legge assolve (173): both films shared the
same d.o.p., Alejandro Ulloa.
Castellari comes up with some impressive
sequences, such as the lovemaking session in the
cemetery, with the silhouettes of the lovers
lighted from behind and the eerie appearance
of the witch Kyra (Caterina Boratto), first seen
as a face sculpted on a grave, and then as a figure
spying on Lilian and her occasional companion.
Another remarkable moment is the seduction
scene atop a motorbike between Fani and An-
tonio Mayans. There, Castellari’s visual sensi-
bility brings the movie into territories akin to
Jean Rollin, and gives Sensività an eerie quality
which sets it apart from the type of Gothic
movies made in Italy during that period—high-
lighted by the refreshing use of the Costa Brava
locations, such as the monastery of San Feliu de
Guixols, standing as Lilian’s house.
On the other hand, the plot relies too often
on expository scenes that drag the story down,
and on characters that don’t gel at all with the
story. Sometimes it is a matter of acting: Mas-
simo Vanni and Wolfango Soldati’s over-the-top
213
performances are grating, and the Italian dub-
bing does not improve upon them. Castellari’s
turn as the commissioner has some humorous
moments (such as the character’s fixation with
herb tea), but similarly seems at odds with the
rest of the movie.
Castellari’s cut (which survives in an old
Swiss VHS release edited by the New Pentax
label) was about 8 minutes long, but the version
submitted to the Italian board of censors ran
about 6 minutes: it was badly distributed and
soon disappeared without a trace. The movie
resurfaced a few years later to home video: New
Pentax Film, the owner of the rights, released a
new version titled Kyra la signora del lago, which
runs only 77 minutes. Even though Castellari is
credited as director, he did not have anything to
do with it: the radically different edit features
new footage shot by Alfonso Brescia which em-
phasized the horrific angle of the story at the ex-
pense of the more atmospheric and erotic ma-
terial. Gone is the original opening: the film
starts with a scene which echoes the story of Lil-
ian’s mother’s death as told during the movie,
but with a horrific angle, as a woman on a boat
on the lake is attacked and killed by a mysterious
hand that emerges (à la Deliverance) from the
waters, while her oblivious little daughter plays
with a toy bike. Cut to: Leonora Fani taking off
her helmet after the motorbike race on the beach
and across the woods, mercilessly cut. Another
laughable attempt at turning the pic into a
straight horror movie takes place after Lilian’s
arrival at her old house, as a stand-in for Fani is
chased (in a very different location) by a hooded
figure with an axe, who then proceeds to break
the door of the room where the woman is hiding
(à la The Shining) but is interrupted by the
arrival of Lilian’s old nanny. The incident is
never mentioned again in the film, in one of the
film’s many blatant non sequitur moments, but
the axe-wielding figure briefly reappears (and
disappears abruptly) near the end, before Lilian’s
encounter with Carlos in the empty warehouse.
Brescia’s footage turns up again during the
cemetery scene, when a ghastly hand comes out
of a grave and grabs Lilian’s leg, and in the scene
of Antonio Mayans’ death, where said hand
drags the young man to his demise. On top
of that, dialogue scenes are missing (such as Lil-
ian’s encounter with her friends at the park with
the animal figures), and the fight between
Wolfango Soldati’s character and the local
youngsters is reduced to a few shots that are
214 1979: Le strelle
superimposed with the final catfight between
the two girls.
The ending is also heavily altered: in the
original cut, after a violent struggle with Lilith,
Lilian breaks the magic symbol into two and
uses it as a phallus, raping her unconscious
sister, then she makes love with her; meanwhile
a fire that has started around the two women
reaches a gas barrel, causing a fatal explosion.
In the abridged version the movie ends abruptly
as, after knocking Lilith unconscious, Lilian ap-
pears to make the place explode when breaking
the symbol. Meanwhile, the hand that had once
again been seen emerging from the lake catches
fire, and sinks down for good.
Understandably, Castellari did not like the
re-edited version at all. “Say, have you seen the
newly shot scenes? With this hand coming out
of the water … gee, what crap, really unwatch-
able stuff! They invited me to a horror movie
festival: ‘Yes, well, but what have I got to do with
horror?’ ‘You did Sensività…’ so I go, they
screen a print of the movie, and I see it starts
like that! After six minutes I walked [out of] the
theater, horrified.”8
NoTeS
1. Davide Pulici, “Il muscolo intelligente, Intervista a
Enzo G. Castellari,” in Manlio Gomarasca and Davide
Pulici (eds.), Il punto G. guida al cinema di Enzo G. Castel-
lari. Nocturno Dossier #66, January 2008, 17.
2. Ibid, 18
3. José Luis Salvador Estébenez, “Entrevista a Bernard
Seray,” La abadìa de Berzano (https://cerebrin.wordpress.
com/2016/01/15/entrevista-a-bernard-seray/).
4. Ibid.
5. Email interview, August 2016.
6. Estébenez, “Entrevista a Bernard Seray.”
7. Private email. Thanks to Francesco Cesari for pro-
viding this bit of information.
8. Pulici, “Il muscolo intelligente,” 17.
Le strelle nel fosso (The Stars in the Ditch)
D: Pupi Avati. S: Pupi Avati, Maurizio
Costanzo, Antonio Avati; SC: Pupi Avati, Cesare
Bornazzini; DOP: Franco Delli Colli (Eastman-
color, Telecolor); M: Amedeo Tommasi (Ed.
103); the theme Le strelle nel fosso (Avati-Tom-
masi) is played by Hengel Gualdi; E: Piera
Gabutti; PD, CO: Luciana Morosetti; AD: Cesare
Bastelli; 2ndAD: Fabrizio Corallo; Props: Anto-
nio Orlando; C: Antonio Schiavo Lena; AC: Gi-
ancarlo Giannesi; SO: Raffaele De Luca; KG:
Mario Pizzi; G: Remo Dolci; W: Giovanna Lai;
AE: Carlo D’Alessandro; SS: Cesare Bornazzini;
Mix: Venanzio Biraschi; SOE: Luciano Anzel-
lotti, Massimo Anzellotti. Cast: Lino Capolic-
chio (Silvano), Gianni Cavina (Marione), Carlo
Delle Piane (Bracco), Roberta Paladini (Olim-
pia), Giulio Pizzirani (Marzio), Adolfo Belletti
(Giove), Ferdinando Orlandi (Ferdinando Zena-
sio Vigetti, the Rat Catcher Narrator), Ferdi-
nando Pannullo (Count Pepoli), Pietro Bona
(Priest), Tonino Corazzari (St. Bartholomew).
PROD: Gianni Minervini, Antonio Avati for
A.M.A. Film (Rome); PM: Gianni Amadei; PSe:
Alessandro Vivarelli; PSeA: Antonio Bisato.
Country: Italy. Filmed on location in Minerbio
(Bologna), at the Po Delta, and at Incir-De Paolis
(Rome). Running time: 104 minutes (m. 2867).
Visa n. 72861 (1.13.17); Rating: V.M.14. Release
date: 3.24.17; Distribution: Impegno Cine-
matografico. Domestic gross: 24,000,000 lire.
1801. A ratcatcher stops by a farmhouse, and
during the night he tells a young girl a tale. In the
swamps near the river Po delta, in an isolated
house surrounded by water and placed on a thin
strip of land, lived a family of men: the old Giove,
the father, and his four sons Silvano, Marione,
Marzio and Bracco. For years no woman had ever
set foot in that farmhouse, after the alleged death
of Giove’s wife while giving birth to her younger
son. But one night a young woman named
Olimpia showed up: she was a pianist heading to
the villa of Count Pepoli after being abandoned
in the countryside. In a few days the young
woman established a friendly relationship with
each member of the family. Eventually the four
young men and their father asked Olimpia to
marry them—which she accepted. The extrava-
gant and multiple marriage was celebrated in a
festival that lasted a day and most of the night.
The next morning, Olimpia was gone and the five
men were dead. The ratchatcher finishes his tale
and leaves. The young girl has the features of
Olimpia.
Conceived and shot in summer 178,1 Le
strelle nel fosso was born out of Pupi Avati’s re-
fusal to oblige to the rules of commercial film-
making, and was yet another attempt at devel-
oping his own vision and themes within a
context similar to that of his earlier movie, the
so-called “Po Valley Gothic.” After the success
of his autobiographical tv movie Jazz Band, the
director asked for carte blanche, and made his
new movie on the spot, as if it was a jazz jam.
He practically improvised Le strelle nel fosso dur-
ing a four-week shoot, working on a minimal
budget and on the basis of a thin plot outline,
with the help of his trustworthy cast and crew.
 1979: Le strelle
The surreal still-life at the climax of Pupi Avati’s Le strelle nel fosso (1979). From left to right: Silvano
(Lino Capolicchio), Marione (Gianni Cavina), Marzio (Giulio Pizzirani), Bracco (Carlo Delle Piane)
and Giove (Adolfo Belletti) (courtesy Luca Servini).
As Giulio Pizzirani recalls, “We did not
know anything about the story. Pupi showed up
at morning, gave us a sheet of paper and we had
to study our lines. Sometimes the dialogue lines
were not call and response, and I recall having
to learn very long parts, deadly difficult speeches
which later on I would repeat, improvising upon
them a bit. It was traumatic.”2 Assistant director
Cesare Bastelli added: “I remember Pupi sitting
on his little chair, in this wonderful place, in the
morning, writing the scene for the day … with
all the actors around, waiting for a sign from
him…. Once I found an injured bird in the
valley and screamed: ‘Pupi, Pupi! I found a sea-
gull!’ and he: ‘Keep it there!’ and in a minute he
wrote the scene where Cavina catches the bird
and takes it to the kitchen. All we had were a
crate of costumes, that beautiful house in the
middle of the waters, a group of actors and
friends, and this awesome natural setting.”3
The result is a charming and eerie fairytale
centered on death, which encompasses Avati’s
favorite themes, such as the duality between
faith and superstition, and the fascination and
fear of the female figure. All this is set in the en-
vironment of the rural Po Valley, in the delta of
215
the river Po, a timeless and depopulated area,
with old dilapidated country farms and solitary
houses that look like remnants of a lost civiliza-
tion. “It was a pretext to make a movie about
death,” the director claimed. “I have a problem
with death and so I tried to make it beautiful,
sunny, warm. Besides, there was the peasant
fable, a territory then still unknown, which had
always fascinated me.”4
As he partly did in La casa dalle finestre che
ridono, here Avati draws explicitly from the um-
bilical cord of the oral folk tales: he adopts a
metanarrative structure, which revolves around
the framing story of the ratcatcher’s tale, and in-
serts other tales and digressions inside it. The
act of storytelling becomes a way to exorcise
death, whose presence accompanies every single
character in the movie; and yet it cannot but
focus on the very thing all of them are obsessed
with. The ratcatcher’s (Ferdinando Orlandi)
story is in itself an allegory of the acceptance of
the inevitable passing from this earth, on the
part of a group of characters who come to terms
with it; on the other hand, the frightening tales
old Giove (Adolfo Belletti) tells to his offspring
(because “to be scared of something meant not
216 1979: Le strelle
feeling lonely”) are centered on the possibility
of a return from the afterlife. Such are the terri-
fying story of the dead woman who returns to
claim her golden leg which her sisters stole when
burying her body—a moment worthy of Bava’s
La goccia d’acqua—or the cleric arising from the
waters of the swamp where he had drowned.
Religion becomes a way to turn away the
dread of passing away. Giove (whose job was to
build tabernacles) is so afraid to fall asleep and
not to wake up that he prays to Santa Rosalia
(portrayed as a little girl sitting on a throne atop
a tree); Saint Bartholomew (Tonino Corazzari,
La casa dalle finestre che ridono’s Buono Le-
gnani) is imagined as a blind man who walks
around the countryside at night to take the souls
of the righteous with him. Priests become mes-
sengers of sorts, figures that can cross the
boundaries between the world of living and the
realm of the dead, like the elderly parish priest
who stops by Giove’s house every now and then
“to inquire how the living are doing, and to tell
how the dead are doing.”
In typical Avati fashion (see also Zeder),
death takes the form of a beautiful girl, and the
act of dying is compared to a seduction. Olimpia
adopts a different approach with each of the five
characters, and, in a similar way as Thomas did
with the “demoniacs” in Thomas … gli indemo-
niati, she brings to the surface their desires and
fears. As so often in Avati’s cinema, woman is
an alien and mysterious creature, impossible to
understand, who haunts the memory of the
weak losers that are the director’s alter ego:
Giove’s wife did not die while giving birth to her
child, but abandoned him and his sons for good,
as Olimpia will do after their collective marriage.
Eventually, the acceptance of death is paired
with a solemn yet ridiculous celebration, vaguely
Fellini-esque, which ends with the image of
Giove and his sons sitting dead at a long table,
in a shot that recalls, not by chance, the “Last
Supper.”
Fear of death equals fear (and rejection) of
women. Avati’s main characters are childish and
immature, even when they are big and strong
like the ever-hungry Marione (Gianni Cavina),
and are more than a bit effeminate. The weak
Silvano (Lino Capolicchio), whose blood “is
turning to water,” has the porcelain skin of a
mademoiselle; Marzio (Giulio Pizzirani) does
all the house work like a good housewife, and
in a scene he even paints a mural painting that
brings to mind the unforgettable works of
Buono Legnani; and Bracco (Carlo Delle Piane,
in a role Avati had devised for Roberto Benigni)
is often dressed up as the girl his parents would
have wanted (grotesque transvestism recalls,
among others, Buono Legnani’s in La casa dalle
finestre che ridono).
As he did in his previous works, the di-
rector borrows themes and images from classical
Gothic: Olimpia is named after the character in
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, and her erup-
tion in this male-centered universe is similar to
Carmilla’s arrival in Le Fanu’s Carmilla, as the
coach (here, an ox-driven carriage) has an acci-
dent near Giove’s house. Still, despite the occa-
sional eerie and even chilling image (such as the
sight of the cleric returning from the dead, a mo-
ment that predates the appearances of the
revenants in Zeder), Avati is not interested in
making a horror movie—whereas he will with
L’arcano incantatore, which is very similar to Le
strelle nel fosso in its setting, structure and in the
developing of the main themes of death, super-
stition/religion. Here, he allows his actors to im-
provise and gives the movie an open, dreamlike
structure, filled with bizarre secondary charac-
ters (like the mad, starving Count Pepoli who
spends his time in a boat, guarding his posses-
sions) that again hint at the folk tales from
which he took inspiration.
The result is perhaps not wholly up to the
director’s expectations. Le strelle nel fosso has
plenty of memorable moments, such as the ex-
traordinary pictorial ending with the rain wash-
ing the bodies of the dead Giove and his sons
on the nuptial feast table, and benefits highly
from Franco Delli Colli’s extraordinary cine-
matography. And yet some of Avati’s choices—
such as the insistence on the portrayal of Giove’s
four sons as excessively naive grown-up chil-
dren—seem infelicitous in hindsight, as Pizzi-
rani himself pointed out: “I found it a bit exces-
sive, phony, when I revised it.”5 Critics were not
kind either: “Once again Avati’s undoubted tal-
ent, even though it returns to the Fantastic in-
spiration of his earliest and best experiments,
loses along the way every naturalness and results
in an almost always manneristic excitement,”6
wrote the eminent Tullio Kezich. Perhaps also
due to its puzzling title (“strelle” is the translit-
eration of the dialectal “streli,” which means
stars, hence “The Stars in the Ditch”), the movie
was a commercial flop, and only with time it ac-
quired cult status.
Overall, despite its shortcomings, Le strelle
 1979: Le strelle
nel fosso represents a key work to fully under-
stand Avati’s peculiar, and often extraordinarily
original, take on the Gothic genre, to which the
director would return in 183 with the outstand-
ing Zeder.
NoTeS
1. According to the Public Cinematographic Register,
shooting began on July 10, 178.
217
2. Ruggero Adamovit, “Le strelle nel fosso: la fantasia,”
in Adamovit, Bartolini, Servini, Nero Avati, 130.
3. Ibid., 131.
4. Ibid., 124.
5. Ibid., 130.
6. Tullio Kezich, Il nuovissimo Mille film. Cinque anni
al cinema, 177–182 (Milan: Mondadori, 183), 377–378.
This page intentionally left blank
 Appendix: Italian Gothic
on the Small Screen
Whereas the Gothic-inspired horror films
made in Italy during the 70s often drew from
lowbrow popular sources, bastardizing and ba-
nalizing their primary inspiration, the products
made for the small screen often took inspiration
from famed literary models, and highlighted the
in-depth penetration of Fantastic literature into
the Italian market that characterized the 60s
and 70s, with the publishing of many popular
anthologies dedicated to the works of the most
famed authors in the field. Such a thread had
been started by I vampiri tra noi (60, edited
by Ornella Volta) and Storie di fantasmi (60,
edited by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini).
66 marked the appearance of another best-
selling anthology, I mostri all’angolo della strada,
also curated by Fruttero and Lucentini, which
collected the most significant stories written
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. But there were
also series of novels dedicated to the Fantastic
and the Gothic—such as Il pesanervi (7
titles between 66 and 70, ranging from
William Beckford to Gustav Meyrinck, from Al-
fred Jarry to André Pieyre de Mandiargues) or
La biblioteca di Babele (75), published by the
renowned Franco Maria Ricci under the super-
vision of none other than Jorge Luis Borges—
and magazines. Among the latter, the short-lived
Horror (first published in December 6),
founded and directed by Pier Carpi and Alfredo
Castelli, was a thought-provoking mixture of
comics, short stories, essays, interviews to
writers and filmmakers, all centered on the com-
mon denominator underlined by the title.
Horror was published by Gino Sansoni, who
also specialized in rereleasing classic horror
novels with lurid titles and covers. On the other
hand, Il giornale dei misteri (7) dealt with
such themes as parapsychology, spiritism and
ufology, with a popular approach.

This blooming of literary production was
destined to mark the made-for-TV works that
appeared during the 70s, which often touched
Gothic themes and managed to attract larger
audiences than their big screen counterparts
could ever dream. This “golden age” of made-
for-television Gothic can be framed between
7, the year of the enormously successful Il
segno del comando, and the early 80s, where
projects conceived in the previous decade (such
as Mario and Lamberto Bava’s La Venere d’Ille)
were finally broadcast. But the face of Italian tel-
evision was radically changing in the meantime,
and there did not seem to be room for Gothic
anymore.
Il segno del comando and the
birth of made-for-TV Gothic
Italian audiences had been taken off guard
by the broadcasting of Giorgio Albertazzi’s ex-
perimental Jekyll in February 6, but the crit-
ical success and the viewing figures of this
modern-day rendition of Robert Louis Steven-
son’s classic had shown that there could be room
for the Gothic on the small screen.
It took a couple of years for a Gothic trend
to fully blossom, but when it did, it was an out-
standing success. In Spring 7, the five-part
TV mini-series Il segno del comando (The Sign
of Command), directed by Daniele D’Anza, kept
almost 5 million viewers glued to the screen,
with its story of reincarnations, esotericism and
mysterious dames set in an arcane Rome, sus-
pended between ancient and modern, from the
7th century palaces to the excavation for a new
subway line.
The main model of D’Anza’s film was
0 Appendix
Claude Barma’s atmospheric Belphégor ou le
Fantôme du Louvre (65), a 4-part French mini-
series based on the novel of the same name by
Arthur Bernède that had been a success when
broadcast in Italy in June 66; but the story
owed also to the surreal TV mystery Geminus
(6) directed by Luciano Emmer, about a Pagan
cult in the catacombs of modern-day Rome. The
story (by Dante Guardamagna and Flaminio
Bollini, later joined by Lucio Mandarà, Giuseppe
D’Agata and D’Anza himself) went through a la-
borious scriptwriting phase: eventually it was
D’Agata and D’Anza who wrapped the final
draft, and the latter replaced Bollini behind the
camera.
The suggestive setting in the Eternal City
conveyed convincingly the idea of an Italian way
to the Gothic and the supernatural. “There were
the two of us, Flaminio Bollini and I—summer
of ’6, late night—coming out of a meeting….
We were strolling and chatting among the shad-
owy alleys and barred taverns, with the echo of
our footsteps on Trastevere’s cobblestones,” as
Guardamagna explained, recalling the story’s
genesis. “Ghosts, we did not see any. But we
evoked them: meetings Henry James-style,
black-robed monks and gypsies à la Byron, an-
nouncing fatal destinies, more or less Faustian
artists. A Roman-style mystery? Yes, but we told
ourselves that one of our cities, in a Northern
visitor’s eyes (think of Hoffmann, or maybe
Thomas Mann) suddenly takes on a dimension
that everyday life hides to us. So, we entrusted
adventure and discovery to a modern-day En-
glish professor, specialized in the life and works
of Lord Byron.”
This is exactly what emerges in the film
during a dialogue between George Powell (Mas-
simo Girotti), Barbara (Paola Tedesco) and the
hero, Professor Forster (Ugo Pagliai), who has
arrived in Rome for a conference. Powell boasts
the primacy of England’s ghosts, whereas Bar-
bara objects: “I know. But they are not export
products. The air of Rome is too limpid to ac-
commodate certain Northern fantasies.” To
which Forster replies: “During the day, perhaps.
But by night, this city seems full of presences,
and vibrations.”
The starting point has more than one ele-
ment in common with Prosper Mérimée’s short
story The Viccolo of Madam Lucrezia, written in
846 and published posthumously. In D’Anza’s
film, Professor Forster follows a beautiful
woman, Lucia (Carla Gravina), who appears and
disappears mysteriously through the alleys of
Trastevere; in Mérimée’s story a young French-
man travelling to Rome falls for an enigmatic
white-dressed girl who, according to a legend,
would be a ghost wandering in the old town al-
leys. But whereas Mérimée opted for a rational
denouement, D’Anza offers an open ending (al-
legedly chosen among five different ones, and
changed at the last moment by the director
under pressure from some actors, who thought
the original one was not up to the magic atmos-
phere built over the course of the story) which
keeps the viewer guessing long after the words
“The End.”
The plot goes back to the themes of the
Gothic novels as well as the th century super-
natural short stories: doppelgängers (Forster
“sees” the elusive painter Tagliaferri having his
very own features, and during the detection he
identifies himself with Byron), the cyclical
nature of events (including a reference to Niet-
zsche’s “eternal return” and superman: in his var-
ious incarnations, Tagliaferri/Forster is a supe-
rior being whom the “sign of command” gives
eternal life), predestination and the inevitability
of Fate, ghostly presences.
Carla Gravina, the evanescent Lucia, is a
spectral figure who lives only when she loves,
at the same time elusive and carnal (on her first
apparition, we see her peering half-naked from
behind a door, teasingly apologizing for her
scant clothing), who recalls Barbara Steele’s
character in Danza macabra. What is more,
D’Anza expertly blends cultured references and
genre staples, Romanticism and feuilleton,
Byron’s sonnets and the Roman folk song Cento
campane, which functions as a leitmotif to the
story. But there were also elements that drew
from Italian Fantastic literature: it has been
noted how the idea of a mysterious square in
Rome whose location is nowhere to be found in
maps was possibly inspired by the short story
Avventura a Campo de’ Fiori, included in the
short story collection Le notti romane (60) by
Giorgio Vigolo, adapted for the small screen by
Luigi Magni in 83.
Compared with the haughty TV mysteries
produced by Italian television around the
same time (such as the adaptations of Francis
Durbridge’s novels, some of them helmed by
D’Anza), Il segno del comando offered something
more: the charm of an experience which cinema
cannot guarantee, and a renewed sense of won-
der unthinkable in the works produced for the
 Italian Gothic on the Small Screen
big screen—not to mention the illusion that it
would still be possible to escape from a chaotic,
troubled present.
Ultimately, D’Anza’s film moves in an op-
posite direction from Albertazzi’s problematic
Jekyll. Such a resistance to the present day is em-
bodied in the character of Prince Anchisi
(Franco Volpi), who dresses in period clothing
and is morbidly attached to his family’s ancestral
traditions: he conveys an idea of an encrusted,
moldy aristocracy, out of time yet stubbornly
encysted in the present, and is an advocate of
that “return to the irrational” which the younger
generations identify superficially with astrology
and fortune-telling. The charm of Il segno del
comando is also in the recovery of a symbolic
language, tied to objects and places, the same
used also by Freemasonry: a thing is itself and
at the same time it is something else.
Television, with its limitation and self-
censorship due to the medium’s nature and to the
diffusion of the product to a mass audience, al-
lows viewers to savor that narrative suspension
which is lost in contemporaneous movies. The
pacing, as usual with made-for-TV products of
the period, is slow and dreamy, meditative and
relaxed; viewers need their time, they love to be
carried away by a plot concocted as a series of
Chinese boxes, where each revealed mystery
leads to another. The lengthy dialogue scenes
are characterized by an insistence on mood and
details, and with a certain solemnity that is
paired with the blatantly traditionalist aesthetics,
underlined by the black-and-white cinematog-
raphy. The present, with its tensions and fears,
is absent. It is as if the characters—and the
audience with them—move inside a timeless
bubble, that bursts only near the ending, in the
scene where Pagliai and Girotti’s characters,
wandering underground, find themselves in the
midst of the excavations for the new subway line
(a setting also explored by Fellini for one of the
most beautiful sequences of his 7 film Roma),
and modernity suddenly breaks the spell as in
a rude awakening.
On top of that, Il segno del comando offers
an incarnation of the Romantic hero that had
been lacking in Italian Gothic films: the charac-
ter played by Ugo Pagliai is a sort of detective of
the occult, who reaches the truth through art
and his own esprit de finesse rather than through
reason. The red thread with literary Gothic is
provided mainly by the surprising use of the fig-
ure of Lord Byron, who in Il segno del comando

becomes at the same time the pretext from
which the action moves as well as a “Guest of
stone” (to quote Don Juan) that hovers on the
characters, the holder of a century-old secret hid-
den between riddles and sonnets. It was Byron
who ensured that the Anglo-Saxon culture as-
similated the myth of the vampire, and it was
him who impersonated the Gothic-Romantic
hero, by playing the part of the fallen angel, the
restless soul who is destined to wander in a world
that does not belong to him, tied to a fate already
written.
Last but not least, D’Anza’s film explores
convincingly the theme of eternal return, de-
clined in a romantic way: just like the restless
ghosts in Danza macabra, Forster and Lucia are
destined to relive forever their love story. “But
you, Lucia, in which world do you belong?” asks
Forster in the final scene, in a tavern that rep-
resents the threshold between the two worlds.
“In the past, in the present … there is no differ-
ence, you know…” is the enigmatic answer.
Ghosts of the small screen
The enormous success of Il segno del co-
mando marked a milestone in the history of Ital-
ian television. The picturesque and the Gothic
would occupy a fair slice in the decade’s produc-
tion, starting with the adaptation of The Moon-
stone, Wilkie Collins’s mystery masterpiece.
La pietra di luna, directed by Anton Giulio Ma-
jano, and adapted with the prestigious collabo-
ration of Italy’s top mystery novelists, Franco
Fruttero and Carlo Lucentini, was broadcast
in 7. Many more followed, such as the
parapsychology-themed ESP (73) starring
Paolo Stoppa, and based on the life of the Dutch
psychic Gérard Croiset; Il dipinto (74,
Domenico Campana), about a cop who is in-
jured on duty and develops psychic powers; and
Gamma (76, Salvatore Nocita), about a brain
transplant whose results lead to consequences
akin to The Hands of Orlac. Meanwhile, with
the four episodes of his series La porta sul
buio (73), Dario Argento sabotaged the con-
ventions of the thriller genre that were to be
found in the contemporary adaptations based
on the works of novelists such as Francis Dur-
bridge—but that is another story.
The 70s made-for-TV mini-series (the
so-called “Sceneggiati”) leaned on immutable
 Appendix
requirements. First of all, of course, there was
the setting. After the mysterious, evocative
Rome seen in Il segno del comando, filmmakers
duly rediscovered the country’s arcane fascina-
tion. Examples are the Tuscan village of Volterra,
which looks like it came out of an Arthur
Conan Doyle novel, complete with seedy taverns
and grave robbers, in Ritratto di donna velata
(Portrait of Veiled Woman, 75, Flaminio
Bollini); the Bourbon period Sicily, on the eve
of the establishment of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies in 86, in D’Anza’s L’amaro caso della
baronessa di Carini (The Bitter Case of the
Baroness of Carini, 75); again the catacombs
and subway excavations of contemporary Rome
in Il fauno di marmo (The Marble Faun, 77,
Silverio Blasi); the Lazio province, between Fras-
cati and Bomarzo’s Parco dei Mostri, in La dama
dei veleni (The Queen of Poisons, 7, Silverio
Blasi).
Ritratto di donna velata followed scrupu-
lously the same formula as Il segno del comando,
which Bollini had co-scripted: a mystery intrigue
with supernatural elements, a heroine (Daria Ni-
colodi) elusive as a ghost, the correspondence be-
tween the past and the present, the theme of rein-
carnation, and a doppelgänger depicted in the
disturbing portrait that gives the movie its title.
What is more, its setting, in the Tuscan town of
Volterra, the site of a famous Etruscan necropolis,
possibly drew inspiration from Armando
Crispino’s successful giallo, L’etrusco uccide ancora.
Ritratto di donna velata met an extraordinary suc-
cess (over  million viewers), but despite some
undeniably evocative scenes, such as the nightly
appearance of a ghost rider before the protago-
nists’ car, in a foggy country road, the result was
erratic, and let down by the choice of a lighter,
less convincing tone, with a frivolous and giggly
hero (Nino Castelnuovo). What is more, the plot
at times looks like a half-baked rehash of its
model, and the direction is often hampered by
the technical limits: like most “Sceneggiati” of the
period, exteriors were shot on film, whereas the
static indoor scenes were shot on video, to jarring
effects.
With L’amaro caso della baronessa di Carini,
consisting of four episodes broadcast beginning
November 3, 75, Daniele d’Anza went back
to the same folk tale that inspired novelist Gio-
vanni Verga to write the novelette Le storie del
castello di Trezza (876), and which was adapted
by other writers as well, such as Italo Toscani
(La mano di sangue, published in 06 on the
weekly magazine Domenica del Corriere). It is
again centered on a case of metempsychosis, and
it tells a tale of love and death: the Baroness’
tragic story (she was killed by her father and her
husband to punish her for an adultery in the
year 563) repeats itself 50 years later, when an
official (Ugo Pagliai, by then Italy’s most popular
Gothic hero) falls madly in love for the beautiful
Laura (Janet Agren), the wife of the Baron of
Carini, Don Mariano D’Agrò (Adolfo Celi).
L’amaro caso della baronessa di Carini is a
very interesting effort, not the least because of
D’Anza’s use of color, which heightens its expres-
sive potential, thanks to Blasco Giurato’s beau-
tiful photography. What is more, the image of
the stabbed woman who leaves the imprint of
her bloody hand on the wall she is leaning on,
shot in slow-motion and with a flou effect, de-
notes the influence of Dario Argento’s cinema.
However, the Grand-Guignol was partly lost to
the viewers, since the movie was broadcast in
black-and-white: RAI started broadcasting in
color regularly only in 77.
D’Anza heightened the story’s folksy
element, framing the narrative, as he did in Il
segno del comando, with a folk ballad (sung by
Gigi Proietti), and opening the movie with a brief
b&w documentary on contemporary Sicily. How-
ever, the most successful aspect of L’amaro caso
della baronessa di Carini can be traced to the
character of Don Ippolito (Paolo Stoppa), a
witty intermediary between the protagonists and
the audience, a sort of omniscient narrator who
repeatedly breaks the fourth wall and addresses
the viewers. Don Ippolito is a disenchanted Illu-
minist, who quotes Voltaire but ultimately can
only take note of life’s unrelenting dark areas,
those that not even reason can scratch.3
Although well-oiled, the formula for made-
for-TV Gothic was not infallible, as proved by
Silverio Blasi’s Il fauno di marmo, a clumsy adap-
tation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s last novel The
Marble Faun. Or the Romance of Monte Beni
(860) set in modern-day Rome. Constantly on
the verge of the ridiculous, it was slanted by crit-
ics (one reviewer underlined its “brazen impu-
dence in dressing with botched parapsycholog-
ical clothes the most blatant ineptitude at telling
a story, let alone carry it along in a dramatically
convincing way”4), and is noteworthy mainly for
featuring one of Italian television’s very first full
frontal nude scenes, courtesy of Consuelo Fer-
rara.
Blasi did a much more convincing job in
 Italian Gothic on the Small Screen
La dama dei veleni. In adapting John Dickson
Carr’s novel The Burning Court in a contempo-
rary Italian setting (and in a much more faithful
way than its previous screen adaptation, Julien
Duvivier’s 6 film La Chambre ardente), the
director opted without hesitation for the Fan-
tastic, emphasizing the element of reincarnation:
the result—aided by Bruno Nicolai’s score,
which reprises one of the composer’s themes for
I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale
(73, Sergio Martino)—brings the film closer
to the themes of 60s Italian Gothic. The limits
imposed by the medium are evident (verbiage,
sleepy rhythm, many scenes filmed with a static
camera), and the choice of Susanna Martinková
was not felicitous for the role of the woman
whom the protagonist (the ubiquitous Ugo
Pagliai) marries, only to suspect that she is the
reincarnation of a notorious poisoner of the
past; nevertheless, the result retains at times the
disturbing power of Carr’s book and its unset-
tling final twist, which make it one of the best
Gothic novels of the 0th century.
La dama dei veleni also shows how Italian
television of the period was adventurous in its
exploration of popular literature. Carr’s works
were the source for other noteworthy mini-
series, including another novel which blended
the whodunit with the Fantastic, Fire, Burn!
(56), adapted for television in 7 by Giovanni
Fago with Morte a passo di valzer, starring
Gianni Garko as a modern-day cop who finds
himself catapulted back in time in 8, and must
solve an impossible murder.
Another interesting literary adaptation was
Domenico Campana’s Racconto d’autunno (Au-
tumn Tale, broadcast in February 8), based
on Tommaso Landolfi’s novel of the same
name—in turn possibly inspired by Charles
Nodier’s Gothic novella Inés de Las Sierras. It is
the story of a young rebel (Stefano Patrizi), who,
fleeing an enemy army during an unnamed and
abstract conflict, takes refuge in a country villa
where an old gentleman (Fernando Rey) lives
together with a mysterious young girl named
Lucia (Laura Lattuada), who might be the ghost
of his dead wife. Campana, who already touched
paranormal themes in the disturbing two-part
TV movie Il dipinto, here plays with Gothic’s
main staples: the theme of the double, here em-
phasized by a painting (a landscape which, seen
by a different angle, reveals a woman’s face in
anamorphosis: a beautiful invention absent in
the book), the insinuating weight of the past, the
3
centrality of the haunted house and its sur-
roundings (secret passages, a garden, a crypt
where a necromantic ritual takes place) in which
the story develops; and, last but not least, the
hesitation between a rational and a supernatural
explanation.
Unlike most TV movies of the period, Rac-
conto d’autunno is shot on film, and from a visual
standpoint it is quite different from its peers.
Campana amplifies the Gothic elements in Lan-
dolfi’s story with striking visual intuitions, from
the use of wide-angle shots to underline the
young protagonist’s disorientation and confu-
sion, to the sudden twists that seemingly plunge
the tale into the realm of the Fantastic: such are
Lucia’s white hands entering the frame to cure
the sleeping rebel’s wound, or the young girl’s
pale hand that rises out of the darkness like that
of a ghost—a moment worthy of Bava, explicitly
quoted in the image of the mastiffs (in Landolfi’s
novel they are wolfhounds) that Rey’s character
carries around on a leash. What is more, Fer-
nando Rey (who dubs his own voice in Italian)
is perfect as the lord of the castle with Poe-like
traits and obsessions, who calls himself out of
his time and proudly exclaims: “Only one pas-
sion has stayed with me: not to live like other
people.”
The film’s limit is to take to the letter what
in Landolfi’s novel was an elaborate linguistic
construction, and to take the story’s Gothic sur-
face as an end and not as an ironic disguise for
a fable that carries many hidden themes, and
can be read both in a private and political way.
For instance, the role of the house in Landolfi’s
story is emblematic; unlike in Poe’s stories, it is
not the effigy and expression of its inhabitants’
delusions and obsessions, but a perfectly self-
contained model of sobriety and balance, that
the eruption of an external element ends up
damaging and condemning to ruin. When Cam-
pana moves away from the cloistered three char-
acters’ game and broadens the scope to the war
seen as the universal condition of a humanity
divided in “invaders” and “bandits,” the allegor-
ical power of Landolfi’s novel is lost (Racconto
d’autunno was written immediately after the end
of World War II, and the novelist was sur-
rounded by ruins, both real and ideological),
and the film’s budgetary and substantial limits
come to the fore. Still, it is one of the best Italian
made-for TV Gothics of the period, and was
very successful at the time of its broadcast, with
an audience of over  million.
4 Appendix
From the page to the screen:
the anthology format
I. From Lovecraft to Poe…
By the end of the 70s the formula of the
sceneggiati was gradually abandoned. A com-
mon format for the Gothic adaptations destined
to the small screen became the anthology
format, with low-budget mini-series consisting
of a number of self-contained episodes that al-
lowed young filmmakers to express an experi-
mental vein, the sign of a will to move along
unexplored paths, and use the medium in a cre-
ative way.
Such an example was Maurizio Ponzi’s Lo
strano caso di via dell’Angeletto (75), starring
Nino Castelnuovo and Paola Gassman, a weird
one-act TV movie broadcast as part of the series
Storie in una stanza, supervised by Giovanni
Antonucci; the series was made of five brief sto-
ries characterized by the unit of time and place,
directed by five different filmmakers. Ponzi’s
episode falls entirely into the Gothic genre, with
the story of a young couple attracted by an ap-
parently normal house which, little by little,
turns out to be a living organism, with a self-
consciousness and even a voice (provided by
voice actress Tina Lattanzi).
The anthology format also allowed film-
makers to adapt stories by renowned writers,
keeping with the small screen’s tendency to lean
on literary models. Such was the case with Nella
città vampira (In the Vampire City, 78), three
short adaptations from Dino Campana (Ma è un
vampiro?), George Oliver Onions and Hanns
Heinz Ewers (Kaiserstrasse o del demone fem-
minile) and Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Casa delle
streghe) broadcast in July and August 78,
whereas a fourth episode (Diario di un pazzo,
based on Gogol’s story) was broadcast almost one
year later, in June 7; a fifth one (to be titled La
signorina ciminiera nella città vampira) was an-
nounced but never made.
Nella città vampira was created and super-
vised by Giorgio Bandini, a pioneer of Italian
radio dramas. Bandini’s project consisted essen-
tially of one-acts, filmed entirely in studio, with
bland and stage-like pacing and the odd refer-
ence to Expressionistic lighting, and character-
ized by a sometimes ironic approach to the lit-
erary sources: as the director claimed, “these
stories, being peopled with ghosts and vampires,
should belong in the noir trend, that is they
should inspire horror and fear. Whereas they
won’t be totally black, as they are treated with
irony.”5 The series featured music scores by
Ennio Morricone, included in the CD Drammi
gotici. The most interesting episode of the lot
was perhaps Casa delle streghe, which blended
together three different Lovecraft stories (The
Music of Erich Zann, Cold Air and Dreams in the
Witch House), tied together by the presence of
a student (played by Flavio Bucci) who is a mere
spectator of the stories or a victim. The cast also
included Micaela Pignatelli and Alessandro
Haber. The critics were harsh: the adaptation of
Capuana’s novel was dismissed as “chaotic” and
the Lovecraft episode was criticized for being
“abstruse” and “confused.” A similar project was
Ultima scena: 5 storie fantastiche (Final Scene: 5
Fantastic Stories, 78), which comprised five
stories set in the show business, including a cou-
ple of interesting early works by Gianni Amelio,
La morte al lavoro (openly inspired by Polanski’s
Le locataire) and Effetti speciali (about a reclusive
elderly horror movie director who invites a
young scriptwriter in his villa to write a new
film).
A much more felicitous attempt at adapting
prestigious literary sources, and characterized
by a creative approach to the subject, was I rac-
conti fantastici di Edgar Allan Poe (Edgar Allan
Poe’s Fantastic Tales), brought to the screen by
Daniele D’Anza and Biagio Proietti in 7, with
music by the popular pop/progressive rock band
Pooh. Consisting of four episodes of 55 minutes
each (Notte in casa Usher, Ligeia Forever, Il
delirio di William Wilson, La caduta di casa
Usher), it was broadcast in 7. With a similar
move as Fellini’s Toby Dammit and later Ar-
gento’s Il gato nero (in Due occhi diabolici, 0),
D’Anza and Proietti hybridized and intertwined
references to different stories, not only literary
and not only belonging to Poe. The character of
Roderick Usher (played by Philippe Leroy)
whose clothes and behavior hint that he may be-
long to a different age, becomes a sort of alter
ego to the writer; he lives in a house inside
which “it is like being out of time and space,” as
another character notes. It is from this house
that everything begins, and it is in it that every-
thing ends: all the characters are inexorably
drawn to it, get lost inside it and/or are incor-
porated into it—an enclosed microcosm where
the ghosts from the past keep repeating the
same acts over and over again, like in Adolfo
 Italian Gothic on the Small Screen
Bioy Casares’ novelette The Invention of Morel
(adapted in 74 by Emidio Greco).
In addition to the references to the Poe uni-
verse, D’Anza and Proietti introduced somewhat
unexpected elements. The series’ first install-
ment, Una notte in casa Usher (A Night at the
House of Usher), turns into a meditation on jus-
tice that recalls Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s work,
with a narrative framing story that pays homage
to the Swiss author’s novel A Dangerous Game,
a.k.a. Traps (Die Panne), whereas the final story,
La caduta di casa Usher (The Fall of the House
of Usher), hints at Buñuel’s El ángel extermi-
nador. And if Rebecca is a predictable filmic ref-
erence when revisiting Ligeia, it is surprising
how the adaptation turns the titular character
into a silent movie star, with references to Sunset
Blvd. and Singin’ in the Rain, in the episode
Ligeia Forever.
The nods to Poe are both visual (the gigan-
tic blade-shaped pendulum that towers over the
hall of the house of Usher, the masked ball in
the final episode that recalls The Masque of the
Red Death) and narrative: MS. Found in a Bottle
and The Tell-Tale Heart are included in the plots
in the form of dialogues or monologues, with
an explicit theatrical quality. Overall, the stories
are hampered by a certain pedantry, and the di-
rection—as often occurs with TV movies of the
period—is not always up to the task. Neverthe-
less, I racconti fantastici di Edgar Allan Poe rep-
resent a refined, thought-provoking experiment:
to use the TV medium as a macro context
within which to explore and interoperate differ-
ent cues, so as to build a sophisticated intertex-
tual apparatus that demands a lot of the viewer.
Lovecraft and Poe were also among the au-
thors adapted in another TV series, this time
with an openly didactic aim: Un racconto, un au-
tore, broadcast weekly in early 8. Each in-
stallment was half an hour long, and included
Poe’s The Oval Portrait, and a three-part adap-
tation of Lovecraft’s The Silver Key (amounting
to a total of 0 minutes) starring Jobst Grapow
as Randolph Carter and HPL and the Greek
filmmaker Stavros Tornes as Carter’s grandfa-
ther. Accordingly, the story emphasized the “re-
fusal of the world of conventional hypocrisy”
and was directed by Ciriaco Tiso. On the other
hand, the four stories that formed part of Il filo
e il labirinto (The Thread and the Labyrinth),
broadcast in August and September 7, were
not adaptations but original scripts devised by
Biagio Proietti and Diana Crispo, and directed
5
by Paolo Fondato, Stefano Calanchi, Nanni Fab-
bri and Proietti himself. The four installments
were: Il sognatore (Paolo Fondato), about a man
who dreams he sees a murder and identifies the
killer but not the victim, reminiscent of Don’t
Look Now and Fulci’s Sette note in nero; Dietro
la tenda scura (Stefano Calanchi), about two
women who move to the house of their dreams,
only to find it is haunted; Sono già stato qui
(Nanni Fabbri), where a man who moves to a
small apartment senses the presence of the pre-
vious inhabitant, who allegedly committed sui-
cide; and L’armadio, about a woman who buys
an old wardrobe and discovers it is a threshold
to a parallel universe.
The series dealt with “stories that lose their
essence of fairytales right when catching the vi-
olent moment of the clash between reality and
the Fantastic world, an unexplored but nonethe-
less existing universe, where reason can try to
enter and illuminate its dark corners, without
having the presumption of clearing and explain-
ing everything” 6 and tried for a realistic context
to the tales.
II. Il fascino dell’insolito
Il fascino dell’insolito—Itinerari dalla let-
teratura gotica alla fantascienza, edited by
Cecilia Cope, Angelo Ivaldi and Biagio Proietti
and broadcast between 80 and 8, drew
from th century and mainly 0th century au-
thors (with such authors as Truman Capote,
William Tenn, Ray Bradbury, Stanley Ellin,
Montague Rhode James…).
The first season (curated by Angelo Ivaldi
and Biagio Proietti) was broadcast from Janu-
ary  to February , 80, and consisted of 5
episodes: La mezzatinta (based on M.R. James’
short story The Mezzotint); La stanza n. 13
(based on M.R. James’ short story Number 13);
Piccolo assassino (based on Ray Bradbury’s short
story Small Assassin); Veglia al morto (based on
Ambrose Bierce’s short story A Watcher By the
Dead); Miriam (based on Truman Capote’s short
story of the same name).
The second season (curated by Cecilia
Cope and Angelo Ivaldi) was broadcast from
August  to September 4, 8, and consisted
of 3 episodes: La strada al chiaro di luna (based
on Ambrose Bierce’s short story Moonlit Road);
La casa della follia (based on Richard Matheson’s
short story Mad House); Impostore (based on
Philip K. Dick’s short story Impostor).
6 Appendix
The third and last season (also curated by
Cope and Ivaldi, and broadcast from July 0 to
August 4, 8) consisted of 6 episodes: La tor-
tura della speranza (based on Auguste de Villiers
de L’Isle-Adam’s short story La torture par l’es-
perance [The Torture of Hope]); La scoperta di
Morniel Mathaway (based on William Tenn’s
short story The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway);
Vampirismus (based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short
story of the same name); La cosa sulla soglia
(based on H. P. Lovecraft’s short story The Thing
on the Doorstep); La specialità della casa (based
on Stanley Ellin’s short story The Specialty of the
House); Castigo senza delitto (based on Ray
Bradbury’s short story Punishment Without
Crime.)
The budgets were low, and the episodes
were mostly shot on video rather than on film;
as Cope and Ivaldi explained, “with this series
… we want to prove that decent shows, worthy
of being watched can be made even without
having the means and the players of America’s
most successful TV series.”7 However, the ap-
proach to the material varied wildly, sometimes
faithful, more often thought-provoking and
innovative. The result represented, even more
than in the case of D’Anza’s I racconti fantas-
tici di Edgar Allan Poe, an attempt to rework
the Fantastic genre according to the demands
of television, while exploring new expressive
ways.
The first season was filmed in black-and-
white and the episodes were mostly suffering
from an overtly timid approach that made the
results look like filmed theater. The choice of
the sources ranged from the ghost story (La
strada al chiaro di luna: Ambrose Bierce’s tale
was reimagined in a contemporary setting) to
the time paradox (La scoperta di Morniel Matt-
away, from the double (the elderly woman
haunted by a creepy girl who has her own
name—Death? A ghost? The image of her own
lost childhood? A mind projection that accom-
panies her descent into madness?—in Miriam)
to the haunted house. The most successful
episode, the disturbing La mezzatinta, inspired
by Montague Rhodes James’ story, is about a
painting of a house whose appearance changes
according to the events, with the addition of new
details, and benefits from a fascinating contem-
porary setting among the villas on Mount Vesu-
vio.
On the other hand, the following seasons
were characterized by the use of color, a more
experimental approach, and even featured
the odd nude scene. The most successful
episodes belonged to the third season: the
Lovecraft-inspired La cosa sulla soglia, directed
by the twins Andrea and Antonio Frazzi (who
also helmed an interesting adaptation of P. K.
Dick’s Impostor) and starring Massimo Ghini
as Daniel Upton, which had already been
screened in competition at Trieste’s Festival of
Science Fiction, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Vam-
pirismus, helmed by Giulio Questi. The Love-
craft episode benefitted greatly from its refined
Art Déco setting in the asylum scenes, as well
as some striking locations such as the well-
known Casina Vanvitelliana, on the Fusaro
lake near Naples, the place where “a corrupt-
ing and voracious entity is resuming its domain
on the bourgeois space like an arcane deity
that sits back on its throne after centuries of
exile.”8
Despite the title, Questi’s Vampirismus is
not a vampire story but a tale of ghouls. Count
Ippolito (Antonio Salines) welcomes as guests
in his house an elderly woman who calls herself
the Baroness (Mariagrazia Marescalchi) with a
shady past, and her little more than teenage
daughter Aurelia (future film director Francesca
Archibugi); attracted by the young woman, the
Count lets them settle in his house like parasites
and marries Aurelia, only to find that at night
his young bride wanders in the graveyards, dig-
ging up and devouring corpses.
Following Hoffmann’s story, Questi departs
from the aristocratic model of the vampire. Ip-
polito is a refined dandy, alien from the things
of the world (“You know that my greatest aspi-
ration is being a serene and imperturbable
dandy, which seems to me the only possible
form of stoicism in this age of overwhelming
democracy,” he says), whereas the self-appointed
“Baroness” is a social climber who settles in his
house—in an ironic paraphrase of the rule that
a vampire must be invited in by its victim—like
a parasite, binging with tea and pastries, and is
frowned upon by the circle of aristocrats that
Ippolito is part of.
What is more, the supernatural is not an
element of the story. Aurelia’s is a mental pathol-
ogy, a neurosis caused by sexual traumas, and
her night raids are a visceral answer to her
diurnal existence as a remissive bride. The aes-
thetic (and ecstatic) aspect of vampirization is
lost too: from suction to mastication, there are
no bites to the jugular but rotting limbs eaten
 Italian Gothic on the Small Screen
with feral greed, with an insistence on macabre
and gruesome details that paraphrases “the evo-
lution of a certain modern literature of terror,
where the underlying cause of horror is not the
supernatural, but the very human madness, or
just an unknown disease, and in any case the
horrific effect is more important than its origin.”
As the renowned philosopher and Ger-
manist Furio Jesi noted, in Hoffmann’s story
“the vampire that feeds on meat demolishes an
Illuministic, rational conception of man and
human body,”0 and the tale foreshadows a re-
flection on the crisis of aristocracy. In Questi’s
adaptation the sense appears rather uncertain;
Vampirismus pairs an embryonic class struggle
and the battle of the sexes, but is held back in
the description of the sexual origin of Aurelia’s
pathology, and is let down by the infelicitous
choice of Archibugi (who also has a couple of
nude scenes) as Aurelia. However, this time the
theatrical dimension, even claustrophobic, is not
an impediment but an unexpected asset: the
story takes place entirely in Ippolito’s palace, and
the only connection with the outside world is a
large window in the living room that gives onto
a garden-cemetery where the key events take
place: the funeral of the Baroness, the wedding,
the discovery of the bride’s nocturnal activities.
It is a choice that helps depict a closed, and in
turn, despite itself, putrefying world.
III. I giochi del diavolo
The six-part series I giochi del diavolo (Sto-
rie fantastiche dell’Ottocento) (The Devil’s
Game—Fantastic Tales of the 800), supervised
by Roberta Carlotto and broadcast in 8, rep-
resented—together with the twin series Il fascino
dell’insolito—the most dense and challenging
body of Fantastic adaptations conceived so far
for the small screen in Italy. What is more, it
showed an admirable trust in television as a cul-
tural and educational tool, able to offer quality
works with good spectacular value to a wide au-
dience as a valid alternative to the rampant dis-
engagement; at the same time it continued the
work of spreading culture propounded by au-
thors like Ugo Gregoretti (the director of 63’s
Omicron, and one of the leading pioneers of Ital-
ian television), to the point that one of Italy’s
most popular short stories anthologies, Racconti
fantastici dell’Ottocento (edited by Italo Calvino
and published by Mondadori, the country’s lead-
ing publishing house, in 83), originated from
7
the renowned writer’s collaboration with RAI
on I giochi del diavolo.
The six stories selected for adaptation rep-
resented the cream of the crop of th century
Fantastic literature, and benefitted from rather
faithful adaptations. The famed authors chosen
ranged from Prosper Mérimée to Henry James,
from Robert Louis Stevenson to E. T. A. Hoff-
mann, from H. G. Wells to Gérard de Nerval,
and involved prestigious filmmakers, such as
Giulio Questi, Marcello Aliprandi and Mario
Bava. It took some time before the results ended
up on the screen: some episodes, such as Bava’s,
were filmed as early as 78.
Here is in detail the episode list as
broadcast on RAI , starting in May 8.
5.0.8: L’uomo della sabbia, by E.T.A.
Hoffmann; screenplay by Mauro Marchesini
and Giulio Questi, directed by Giulio Questi.
5.7.8: La Venere d’Ille, by Prosper
Mérimée; screenplay by Lamberto Bava and
Cesare Garboli, directed by Mario and Lam-
berto Bava.
6.3.8: La presenza perfetta, by Henry
James (from the short story Sir Edmund
Horme); screenplay by Jean Ludwigg, directed
by Piero Nelli.
6.7.8: La mano indemoniata, by Gérard
De Nerval; screenplay by Tullio Pinelli, di-
rected by Marcello Aliprandi.
6.3.8: Il diavolo nella bottiglia, by Robert
Louis Stevenson; screenplay by Tomaso Sher-
man, directed by Tomaso Sherman.
6.4.8: Il sogno dell’altro, by Herbert
George Wells (from The Story of the Late Mr.
Elvesham); screenplay by Giovanna Gagliardo,
directed by Giovanna Gagliardo.
Expectations were high, but the result dis-
pleased many. Critics noted “many of the con-
tradictions and uncertainties typical of the first
hesitant attempts to interweave two similar but
not identical means. Namely, a scenic organiza-
tion and a narrative technique characterized by
a mainly theatrical approach are associated with
figurative choices and discursive forms that …
are still too backward,” compared with the con-
temporaneous television standards. In short, the
mise-en-scène strangled at birth the fantastique
and the intertwining of real and imaginary. The
result floated “in an intermediate and indeter-
minate space, in which we can indeed glimpse
the Fantastic, but also its very impossibility.”
8 Appendix
That is the case with L’uomo della sabbia,
based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story The
Sandman, and directed by Giulio Questi, whose
last feature film had been the outstanding Ar-
cana. It was one of the two Gothic-inspired TV
movies that Questi adapted for television in that
period, the other being Vampirismus. As the di-
rector recalled, “those were different times com-
pared with now, and there were quite good peo-
ple working on television. There was a list of
stories chosen by Italo Calvino—hence we
started at a level that today we could only dream
of—it is not that RAI officials came up with the
scripts, as now happens. So, I was commissioned
two TV movies, to be chosen from those on the
list: I picked up Hoffmann and made my two
movies, at a distance of a couple of years.” 3
Regrettably, the complex themes of Hoff-
mann’s tale were lost in Questi’s adaptation.
Apart from the odd visual invention—such as
the scene where the protagonist Nataniele (Do-
nato Placido) and his friend Lotario (Saverio
Vallone) discuss philosophy as they fence, a nod
to a famous sequence of Buñuel’s La Voie lactée
(6)—the film fails to convey the uncanny
core of the story, in which Hoffmann discovered
the subconscious one hundred years ahead of
psychoanalysis, thus inspiring Sigmund Freud’s
celebrated essay Das Unheimliche.
By having Nataniele evoke his childhood
nightmares (he is obsessed with the disquieting
“sandman,” who gouges out children’s eyes, and
he identifies the monster with the ambiguous
attorney Coppelius, whom he believes to be in-
volved in his father’s death), Hoffmann staged
a fear of mutilation that alluded to castration,
as theorized by Freud. However, Questi does not
show the first encounter of little Nataniele and
Coppelius; therefore, the drama of the adult
Nataniele (who thinks he recognizes Coppelius
as the optician Coppola) loses its reason for
being. The director is more interested in the
other uncanny element of the story: Olimpia,
the beautiful girl Nataniele falls for, unaware that
she is actually an automaton. In the scene where
the mechanical doll debuts in society, Questi
partially recovers the biting anti-bourgeois vein
of his earlier film La morte ha fatto l’uovo (68)
Similarly, Piero Nelli’s adaptation of the
Henry James story, La presenza perfetta, suffers
from giving up to the uncertainty that charac-
terized James’ Sir Edmund Horme; whereas Mar-
cello Aliprandi, Tomaso Sherman and Giovanna
Gagliardo’s episodes (despite the participation
of such renowned collaborators as Tullio Pinelli,
who scripted La mano indemoniata) seem to
consciously self-restraint themselves. The result
denotes a “lack of trust in the opportunities given
by the Fantastic to open itself to cultured re-
readings and varied textual strategies.”4
Among the six one-hour episodes of I
giochi del diavolo, Mario Bava’s last film La
Venere d’Ille (filmed in the fall of 78 and co-
directed with his son Lamberto) stands out. First
of all, it shows an evident, consummate famil-
iarity with the genre, which allows the director
to bring to the screen such a prestigious literary
source without hindrance or subjection of any
kind, as a narrative plotline that is never over-
whelming.
As critic Gualtiero Pironi noted,
Bava also managed to catch many of the tale’s sub-
themes, and used them to depict a splendid portrayal
of a peasant and Mediterranean culture, in which
solar and lunar elements cohabit and intertwine (the
material, irrational, religious side and the lunar, irra-
tional, magic side of the Mediterranean peasant world
and culture)…. In fact, it is exactly by conveying this
cultural trait of the world he portrays that Bava man-
ages to justify, diegetically and linguistically, the
splendid zoom shot that links the Moon to the Earth
and gives way to the masterful last part of the story,
all focused on the perfect use of fantastic hesitation,
in which the earth and the sky, the rational and irra-
tional combine and determine the shock which makes
the narrative reach its climax and its sense.5
It is natural to see La Venere d’Ille as a
summation of sorts of Bava’s oeuvre and of
Italian Gothic in general.6 But this somehow
leads to underestimate the contribution of co-
scriptwriter Cesare Garboli, a distinguished lit-
erary critic and a scholar of the works of such
important and groundbreaking female writers
as Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg. Through
different ways, Garboli and Bava use Mérimée’s
tale for a discourse that indeed touches Italian
Gothic on film, but it also faces a much broader
theme, which finds its citizenship in cinematic
and literary Gothic, and which here becomes
central: the status of women.
The bronze Venus which, once extracted
from the ground, marks the downfall of the
wealthy Peyrehohade family, is an alien presence
that puts in check the gears of patriarchy, as well
as its continuous abuse of the female condition.
The character of the artist Mathieu (Marc Porel),
the alter ego of Mérimée’s first person narrator,
is the witness of women’s role in a male-oriented
 Italian Gothic on the Small Screen
society, pleasure-loving and vulgar, in which
woman—just like the food on screen in virtually
every scene—is something to take and consume
before moving on to something else: see the
scene where a maid implicitly offers, together
with a tray of goodies, her own young body to
her master Alfonso.
The marriage between Clara (Daria Ni-
colodi) and Alfonso (Fausto Di Bella) becomes
a further humiliation for the woman, with the
ritual of the garter stolen from the bride and cut
into little pieces by the guests who share it, an
anticipation of the virginity which Clara is about
to lose on her wedding night. And yet, despite
her forced subservience to Alfonso, Clara—and
every woman, for that matter—remains unat-
tainable. If her destiny is to serve her husband,
her victory is in the halo of impermeability that
separates her from the society of men. This is
noticed by Mathieu, who is incapable of fixing
Clara’s features on paper as much as he is unable
to figure out what links such a proud, sensible,
intelligent woman to the vulgar and conceited
Alfonso: “I will never be able to paint your por-
trait…. I cannot keep you steady, you change
under my eyes, you are two persons.” In his ob-
stinacy to conceive love only in a spiritual and
idealized manner, Mathieu is the umpteenth fig-
ure of a weak and helpless spectator in Italian
Gothic: he is an artist who’s unable to portray
his model just like, as a man, he is not able to
understand her.
Mathieu confuses the Venus with Clara, and
in his memory he blends the two images. The in-
decision between the animate and inanimate, the
original and its simulacrum is a typical theme of
Bava’s cinema, but in La Venere d’Ille the reflec-
tion on the double is not developed in a Mani-
chean way, dividing the saint and the whore, the
innocent and the witch. On the contrary, it is a
way to underline the superiority of the feminine,
which, despite all the attempts at ownership—se-
duction, marriage, even the act of sculpting a
woman’s figure and making its features eternal in
a bronze statue—remains aerial, unreachable, im-
possible to comprehend in a unique way.
In the film’s most ambiguous scene, when
Mathieu meets what he believes to be Clara in
the garden, in the evening, the two entities seem
to become one and the same. “Poor Mathieu,
you’re always asking yourself who I am … here
I am, don’t you see me?,” the woman mocks him,
and provocatively kisses him. In that moment,
Bava explicitly identifies Clara and the Venus,

by showing the glimmering ring at the woman’s
finger, that same diamond ring which Alfonso
slipped on the statue’s ring finger. But the en-
counter ends with a sharp rebuke: “You too are
like everyone else … you don’t know sacrificing
to love.” What matters is not that the Venus has
taken human form, but what the sudden iden-
tification alludes to. Clara, and the Venus, are
superior, and thus they will win, because they
know how to “sacrifice to love,” something that
men are incapable of, and therefore doomed to
failure, unable to unite Platonic sublimation
(like Mathieu) and carnal impulse (like Al-
fonso).
Of course, Clara is a victim too. She agrees
to marry a man she does not love and who wants
her for her wealth, and upon witnessing
Alfonso’s death—killed on the wedding night by
the revived Venus—she will succumb to mad-
ness. And yet there is a noticeable pleasure in
her voice, when she reveals to Mathieu her phys-
ical attraction to her future husband, and there
is an impatient anticipation in the sequence
where she prepares for the wedding night,
taking a bath and surrounded by maids, and in
the thrill with which she welcomes what she be-
lieves to be her husband in the nuptial bedroom.
Like the heroine of André Pieyre de Mandiar-
gues’ short story Le Sang d’agneu (in the anthol-
ogy Le Musée noir), in the moment she chooses
to give herself to the man, sacrificing herself to
love, Clara brings him to ruin, which here is the
Venus’ deadly embrace.
The goddess of love that crushes between
her arms on the nuptial bed the young husband
who inadvertedly sealed a promise of marriage
with her, is certainly a nemesis, the umpteenth
incarnation of the vagina dentata myth.7 But
Mérimée’s misogynist fantasy becomes in Bava’s
film, in a period characterized by feminist strug-
gles, a symbol of retaliation; what is more, a few
years earlier Garboli had penned the introduc-
tion for the rerelease of Nascita e morte della
massaia, an exemplary surrealist fable on the
role of woman in patriarchal society, written by
the “feminist avant la lettre” Paola Masino. It
has been noted how the ending of La Venere
d’Ille, with the burning of the statue that is cast
in order to be transformed into a bell, recalls the
opening of La maschera del demonio, to chisel
the director’s filmography in a mirror-like way.
But the statue’s expression among the flames is
a mocking, cruel smile; put to the stake, dis-
solved in its identity, and with a cruel retaliation
30 Appendix
that turns it from Pagan symbol to a sacred ob-
ject, it nevertheless remains unattainable. And
therefore winning.
If on the one hand Bava bends his unmis-
takable style to a narrative flatness that is typical
of the small screen, on the other hand La Venere
d’Ille retains some of the director’s trademark
images: the cutting transitions on the setting sun,
the alchemy of colors in the scene of Alfonso’s
death, the refined game of transparencies that
reveal the terror on Clara’s face as she is waiting
on the bed, beneath the canopy tents. The direc-
tor immediately breaks the story’s ambiguity, and
embraces the Fantastic since the early scenes: in
Mérimée the hesitation persists longer, as an in-
nocent Spanish is initially accused of Alfonso’s
murder, and the terrible truth emerges only later,
from the bride’s tale. And yet Bava avoids show-
ing the revived Venus, and opts for a more allu-
sive depiction of the deity than in Mérimée’s
story, with POV shots and merely alluded pres-
ences.
The image of Venus’ hand emerging from
the ground recalls other similar inanimate hands
in the director’s work, from the old lady’s ghost
in La goccia d’acqua to the ceramic ornament
in Shock; it is a sign of Bava’s predilection for
surreal details. But there’s more. The Venus re-
flected on a window’s glass, so that one is not
able to understand whether it is outside or inside
Mathieu’s room (another moment absent in
the novelette) refers on the one hand to the di-
rector’s typical threats separated by an illusory
barrier (the vampires’ faces beneath windows in
I Wurdalak, Melissa’s apparitions in Operazione
paura), and on the other it works as a displace-
ment, confusing the character’s (and the audi-
ence’s) spatial coordinates. But the most signifi-
cant scene is when the morning light illuminates
part of Clara’s portrait drawn by Mathieu, right
over the eyes, and gives the drawing that life
which the artist failed to give it. It is an image
that recalls that of Daliah Lavi in bed, illumi-
nated by the moonlight, in La frusta e il corpo,
and which summarizes how the “master of sus-
pense,” as Garboli called him, was after all a
poet, inexorably drawn to the feminine mystery.
NOTES
1. Dante Guardamagna, quoted in Giorgio Tabanelli,
Il teatro in televisione (Rome: Rai-Eri, 00), 6–7.
2. Leopoldo Santovincenzo, Carlo Modesti Pauer and
Marcello Rossi, Fantasceneggiati. Sci-fi e giallo, magico nelle
produzioni Rai (1954–1987) (Bologna: Elara, 06), .
3. L’amaro caso della baronessa di Carini was remade
in 007: the less said the better about the new version,
which has all the shortcomings of contemporary made-
for-TV Italian products and even features an embarrassing
happy ending.
4. March., “Fauni di marmo e facce di bronzo,” Il Cor-
riere Mercantile, October 3, 77.
5. Franco Scaglia, “Adesso gli ridono in faccia,” Radio-
corriere TV, #8, –5 July 78, 4–6.
6. Quoted in Santovincenzo, Modesti Pauer and Rossi,
Fantasceneggiati, 5.
7. Carlo Scaringi, “Un brivido per il sabato sera di
piena estate,” Radiocorriere TV #6 (7 June—3 July 8),
68–7.
8. Santovincenzo, Modesti Pauer and Rossi, Fan-
tasceneggiati, 8.
9. Roberto De Pol, “Sinfonia d’orrore. E. T. A. Hoffmann
e la letteratura orrorifica,” Quaderni di Palazzo Serra #7
(Genova: Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione
Linguistica e Culturale—Università di Genova, 00), .
10. Margherita Cottone, “Furio Jesi: Vampirismo e di-
dattica. Le lezioni su ‘Il vampiro e l’automa nella cultura
tedesca dal XVIII al XX secolo,’” Cultura tedesca #, ,
53.
11. Gualtiero Pironi, “Quando il diavolo della teatralità
ci mette la coda…,” Cineforum #06, July-August 8, 46.
12. Ibid.
13. Davide Pulici, “Incontro con Giulio Questi,” Nocturno
Cinema #5/6, February 8, 6.
14. Pironi, “Quando il diavolo della teatralità ci mette
la coda…”
15. Ibid.
16. See Muriel Lafond, “La Vénus d’Ille de Mario (et
Lamberto) Bava: un film-testament,” in Frank Lafond,
Cauchemars Italiens. Volume 1: Le Cinéma fantastique
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 0.), 6ss.
17. The theme of the married Venus appears since the
early days of Christianity. Muriel Lafond mentions De
gestis regum anglorum by William De Malmesbury, which
dates back to 00. Ibid.
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secondo Mario Bava. Turin: Movie Club, 84.
Howarth, Troy. The Haunted World of Mario Bava—
Revised and Expanded Edition. Baltimore, MD: Mid-
night Marquee Press, 04.
Howarth, Troy. So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of
Italian Giallo Films. Volume 1: 1963–1973. Baltimore
MD: Midnight Marquee Press, 04.
Howarth, Troy. So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of
Italian Giallo Films. Volume 2: 1974–2013. Baltimore
MD: Midnight Marquee Press, 05.
Howarth, Troy, and Mike Baronas. Splintered Visions:
Lucio Fulci and His Films. Baltimore, MD: Midnight
Marquee Press, 05.
Kezich, Tullio. Il Millefilm—Dieci anni al cinema 1967–
1977. Milan: Mondadori, 83.
Koven, Mikel J. La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema
and the Italian Giallo. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 006.
Lafond, Frank (ed.). Cauchemars Italiens: Volume 1: Le
cinéma fantastique. Pris: L’Harmattan, 0.
Lafond, Frank (ed.). Cauchemars Italiens: Volume 2: Le
cinéma horrifique. Pris: L’Harmattan, 0.
Leutrat, Jean-Louis (ed.). Mario Bava. Liège: Éditions
du Céfal, 4.
Lippi, Giuseppe, and Codelli, Lorenzo (eds.). Fant’italia:
Emergenza, apoteosi e riflusso del fantastico nel cinema
italiano. Trieste: Ed. Festival Internazionale del film
di fantascienza, 76.
Lucas, Tim. Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.
Cincinnati, OH: Video Watchdog, 007.
Martinet, Pascal. Mario Bava. Paris: Edilig, 84.
McDonagh, Maitland. Broken Mirrors / Broken Minds:
The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. London: sun tav-
ern fields, .
Mora, Teo. Storia del cinema dell’orrore, voll. II and III.
Fanucci, Roma (78) 00–03.
Navarro, Antonio José (ed.). El giallo italiano: La os-
curidad y la sangre. Nuer, Madrid 00.
Pezzotta, Alberto. Mario Bava. Milan: Il Castoro (5)
03.
Piselli, Stefano (ed.). Cinefumetto: nerosexy, fantastique,
western, saderotik: estetica pop italiana, 1960–1973.
Florence: Glittering Images, 008.
Piselli, Stefano (ed.). Eroticissimo: Uncut “cineromanzi”
sequences from rare and kinky European sexploitation
movies 1969–1973. Florence: Glittering Images, 0.
Piselli, Stefano (ed.). 1970s Italian Sexy Horror: Weirdly
Erotic Terror Movies from “Cineromanzi.” Florence:
Glittering Images, 007.
Piselli, Stefano, Riccardo Morlocchi, and Antonio Br-
uschini. Bizarre Sinema! Wildest Sexiest Weirdest
Sleaziest Films: Horror all’italiana 1957–1979. Flo-
rence: Glittering, 6.
Poppi, Roberto. Dizionario del cinema italiano. I registi.
Rome: Gremese, 00.
Poppi, Roberto, and Mario Pecorari. Dizionario del cin-
ema italiano. I film (1970–1979) (Rome: Gremese,
6.
Pugliese, Roberto. Dario Argento. Florence: Il Castoro
Cinema, La Nuova Italia, 86.
Romagnoli, Michele. L’occhio del testimone: Il cinema
di Lucio Fulci. Bologna: Granata Press, .
Santovincenzo, Leopoldo, Carlo Modesti Pauer, and
Marcello Rossi. Fantasceneggiati. Sci-fi e giallo
magico nelle produzioni Rai (1954–1987). Bologna:
Elara, 06.
Tentori, Antonio, and Cozzi, Luigi (eds.). Horror Made
In Italy. Rome: Profondo Rosso, 007.
Thrower, Stephen. Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio
Fulci. Godalming, Surrey: FAB Press () 06.
Vallan, Giulia D’Agnolo, and Della Casa, Stefano.
Mario Bava. Bellaria: Catalogo del festival Bellaria,
3.
Viganò, Aldo. Dino Risi. Milan: Moizzi Editore, 7.
Zagarrio, Vito (ed.). Argento vivo: Il cinema di Dario
Argento tra genere e autorialità. Venice: Marsilio,
008.
ESSAYS IN VOLUMES
Hunt, Leon. “A (Sadistic) Night at the Opera.” in Ken
Gelder (ed.). The Horror Reader. New York: Rout-
ledge, 000.
Mora, Teo. “Mario Bava. Il visionario filmico,” in
 Bibliography
Bertieri, Claudio and Salotti, Marco (eds.). Genova
in celluloide: I registi liguri. Genoa: Comune di Gen-
ova—Assessorato alla cultura, 84, p. 04
Paniceres, Ruben. “El gotico italiano. Fantastico y cien-
cia ficcion,” in Palacios, Jesus and Paniceres, Ruben
(eds.). Cara a cara: Una mirada al cine de genero ital-
iano. Gijon: Semana Negra, 004.
PERIODICALS—SPECIAL ISSUES
Bava, Lamberto, and Grazia Fallucchi. “Omaggio a
Mario Bava.” La Lettura, September 80.
Della Casa, Stefano (ed.). “Speciale fantastico italiano.”
Cineforum #, November 0.
Fassone, Riccardo (ed.). La stagione delle streghe. Guida
al gotico italiano: Nocturno Dossier #80, March 00.
Gomarasca, Manlio, and Davide Pulici (eds.). Eroi &
antieroi del cinema italiano: Nocturno Dossier #0,
April 003.
Gomarasca, Manlio, and Davide Pulici (eds.). Genealo-
gia del delitto: Il cinema di Mario e Lamberto Bava.
Nocturno Dossier #4, July 004.
Gomarasca, Manlio, and Davide Pulici (eds.). Joe D’Am-
ato. Guida al cinema estremo e dell’orrore: Nocturno
Dossier #78, January 00.
Gomarasca, Manlio, and Davide Pulici (eds.). Il punto
G. guida al cinema di Enzo G. Castellari: Nocturno
Dossier #66, January 008.
Gomarasca, Manlio, and Davide Pulici (eds.). Le sorelle
di Venere 2: Nocturno Dossier #5, June 007.
Gomarasca, Manlio, and Davide Pulici (eds.). Le tre
madri. Guida alla trilogia di Dario Argento: Nocturno
Dossier #64, novembre 007.
Monell, Robert. Riccardo Freda. European Trash Cin-
ema Special #, 7.
Navarro, Antonio José. “Estudio Mario Bava.” Dirigido
Por #346, June 005.
Navarro, Antonio José. “Estudio Mario Bava ().” Di-
rigido Por #347, July/August 005.
Romero, Javier G. (ed.). Antología del cine fantástico
italiano. Quatermass #7, November 008.
Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. “Mario Bava: the Illusion
of Reality.” Photon #6, January 75.
PERIODICALS—ARTICLES,
REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS
Blumenstock, Peter. “Margheriti—The Wild, Wild In-
terview.” Video Watchdog 8, May / June 5.
Bocci, Sandro. “Tendenze del ‘fantastique,’” Il Falcone
Maltese #0, marzo 74.
Carrère, Emmanuel. “La Maison de l’exorcisme.” Positif
#, November 77.
Castelli, Alfredo, and Tito Monego. “La maschera del
demonio—Intervista con Mario Bava.” Horror #,
December 6.
Ceccarelli, Lavinia. “I trucchi del mestiere: come si fa
l’horror con la trippa e la pizza / Intervista a Ando
Gilardi e Mario Bava, due tecnici dell’immagine.”
Giovane Sinistra #, March 7.
Cozzi, Luigi. “Gli artisti e gli artigiani del cinema: Mario
33
Bava, l’evocatore d’ombre,” New Cinema #, Novem-
ber 70.
Cozzi, Luigi. “Così dolce… così perverso… Intervista
con Ernesto Gastaldi.” Horror 5, April 70.
Cozzi, Luigi. “Operazione paura.” Horror 3, December
70 / January 7.
Cozzi, Luigi. “Il vampiro in orbita.” Horror 6, May
70.
Curti, Roberto. “Francesco Barilli Interview: Cinema
Between Brush Strokes,” Offscreen Vol. 5, issue
, December 0. (http://offscreen.com/view/
francesco_barilli_interview.)
Garofalo, Marcello. “Le interviste celibi: Antonio
Margheriti. L’ingegnere in Cinemascope.” Segnocin-
ema #84, March / April 7.
Garofalo, Marcello. “La tecnica e gli effetti. Le interviste
celibi: Antonio Margheriti .” Segnocinema #85,
May / June 7.
Garofalo, Marcello (ed.). “Sangue, amore e fantasy.”
Segnocinema 85, May / June 7.
Gomarasca, Manlio, and Daniele Aramu. “Renato
Polselli: il mio cinema blasfemo.” Solamente giallo:
Personaggi, luoghi e paure del giallo all’italiana 1950–
1979. Nocturno Book #7.
Ippoliti, Stefano, and Matteo Norcini. “Intervista esclu-
siva a Mario Caiano.” Cine70 e dintorni #, Spring
00.
Jones, Alan, and Mark Ashworth. “Diva Divina. The
Mariangela Giordano Story,” in Stefan Jaworzyn
(ed.). Shock Xpress #. London: Titan Books, 4.
Kessler, Christian. “Gordon Mitchell. Atlas in the Land
of Cinema.” Video Watchdog #48, 8.
Kessler, Christian. “Gunslingers, Cannibals, and More…:
An Interview with Donal O’Brien.” European Trash
Cinema #6, March 6.
Lucas, Tim. “Father of Lady Frankenstein. Mel Welles
interviewed.” Video Watchdog #78, December
00.
Lucas, Tim. “Udo Kier: Andy Warhol’s Horror Star.”
Video Watchdog Special Edition #, 5.
Lucas, Tim. “What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood
in the Scripts of Ernesto Gastaldi?,” Video Watchdog
3, May/June 7.
Matelli, Dante. “Il cinema ordinò: chiamatemi romano!,”
L’Espresso, May 7. [Interview with Mario Bava]
Mora, Teo. “Per una definizione del film di fantasmi.”
Il Falcone Maltese #, July 74.
Moullet, Luc. “La peur et la stupeur.” Cahiers du
Cinéma #486, December 4. [Mario Bava retro-
spective]
Pezzotta, Alberto. “Mario Bava. Tra finzione e realtà,”
Filmcritica #8, 84.
Pezzotta, Alberto. “Mario Bava. Tra finzione e sber-
leffo,” Duel #3, 4.
Pezzotta, Alberto. “‘Non sono mai stato un cinefilo.’ In-
tervista con Giulio Petroni.” Segnocinema #,
May/June 003.
Pironi, Gualtiero. “Quando il diavolo della teatralità
ci mette la coda…,” Cineforum #06, July–August
8.
Pulici, Davide. “Incontro con Giulio Questi.” Nocturno
Cinema #5/6, February 8.
34 Bibliography

Safad, Louis. “Un cinéaste d’outre-tombe,” Libération,
7 May 80. [77 interview with Mario Bava, pub-
lished posthumous]
Salza, Giuseppe. “Mario Bava: il brivido sottile di
crudeli leggende.” Segnocinema 3, May 84.
Talbot, Paul. “Monsters for Morrissey. The Making of
Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein & Dracula.” Video
Watchdog #8, May/June 5.
Troiano, Francesco. “Un po’ di italian horror.” Cinema
60 #65, September / October 85.
Venturelli, Renato. “Eroi senza pietà. Intervista a Mario
Lanfranchi.” in Renato Venturelli (ed.). Cinema e
generi 2010. Genoa: Le Mani, 00.
Volta, Ornella. “Entretien avec Mario Bava.” Positif #38,
May 7.

A cuore freddo (7) 0
A doppia faccia (6) 64, 77
A mosca cieca (66) 58
A qualsiasi prezzo (68) 4
Accattone (6) 6, 80
Un Accetta per la luna di miele see
Il Rosso segno della follia
Acteon (67) 6
Addessi, Giovanni 38, 3
The Addiction (6) 8
Addio fratello crudele (7) 6
Adriani, Patricia 
Un Affare tranquillo (64) 33
Afrika (73) 5
Agi Murad—Il diavolo bianco (5)
6
Agnelli, Giovanni 6, 30
Agrama, Faroul “Frank” 8, , 07
Agren, Janet , 6, 
Aguilar, Carlos 5
Ai margini della città (54) 75
Albertazzi, Giorgio , 
Alberti, Barbara 8
Alda, Robert 8
Alessandroni, Alessandro 35
Alessi, Ottavio 34
Alessia… un vulcano sotto la pelle
(77) 55
Alfaro, Italo 3
Aliprandi, Marcello 44, 45, 66–
6, 7, 8
Alla ricerca del piacere (7) 46
Allen, Woody 6
All’onorevole piacciono le donne
(7) 3, 4
Almendros, Néstor 48
Altman, Robert 33, 48
L’Altra faccia del peccato (6) 7
L’Altro inferno (80) 04
L’Altro piatto della bilancia (7)
47
Alvina, Anicée 7
Amadio, Silvio , 46, 74
L’Amante del demonio (7) , 50–
53, 7, 35, 37
L’Amante del vampiro (60) 8,
03, 04, 7, 08
L’Amante fedele (78) 6
Le Amanti del mostro (74) 06–
0, 5
Amanti d’oltretomba (65) 5
L’Amaro caso della baronessa di
Carini (75, TV mini-series)
, 30
Index
Amarsi male (6) 0
L’Ambizioso (75) 
Amendola, Mario 38, 06
L’Amica di mia madre (75) 77
L’Amico del giaguaro (5) 0
L’Amico del padrino (7) 8, 07
Amore e morte nel giardino degli dei
(7) 60
L’Amore in città (53) 0
L’Amour chez les poids lourds (78)
66
Anche per Django le carogne hanno
un prezzo (7) 
Andrei, Marcello 4, –
Andress, Ursula 68
El Ángel exterminador (6) ,
5
Un Angelo per Satana (66) 4,
0
Anima persa (77) 6–7
Anna dei miracoli (68, TV movie)
76
L’Année dernière à Marienbad (6)
4
Anni facili (57) 6
Anno uno (74) 8
Antel, Franz 36
L’Anticristo (74) 3
Antonelli, Laura 0, 0
Antonio e Placido: attenti ragazzi …
chi rompe paga (75) 77
Antonioni, Michelangelo , 46,
7, 0, 
Antropophagus (80) 
L'Apocalisse delle scimmie (0) 60
Apostolof, Stephen C. 8
Appunti su un fatto di cronaca
(50) 00
Aquila nera (46) 67, 37
Aragon, Louis 
Arcana (7) 34
L'Arcano incantatore (6) , 5,
6, 6
Archibugi, Francesca 6, 7
The Arena (74) 8
Arena, Maurizio 
Argan, Giulio Carlo 4
Argento, Dario , 4, , 4, 4, 58,
64, 76, 5, 6, 05, , 3, 4,
55, 60, 7, 74, 75, 76, 80–
87, 5, 8, 0, , 
Aricò, Ettore Elio 3, 4, 53
Arié, Bruno 5
L'Arma l’ora il movente (7) 67
35
Arnaud, Georges-Jean 78
Arpino, Giovanni 70, 7, 7
Askin, Tony [Antonio Aschini] 3
Assassination (67) 4
L'Assassino ha riservato nove
poltrone (74) 5, 0–3
Astaire, Fred 
Atadeniz, Yılmaz 4
Atav, Ayşin 6
Un Attimo di vita (75) 8
Audrey Rose (77) 
Audry, Geneviève 50, 5
Autant-Lara, Claude 3
Avallone, Marcello 5, 7–
Avati, Antonio 0, 6, 5, 63, 0
Avati, Pupi 4, 5, –3, 3–6, 0,
5, 6, 38, 3, 45, 57–63, 74,
87–0, , 4–7
L'Aventure, c’est l’aventure (7)
43
Avram, Chris 60, , 4
L'Avventura (60) 
Axén, Eva 84
Azzini, Nedo 8
Baba Yaga (73) 3
Baby Love (7) 66
Baccaro, Salvatore , 37
Il Bacio (74) , 6, 3–6
Il Bacio di una morta (74) 5
La Bacio di una morta (4) 4
La Badessa di Castro (74) 4
Baker, Carroll 3
Baker, Roy Ward 05
The Balcony (63) 5
Baldanello, Gianfranco 4
Baldassarre, Raf 40
Baldi, Ferdinando 5
Baldwin, Peter 3
Balsamus l’uomo di Satana (70)
5, –4, 4, 5, 6, 58, 6
La Bambola di Satana (6) 5
Banana Republic (7) 0
Bandidos (68) 77
Bandini, Filiberto 4
Bandini, Giorgio 4
Banfi, Lino 
Barbareschi, Luca 00
Barbieri, Francesco 78
Barilli, Francesco 4, –34, 48,
4, 6–0
Barma, Claude 0
Barnard, Christiaan 35, 70, 50
Baron Blood (7) 3, 53–57, 85, 87
36
Barros, Esmeralda 8, 
Barrymore, Christa 03, 04
Barthelme, Donald 3
Bartolani, Alberto 0
Bartolini, Claudio 4, 43
Basile, Giambattista 5
Bastelli, Cesare 5, 5
Bataille, Georges 
Báthory, Erszebét 8
Battaglia, Gianlorenzo 35
Batzella, Luigi (aka Paolo Solvay)
7, 6–, 6–, 56
Bava, Lamberto , 3, 86, 87, 8,
6, 78, 7, 03, , 7, 8
Bava, Mario , 5, 8, –3, , 33,
4, 53–57, 6, 67, 74, 76, 77, 8,
84–0, 6, , 0, 04, 3, 3,
7, 3, 45, 57, 68, 77–80,
8, 85, 88, 06, 6, , 3,
7, 8–30
Baxter, Les 54
Bazzoni, Camillo 30, 3
Bazzoni, Luigi 4, 6, 46–50, 5
Beatrice Cenci (56) 6
Beaugrand, Henry 64
Beckett, Samuel 8
Beckford, William 
Beffe, licenze et amori del De-
camerone segreto (7) 73
La Bella e la bestia (77) 3
Il Bell’Antonio (60) 4
La Belle et la Bête (46) 86
Belletti, Adolfo 5
Bellezze in bicicletta (5) 58
Belli, Agostina 76, 
Bello di mamma (8) 68
Bellocchio, Marco 4, 4
Belphégor ou le Fantôme du Louvre
(65) 0
Bene, Carmelo 7
Benigni, Roberto , 6, 6
Bennati, Giuseppe 0–3
Bennett, Joan 86
Benussi, Femi 56
Berenguer, Manuel 76
Berger, William 7, 8, 
Bergman, Ingmar 88
Bergonzelli, Sergio 55
Berkeley, Busby 8
Berlinguer ti voglio bene (77) 6
Berlusconi, Silvio 
Bernabei, Claudio , 
Bernanos, Georges 5
Berruti, Giulio 30
Bertolucci, Bernardo 84, 33
Bertolucci, Giuseppe 6, 00
La Bestia in calore (77) 7, ,
, 37
La Bestia uccide a sangue freddo
(7) 6, 65
Bestialità (76) 04
Beswick, Martine 6
La Bête (75) 3, 65
Betti, Laura , 
Betti, Ugo 67
Biagetti, Giuliano 6
Biancaneve & Co. (8) 6
Bianchi, Andrea 77, 08–
Bianchi, Mario 6, 66
Bianchi cavalli d’agosto (75) 45
Index
Bianchi Montero, Roberto 46, 68,
04, 0
Un Bianco vestito per Marialé (7)
4, 57–60
Les Biches (68) 48
Bierce, Ambrose 5, 6
The Big Shave (68) 68
Biggle, Lloyd, Jr. 7
Bildnis des Dorian Gray, Das (70)
46
Billa, Salvatore 65
La Bimba di Satana (83) 0
Birkin, Jane 94, 5, 6
Bisera, Olga 6
Bitter Moon () 8
Bixio, Franco 38, 76
Black Aphrodite (77) 66
Black Mirror (TV series) 30
Black Moon (75) 
Blade Violent—I violenti (83) 04
Blanc, Erika [Enrica Bianchi
Colombatto] 4, 60
Blasi, Silverio 
Blondell, Simone [Simonetta
Vitelli] 35, 37
Blood for Dracula (74) 3, 5, 83,
6–
Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (73)
66
Blu Gang e vissero per sempre felici e
ammazzati (73) 4
Bluebeard (7) 64
Bo, Angela 3
Boccaccio ’70 (6) 3
Boccardo, Delia 
Boccia, Tanio 5
The Body Snatcher (45) 35
Bogart, Humphrey 36–88
Bogdan, Adriana 
Il Boia scarlatto (65) 77, 7, 54
Boileau, Pierre 4
Bolchi, Sandro 5
Bollini, Flaminio 0, 
La Bolognese (74) 55
Bolognini, Mauro 4
Bona, Pietro 8
Bonini Olas, Marcello 03
La Bonne (86) 0
Bonnie and Clyde (67) 06
Bonnie e Clyde all’italiana (8)
06
Bonomi, Nardo 30
Bonuglia, Giancarlo 5
Bonuglia, Maurizio 6, 3
Bora Bora (68) 6, 48
Boratto, Caterina 3
Bordella (76) 3, 38, 63
Borel, Annik 65, 66
Borges, Jorge Luis 
Un Borghese piccolo piccolo (77)
7
Boriani, Tino 5
Borione, Pina 0, 5
Borowczyk, Walerian 3, 8, ,
65, 0
Boschero, Dominique 78, 0
Bosé, Lucia 46, 47, 8, 34
Il Boss (73) 68
Bouchet, Barbara 64, 75
Un Bounty killer a Trinità (7) 0
Boyd, Stephen 37
Boyle, Peter 43
Bradbury, Ray 5, 6
Brambati, Angela 77
Brambilla, Pietro 6, 63
Brancucci, Ernesto 66
Brandi, Walter [Walter Bigari] 8
Brandon, Michael 74, 83
Brass, Tinto 5, 
Braunsberg, Andrew 8
Brazzi, Oscar 48–50, 35, 137
Brazzi, Rossano , 48–50, 37, 4
Brescia, Alfonso 3, , 3
Brice, Pierre , 43, 44, 45
The Brides of Dracula (60) 5
Brignone, Guido 4
Bristow, Gwen 
Brocani, Franco 8, 05
Brochero, Eduardo Manzanos 74
Brooker, Charlie 30
Brooks, Mel , , 38, 4, 43,
66, 8
Broun, Charles W., Jr. 35
Browning, Tod 04
Bruce, Leo 4
Brueghel, Pieter 43
Bruni, Franco 64, 76
Bruni, Piera 56
Brusati, Franco 86
Bucceri, Gianfranco 6
Bucci, Flavio 85, 4
Bufi Landi, Aldo 6
Bugnatelli, Salvatore 74
Buio omega (7) 4, 3, 0–05
Buñuel, Juan 7
Buñuel, Luis 0, 5, , 04, 5,
8
Burton, Clarence 64
Buzzati, Dino 30, 46, 48
Byleth (il demone dell’incesto) 60–
6, 7, 73, 5
Byron, George Gordon 0, 
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 48
Il Cacciatore di squali (7) 
La Caduta degli dei (6) 
Cagliostro (4) 3
Cagliostro (75) 3
Cagné, Gil 3
Caiano, Mario 4, 7–, 48, 64, 5
Calanchi, Stefano 5
Calderoni, Rita , , 03, 04, 5,
6–, 53
Calderoni, Stella 5
Calvino, Italo , 7, 8
Calvo, José 67
Campana, Dino 4
Campana, Domenico 74, , 3
Campanini, Francesco 0
Campogalliani, Carlo 4, 58
Camus, Albert 58
Canale, Gianna Maria 85
Candelli, Stelio 7, 73, 7
Candy (68) 
Cantafora, Antonio 8, , 54
Canter, Kieran 0, 04
Canterbury proibito (7) 3
Capogna, Sergio 6
Capolicchio, Lino 60, 6, 6
Capote, Truman 33, 5

Il Cappotto di legno (8) 6
Capriccio all’italiana (68) 08
Caprioli, Vittorio 5
Cara dolce nipote (77) 0
Cardinale, Claudia 35
Cardini, Anna 04
Carnalità (74) 55
Carne bollente (87) 04
Carne per l’inferno (67) 5
Caro papà (7) 80
Caroli, Daniela 0
Carpi, Fiorenzo 5
Carpi, Pier [Arnaldo Piero Carpi]
3, 74, 
Carr, John Dickson 3
Carraro, Tino 65, 66
Carrère, Emmanuel 86
Carsten, Peter 40
Carver, Steve 
Casa Barilli (7) 00
La Casa dalle finestre che ridono
(76) 4, 0, 3, 6, 3, 45, 57–
63, 87, 8, 5, 6
Casa d’appuntamento (7) 7, 35,
36
Casa dell’amore... la polizia inter-
viene (78) 4, 53
La Casa della paura (74) 35
La Casa dell’esorcismo (75) 3, 87,
8, 78
La Casa nel tempo (8) 47, 77
La Casa nel vento dei morti (0)
0
Casanova (76) 56, 6, 7
Casapinta, Ferruccio 5
Casini, Stefania 8, 
Cassidy, Joanna 46
Cassinelli, Claudio 68, 76
Castel, Lou 58, 7, 3, 4, 5
Castellari, Enzo G. [Enzo Girolami]
5, 43, –4
Castelli, Alfredo 
Il Castello dei morti vivi (64) 33,
43, 55
Castelnuovo, Nino 0, 
Castle, William 55, 3
Cat People (4) 64, 86
Catalano, Massimo 04
Catene (4) 4
Les Cauchemars naissent la nuit
(6) 77
Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco
ovvero: Dracula in Brianza (75)
0, 38–4, 4, 07
Cavallone, Alberto , 48, 5
Cavani, Liliana 4
Cavina, Gianni 0, 3, 6, 6, 160,
8, 215, 6
Celi, Adolfo 30, 5, 6, 
Celli, Giorgio 0, 4
La Cento chilometri (5) 3
C’era una volta (67) 6
C’era una volta il West (68) 35
Ceremonia sangrienta (73) 5
Un Certo Harry Brent (70) 
Cerulli, Fernando 7, 3
Cervi, Antonio “Tonino” 4–7
Cervi, Gino 5
Cesari, Francesco 4
Cestié, Renato 45
Index
Chabrol, Claude 0, 48, 75, 4
Challenge of the Tiger see Mie jue
qi qi
La Chambre ardente (6) 3
Chaplin, Charles 0
Charlys Nichten (74) 73
Che? (7) 8, , 8
Chi l’ha vista morire? (7) 6,
3
Chi sei? (74) 46, 78
Lo chiamavano Trinità… (7) 46
Chiani, Caterina see Damon,
Marzia
Chiari, Mauro 04
Chiari, Walter 7
Chiusi, Sergio 86
Chomsky, Marvin J. 06
Christian-Jacque [Christian
Maudet] 6
Christiane F.—Wir Kinder vom
Bahnhof Zoo (8) 64
Christie, Agatha 
Christine, Katia 08, 5, 6
Cicciolina see Staller, Ilona
Cimarosa, Tano 03
Cinema!!! (7—TV series) , 4,
63
5 bambole per la luna d’agosto (70)
56, 67
5 donne per l’assassino (74) 3
5 tombe per un medium (65) , 6,
77
Cipriani, Stelvio 50, 54, 66, 46
Cirillo, Claudio 6
Citati, Pietro 86
Cittini, Alberto 8
Civinini, Sergio 48
Clarke, Robin 5
Clouzot, Henri-Georges 7, 60
Cocteau, Jean 86, 7
La Coda dello scorpione (7) 77
Col cuore in gola (67) 
Coletti, Duilio 05, 8
Colin, David, Jr. 7, 80
La Collectionneuse (67) 6
The Collector (65) 7
The College Girl Murders see Der
Mönch mit der Peitsche
Collins, Wilkie 
La Colomba non deve volare (70)
, 07
I Coltelli del vendicatore (66) 6
Colucci, Mario 45–48
Come un uragano (7) 
Comincerà tutto un mattino: io
donna, tu donna (78) 06
Commando suicida (68) 3
Concerto per pistola solista (70)
4
Congo vivo (6) 0
Constantin, Michel 3
Contamination (80) 04
Conte, Richard 5
Contes Immoraux (74) 8
La Controfigura (6) 3
Contronatura see The Unnatu-
rals—Contronatura
Controrapina (aka The Rip-Off,
78) 6
Convoi de filles (78) 55
37
Cope, Cecilia 5
Coralba (70) 48, 
Corazzari, Tonino 6
Corbucci, Bruno 38, , 06
Corbucci, Sergio 74
Corman, Roger 33, 34, 36, 37, 8,
86
I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza
carnale (73) 3
Corruzione al palazzo di giustizia
(74) 67
La Corta notte delle bambole di
vetro (7) 5
Cortese, Ernesto 
Cortese, Valentina 6, 4
Cosa avete fatto a Solange? (7)
64, 68, 3
Così… così… più forte (70) 05
Costanzo, Maurizio 8
Cotten, Joseph , 34, 36, 55, 6
Count Dracula (70) 0
Countess Dracula (7) 8
Courbet, Gustave 05
Coward, Noël 
Cozzi, Luigi 83, 04, 05
Craven, Wes 0
Crepax, Guido 3
Crescete e moltiplicatevi (73) 4
La Cripta e l’incubo (64) , 
Crisanti, Gabriele 0
Crispino, Armando 6, 4–44,

Crispo, Diana 5
Cronaca di un amore (50) 46
Cugine mie (76) 6
Cuomo, Alfredo 60
Cuore (48) 8
Cuore (73) 60
Cushing, Harry 34, 5, 53
Czemerys, Eva , 3
Da uomo a uomo (67) 3
D’Agata, Giuseppe 0
Dagli archivi della polizia criminale
(73) 5, 5
Dagobert (84) 37
Dahl, Roald 6
Dali, Fabienne 56, 57
Dalí, Salvador 5
Dalla, Lucio 0, 0, 0, 0
Dallamano, Massimo 64, 68, 77,
44–46
Dallesandro, Joe 80, 8, 8, 83, 7,
8, , 
La Dama dei veleni (7, TV mini-
series) , 3
La Dama rossa uccide sette volte
(7) 5, 4, 6–64
D’Amato, Joe see Massaccesi, Aris-
tide
Damiani, Amasi 3, 
Damiani, Damiano 65, 86, 4
Damon, Mark , 6, 7, 8, 
Damon, Marzia [Caterina Chiani]
6, 05, 5, 56
Dana, Rod 34
Danning, Sybil 64
D’Anza, Daniele , 0, , ,
4, 5, 6
Danza macabra (64) , 3, 38, 3,
38
40, 47, 5, 73, 86, 88, , 7, 3,
68, 7, 7, 0, 
Darc, Mireille 3
Dard, Frédéric 75
Darel, Dominique 8
Darni, William 03
D’Avack, Massimo 3
Da Verona, Guido 4
Davila, Francesca Romana [Enza
Sbordone] 
Davis, Bette 86, 8
Davoli, Ninetto 43
Dawn of the Dead (78) 0
Dawn of the Mummy (8) 8
Dawson, Anthony M. see
Margheriti, Antonio
Dazzi, Tommaso 7, 8, 00
Deacon, Brian 6
Dead of Night (45) 8
De Amicis, Edmondo 60
De Benedetti, Carlo 6
De Benedittis, Laura 5
Il Decameron (7) 80, 03
Decamerone proibito (7) 73
De Carolis, Cinzia 76
De Concini, Ennio 5
De Filippo, Peppino 3
De Fonseca, Carolynn 
De Funès, Isabelle 3
Degli Esposti, Francesco 34
De Gregori, Francesco 0
De Laurentiis, Aurelio 74
De Laurentiis, Dino 80
De Laurentiis, Luigi 74
Del Balzo, Raimondo 45
Del Cile, Cleofe 5
Del Grosso, Remigio 58
Deliria (87) 
Delirio caldo (7) 34, 03, 3, 4
Il Delitto del diavolo—Favola
thrilling (70) 4–6, 3, 0
Deliverance (7) 75, 3
Delle Piane, Carlo 5, 8, 215, 6
Delli Colli, Franco 0, 46, 6
Dell’Orso, Edda 5
Delon, Alain 3
Delon, Nathalie 68, 6
Delvaux, André 5
De Marchi, Emilio 4
De Martino, Alberto 3, 4, 3
Demick, Irina 67
Il Demonio (63) 57
Les Démons (7) 40
Demons of the Mind (7) 7
De Nardo, Gustavo 56
De Nerval, Gérard 7
Deneuve, Catherine 33, 7
Deodato, Ruggero 6, 8, 5, 5
De Ossorio, Amando 45
Le Deportate della sezione speciale
SS (76) 64
De Quincey, Thomas 8, 85, 86
De Rosa, Mario 56
De Rossi, Massimo 5
De Rossi, Patrizia 56, 0
De Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-
François 58, 86
De Santis, Giuseppe 6
De Sica, Christian 3,
De Sica, Vittorio 00, 8, 6, 8
Index
Un Detective (6) 3
De Toth, André 56, 6
Les Deux orphelines (65) 65
I Devastati (57) 58
Diabla see Sensività
Le Diable au corps (47) 3
Diabolicamente… Letizia (75) 74
Diabolik (68) 3, , 80
Les Diaboliques (55) 7, 60
I Diafanoidi vengono da Marte
(66) 83
Diario di un vizio (3) 0
Diario di una schizofrenica (68)
48
Diario segreto da un carcere fem-
minile (73) 64
Il Diavolo nella bottiglia (8, TV
movie) 7
Di Bella, Fausto 
Dick, Philip K. 6
Di domenica (63) 48
Dieci italiani per un tedesco (6)
43
Diffring, Anton 5
Di Giovanni, Gastone 4
Di Lazzaro, Dalila 7, 81, 8, 84
Di Leo, Fernando 6, 46, 7, 0,
03, , 33, 65
Dillman, Bradford 
Di Lorenzo, Edward 34, 35
Dionisio, Silvia 68, 8
Il Dipinto (74, TV mini-series)
74, , 3
Di Silvestro, Rino 63–66
Disney, Walt 54, 8, 86
Disperati, Giuliano 30, 3
Divisione Folgore (54) 05
Dmytryk, Edward 64
Docteur Justice (75) 6
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (3) ,
06
Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (7) 05
D’Offizi, Sergio 5
Dogan, Antonella 64
Dogtags (87) 60
Dolce pelle di donna (78) , 53
La Dolce vita (60) , 6, 54, 
Dolfin, Giorgio , 3
Una Domenica d’estate (6) 3
La Domenica specialmente ()
00
Il Dominatore del deserto (64) 5
Donaggio, Pino 6
Donati, Ermanno 0
Donati, Sergio 4
La Donna del lago (65) 4
Una Donna per tutti () 04
Don’t Look Now (73) 6, 46, 68,
6, 75, 5
Doré, Gustave 6
Doria, Sergio 3
Dorian, Max 03
Doriana Grey (75) 
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 86
Dottor Jekyll e gentile signora (7)
05–08
Douglas, Kirk 
Dracula cerca sangue di vergine e…
morì di sete!!! see Blood for
Dracula
Dreyer, Carl Theodor 60
Due occhi diabolici (0) 86, 4
Duel (7) 4
Dunn, Michael 36, 37
Durbridge, Francis 0, 
Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 5
Duru, Yılmaz 0, 6
Duvivier, Julien 3
E Dio disse a Caino… (70) 38
E per tetto un cielo di stelle (68)
3
E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà, …
(8) , 04
Easy Rider (6) 5
Ecce Homo (67) 58
Eco, Umberto 6
Edwards, Blake 30
8 ½ (63) 0
Ekberg, Anita 3
Ellin, Stanley 5, 6
Elmi, Nicoletta 55, 8, 45
Emmer, Luciano 0
Enfantasme (78) 0–
Enigma rosso (78) 3
Enrico IV (84) 4
Ensayo de un crimen (55) 0, 04
Erberto Carboni (8) 00
Ercole al centro della terra (6) 56
Erika (7) 43, 44, 45
The Erotic Dreams of Cleopatra
(85) 66
Erotic Flash (8) 04
Erotico 2000 (8) 06
Escher, Maurits Cornelis 84, 86
Escrivá, Javier 5
L'Esorciccio (75) 8
ESP (73, TV mini-series) 74, 
Estratto dagli archivi segreti della
polizia di una capitale europea
(7) , 65–6
Il était une fois un flic (7) 3
L'Etrusco uccide ancora (7) 4,

Eugenie … The Story of Her Journey
Into Perversion (6) 4
Eva, la venere selvaggia (68) 36
The Evil Dead (8) 05
Evil Dead II (87) 47, 05
Ewers, Hanns Heinz 4
Ewing, Loren 37
The Exorcist (73) 3, 5, 55, 60, 68,
8, 06, 44, , 0
Fabbri, Nanni 5
Fabbri, Ottavio 0, 04
Fago, Giovanni 3
Fai in fretta a uccidermi… ho
freddo! (67) 
Fajardo, Eduardo 86, 88
La Familia Vourdalak (75, TV
movie) 77
Fanetti, Pasquale 04
Fanfoni, Vittorio 04
Fango bollente (75) 
Fani, Leonora 00, , 3
Fanon, Frantz 5
Fantasia erotica in concerto (85)
06
Fantasma d’amore (8) 
 Index 3

Fantozzi (75) 43, 06 Fotre, Vincent 54 Gassman, Paola 4

Farina, Corrado 4, 5, –3
Farmer, Mimsy 3, 33, 78, 8
Farmer, Philip José 06
Farrow, John 75
Farrow, Mia 
Il Fascino dell’insolito—Itinerari
dalla letteratura gotica alla fanta-
scienza (80–8, TV series)
34, 5–7
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 4
Fassio, Stefania 04
Fate la nanna coscine di pollo (77)

Il Fauno di marmo (77, TV mini-
series) 
Fear in the Night (47) 77
The Fearless Vampire Killers (67)
3, , 40
Fehmiu, Bekim 3
Feldman, Marty 55
Felicità perduta (46) 43
Felisatti, Massimo 4, 4
Fellini, Federico 0, , 3, 5, 6,
8, , 3, 0, 43, 53, 54, 56,
6, 6, 7, 7, , 6, , 4
Fellini—Satyricon (6) , 5, 7
Femina ridens (6) 6, 
Fenech, Edwige 78, 7, 07
Fenelli, Mario 48
Ferrara, Abel 8
Ferrari, Paolo 
Ferreol, Andréa 04
Ferreri, Marco 30, 5, 00, 38, 7
Ferri, Gaetano 53, 54
Ferroni, Giorgio 74–77, 57, 58
Ferzetti, Gabriele , 76
Festa Campanile, Pasquale 6, 6
Fidani, Demofilo 74
Fiedler, Leslie 33
Field, Karin 3
Fierro, Jole 8
I Figli di nessuno (74) 5
Il Figlio della sepolta viva (74) 5
Il Figlio di Dracula (60) 30
Filippone, Edoardo 
Filippou, Pavlos 66
Il Filo e il labirinto (7) 5
Finché c’è guerra c’è speranza (74)
6
La Fine dell’innocenza (76) 46
Un Fiocco nero per Deborah (74)
4, –
Fisher, Kay 05
Fisher, Terence 30
Fisichella, Enzo 0, 0
Flesh (68) 80
The Flesh and the Fiends (60) 34
Flesh for Frankenstein (73) 3, 5,
34, 35, 80–84, 7, 8, , 03
Fletcher, Lucille 5
Flynn, John 46
Fondato, Paolo 5
Ford, John (film director) 06
Ford, John (playwright) 6
Forlai, Romolo 03
Formula 1—La febbre della velocità
(78) 0
Forsyth, Stephen 0, , 3
Fotografando Patrizia (84) 0
Foucault, Michel 76
The Fox (67) 48
Fracchia la belva umana (8) 06
Fragasso, Claudio 04
Fraile, Francisco 67
Francesco d’Assisi (66) 4
Franchi, Franco 4
Franciosa, Anthony 38
Franciosa, Massimo 4
Francis, Anne 86, 87
Francis, Freddie 57, 36
Franco, Francisco 4
Franco, Jesús “Jess” 34, 37, 40, 4,
50, 6, 0, 5, 55, 57, 77, 4,

Franju, Georges 57, 5
Frankenstein all’italiana (75) ,
4–44
Frankenstein ’80 (7) 6–7, ,
35, 50
Frankenstein 1970 (58) 70
Frankenstein 2000—Ritorno dalla
morte () 04
Fratter, Roger 0
Fraulein Doktor (6) 6
Frazzi, Andrea 6
Frazzi, Antonio 6
Freaks (3) 04
Freda, Jacqueline 66, 6
Freda, Riccardo , 6, 8, 0, , 8,
30, 33, 56, 58, 60, 6, 64, 65–6,
77, 87, 0, 3, 6, , 37, 74,
75, 0
Freixas, Ramón 
Freud, Sigmund 40, 3, 45, 4,
85, 8
Friedkin, William 3, 68
Frizzi, Fabio 76
Fröbe, Gert 75
La Frusta e il corpo (63) , 3,
80, 30
Fruttero, Carlo , 
Fuchsberger, Joachim 40
Fulci, Lucio 3, 4, 6, 47, 75, 3, ,
38–4, 4, 57, 7–77, 8,
0, 04, 5
Furia, Oddone 53
Furneaux, Yvonne 6
Fux, Herbert 34, 35
La Gabbia (85) 0
Gabin, Jean 6
Gaburro, Bruno 5, 
Gagliardo, Giovanna 7, 8
Gainsbourg, Serge 5, 6, 
Galli, Ida (aka Evelyn Stewart/Ewe-
lyn Stuart) 6, 5
Galli, Maïténa 50
Gallone, Carmine 84
Gamma (76, TV mini-series) 
Garboli, Cesare 7, 8, , 30
Gardenia, Vincent 
Gariazzo, Mario 3, 37, 45
Garko, Gianni 75, 76, 76, 3
Garofalo, Franco 05
Garrone, Matteo 6
Garrone, Sergio , 06–0, 4–
6, 86
Gaslini, Giorgio 76
Gassman, Vittorio 7, 7
Gastaldi, Ernesto 78, 7, 4, 74
Gastoni, Lisa 4
Gatti, Gengher 5, 
Il Gatto a nove code (7) 76
Il Gattopardo (63) 6, 67
Gaudenzi, Franco 0, 7, 8
Gebissen wird nur nachts - das Hap-
pening der Vampire (7) 57
Geleng, Antonello 46
Geminus (6) 0
Gemma, Giuliano 4
Gemser, Laura 68
Genberg, Mia 46
Genberg, Pia 46
Genet, Jean 5
Genova a mano armata (76) 6
Genoveffa di Brabante (64) 0
Ghia, Dana 5
Ghini, Massimo 6
Ghione, Riccardo 4, –0
Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (66)
37
Giacomelli, Mario 
Giallo a Venezia (7) 0
Giancaro, Maria Pia 64
Giannini, Giancarlo 0
Gianviti, Roberto 74
I Giardini del diavolo (7) 54
Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini (70)
6
Gicca Palli, Lorenzo “Enzo” 37,
04
Gide, André 58
Gilling, John 34
Gimpera, Teresa 76
Ginzburg, Natalia 8
I Giochi del diavolo (Storie fantas-
tiche dell’Ottocento) (8, TV
mini-series) 6, 7, 8
Un Gioco per Eveline (7) 7–
Giordan, Ivana 3
Giordana, Marco Tullio 00
Giordano, Daniela 7, 8, 
Giordano, Mariangela 0, 0
Giordano, Paolo 48
Giorgi, Eleonora 6, 3
Giornata nera per l’ariete (7) 6,
48, 4
Giorni da leone (00) 00
Il Giorno del giudizio (7) 37
Giovannini, Maria 56
Il Giovedì (64) 7
The Girl in Room 2A (74) 35, 36
Girod, Francis 04
Girolami, Marino 43, 0, 06
Girotti, Massimo 55, 6, 0, 
Gita scolastica (83) 8
Giulietta degli spiriti (65) 
Giurato, Blasco 
Giuseppe Verdi (000) 00
Gizzi, Claudio 8, 84
Gobbi, Sergio 0–
Godard, Jean-Luc 3, 58, 56
Gordon, Phyllis 64
Gottlieb, Franz Josef 37
Goytisolo, Juan 48
Granata, Graziella 7
Grand, Giorgio 04
40
La Grande Bouffe (73) 7, 04
Il Grande duello (7) 8
Il Grande racket (76) 
La Grande scrofa nera (7) 75
Granger, Farley 46
Granger, Stewart 8
Grapow, Jobst 5
Grau, Jorge 5, 6, 6, 8, 
Gravina, Carla 3, 0
Gravy, Claudia 6
Grazie zia (68) 4
Grazzini, Giovanni 5, 4
Gregoretti, Ugo 7
Grimaldi, Alberto 80, 8
Gritos en la noche (6) 5
Guardamagna, Dante 0
Guarnieri, Ennio 
Guerra, Tonino 8, 00
Guerrieri, Lorenza 06, 43
Guerrieri, Romolo 3, , 3
Guerrini, Mino 0
Guglielmi, Marco 
Guillermin, John 80
Guyon, Jean-Paul 
Haber, Alessandro 4
Un Hacha para la luna de miel see
Il Rosso segno della follia
Hackett, Pat 8
Hakan, Fikret 50
Hands of the Ripper (7) 45
Hanna D. – La ragazza del Vondel
Park (84) 64
Hanno cambiato faccia, … (7) 4,
5, 7, –3, 0, 3
Hargitay, Mickey , 34, 35, 36, 03
Harper, Jessica 181, 8
Harrison, Richard 6, 
Hatchet for the Honeymoon see Il
Rosso segno della follia
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 5, 4, 
Heat (7) 80
Hedman, Marina 76
Herzog, Werner 8
Heyes, Douglas 86
Hill, Craig 76
Hill, Terence [Mario Girotti] 36
Hillinger, Wolfgang 
Histoires extraordinaires (68) 8
Hitchcock, Alfred , 37, 4, 77,
03, 05
Hitler, Adolf 83, 85
Hitler: The Last Ten Days (73) 5
Ho incontrato un’ombra (74) 
Hoffmann, E.T.A. 0, 6, 0,
6, 7, 8
Hölderlin, Friedrich 7
Holmes, John 04
Holocaust (78, TV mini-series)
06
Holocaust parte seconda: i ricordi, i
deliri, la vendetta (78) 06
Holocaust 2000 (77) 
Holt, Joel 35
Holt, Seth 5
Hooper, Geraldine 7, 3
Hooper, Tobe 0
Hopper, Dennis 5
Horror (63) 4
Horror of Dracula (58) 30
Index
Horror of Frankenstein (70) 34 Karina, Anna 86
Hough, John 7 Karlatos, Olga 68
The Hound of the Baskervilles (5) Karloff, Boris 35
5 Kartal, Kazım 4
The Hound of the Baskervilles (78) Kasché, Renate 36
 Katarsis (63) 5
House of Wax (53) 56 Katz, Raoul 5
The House on Haunted Hill (5) Keaton, Camille , 67, 68, 05, 06
55, 3 Keller, Hiram 5
Hoven, Adrian 57 Kelley, DeForest 77
Hundar, Robert [Claudio Undari] Kenton, Erle C. 36
46 Kessler, Christian 7, 06, 5
Huston, John 30 Kezich, Tullio 68, 7, 6
I Spit on Your Grave (78) 68 Kier, Udo 81, 8, 84, 7, 8, 65,
Iconockaut (76) 3 85
L'Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco (7) King, Stephen 4, 7
65, 67, 3, 65 King Kong (76) 80
Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde Kinski, Klaus 38, 3, 40, 4, 91, ,
(68) 57 3, 07, 08, 0, 5, 48
Images (7) 33 Klimovsky, León 75, 76
Immagini di un convento (7) 0 Klossowski, Pierre 86
In quella casa Buio omega see Buio Knight, Arthur 35
omega Koch, Howard W. 70
Gli Indifferenti (6)  Koch, Marianne 3
Koscina, Sylva 48, 4, 86, 87, 88,
Indizio fatale ()  8, 4
Infascelli, Carlo 5 Kraft, Evelyne 37
Inferno (80) 4, 3, 84, 85, 86, Krüger, Hardy 68
8 Kümel, Harry 8
L'Ingenua (75) 4 Kuntsmann, Doris 94, 5
Ingrassia, Ciccio 8, 4 Kuveiller, Luigi 7
Ingrid sulla strada (73)  Kyra la signora del lago see Sensiv-
The Innocents (6) 78 ità
Innocenza e turbamento (74) 46
Interno di un convento (78) 0 Labbra di lurido blu (75) 4
Interrabang (6) 6 Labbra rosse (60) 
Invernizio, Carolina 6, 4, 5, 6 Lado, Aldo 5, 5, 6
Isabella, duchessa dei diavoli (6) Lady Dracula (77) 37
 Lady Frankenstein (7) , 3–37,
Isbert, Tony 68 5, 70
Işık, Ayhan 07, 5, 6 Laennec, Katell [Cornely Pascale
La Isla de la muerte (67) 33 Sylvie] 0
L'Isola delle svedesi (68)  Lafond, Frank 6
Israel, Víctor 4 Lafond, Muriel 30
L'Italia s’è rotta (76) 08 La Lama nel corpo (66) 4
Ivaldi, Angelo 5, 6 Landolfi, Tommaso 3
Ivaldi, Mauro 77 Landru (6) 0
Ivanna (70) 5 Lanfranchi, Mario 3, 3–6
Lang, Fritz 8, 86
James, Henry 55, 6, 67, 68, 0, Last Cut (7) 
7, 8 The Last Porno Flick (74) 66
James, Montague Rhode 5, 6 Lastretti, Adolfo 68
Jannacci, Enzo 38 Latimore, Frank 6
Jarry, Alfred  Lattuada, Alberto 6, 0
Jazz Band (78, TV mini-series) Lattuada, Laura 3
63, 8, 4 The Laughing Policeman (73) 46
Je t’aime moi non plus (76)  Laurenti, Fabrizio 
Jekyll (6) , ,  Lauricella, Pippo 5
Jesi, Furio 7 Lautner, Georges 3
Jessua, Alain 0 Lavagnino, Angelo Francesco 6,
Job, Enrico 8 47
Johnny Yuma (66)  Lavi, Daliah 
Johnson, Richard 45, 46 Lavia, Gabriele 7, 0, 5
Jourdan, Louis 86 Law, John Phillip 60, 68, 6, 3
Juerging, Arno 8, 7, 8 Le Bar, Bob 7
Jung, Carl Gustav 48 The Legacy (78) 86
Legend of Hell House (73) 80
Kakkientruppen (77) 43 La Leggenda del Piave (5) 67
Kaput Lager—Gli ultimi giorni delle La Leggenda del rubino malese
S.S. (77)  (85) 6

La Leggenda di Fra Diavolo (6)
6
Lelouch, Claude 43
Lenzi, Umberto 6, 5, 64, 3
Leonardo, Enzo 0, 4
Leoncini, Leonida 
Leone, Alfred 54, 55, 56, 85, 86, 88,
8
Leone, Sergio 35
Leoni, Roberto 6, 0
Leonor (75) 7
The Leopard Man (53) 56
Leroy, Philippe 6, 47, 66, 4
Lesoeur, Marius 
Lettieri, Al 3
Levi, Paolo 
Lewis, Herschell Gordon 70, 
Liberatore, Tanino 0
Liberatore, Ugo 6, 68
Libidine (7) 76
Libido (65) 7
Liebes lager (76) 04
Ligabue, Antonio 6
Il Limbo (67) 0
Liofredi, Marco 8
Lionello, Alberto 0
Lionello, Oreste 6
Lisa and the Devil see Lisa e il di-
avolo
Lisa e il diavolo (73) 3, 56, 67, 77,
84–0, 3, 7, 7, 85, 03
The Little Shop of Horrors (60)
33
Livi, Piero 3
Lizzani, Carlo 4, 0, 4, 63, 4
Lo ammazzò come un cane… ma lui
rideva ancora (7) 05
Lo Bianco, Tony 6
Lobravico, Carol 8, 
Lo Cascio, Franco 3, 06
Le Locataire (76) 4
Lombardo, Paolo 50–53, 73, 5
Lombroso, Cesare 64
Lonely Lady (83) 04
López, Charo 77
Lorre, Peter 77
Lourcelles, Jacques 8
Love, Lucretia , 3
Love Birds—Una strana voglia d’a-
mare (6) 8, 48
Lovecchio, Raoul 03
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips 6, 85,
, 4, 5, 6
Lovelock, Ray 5, 6
LSD (70) 58
Luca il contrabbandiere (80) 3
Lucas, Tim , 3, 57
Luce rossa (7) 06
Lucentini, Franco , 
Una Lucertola con la pelle di donna
(7) 6, 3, 75, 76
Lucisano, Fulvio 44, 78
Ludwigg, Jean 7
La Lunga spiaggia fredda (7) 7
Lunga vita alla signora (87) 3
I Lunghi capelli della morte (64)
6
La Lupa mannara (76) 63–66
Luppi, Aureliano 34
Luttazzi, Lelio 5
Index
Macabro (80) 6, 03
Macario, Erminio 54
Macchie solari (75) 6, 4, 44
Maccione, Aldo 142, 43
Maccoppi, Antonio 7
MacRae, Henry 64
Madeleine—Anatomia di un incubo
(74) 68, 0, 74
Maesso, José Gutiérrez 66, 8
Les Magiciens (aka Death Rite, 75)
75
Magni, Luigi 0
Magnolia, Lorenzo 0
Magnus [Roberto Raviola] 0
Magritte, René 86
Maietto, Carlo 
Maiolini, Paola 5
Majano, Anton Giulio 
Mal [Paul Bradley Courling] 44
Malabestia (78) 
Malabimba (7) 08–
Maladolescenza (77) 33, 0
Maladonna (84) 
Maldera, Roberto 4, 75
Malenka, la sobrina del vampiro
(6) 45
Malfatti, Marina 4, 64, 7, 0,
0, 
Le Malizie di Venere (6) 46
Malle, Louis 
Malocchio (75) 68
Malombra (4) 45, 0
Malù e l’amante () 04
Mamoulian, Rouben , 06
A Man Called Horse (70) 3
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(34) 37, 77
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(56) 37
Manaos (80) 
Mancini, Carla 60, 77, , 3, 4
Mancini, Mario 6–7, 35
Mancori, Guglielmo 38
Mancori, Sandro 38
Mandará, Lucio 0
Mandiargues, André Pieyre de ,
, 
Manera, Gianni 6, 5
Manfredi, Nino 86
Mangione, Giuseppe 58, 5
Mania (74) –4, 53
Mann, Thomas , 0
Manni, Ettore 68, 56
Manning, Bruce 
La Mano che nutre la morte (74)
08, 0, 4–6
La Mano della morta (4) 4
La Mano indemoniata (8, TV
movie) 7, 8
Mansfield, Jayne 35
La Mansión de la niebla (7) 5
Maraini, Dacia 80
Marano, Ezio 5
Marchesini, Mauro 7
Marciano, Francesca 58, 160, 8
Marcovaldo (70, TV mini-series)

Marcovecchio, Aldo 43, 45
Marcuse, Herbert 30, 3
Marescalchi, Mariagrazia 6
4
La Marge (76) 
Margheriti, Antonio (aka Anthony
M. Dawson) , 3, 5, 37–40, 46,
73, 8, 3–6, , 8, 
Margheriti, Edoardo 5
Mariani, Luigi 74
Mariani, Marco 3
Marletta, Franco 73
Marnie (64) 
Marotta, Franco 45
Marquand, Christian 
Marquand, Richard 86
Marquis De Sade’s Justine (68) 34
Marraccini, Dante 8
Marsh, Ray 66
Martin, Karlheinz 67
Martinková, Susanna 3
Martino, Luciano 7
Martino, Sergio 60, 68, 77–7, 3
Martino, Walter 80
Marx, Barbara 35
Marx, Harpo 06
Marzano, Barbara 0
La Maschera del demonio (60)
0, , 45, 55, 56, 67, , 6, 84,

Mascitti, Iolanda 8, 
Maselli, Francesco 0, 
Masi, Marco 5, 53
Masino, Paola 
The Mask (6) 44
Massaccesi, Aristide 67, 0–3, 7–
, 67, 0–05, 0, 0
Mastriani, Francesco 4
Mastrocinque, Camillo , 4, 
Mastroianni, Ruggero 
Matarazzo, Raffaello 4
Mattei, Bruno 8, 66, 0, 04
Mattei, Giuseppe 8
Una Mattina come le altre (8)
00
Mattoli, Mario 54
Maulini, Giorgio 85
Maupassant, Guy 33, 7
Mauri, Roberto 68, 8, 7, 36, 74
Maya (8) 
Mayans, Antonio , 3
La Mazurka del barone, della santa
e del fico fiorone (75) 3, 6,
0, 38, 58
Mazzamauro, Anna 43
Mazzei, Francesco 67
McCarthy, Kevin 77
McLeod, Norman Z. 06
Il Medaglione insanguinato (Per-
ché?!) (75) 3, 44–46
Medici, Gianni 46
Il Medium (80) 74
Melato, Mariangela 24, 6, 58
Méliès, Georges 7, 86
Melikov, Arif 6
Melissa (66) 48
Mell, Marisa 4, 5
Menczer, Erico 8
Mercanti, Pino 4
Mercier, Michèle 38, 3
Merenda, Luc 8, 00
Méril, Macha 74
Mérimée, Prosper 0, 7, 8,
, 30
4
Merino, José Luis 5
Merli, Silvana 66
Il Merlo maschio (7) 6
Méténier, Oscar 5
Metti, una sera a cena (6) 6
Meyrinck, Gustav 
Miami Vice (84–8, TV series)
34
Micheli, Elio 6
Microscopic Liquid Subway to Obliv-
ion (70) 3
Mie jue qi qi (80) 
Migliorini, Romano 74, 77, 85
Mikels, Ted V. 66
Mil sexos tiene la noche (8) 77
Milano odia: la polizia non può
sparare (74) 6
Miles, Vera 03
Milian, Tomas 3, 4
Milland, Ray 55
Mille, Giorgio 0
Mimì Metallurgico ferito nell’onore
(7) 76
Ming, ragazzi! (73) 
Minnelli, Liza 8
Minnelli, Vincente 
Il Mio amico Jekyll (60) 06
Mirabella, Michele 8
Miraglia, Emilio 5, 40–4, 6–64
Mitchell, Cameron 33
Mitchell, Gordon , 5, 7, 05, 06,
3, , 35, 37, 5, 5, 53
Modesto, Sam 04
Modigliani, Francesca 3
Moffo, Anna 5
La Moglie più bella (70) 86
Moncada, Santiago 0, , , 7
Der Mönch mit der Peitsche (67)
64
Mondo erotico—Inchiesta n. 8 (73)
45
I Mongoli (6) 6
Monicelli, Mario 0, 38, 7
Monreale, Cinzia 0, 04
Monsieur Verdoux (47) 0
Montagnana, Luisa 4
Montefiori, Luigi 8
Montero, Roberto see Bianchi
Montero, Roberto
Monti, Maria 76
Monti, Silvia 6
Monty, Mike 56
Mora, Teo 40
Morante, Elsa 8
Morante, Massimo 04
Moravia, Alberto 8, 00, 
Mordi e fuggi (73) 8
Morgens bis mitternacht, Von (0)
67
Moro, Aldo 3, 4, 80
Morricone, Ennio 4, 4
Morrissey, Paul 3, 5, 80–84, 6–
, 03
Morte a passo di valzer (7, TV
mini-series) 3
Morte a Venezia (7) 8
La Morte accarezza a mezzanotte
(7) 3, 74
La Morte cammina coi tacchi alti
(7) 3
Index
La Morte ha sorriso all’assassino
(73) 67, 0–3, 7, 0, 0
La Morte negli occhi del gatto (73)
3, 8, 3–6
La Morte non conta i dollari (67)
0
La Morte risale a ieri sera (70) 
La Morte scende leggera (7) 6,
7–74
Moschin, Gastone 4
Il Mostro (77) 80
Il Mostro dell’opera (64) 03, ,
4
Il Mostro di Venezia (65) 5
Il Mostro è in tavola, barone...
Frankenstein see Flesh for
Frankenstein
Moullet, Luc 3, 87
Movie Rush—La febbre del cinema
(76) 0
Il Mulino delle donne di pietra
(60) 74, 76
Muller, Paul , 35, 36, 66, 67
Müller Loeb Casella, Yvonne 8
Murder Obsession (8) , , 3,
58, 67, 68, 
Murgia, Pier Giuseppe 0
Musante, Tony 0
Musoduro (53) 0
Mussetto, Giambattista 74, 77
Musumarra, Romano 84
Muti, Ornella 86, 3
Nabokov, Vladimir 0, 7
Nada (74) 4
The Name of the Game (TV series)
38
Nana, Aïché 
Narcejac, Thomas 4
Naschy, Paul [Jacinto Molina] 8
Natale, Roberto 77, 85
Natoli, Luigi 4
Nebbia, Franco 40
Necropolis (70) 8, 05
Negri, Giulio Giuseppe 4
Nel labirinto del sesso—Psichidion
(6) 3
Nel nome del padre (7) 4
Nell, Krista [Doris Kristanell] 7,
8, 56
Nella città vampira (78) 4
Nella stretta morsa del ragno (7)
3, 37–40, 86, 4, 6
Nelle pieghe della carne (70) 55
Nelli, Piero 7, 8
Neri, Rosalba , 33, 34, 35, 5, 53,
8, 
Nero, Franco 4, 67, 75, 0, 3
Nero veneziano (78) 68
Nerosubianco (6) 5
Nicolai, Bruno 4, 64, 78, 3
Nicolodi, Daria 7, 8, 83
Nietzsche, Friedrich 86
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (48)
75
Night of the Living Dead (68) 76
Nightmare (56) 77
Nightmare (8) 58, 60
Nightmares in a Damaged Brain see
Nightmare (8)
99 Women (68) 34, 6
No profanar el sueño de los muertos
(74) 6, 
La Noche de Walpurgis (70) 76
Nocita, Salvatore 
Nodier, Charles 3
Non commettere atti impuri (7)
4
Non è mai troppo tardi (53) 43
Non si sevizia un paperino (7)
75, 4, 57, 75
Nosferatu () 4, 0
Nosferatu (7) 8
La Notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba
(7) 5, 40–4, 64
La Notte dei dannati (7) , 2, 43–
45, 46, 48, 73, 06
La Notte dei diavoli (7) 68, 74–
77, 57
La Notte dei serpenti (6) 4
Le Notti del terrore (8) 77, 0
Le Notti di Cabiria (57) 
Novak, Harry 36, 37
Nuda per Satana (74) , 3, 6–

Nude per l’assassino (75) 0
Nunes, José María , 3
Nusciak, Loredana 46
Oasis of the Zombies (8) 55
O’Brien, Donal 06
L'Occhio dietro la parete (77) 6
L'Occhio nel labirinto (7) 64
Odoardi, Giorgio 
Oggi a me… domani a te! (68) 5
Oliver, Robert Harrison 7, 35, 37
Oliveros, Ramiro 35
Olizzi, Lidia 56
Olmi, Ermanno 3
Un’Ombra nell’ombra (7) 74
Ombre roventi (70) 4, 7–, 74
The Omen (76) 
Omicidio per vocazione (68) 77
Omicron (63) 7
O’Neill, Jennifer 0, 75, 76
Onions, George Oliver 4
Opera (87) , 86
Operazione notte (57) 0
Operazione paura (66) 0, , 3,
8, 55, 56, 5, 77, 87, 88, 0, 7,
57, 30
Orano, Alessio 86, 87
Ordine firmato in bianco (75) 5
Orfei, Moira 5, 4
La Orgía nocturna de los vampiros
(73) 75
Orgy of the Dead (65) 8
Orlandi, Ferdinando 5
Orlando, Orazio 3
Le Orme (75) 4, 46–50, 75, 7
L'Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock
(6) 8, 5, 75, 4
Gli Orrori del castello di Norimberga
see Baron Blood
Ortese, Anna Maria 7
Orth, Jacques 04
Ortolani, Riz 38, 6
Oscenità (80) 3, 4
L'Osceno desiderio—Le pene nel
ventre (78) –5

L'Ossessa (74) 3, 68, 0
Osterman, Enrico 3
The Others (00) 6
Ottoni, Filippo 75
The Outfit (73) 46
Owen, Harold 5
Özipek, Güzin 4
Özkaracalar, Kaya 6
La Padrona è servita (76) 6
Il Paese del sesso selvaggio (7)
3
Pagani, Amedeo 8
Pagliai, Ugo 64, 0, , , 3
Paladino, Cesare 
Palance, Jack 7, 4
Pallanch, Luca 7
Pallardy, Jean-Marie 66
Pallottini, Riccardo 35
Paluzzi, Luciana 8, 68
Pampanini, Silvana 58
Pamphili, Mirella 6
Pane e cioccolata (74) 86
Pani, Corrado 4
Pannacciò Elo [Angelo Pannaccio]
04–06
Papa, Ciro 7, , 36, 37
Paramo, José Antonio 77
Parenti, Neri 06
Parenzo, Alessandro 78
Parigini, Novella 7
La Parmigiana (63) 30
Parolini, Gianfranco 6
La Parte più appetitosa del maschio
(7) 0
The Party (68) 30
Pasolini, Pier Paolo , 46, 6, 80,
03, 43
Pasqualino settebellezze (76) 38
Pastore, Sergio 64
La Patata bollente (7) 07
Patrick vive ancora (80) 0
Patrizi, Stefano 3
Patroni Griffi, Giuseppe 6, 6,
7
Patucchi, Daniele 05
Paura nella città dei morti viventi
(80) 3
Peccati di una giovane moglie di
campagna (77) 55
Peckinpah, Sam 5
Pelle di bandito (6) 3
La Pelle sotto gli artigli (75) 50–
53
Penn, Arthur 06
Pensieri morbosi (80) 04
Pensione paura (78) 6–0, 03
Pépé le Moko (37) 6
Per amore di Cesarina (76) 04
Per una manciata d’oro (66) 4
Peraino, Luis 
Perkins, Anthony 86
Perodi, Emma 5
Perrella, Alessandro 5
Petit, Alain 
Petrini, Luigi 05
Petroni, Giulio –5
Pettinari, Daniele 3
Pettini, Giancarlo 
Pevarello, Osiride 5
Index
Pezzotta, Alberto 56, 57, 86
Phenomena (85) 86
I Piaceri dello scapolo (60) 3
Picasso, Paloma 8
Piccoli, Michel 04
Pieces (8) 37
Pierrot le fou (65) 56
La Pietra di luna (7, TV mini-
series) 
Pietrangeli, Antonio 30
Pignatelli, Micaela 4
Pigozzi, Luciano , , 55, 56, 7,
5, 36, 37, 56
Pinelli, Tullio 7, 8
Pirandello, Luigi 4, 5, , 3
Pironi, Gualtiero 8, 30
Pirro, Ugo 
Pisano, Berto , 0
Pistilli, Luigi 60, 68
Pitt, Ingrid 8
Pittorru, Fabio 4, 4, 64
Pivano, Fernanda 3
Pizzirani, Giulio 0, 11, 6, 8, 215,
6
Pizzuti, Riccardo 36
Placido, Donato 8
Placido, Michele 3
Plagio (68) 6
Plague of the Zombies (66) 5
Pleins feux sur l’assassin (6) 57
Il Plenilunio delle vergini (73) , 3,
7, 6–, 6
Poe, Edgar Allan 38, 3, 40, 4, 43,
58, 7, , 5, 8, 47, 67, 75,
7, 84, 86, 0, 3, 4, 5,
6
Polanski, Roman 3, 0, 7, 8, 8,
, 0, , 3, 33, 87, 8, ,
5, 4
Politoff, Haydée 6
La Polizia incrimina la legge assolve
(73) 3
La Polizia ringrazia (7) 08
Polop, Francisco Lara 5
Polselli, Renato , 34, 48, 50, 0–
04, , –4, 7, , 53
Poltrone rosse – Parma e il cinema
(04) 00
Pompili, Silvana 6
Ponti, Carlo 8, 8, 4, 8, 
Ponzi, Maurizio 4
Porel, Marc 75, 76, 8
I Porno amori di Eva (7) 0
La Porta sul buio (73) 87, 
Porter, Mack 73, 74
Poseída see L’Osceno desiderio—Le
pene nel ventre
Un Posto ideale per uccidere (7)
6
Pozzetto, Renato 07
Il Prato macchiato di rosso (73) 4,
–0
Prattico, Franco 48
La Presenza perfetta (8, TV
movie) 7, 8
Price, Vincent 55
Prima della rivoluzione (64) 30
Il Principe dalla maschera rossa
(55) 6
Professione reporter (75) 8
43
Profondo rosso (75) 7, , 3,
64, 7, 6, 74, 83, 84, 86
Il Profumo della signora in nero
(74) 4, –34, 48, 75, 7,
6, 8, 00, 0
Profumo di donna (75) 7, 
Proietti, Biagio 48, , , 34, 4,
5
Proietti, Gigi 
Pronto ad uccidere (76) 6
Prosperi, Franco 6
Prostituzione (74) 64
La Prova generale (70) 58
Psycho (60) 0, 87, 03
Puente, Jesús 
I Pugni in tasca (65) 4
Puig, Manuel 48
Pulieri, Giuseppe 
Punter, David 3, 3, 48
Pupillo, Massimo , 6, 77
Purdom, Edmund 5, 5, 5, 37
Putignani, Rodolfo 
Qualcosa striscia nel buio (7)
45–48, 0
Quando i califfi avevano le corna
(73) 3
Quando l’amore è oscenità see
Oscenità
Quante volte… quella notte (6–
7) 8, 54, 35
Quasi davvero (78) 6
I 4 dell’Apocalisse (75) 38
4 mosche di velluto grigio (7) 74,
8, 83, 84
Queen, Ellery [Frederick Dannay,
Manfred B. Lee] 
Quei paracul… pi di Jolando e
Margherito (75) 4
Quel maledetto treno blindato (78)

Quella carogna dell’ispettore Sterling
(68) 4
Quelli che contano (74) 0
Quelli della calibro 38 (76) 46
Questa libertà di avere… le ali bag-
nate (7) 5, 53
Quien Sabe (66) 4
Rabal, Francisco 8, 00
I Racconti di Canterbury (7) 03
I Racconti fantastici di Edgar Allan
Poe (7, TV mini-series) 4–
5, 6
Racconto d’autunno (8, TV
movie) 3
Un Racconto, un autore (8, TV
mini-series) 5
La Ragazza che sapeva troppo (63)
3
La Ragazza dalla pelle di corallo
(76) 
La Ragazza dalle mani di corallo
(6) 05, 06
La Ragazza di latta (70) 67
Un Ragazzo d’oro (04) 6
Raho, Umberto 3, 64
Rakoff, Alvin 3
Rambaldi, Carlo 36, 66, 68, 6, 70,
76, 8, 5, 80
44
Randall, Dick , 34, 5, 7, , 35,
36, 37
Rascel, Renato 07
Rassimov, Ivan 5, 60, 78, 08
Rassimov, Rada 56, 0
Ratti, Filippo 43–45, 66
Ravaioli, Isarco 3, 4
Ray, Aldo 3
Ray, Jean 86
Razzini, Vieri 74, 75
Re Manfredi (6) 5
Rea, Luca 4
Reazione a catena (7) , 53, 55,
56, 47, 8, 88, 8, 78, 80, 
Rebecca (40) 5
Reeves, Steve 30
Regalo di Natale (86) 8
Le Regine see Il Delitto del diavolo
Le Regine see Il Delitto del di-
avolo—Favola thrilling
Regnoli, Piero 5, 68, , 54, 74,
4, 0, 0, 
Reich, Wilhelm 3, 0
Repulsion (65) 3, 3, 33, 
Requiescant (66) 4
El Retorno de Walpurgis (73) 8
Reverberi, Gianfranco 03
Rey, Fernando 67, 6, 3
Ribotta, Ettore 5
Ricci, Franco Maria 6, 
Richardson, John 7
Richardson, Tony 6
Der Richter und sein Henker (75)
8
Rienzi, Maria Teresa 67
Rienzi, Nicolò 67
Riesgo, Joaquín Domínguez 4
Rigby, Jonathan 45
Righi, Mario 68
Rinaldi, Antonio 56
Risi, Dino 0, 8, 8, 37, 6–
7, 80, , 
Risi, Nelo 48
Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel
Trecento… (73) , 34, 0–04,
3, 7, 53
Ritratto di donna velata (75, TV
mini-series) 
Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale
al capo della squadra mobile
(7) 46
Rivelazioni di uno psichiatra sul
mondo perverso del sesso (73)
03, 3, 4
Rivière, Georges 73
La Rivoluzione sessuale (68) 0
Rizzo, Alfredo 54–57
Rizzo, Carmine Domenico 3
Ro.Go.Pa.G. (63) 
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 7
Robinson, Edward G. 77
Robinson, Shawn 5
Rocco e i suoi fratelli (60) 3
Roeg, Nicolas 6, 46, 68, 75
Roffman, Julian 44
Roger La Honte (66) 65
Rohmer, Eric 6
El rojo (66) 6
Rollin, Jean 5, 3
Roma (7) 
Index
Roma come Chicago (68) 3
Roma Imago Urbis (4) 4
Román, Leticia [Letizia Novarese]
3
Romano, Renato 7
Romanzo popolare (74) 38
Rome, Sydne 67
Romero, George A. 76, 0
Rondi, Brunello , 57
Rosati, Giuseppe 
Rose, William 35
Rose rosse per il Führer (68) 46
Rosemary’s Baby (68) 0, 78, 0,
3, 33, 4, 5
Rosenberg, Stuart 46
Ross, Howard [Renato Rossini] ,
65
Rossellini, Franco 4
Rossellini, Roberto , 8
Rossetti, Dario 0, 04
Rossi, Luciano , 3
Rossi, Mirella 3, 53
Rossi Stuart, Giacomo 3, 4, 46,
47, 88, 3, 56
Il Rosso segno della follia (70) ,
5, –3, 87
La Rouge aux lévres (70) 8
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 43
Rousset, David 85
Rovai, Giulia 48
Roy, Massimiliano 5
Rusicka, Francesca “Chicca” 85
Russo, Luigi 3, 7, 73, 
Ryan, Shawn 6
Rydell, Mark 48
Sacchetti, Dardano 75, 78
Sacchi, Robert 36
Saffray, Marie Eugénie 5
Sainati, Alfredo 5
Le Salamandre (6) 48
Salce, Luciano 4, 40, 43, 06
Salerno, Enrico Maria 0, 5, 7
Salerno, Nicola 7
Salerno, Vittorio 
Salines, Antonio 6
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
(75) 43
Salomè (7) 7
Samperi, Salvatore 0, 4
San Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile
(76) 63
Sanders, Anita 5, 6
Sandrelli, Stefania 75
Le Sang d’un poet (30) 7
Sangster, Jimmy 34
La Sanguisuga conduce la danza
(75) 54–57
Sansoni, Gino 
Santaniello, Oscar 0
Santi, Giancarlo 8
Santilli, Antonia 68
Santini, Alessandro , 50–54
Santoni, Espartaco 86, 88
Santuccio, Gianni 5
Sarduy, Severo 48
Sartre, Jean-Paul 40
Sasdy, Peter 8, 04
Satanella () 4
Satanik (68) 0
Satta Flores, Stefano 
Saturday Night Fever (77) 04
Savage, John 
Savage Hunt (80) 60
Savalas, Telly 67, 86, 85
Savina, Carlo 8, 45, 88, 3, 4
Savona, Leopoldo 60–6, 7–74
Scaccia, Mario 3, 7
Scacco alla regina (6) 6
Scala, Delia 58
Scalfaro, Oscar Luigi 4
Scandalosa Gilda (85) 0
Scardamaglia, Elio 5
Scavarda, Aldo 
Scavolini, Romano 4, 57–60
Scavolini, Sauro 60, 7
Scerbanenco, Giorgio 
Schicchi, Riccardo 04
Schivazappa, Piero 6, 0, 
Schneider, Romy 7, 04
Schön, Mila 64
Schubert, Karin 04
Schurer, Erna [Emma Costantino]
, 30
Scorsese, Martin 68
Scott, Susan [Nieves Navarro] 7
Se vuoi vivere… spara! (68) 08
Seberg, Jean 
Il Secondo tragico Fantozzi (76)
06
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
(47) 06
Il Segno del comando (7—TV se-
ries) 74, –, 
6 donne per l’assassino (64) 0,
56, 87, 3, 5
Seigner, Emmanuelle 0
Sella d’argento (78) 77, 04
Il Seme di Caino (7) 5
Senatore, Paola , 3
Sensività (7) 5, –4
Senso (54) 6
Sentenza di morte (68) 5
Senza buccia (7) 67, 6
Senza scrupoli (86) 0
Sepolta viva (73) 5
Serao, Matilde 4
Seray, Bernard 
Serling, Rod 86, 87
Serra, Gianna 8
Servo suo (73) 60
Il Sesso del diavolo—Trittico (7)
48–50
Il Sesso della strega (73) 6, 68,
04–06, 5
Sessomatto (73) 8
Sette note in nero (77) 4, 0,
7–77, 5
Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso
(7) 64
Sette scialli di seta gialla (7) 64
La Settima donna (78) 77
Sexperiencias (67) 3
Seyrig, Delphine 8
Sfida sul fondo (76) 66
Shadow, John , 3
She-Wolf of London (46) 64
Shelley, Mary 35, 70
Sherman, Samuel 7
Sherman, Tomaso 7, 8

The Shining (80) 73, 3
Shock (77) 55, 87, 3, 45, 68,
77–80, 03, 30
Siciliano, Mario 68
La Signora senza camelie (53) 46
Silva, Henry 4
Silva, María 8
Silvio Amadio , 46, 74
Simon, François 68
Simón, Juan Piquer 37
Simonelli, Giovanni 3, 5, 6
Simonetti, Claudio 04
Sinatra, Frank 35
Il Sindacalista (7) 40
Sindoni, Vittorio 77, 04
La Sindrome di Stendhal (6) 04
Singin’ in the Rain (5) 5
Siragusa, Gianni 76
The Sixth Sense () 6
Det Sjunde inseglet (57) 88
Skay, Brigitte 
Skerl, Peter 04
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(37) 8, 86
Soavi, Michele 
Sogni mostruosamente proibiti
(8) 06
Il Sogno dell’altro (8, TV movie)
7
Un Soir, un train (68) 5, 
Soldati, Mario 45
Soldati, Wolfango 00, , 3
Solis, Dag 35
I Soliti rapinatori a Milano (63)
3
Sollazzevoli storie di mogli gaudenti
e mariti penitenti (7) 0
Solvay, Paolo see Batzella, Luigi
Sommeil blanc (00) 
Sommer, Elke 54, 85, 86, 8
Sorbole... che romagnola (76) 55
Sordi, Alberto 6, 7
Sorel, Jean , 75
Il Sorpasso (6) 7
Sorrentino, Arnaldo 8
I Sovversivi (67) 0
Sözen, Şakir V. 07, 08, 0, 5,
6
Spaak, Catherine 47
Space: 1999 34
Spadaro, Eva 3, 4
Spence, Ralph 5
Spencer, Bud [Carlo Pedersoli] 36
Spettri (87) 
Lo Spettro (63) 8, 60, 3
Spielberg, Steven 4
Splendori e miserie di Madame
Royale (70) 5
Squitieri, Pasquale 
Stafford, Frederick 65, 66
Stajano, Giò 66
Staller, Ilona 40
Stamp, Terence 76
Starace, Bella 5
Lo Stato d’assedio (6) 58
Steel, Alan [Sergio Ciani] 5
Steele, Barbara , , 8, 3, 56, 67,
73, 76, 6, 3, 5, 85, 4, 0
Steffen, Anthony [Antonio De
Teffé] 4
Index
Stegers, Bernice 03
Steiner, John 40
Steiner, Rudolf 8
Steloff, Skip 34
Steno [Stefano Vanzina] 35, 67, 3,
06, 07, 08
Stern, Ingrid 46
Stevenson, Robert Louis 70, 7,
05, 06, 7
Stewart, Evelyn see Galli, Ida
Stoker, Bram 8, 40
Stoppa, Paolo , 
Stoppi, Franca 0, 04, 05
Storaro, Vittorio 4, 50
Storie in una stanza (75, TV mini-
series) 4
Stracuzzi, Stefania 45
La Strage dei vampiri (6) 8, 7
Lo Strangolatore di Vienna (7)
7, 35
Lo Strano caso di via dell’Angeletto
(75, TV Movie) 4
Lo Strano vizio della signora Wardh
(7) 77, 78
Strategia per una missione di morte
(7) 
Straub, Robert 35, 37
Le Strelle nel fosso (7) 6, 4–
7
Strick, Joseph 5
Stross, Raymond 
Suggestionata (78) 55
Sunset Blvd. (50) 5
Suor Emanuelle (77) 0
Suspiria (77) 4, 6, 65, 80–87,

Un Sussurro nel buio (76) ,
66–6
Sykes, Peter 7
Taglioni, Fabrizio 5
Tamar Wife of Er (70) 65
Tamburi, Jenny 43
Tamburini, Stefano 0
Tarascio, Enzo 4, 0, 0
Tate, Sharon 67
Taviani, Paolo 0
Taviani, Vittorio 0
Un Taxi mauve (77) 
Tecnica di un amore (73) 
Tedeschi, Gianrico 142, 43, 07
Tedeschi, Luigi 
Tedesco, Paola 0
Telefoni bianchi (76) 
Tempera, Vincenzo “Vince” 74, 76
Tempi duri per i vampiri (5) 55,
3, 40, 06
Il Tempo degli assassini (75) 
Tenebre (8) 6, 86
Tenn, William 5, 6
Teorema (68) , 46, 76, 74, 0
Tepepa (6) 3
Terror (78) 86
Terror! Il castello delle donne
maledette (74) , 5, 7, 34–
37
Il Terrore con gli occhi storti (7)
67
Terrore nello spazio (65) 86
La Terza madre (007) 83, 85
45
Il Terzo occhio (66) 0
Il Testimone deve tacere (74) 
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(74) 75
They’ve Changed Faces see Hanno
cambiato faccia, …
Thomas... gli indemoniati (70)
3–6, 58, 6, 6
Timpani, Antonio 5
Tinti, Gabriele 68, 87, 8
Tiso, Ciriaco 5
Toby Dammit (68) 3, 8, 54,
7, 4
Todorov, Tzvetan 
Tognazzi, Ugo 6, 0, 3, 63, 04
Tolstoy, Aleksey 74, 75, 76, 77
Tom Jones (63) 6
Tombs, Pete 4
Tommasi, Amedeo 5
Tonelli, Bob [Ariano Nanetti] 0,
, 3, 5, 6, 160, 6, 8
Tonelli, Steno 0
Top Sensation (68) 34
Torino centrale del vizio (7) 
Tornatore, Giuseppe 00
Tornes, Stavros 5
Torrisi, Pietro 65
Toscano, Laura 45
Totò [Antonio De Curtis] 4, 08
Tourneur, Jacques 56, 64, 86
Tovoli, Luciano 83, 86
Tozzi, Fausto 0
Traitement de shock (73) 0
Tranquilli, Silvano 40, 74
Il Trapianto (6) 35
Trasatti, Luciano 73
Trash (70) 80, 8, 83
Travolta, John 04
Tre franchi di pietà (66) 8
I Tre volti della paura (63) 0, ,
74
Tressler, Dieter 55
Trifirò, Goffredo 5
Le Trio infernal (74) 04
Trog (70) 36
Troisio, Antonio 5, 60
Trotter, Laura 5
Il Trovatore (4) 84
Truffaut, François 37
Il Tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e
solo io ne ho la chiave (7) 60,
70, 84
Turner, Lana 8
Tutti defunti … tranne i morti
(77) 4, 58, 87–0, 0
Tutti i colori del buio (7) 68, 77–
7
Twain, Mark 5
Twins of Evil (7) 
Two Families (007) 60
2001: A Space Odyssey (68) 30, 
Two Weeks in Another Town (6)

L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo
(70) 64
Gli Uccisori (77) 5
L'Udienza (7) 38
Ugarte, Julián 7
Ulloa, Alejandro 3
46
L'Ultima carica (64) 6
L'Ultima neve di primavera (73)
45
L'Ultima preda del vampiro (60)
54, 55, 56, 08
Ultima scena: 5 storie fantastiche
(78, TV mini-series) 4
Le Ultime ore del Che (004) 60
Ultimo tango a Parigi (7) 84
L'Ultimo treno della notte (75) 3
Una forca per tre vigliacchi (7)
53
Una sull’altra (6) 75, 76
The Undead (57) 33
Ungari, Enzo 
The Unnaturals—Contronatura
(6) 38, 3, 40, 46, 47, 64, 5
Uomini contro il Po (5) 4
Uomini e lupi (57) 6
Uomini si nasce poliziotti si muore
(76) 6
Un Uomo da ridere (80) 77
L'Uomo della sabbia (8, TV
movie) 7, 8
L'Uomoorgoglio e la vendetta (67)
4, 5
L’Urlo (63) 30
Un Urlo dalle tenebre (75) 3, 68,
06, 0
Ustica: una spina nel cuore (000)
60
Usuelli, Teo 0
Uysal, Ersan 6
Vacanze per un massacro (80)

Vai avanti tu che mi viene da ridere
(8) 
Vai col liscio (76) 6
Valerii, Tonino 0
La Valle dell’eco tonante (64) 5
Valletti, Aldo 43
Valli, Alida 86, 87, 88
Vallone, Saverio 8
Valverde, Máximo 00
I Vampiri (57) 30, 3, 45, 67, ,
0, 5
Vampirismus (8, TV movie)
6–7, 8
Vampyr (3) 60
Vampyros Lesbos (70) 50
Van Cleef, Lee 3
Vani, Bruno 4, , 53
Vanni, Massimo 3
Van Vooren, Monique 8, 83
Vanzina, Stefano see Steno
Varela, José 
Varriano, Emilio 56
Vayan, Greta 8
Index
Vázquez Figueroa, Alberto 
Lo vedi come sei… lo vedi come sei?
(3) 54
Vegezzi, Nello 5
Velasco, Mahnamen 74
Venantini, Venantino 5
La Vendetta di una pazza () 4
La Vendetta di una pazza (5) 4
Vendetta per vendetta (68) 46
Il Venditore di palloncini (74) 45
La Venere d’Ille (78) 87, 7, ,
7, 8–30
Venus in Furs (68)
La Vera storia della monaca di
Monza (80) 04
Verga, Giovanni 
La Vergine dei veleni (7) 4
La Vergine di Norimberga (63)
64, 4, 5
La Verità secondo Satana (70) 48,
03, 
Vernon, Harry 5
Verrecchia, Alberto 
La Viaccia (6) 4
Vidali, Enrico 4
Villa, Franco 0
Villaggio, Paolo 6, 06, 07
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Auguste de
6
Viola, Giuseppe “Beppe” 38
Violenza in un carcere femminile
(8) 04
Viotti, Patrizia , 43, 44, 45, 73
Viridiana (6) 5
Virus (80) 0, 04
Visconti, Luchino , 6, 00, 8,
3, 67
La Vita, a volte, è molto dura, vero
Provvidenza? (7) 4
La Vita è bella (7) 
Vitali, Alvaro 43
I Vitelloni (53) 73
Viti, Attilio 33
Vitti, Monica 
Vivarelli, Piero 0
Vivo per la tua morte (68) 30
I Vizi morbosi di una governante
(77) 45
Vlady, Marina 0, 
Voci notturne (5, TV series) 
La Voie lactée (6) 8
Volpi, Franco 
Volta, Ornella 
Vonnegut, Kurt 3
Von Theumer, Ernst Ritter 33
Le Voyou (70) 43
Walcamp, Marie 64
Wallace, Edgar 64
Warhol, Andy 80, 8, 8, 83, 84, 8,

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte
(7) 4
Warren, Bill 34
Warren, Norman J. 86
Waugh, Hillary 78
Webley, Patrizia [Patrizia De Rossi]
0, 0
Wedekind, Frank 8, 85
Weis, Don 37
Welles, Mel , 3–37, 70
Welles, Orson 3, 3
Wells, Herbert George 7
Wendel, Lara [Daniela Rachele
Barnes] 33
The Werewolf (3) 64
Wertmüller, Lina 76, 38
Whiskey e fantasmi (74) 6
Whitmore, James 45
The Whole Town’s Talking (35)
06
The Wild Wild West (65–6, TV
series) 34
The Wild, Wild World of Jayne
Mansfield (68) 35
Wilson, Ajita 76, , 66
Winters, Shelley 7
Wolff, Frank 33, 58
Woodlawn, Holly 80
Woods, Robert 5, 53, 7
Woolrich, Cornell 75, 76, 77,
83
Wright Williams, Walter 07
Wyler, William 7
Yarbrough, Jean 64
Les Yeux sans visage (60) 5
Young, Gig 0
Young Frankenstein (74) , 35, 55,
, 38, 4, 06
Zampa, Luigi 6, 80
Zamuto, Elio 65
Zapponi, Bernardino 7, 7
Zarchi, Meir 68
Zavattini, Cesare 00, 0
Zeder (83) , 3, 5, 5, 6, 6,
6, 7
Zeglio, Primo 46, 48, 5
Zelda (74) 8
Zelenovic, Srdjan 84
Zenabel (6) 5
Zombi Holocaust (80) 0
Zombi 2 (7) 3, 77
Zorro contro Maciste (63) 5
Zurli, Guido 7