Tag Archives: Italian

Sometimes They Return: Cemetery Man

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Certain films make such a strong impression that even if you love them, you are rarely drawn to re-watch. It just seems better to sit with the first feeling they gave you – you don’t want a subsequent viewing to rob you of the memory of how they affected you. And sometimes, on top of that, a given film is just hard to find on streaming, even if you wanted to check it out again, such that your remembered first viewing grows in stature over the years: it becomes something treasured, almost mythic, a half glimpsed moment of true magic from long, long ago.

Such it was with today’s film, Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (1994). I’ve previously written on this blog about how I first saw it way back when: In high school, a good friend and I wanted to go see a movie, picked up the local newspaper to see what was playing (as one used to do), and saw a listing for a film with no description, but just an intriguing title. We went to the cinema and there was no poster, and the nameplate outside of the screening room was just sharpie scrawled on an index card. We bought two tickets and assumed we were in for something cheap and terrible, and when we went in, found that we were the only ones in attendance. We figured that with no one else around, we could just crack jokes at something that would be ‘so bad it’s good’ and settled in for a laugh. The film started, and we made a couple of early comments and then quickly shut up – because it was kind of amazing.

Poetic, absurd, artful, and successfully, intentionally funny, this was an unexpected gem, and one of the best cinema experiences I’ve ever had. We’d gone in completely cold, expecting the absolute worst, and were rather blown away by this peculiar Italian horror-comedy that was in turns silly, sexy, dark, and disturbing, with moments of grotesquerie both delightful and off-putting, not to mention a surprising depth and shades of existential profundity. I loved it. And I spent years carrying this memory, especially because in the streaming era, it was really hard to locate. Finally, after about 30 years, Severin restored and released the film on 4K and a clear, crisp print showed up on Shudder that did justice to its craft and artistry, so I was stoked to finally take it in again, and I knew it would be worth writing about. And it was, but not only for the reasons I’d counted on.

Rather, I suppose this is a case of something like “you should never meet your heroes” or maybe “you can never go home again” or some other such pat life advice, as my experience of re-viewing was not quite what I’d hoped for – there were still things to appreciate, but what had so impressed me thirty years ago, didn’t quite do it for me now. There were even elements that actively turned me off. I spent some time thinking about it, and then decided to watch it one more time, and happily then found myself enjoying it much more again. Interesting…

And so that is what I want to write about today – not just the film itself, but how and why it clicked for me so well in the mid-90s, how and why it didn’t when I first re-watched it last week, and what finally, on a third viewing, I found I could still love in it regardless of what could be viewed as significant issues. No matter what, it is clearly a unique piece of work, worthy of appreciation and consideration. So let’s get into it. There’s no way to do this adequately sans spoilers, so you’ve been warned…

Cemetery Man (1994) (A.K.A. Dellamorte Dellamore)

Cemetery Man Poster

Michele Soavi has been mentioned a couple times on this blog before. He was an assistant to Dario Argento and worked with a bunch of other big names in the Italian horror industry in the 80s. You can find him on screen in such masterpieces as Lucio Fulci’s The City of the Living Dead  (1980) or Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985), and of course, his feature directorial debut was one of my favorite slashers of the 80s, the stylish, if sometimes delightfully ridiculous Stagefright (1987) (the killer in the owl mask; Marilyn Monroe playing the sax; the cat jump scare in the back of a car (how did it even get in there?); the theatre director who’s an absolute asshole, but you sympathize with him cause you can see how he can see just how terrible his show is, and he is trying to fix it and can’t, and it just really stings – I love it all!). By 1994, Soave had a few films under his belt and took on this ambitious adaptation of a novel by Tiziano Sclavi, Dellamorte Dellamore, Sclavi being quite well known at the time in Italy for his surreal horror comic, Dylan Dog.

Originally released with the same title as the novel, Cemetery Man follows a worker at a cemetery in a small town in Italy, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) and his nonverbal, simpleminded assistant, Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), as they go about their duties: digging and cleaning graves, changing flowers, and most importantly, shooting in the head the zombies that tend to rise within a week of their original burial. Theirs is an absurd, repetitive, dreary existence and the ennui is strong with them. Dellamorte dispatches the undead that surround him with little more than a shrug and a sigh. And outside the gates of the cemetery, things are little better. The town, Buffalora, beyond the borders of which, he has never ventured, is small, venal, frustratingly bureaucratic and corrupt, with the mayor unconcerned about the dead rising as long as it doesn’t interrupt his campaign for reelection.

Things change for Dellamorte when he sees a beautiful widow (Anna Falchi) attending the funeral of her husband and he immediately falls in love with her. After taking her to visit the cemetery’s ossuary, she is so overcome with passion by the assembled skulls and bones that she also falls for him. They kiss like in a Magritte painting and proceed to have sex on the grave of her beloved husband, who rises and bites her, seemingly leading to her death. Dellamorte keeps her body under watch and when she rises, he shoots her, as is his job. But she just keeps coming back. One night, she returns as a seductive zombie, drawing him to her and sexily taking a chomp out of his shoulder before Gnaghi plants a shovel in her head. Later, she seems to return as the new mayor’s (the other one had died before the election) assistant, who already knows and loves Dellamorte, though she’s never before been to Buffalora or met him. They have a short lived romance, dependent on her belief that he’s impotent, as she has a fear of sex – he has himself chemically castrated, only for her to get over said fear and leave him for the mayor (in a problematic turn of events that we’ll get into later). And finally, she appears as a university student that Dellamorte goes home with. She also tells him that she loves him, but he soon discovers that she is a prostitute and that declaration just made the evening more expensive.

Along the way, Dellamorte goes down a dark path, sliding from a state of poetic melancholy at the beginning, through various romantic ups and downs, not to mention social indignities, to cold blooded acts of murder – some funny, some satisfying, and at least one quite disturbing. He has conversations with Death who tells him to stop killing the dead and that if he doesn’t want people to rise, to go shoot the living in the head to ensure that they won’t. This he does, beginning a vein in the film reminiscent of Kafka or Ionesco wherein it seems impossible for him to be caught, impossible for him to retain responsibility for his own acts, no matter how he tries – the police inspector will never see him for who he is and his crimes are stolen from him. The romantic gloom of the first half of the film is supplanted with an existential hopelessness – nothing has meaning: not life, not death, not love, not sex, not murder. Finally, he and Gnaghi drive away from Buffalora only to learn, as suspected, that there is no world beyond its borders – they are trapped within a snow globe – beautiful and pointless. In an odd turn, Dellamorte and Gnaghi exchange roles, Gnaghi now speaking and Dellamorte responding with Gnaghi’s characteristic grunt, and the film ends – they will return, events will play out again – perhaps a new iteration thereof, but with no meaningful change – nothing ever could.

You could imagine how this impressed me at 16. It is a weird movie to say the least, but one with a wealth of concepts, moods, and images. I’m sure I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but the philosophical vibe washed over me and left me intrigued, puzzled, entertained, and tickled with the idiosyncratic peculiarity of it all.

Plus, it must be said that it is beautiful to look at and also really quite funny, with loads of memorable details: the bus full of scouts that drive off a cliff and of course return as zombies, one of which keeps rubbing sticks between his hands menacingly as if to start an undead campfire, the sex dripping from Anna Falchi’s seductive line, “you know, you’ve got a real nice ossuary,” the scene when Gnaghi, so infatuated with the mayor’s daughter, vomits on her right before her boyfriend shows up on his motorcycle – she exclaims, “he threw up on me,” and the boyfriend responds, “cool – new fad” before she jumps on behind him and they ride away, unconcerned with the regurgitated bile between them, and of course, the sweet, child-like romance Gnaghi later has with her decapitated, reanimated head after she dies in a motorcycle accident. And again, beyond the comedy, I just loved the gory absurdity of it all, the morbid, poetic existentialism found in what I’d expected to be little more than cheap, b-movie detritus.

Thirty Years Later

Everything I’ve written above sounds great, and all of that is there to be found in the film, but that said, I did find myself sadly unsatisfied on the re-watch. First of all, things that had felt deep to me as a teenager, philosophically rich and ghoulishly beautiful, at 45, just seemed, I don’t know, facile? Shallow? Obvious? I didn’t come away feeling like this all revealed some truths of the human condition – but rather, it seemed more than a bit pretentious.

But all of that is fine. I mean it is an unfair standard to expect every film to reveal some profound truth of what it is to be human – that is a pretty high bar, and I wouldn’t judge any other film for not clearing it, and Soavi’s film genuinely deserves credit for actually approaching such an ambitious artistic feat. What really was difficult the second time around was how the philosophical-ness and poetic-ness felt not only slight, but actually ugly when it came to women, or rather, the woman, or even just “She,” which is as far as the film goes in naming Anna Falchi’s embodiment of feminine, sexy, mysterious, eternally unattainable woman-ness.

Dellamorte seems to have no other reason for falling in love with her than that she is beautiful, and she seems to have no reason to fall in love with him except the dictates of the story (to be fair, Rupert Everett is a very attractive man, but her attraction feels more like narrative convenience). While her perpetual return is intriguing, something about it feels uncomfortable: in Dellamorte’s story, there is one woman, without a name, who is all women, who is everywhere, whom he loves, whom he obsesses over, whom he doesn’t really know, and whom he can never truly have – she will always slip away from him, be taken from him; she is a failed promise, a lie, a tease. Life allows no such satisfaction – she exists (occasionally) only to be desired, to be longed for, but she seems to lack essence. She is an empty ideal – not a person – not a character.

And it does get pretty dark. I wrote above of the second half of the film when Dellamorte goes on a bit of an existential killing spree. Much of that is enjoyable – we see him killing people we’d earlier seen be jerks, or we see him kill dispassionately, because nothing matters anyway, but there is one time that he kills emotionally. Late in the film, drunk and despondent after being rejected by the most recent incarnation of “She” (the Mayor’s assistant), Dellamorte is approached by two young, attractive women in a tavern, one of whom is the next incarnation of the object of his desire. He goes home with them, is told that “She” loves him, and proceeds to make love to her. When he discovers that they are prostitutes and that he must pay extra for her declaration of affection, he puts a space heater in her bed, starting a fire that burns their apartment to cinders with them (and one other girl) inside.

It all feels like a Trojan Horse – Rupert Everett has brought so much charm and weary resignation to the role, and we have happily gone along with him on a dark, blackly comic, sweetly grotesque ride, only to end up in this ugly sequence of incel violence – a bitter man, denied the love he feels he deserves, feeling lied to and cheated, murders three young women because his feelings got hurt. It lands like a sucker punch.

Add to that the storyline of the mayor’s assistant (she is initially terrified by sex and feels free to love Dellamorte because the word around town is that he’s impotent (which he’s not) – he goes to a doctor and gets chemically castrated so they can be married – and then she turns up and explains that the mayor has raped her, curing her of her phobia, and she’s now going to marry him instead – you know, a totally normal, realistic reaction for an actual human female), and it’s hard to say that the movie doesn’t feel more than a little misogynistic. Somehow, as a 16 year old boy, so enamored of the glorious weirdness on display, I’d just failed to pick up on it.

Is this a case of changing social mores in the last 30 years (we are certainly more aware and less tolerating of elements of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and such these days) or is it just that I’ve grown up some and now find myself turned off by elements that I must admit I didn’t think about when I was a kid and first watched this movie? Whatever it is, it did sour me a bit on the film this time around.

But Let’s Give It Another Chance, Huh?

For all of the criticisms of the last section, I don’t want to come down too hard on the film (or on my teenage self). In spite of my reservations, there was still a great deal that I enjoyed and appreciated, and I thought I should give it one more try. And I’m glad I did. The first time I saw it, I had no expectations or even had negative ones and was so happily surprised. The second time, I was carrying the nostalgia of that first impression and it was a cold splash of water in the face to confront some problematic elements. And so, I wanted to approach it a third time, more cognizant and clear eyed of what I was going to see.

And I’m happy to report that I kinda loved it again. My criticisms stand – I don’t think there’s much of a way to get around them, but maybe even the most troubling elements can be an important part of the whole. Maybe the point is that the “love” between “She” and Dellamorte is a superficial fantasy – an illusory preoccupation to create a sense of meaning in a clearly meaningless existence. The degree to which She isn’t really a character is just the most prominent example of something that may be true of all of the other secondary players besides Dellamorte and Gnaghi. The degree to which the only significant female character is reduced to a symbol feels disappointing at the very least, but we don’t have to read it as being about gender – she is just the only other “real thing” in Dellamorte’s existence and she isn’t even real either. Nothing in life or death is.

When he murders her (as the college student) and her friends, it feels ugly, but this is a horror movie, after all, and perhaps this moment just brings the weight we should feel regarding all of his murders, but for whatever reason, don’t. We discover that our viewpoint character, the sensitive, charismatic figure at the center of all this hypocrisy and madness, sighing and rolling his eyes at the mendacity and ridiculous hopelessness of the world around him – we discover that he is no better than the rest – he is, in fact, awful. And yet, in the next scene when he shoots a bunch of people at the hospital, I feel we are right back there with him, only having held judgement against him for the moment, and are now feel free to laugh as he coolly murders doctors and nurses. Why was that judgement so short lived? Are we just sold on the lack of meaning, the absence of ramifications for his actions that so frustrates him? Is the movie doing in that moment exactly what it should? Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t want to give up all that I find to value in it just because it also contains parts I respond negatively to.

At the end of the day, this is a fascinating, funny, moving, troubling piece – I don’t think it is like anything else – it is like itself, and if nothing else, that is a thing truly worthy of praise. Furthermore, as written above, it is gorgeously shot, laugh-out-loud hilarious, shocking, and puzzling in a lot of good ways. The performances are uniformly excellent (Everett is so charismatic, Hadji-Lazaro embodies Gnaghi with lovable, quirky commitment – it’s really special, and Falchi, even if one could question the depth of her “characters” in the context of the story, is given a lot to do, and brings a lot of life and play to her four parts). The visuals are creatively striking and beautiful, and the score is a hoot. Finally, the film is thoughtful (even if those thoughts aren’t always the deepest, it is still thinking them) and takes big artistic swings without sacrificing the entertaining pleasures of being a weird, gross little horror movie. How could I not love something like that?

And so that’s that – I didn’t exactly have the experience I’d been looking forward to over the years, but it was interesting and rewarding to re-approach this film I’d treasured, find that it was other than I had remembered, or that perhaps I had changed, and ultimately, to come to terms with it differently. It was a reflective experience and time well spent. Plus, it is still, in many ways, really very cool and weird.

Argento’s Animal Trilogy

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I’ve been wanting to do this post for a long time – I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to finally make it happen. Dario Argento played a significant role in my early forays into the genre. I remember watching Suspiria (1977) for the first time and being so struck by it. I don’t think I’d yet seen such an aesthetic piece before – in horror or in film generally – and to be clear, I don’t mean simply an ‘aesthetically pleasing’ (read: beautiful) film, but rather a film so focused on aesthetics above all else, with all other elements in service to style, to color, light, composition, and sound, and yet still working – not just a hollow, artsy exercise in pretty shots. It was also my introduction to Italian horror: the first time I’d dealt with the characteristic, and at first, puzzling dubbing, and my introduction to the glories of Italian horror scores, specifically Goblin – it made a deep impression.

Of course, I then went down a rabbit hole on its director, particularly, his most famous works of the 70s and 80s, most of which (with one glaring exception), I’ve written about by now. Eventually, I branched out to other Italian horror directors, and subsequently, to a broader view of international horror than I’d previously taken. For young horror fan me, Suspiria had opened that door, and it will always hold a warm place in my heart, both for its own specific merits and for this role that it served me.

But I’ve always had a significant blind spot with Argento. He’d made a splash at the beginning of the seventies with a series of gialli, stylish Italian crime thrillers, all with animals in the title: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), often referred to as his “animal trilogy,” though they are all narratively unconnected. While I had watched The Bird with the Crystal Plumage long ago, somehow it hadn’t made as deep an impression on me as some of his later work – it was less of a horror piece (though it certainly has elements), and the other two, I still haven’t seen. But about a year ago, I randomly put on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and I just had an absolute blast and knew that I had to finally consider these three works – as a whole and separately.

And so that’s what we’re doing this week – revisiting the first, checking out the next two, and sharing some thoughts on each of them. I don’t know how much I will have to say about each, but I’m sure it will be fascinating to see some of the earliest work of a director who I’ve so enjoyed (of course, beware of spoilers). Also, a new documentary on Argento, Panico (2023) has just shown up on Shudder, so I’d like to watch that as well and see what context it brings.

But First, A Note On Giallo

Discussions of the borders between genres are, I think, often somewhat fruitless, but if I’m going to get into these three movies, I think it makes sense to look at how “giallo” relates to “horror.” Generally, a giallo film is more of a murder mystery thriller than horror, and as I wouldn’t be inclined to include, say most 90s Hollywood thrillers on this blog, it is fair to ask why I feel it’s different if it’s Italian. For me, it is all a matter of style. Beyond specific genre tropes, such as the black gloved killer whose identity isn’t known until the final act or the often lurid sex and violence, I think the giallo is characterized by heightened style – not just stylish, but also cinematically stylized. Weird angles, expressionistic composition, energetic editing, strong use of color, and soundscapes that both seduce and assault the senses, gialli have artistic license to aspire to more than mere realism, and in that I feel there is a kinship with horror. The story may simply be a convoluted murder mystery, but the feeling transports the viewer more wholly, and in this stylish weirdness, there be horror dragons. Also, of course, one can trace direct lines of influence from the giallo to the American slasher of the 80s; so it all connects.

And Second, A Note on Pictures

Writing from the future, having finished the post and gone looking for pictures to illustrate what I’ve described, I find it’s surprisingly hard to do justice to just how good these films look. In some later films (such as Suspiria), Argento shoots in a way that you can take any shot and put it in a frame on the wall, but I feel that’s not the case here. With these three movies, I feel the flashiness is more often in the movement of the camera and the edit, with individual shots incapable of demonstrating how very cool it all is, though I do make some descriptive efforts. So, I’ve done my best in collecting, but it should go without saying that it is worth watching the films themselves.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

As I understand it (and I am not an expert), giallo films had been being made since the early sixties (Wikipedia lists the first as Mario Bava’s The Girl who Knew Too Much in 1963), but Argento’s directorial debut was a huge international hit and really kicked off a boom time for the form. It’s easy to see inspiration in earlier works, notably Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), but by all counts, Argento brought a new modern energy and panache to this horror-adjacent genre. This is a fun, ultra-stylish film – you can feel how it’s the first effort of a young artist out to make their mark. Does everything make sense? Maybe not. Are the female characters uniformly underwritten? Unfortunately, yes. Are there tons of scenes that captivate and titillate and startle and wow? Boy howdy!

The story is typical of what I’ve seen described as “m. gialli” (when the story follows a male protagonist – the tropes differ with a female lead). An outsider, in this case, an American author temporarily living in Rome and about to return to the States, happens to witness a woman being attacked through the window of an art gallery. He rushes to help, but gets stuck in a glass antechamber and can only witness her suffering as he calls and calls for police. Once they arrive, he is pulled into the investigation as both a witness and a suspect, with a shadowy figure occasionally trying to kill him before he gets too close to the truth. Throughout the film, we see the killer strike again and again, always hunting beautiful young women. Finally, the killer is revealed with a surprising (and pretty satisfying twist), leading both the protagonist and the viewer to recontextualize what was actually seen at the beginning of the film (something Argento will return to later, perhaps perfecting the idea in Profondo Rosso (1975)).

While the structure is somewhat rote for the genre, this is a film of tremendous scenes and set pieces, and whenever we get into a kill or a chase, it really pops: As jarring, mysteriously ominous music plays, a young woman lies in bed smoking in her nightgown. She turns off the light and the camera shifts to her point of view. We see the empty doorway to her bedroom as her hand moves the cigarette in and out of frame. Finally, the camera follows her gaze to the bedside table as she stubs out her smoke and then back to the open doorway, now filled with a shadowy figure. Extreme close-up of her open mouth as she screams, zooming out to see her terrified face as a gloved hand stifles her shriek of terror. A series of quick cuts – the knife slicing off her nightdress – her widened eyes – the killer in shadow, cloaked in a shiny black raincoat and hat – light shining off the blade as it trails along her belly – her hand clutching a twisted sheet – blood splashed across a pillow. It is all so propulsive, so musical in its rhythms, done with such relish and flair, and at the same time, it is scary and icky, with a sickly veneer of sexualized violence (it is strictly murder, but it feels pretty rapey).

And the film is full to bursting with such nigh hypnotic sequences. There’s another kill scene where a girl comes home to her building and we first look down on her, framed at the bottom of a triangular stairwell, before we shift to follow her ascent. Mysteriously, the lights go out on the upper floors and she has to light her way with matches that keep going out – it is tense and scary and you know this will not end well, but that does nothing to reduce the delicious suspense as she climbs to her inevitable doom. Or, late in the film, there is a great crane shot where the protagonist is racing to find his girlfriend who’s disappeared and clearly in danger, and suddenly we’re looking at him from above, but then the camera pans up to look out over the wide expanse of the whole city – she is lost in all of this space, all of these buildings and people, and then, finally, we zoom in to one window, far in the distance, where we will soon cut to discover her fate. The crane shot in Tenebre (1982) gets a lot of attention (and rightly so), but this early effort really does the trick.

I was shocked to read that, being his first film, Argento was considered inexperienced and was almost fired during filming. I don’t know what it was like on set, but the final product comes across as the confident work of an artist with a sure eye, and a strong sense of artistic purpose. Also, his father was one of the producers, so it would have been really rough if they’d actually fired him.

Finally, I love so many of the little details that live beyond the scenes of stylish murder. This movie is full of memorable characters, lines, and visual treats. The art in the gallery is fascinating – brutal, alien, and dangerous looking (another element that will resurface in Tenebre). There are so many enjoyable personalities and interactions – Solong, the pimp who has to say “so long” at the end of every sentence so as not to stutter, the effeminate German art dealer who had sold the painting that holds a key to the murderer’s identity, the crazy, cat eating artist (responsible for said painting) who exclaims that now he only paints mystical scenes because he’s “feeling mystical,” and the police lineup which has the lead investigator castigating his men that “Ursula Andres belongs with the transvestites, not the perverts!” It is consistently a deeply funny movie, and it is all of these odd little notes that lift it above simply being a cool looking thriller. It has more life than that. With its more than realistic stylization and its deep undercurrent of weird specificity, there is a pinch of something that feels like horror to me – it’s an easy film to love.

Ok, so that is The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the only one of these that I’ve previously seen. Now for something new…

Cat O’Nine Tails (1971)

Well, that was…fine. I mean, it is a well-crafted investigative thriller, but whereas the style of “Bird” elevated it to something akin to horror, this really feels of a different genre and I wouldn’t be writing about it on this blog if not for this project. But, I don’t want to be negative about it off the bat because this movie has a lot of cool stuff – it just feels further from “horror.”

The initial premise is promising: A blind man (a former journalist who’s lost his sight and now lives with his precocious granddaughter, writing crossword puzzles) overhears a violent attack, and with the help of said granddaughter, begins investigating a series of murders, before they inevitably become targets themselves. Along the way, he ropes in a sighted reporter as they follow the nine leads (hence the title) that branch out from these killings revolving around an experimental genetic clinic.

While my initial paragraph comes off as lukewarm at best, there is great verve and craft on display here: interesting shots, tight, exciting edits (particularly some bits where we rapidly cut back and forth between times and locations before finally settling on a new context – a trick I recently appreciated Ti West using in X (2022) ), a great, groovy, occasionally jazzily discordant score from Ennio Morricone (who did the music for all three of the “Animal Trilogy”), and of course the film-making really comes to life whenever a character loses theirs. If there is a murder scene, a chase, or some other moment of violence, the movie just gets fresh energy and there are choices that surely wow.

I particularly enjoyed an early railway station murder – a man has come for a mysterious rendezvous. We shift between an objective view of him as he tries to find the one he’s meant to meet among the crowd on the platform, and the subjective perspective of the killer, clearly looking out from behind a column, back and forth and back and forth between the intended victim on one side and the oncoming train coming from the other, with one jump cut to an extreme close-up of the killer’s iris, filled with homicidal urgency. Finally, that subjective view looks back to the victim, who glances up, recognizes the one he’s come to meet and begins to walk forward before the hands of the killer come into view of this POV shot, pushing the victim onto the tracks. Quick cuts to his head slammed against the front of the train, a paparazzo catching the photo, the victim’s body spinning, pulled by the power of the locomotive, a woman bringing her hands to her head as she screams, a close up of a man’s mouth, shouting, and finally, a wide view of the gathered crowd, the murderer having disappeared into the chaos. It is really engaging work.

But, as I said, this one, for all of its flashes of high style, feels less stylized, feels more like a “normal” thriller. For me, one element that contributes to this is a shift of protagonist. Initially, it had seemed that the blind witness (played by the always enjoyable Karl Malden), would be the main lead – another “outsider” who everyone discounts due to his disability, who is enjoying getting back on the horse of chasing down a story, but you always have doubts that he should really be putting himself and his granddaughter at risk. As with many an investigative m – gialli lead, such as the writer in “Bird” or the musician in Profondo Rosso (1975), the blind crossword writer and this little girl are unlikely, but surprisingly effective detectives – a good team. But relatively early on, he goes to an active journalist (James Franciscus) with his discoveries, and they start working together, and it’s not long before the film shifts to primarily follow the new guy – young, square jawed, masculine, effective, and more than a bit obvious – and I was disappointed in the change. Malden is still around until the end, but there’s a long stretch in the middle where he seems to disappear from the story, and instead we just see an investigator investigating an investigation. While it is all still carried out well, this was to the film’s detriment.

I guess they just didn’t want to let Karl Malden enjoy this glass of post coital milk with Catherine Spaak.

By the end, we get a killer reveal that makes sense, but won’t blow any minds, and a great, intense moment of the killer’s death – and as I said, it’s all fine. I consistently enjoyed watching the story unfold, though I wouldn’t really consider this even particularly horror adjacent. My read is that Argento put a lot of creativity and effort into making a splash with “Bird”; it was a hit and he was cleared to direct more movies, and the next was very capably made – the work of a solid craftsman with a good eye and some pizzazz – but probably wouldn’t have made a name for him if it had come first. Still, it is interesting to see in terms of a larger career trajectory, and it has me curious what I’ll find in the third film.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)

Wow – what an opening! Argento starts his third movie with an electric sequence of pure style and intrigue – setting a tone, introducing character and context, and pulling the viewer into a sense of weird mystery. We cut between instruments being played – close ups on the skins of a drum as the sticks bang down in slow motion, looking down the neck and even out the inside of a guitar before a hand starts to strum – and one of the men playing them, the drummer, Roberto, as he goes about his life, more and more aware that he’s being followed by a mysterious, dark figure. As he plays, Roberto is bedeviled by a small flying insect – in his face, his hair, his eyes, flitting around his head – he tries to get it when it settles on one of the drums, but too late. Sometimes the music of the band dominates the soundscape and sometimes we cut to near silence – an isolated shot of a beating heart with a heartbeat, once with the title card and once without, and then back to Roberto being tailed by the dark figure. Finally, the insect settles on the bottom cymbal and you can see Roberto, eager, hoping it won’t move for a few seconds, and then it’s time: the cymbals crash, the fly is dead. Roberto has a look of relief and satisfaction.

By the end of this scene (about 4 minutes long), I was charged – hooked and excited to see where this was going to go – and immediately we’re off to the races as one night after a recording session, when Roberto is walking home alone, he realizes the man is watching from the shadows and decides to follow and confront him. This becomes a chase through arched piazzas, full of movement and light and shadows and bold camera placements, striking angles, and a play of framing and focus. Finally, he follows the man into an old, abandoned, dilapidated theatre and catches his arm. The man pulls a switchblade, there’s a struggle, and Roberto seems to accidentally stab his stalker, who falls into the orchestra pit as floodlights fill the room and another figure in a creepy, plastic baby doll mask photographs Roberto in what looks like an act of murder. And then the lights are off, the figure is gone and Roberto is on his own to deal with this apparent crime which has so clearly and mysteriously been staged (in a theatre no less).

Great set up – so far, I love everything about the movie – suspenseful, intriguing, and so very over-the-top cool. But then, I’m sorry to say it doesn’t last. On Wikipedia, I read a quote from a contemporary review of “Four Flies” from Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, that the film works “when the camera is moving and no one is talking,” and I think he nailed it. Argento pulls off some spectacular scenes here, and the passion for a great shot and a great edit is clear, but the story never really cohered for me, and furthermore (as this is a horror blog), though it sets up some atmosphere early on, and there are a couple of moments that feel like horror, most of the investigatory angle of the movie apparently isn’t interested in maintaining that vibe. What’s more, the investigation felt frustrating as we are fed red herring after red herring, and in the end, the explanation of what is going on feels like it comes completely out of left field, while leaving big questions unresolved. Now, I don’t need to understand everything, but for me, it just didn’t feel like it worked. And then the final moments are just so wildly abrupt that I couldn’t help but laugh. I mean, it was kind of fun, but I wasn’t sure if it was the tone this story wanted to end on.

So, I think this one might mainly be recommended for completionists – if you really want to track Argento’s development as a director, you will find a great deal to enjoy, but if you are just casually looking for a satisfying movie, you may come away disappointed.

That said, there are pieces in here that I certainly appreciated, and even some that I loved. As is often the case, there was enjoyable specificity of character that brought a sense of life to it all, raising the film above its mystery procedural roots. For example, as he is being tormented by the unknown blackmailer who doesn’t even ask for anything, but just seems to be trying to torment him, Roberto turns for help to his friend, “God” (short for Godfrey), a big scruffy hippy type who lives in a shack next to a polluted stream, wears rags, and eats raw fish. God brings onto the case his associate, “The Professor,” a well-spoken tramp with a bible verse for every occasion, and Arrosio, a flamingly gay private detective on an 83 case losing streak who is sure that this will be the one he finally solves. It is odd to say the least. But also oddly lovable. Perhaps they kill the tone, but these roles bring something fresh and surprising to the film – and while Arrosio’s gayness reads as caricature from a contemporary perspective, he isn’t fobbed off as a joke – he does effectively figure out the mystery (though he doesn’t live long enough to reveal that information), so that’s something for representation I guess (beyond that, it is interesting to note how there are explicitly queer characters in almost all of Argento’s early films – I read somewhere that he was trying to show a more modern world – the one that he inhabited – and that this was an integral element of that).

And then there are a couple scenes that would shine in any horror movie, in which Argento allows himself to depart from straight realism and approach something more surreal, more expressive. The best example here features a character who has figured out what is happening and arranges to meet the killer in a crowded park on a sunny afternoon. She sits on a bench as children play and scream in an adjacent playground, young lovers kiss among the trees, cheerful music blares from loudspeakers, and everywhere there is bustling life and safety. Then the sound cuts out for a moment and the music is gone. We hear the children, but don’t see them. Suddenly, she is all alone – the park seems deserted. She is no longer safe. She gets up and starts for the exit, but in the next shot, it is abruptly night time and she knows she’s being followed by someone unseen.

Over the course of about 90 seconds, she seems to have stumbled from the world of the living, surrounded by the hubbub and security of the crowd, of day, into an underworld of shadow and threat. She runs through the paths of the park, the looming trees on either side become endless, winding corridors and it feels like a knife wielding maniac could leap out at any moment. She runs round a corner, and now she’s no longer among trees, but flanked on either side by stone walls, cobwebs connecting them that she must claw through. The way grows more and more narrow as, more and more desperate with fear, she claws herself forward. We alternate between her panting and grunting as she lurches towards freedom and life, and a silent POV shot of the killer trailing her slowly but surely. Finally, he hear her death screams and see her hand scratching down a wall as she meets her end. It is an absolute nightmare – and it doesn’t really make a lick of sense, but I think that’s part of why it works so well. The director is free to follow the star of the moment, unburdened by narrative demands. It’s when the story returns to the narrative that it falters.

So yeah, I’m happy I watched it. There are surely details worth seeing. But I can’t say it’s my favorite thing by Argento.

Summing Up

Ok, so I have now watched the “Animal Trilogy” and first off, I think it’s obvious why the only one I’d seen before was the first – The Bird with the Crystal Plumage really stands out among the three as special – in craft, in creativity, in style, and in its connection to the horror genre. The next two titles were made the following year and perhaps it was just too much too soon, but through them both, Argento’s talent and passion are still evident, and if one is interested in his work, I think it’s worth seeking them out. As I understand, after this, he turned to TV for a little while and also made a period comedy, The Five Days (1973) before returning to giallo (and horror) with what some consider his best film, Profondo Rosso (1975) (AKA Deep Red) (one of these days, I will finally write about it as well). While Profondo Rosso is obviously superior to these first three (a subjective opinion, but one I expect many would share), I think one can also see the seeds of creative choices he would make there in these “Animal” films. I’m happy to have finally seen them and I’m curious to know more.

So, that said, I have one more assignment for myself this week. As I wrote at the beginning, a documentary on Argento’s oeuvre has just dropped on Shudder, so before I sign off, I’m going to give it a watch and report back on anything of interest, particularly that which pertains to these first three films…

Dario Argento – Panico (2023)

Well, I’m glad I watched that, but I’m not sure how much to go into. It is a very personal piece of work – most of the interviews are with family or long-time collaborators who feel like family – his ex-wife, some of his daughters, his sister, Claudio Simonetti (of Goblin), and Michele Soavi, Lamberto Bava, and Luigi Cozzi (all three of whom worked under Argento as an assistant, and also directed films that he produced), with just three directors, Guillermo del Toro, Gaspar Noé, and Nicolas Winding Refn, speaking about how they were influenced by Argento’s work (an interesting collection – they are three strikingly different directors, though a possible through line between them is how visual they all are).

It is a very intimate portrait, as interested in his life as a father, a lover, a brother, or a son, as it is in his life as a film maker, but one quality that comes across loud and clear is the extent to which the work was always treated as art. And I don’t mean that in a pretentious way – he was not (he’s still alive, so I should be using a different tense, but generally I’m speaking of the early career, namely the Animal Trilogy) claiming to make some “elevated work,” ashamed to be associated with the genre in which he found a home. Rather, he was making entertaining thrillers or horror films, but respecting them as art and therefore all the more demanding of himself and his team in their execution. This is obvious in the technical prowess on display (apparently, on “Bird” the reason he was almost fired was that one of the producers thought he was doing too much weird stuff with the camera – I think time has proved that guy wrong), but it was no less true in the writing, the storytelling, the choice of subject matter. Over the course of his career, he has returned time and time again to dark themes and brutality out of a need to express something specific of himself on celluloid (in, again, an entertaining thriller, as opposed to some kind of heavy drama). And sometimes, very private elements make their way onto the screen, such as Trauma (1993) in which his daughter, Asia Argento plays a character suffering from anorexia, who was directly based on Asia’s half-sister. Or in the case of our three films today, apparently Four Flies on Grey Velvet at least in part prompted the dissolution of his first marriage as his wife at the time was, shall we say, nonplussed to see the degree to which the protagonist and his wife were so directly based on Dario and herself (if you watch the movie, you’ll understand why she might find that objectionable).

It’s easy to say, “Oh Argento – he’s so stylish and visual and makes things that look cool,” but watching Panico, he really comes across as a cinematic artist who is doing everything in his power to dig deep and make work that is significant, meaningful, personal, powerful – but in his case, that is work where a killer’s hands get lacerated as he falls down an elevator shaft, a woman is decapitated in a slow motion car accident, art objects can be deadly, and black gloved hands are always capable of reaching out of the shadows, blade in hand. We respect work that makes us cry – we can recognize the artistic value in drama – why not work that makes us tremble? Why should sadness be held above terror – or as Argento would have it in one interview, “panic”? Now, it is obvious that Argento is not alone in this, but I think that so often, genre is still undervalued and standout work from horror or thrillers, or even lighter fare like romantic comedies is overlooked (horror can ask so much of a performer and comedy is really hard). This documentary merely underlines the extent to which this genre director deserves to be considered through the lens of artistic merit.

I must admit that the second two films, while interesting to me as a completionist, and while they included many great elements, didn’t exactly blow me away (at least not like “Bird” or much of his stellar run from Profundo Rosso (1975) to Opera (1987). But after watching something of the life behind the scenes, perhaps I appreciate them a bit more. They are straightforward mystery thrillers, but they were made with a real drive to innovation, to expression, to doing something bigger, better, more. And the experience of making these surely contributed to building the foundation that made his best work possible.

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And so there we have the “Animal Trilogy.” It’s been gratifying to explore these three. All have something to recommend them, and as an early glimpse of a director I’ve long enjoyed and respected, it has been illuminating. How good it is that I finally took up this particular homework assignment and checked them out. Thanks for coming along. If you’re interested in watching any or all of them, as of the time of writing, I found The Bird with the Crystal Plumage on Shudder, Cat O’Nine Tails on Tubi, and Four Flies on Grey Velvet on Plex.

Catching Up With Shudder – International Voices

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As is true of many people, I carry more subscriptions than are probably necessary. Summing it all up, it doesn’t break the bank and I don’t exactly feel like I’m wasting my money, but how on earth could I ever watch all of the stuff on all of these different services? But each has something I want and that keeps me paying every month. One that I never regret is my subscription to Shudder, a streamer specializing in Horror (and thrillers – there’s a great collection of Gialli). I know that there are other ways to have access to a great amount of content (Tubi is free with commercials, for example), but I just feel some kind of loyalty to this one – it feels smaller; it doesn’t have an endless selection, and sometimes they can’t afford the biggest films, but it is curated by people rather than algorithms and I like that personal touch. And they do release a lot of exclusive films – some of which they produce and some of which they simply distribute.

But as I’ve often written, I have trouble keeping up with new stuff, so this week, as I’m a teacher and it’s winter holiday where I live (so I have some extra time), I’d like to catch up on some Shudder originals from last year, particularly some international releases and/or films bringing a different cultural perspective. Sometimes I see fans complain about how Hollywood has run out of ideas and is just endlessly milking properties that should have been allowed to die gracefully (but, to be fair, this is Horror – no one dies gracefully), but in recent years, streaming has really opened up the international market, and I feel that there are so many fresh voices worth exploring. So that’s the plan. Let’s see how much I can get through by the end of the week.

These will be shorter reviews – just giving some first impressions – and I’ll try to keep these spoiler free…

Saloum (2022) (Senegal)

A Senegalese genre mash-up, written and directed by Jean Luc Herbulot from Congo, this is a wild, entertaining ride, steeped in cultural references and recent history that I respectively had no previous connection to and was woefully ignorant of. Set in 2003, directly after a coup in Guinea-Bissau, the movie blends elements of a Dirty Dozen-esque Western, a slick Guy Ritchie crime flick, and African Folk Horror, while also digging into very real and raw emotional territory growing out the hellish conditions of child soldiers, the constant specter of colonialism, and cycles of abuse – personal, economic, sexual, and political. But for all of the weight of those themes, it is chiefly just a lot of fun.

We follow a trio of legendary mercenaries on an adventure as they escort a Mexican cartel member out of the coup, along with a great deal of stolen gold. After crash landing in the remote region of Sine-Saloum (in Senegal), they find their way to a kind of liminal outpost where apparently good works are done and volunteers live in communal harmony, but in fact, dark secrets run deep, the sand is soaked with blood, personal ghosts await vengeance, and literal spirits haunt the blasted land.

I enjoyed all of the characters and loved how varied they were allowed to be. Our trio of outlaws seem initially so hard, so dangerous – they can easily be read as militaristic thugs. But as we get to know them, they are so worldly and cultured. They speak many languages (including sign, which will become important). They may be “very bad men” (and they probably are) but they may also be “mythic heroes.” They are even surprisingly well-versed in spiritual matters, with one of them being some kind of cleric who can help navigate the magical threat they’ll face. Though they begin as a blend of archetypes, we come to know them as quite specific and anything but typical.

I will say that the Western and Crime elements landed better for me than the Horror. When something supernatural does turn up, even though there’s plenty of threat and blood and death, it somehow doesn’t fully tap into a horror vibe. However, the supernatural storyline is still fascinating, especially as it’s so tied to what I assume must be local folk beliefs, superstitions, and stories. The fact that I don’t know anything about this folklore made it all feel so rich and intriguing – and I appreciate that the film doesn’t seem to feel the need to really slow down and make sure that we’ve all got it all – it flies by at a clip and if you don’t immediately get something, I feel Herbulot assumes you’ve caught enough to work with, and keeps the story moving.

And beyond the action, it is also quite emotional. Balancing real world horrors and genre thrills, characters are given room to breathe and feel and change, and their personal histories come to bear in sometimes surprising, even tragic ways. This was a fascinating, high-paced, rewarding watch and while the “scary” parts weren’t very scary, the way it grounds the characters’ experiences in realistic trauma carries weight and brings the horror in a different way.

The Sadness (2021) (Taiwan)

A Taiwanese production with a Canadian director (who has lived there since 2008), The Sadness is gory, disturbing, intense, stressful, triggering, mean-spirited, and a pretty fun ride if you’re up for that sort of thing. Rob Jabbaz’s feature debut, filmed during the early days of the Covid pandemic (apparently Taiwan did pretty well at the beginning (8 deaths in 2020), so filming was actually possible), concerns a viral outbreak which transforms ‘normal’ people into vicious, sex-crazed sadists. I’d thought it was going to be a zombie movie, but is actually more akin to contagion films like Romero’s The Crazies (1973). Ostensibly, we follow a young couple as they try to find each other across a Taipei transformed in a matter of hours into a blood-soaked hell-scape filled with roaming bands of humans at their most monstrous. But I think that structure largely exists to allow Jabbaz to create scene after scene of mostly unrelated violence and depravity. But what violence and depravity! I spent probably 65% of this movie constantly cringing and recoiling at its sudden acts of extreme brutality.

It’s a really tense watch, but for all that it puts on display some truly awful stuff, it can also be a blast. It is a thrilling rollercoaster that raised my heartrate and put me on edge for the majority of its run time. And the practical effects work (from IF SFX Art Maker) is really extraordinary: fleshily realistic, but operatically explosive, they paint Taipei red by the end of the film. Faces are fried with hot oil and pulled apart, arterial geysers shoot up from torn necks, noses are bitten off, heads blow up, limbs are snapped, eyes are gouged, fingers are cleaved, and things are done which I’m not even going to put into words – it’s a lot, and it is all pulled off so well – disgusting, scary, and wild – and so creatively conceived of and masterfully executed.

At this point, I don’t know how much I need to watch a film about a viral pandemic – it can be a bit tiring. But this is such a high octane experience that it balances the weight of its metaphor, which is basically the classic zombie movie observation that disasters bring out the worst in us and that it takes so little for the thin veneer of society to be stripped away as we turn on each other. This is tackled in two ways: how the infected are portrayed and how we see everyone else respond. Of course, the infected are terrible, but the way they are terrible feels kind of novel.

These are not mindless zombies or rage filled marauders (ala 28 Days Later). They are fully cognizant of what they are doing and who they are – but the virus has amplified any of their inherent cruelty and crossed wires in their brains such that they derive overwhelming sexual pleasure from causing harm (and the wires cross the other way too, so  be warned that there’s sexual violence as well). They are crazy and dangerous, but they have the ability to be calculating; and they are as intelligent as they’d been before infection – it makes for a really unsettling situation – almost like a mass possession, ‘evil’ spreading through the population.

But it’s not only the infected. Of course, in classic fashion, we see healthy characters take immediate steps to protect themselves to the detriment of those around them. Doors are closed in people’s faces as they run from assailants, someone who could help a woman being assaulted, hides just feet away and does nothing, too concerned with his own safety, those who have yet to be exposed to a viral load lash out at each other. Typical for a genre like this, the film holds a dim view of humanity, but hey, after the last few years, it’s kinda hard not to.

Dark Glasses (2022) (Italy)

When I heard that Dario Argento had a new film coming out, his first since Dracula 3D (2012) (about which, the less said, the better), I was, let’s say, relieved. I can’t go so far as to say ‘excited’ as I didn’t want to get my hopes up – it had been a while since he’d made a film I had particularly liked, let alone loved as I did his work in the 70s and 80s. But it was a relief that no matter what this new film was, Dracula now wouldn’t be his swan song. Well, Shudder picked up his latest and released it back in October, so now I’ve finally checked it out and I can say…it is a film.

Honestly, I generally avoid negativity here, because really, what’s the point? (and the internet is so full of it) I mostly just want to focus on work that interests me, and not to criticize films that fall short, but I can’t find very much to praise in this case – which is depressing. It’s not terrible by any means. I’m not offended by it on some deep artistic level. It isn’t a total failure. But it also isn’t particularly noteworthy either – I think if Argento’s name weren’t attached, it would come and go, maybe end up on some streamer without any fanfare, and horror bloggers such as myself would probably never end up writing about it.

Essentially, it is a straightforward thriller: a serial killer has been targeting prostitutes in Rome. One such sex worker, Diana, is attacked, but survives, though in escaping her assailant, she has a car accident and loses her sight. Then, having befriended a young boy who was orphaned in the crash, the two of them are hunted by the tenacious killer until the final showdown and identity reveal. There are chase scenes and bloody murders (the gore seems to be practically executed and is quite well done), periodic jump scares (one effective bit with water snakes), and lots of screaming too loudly when one should be silently hiding. It’s…fine.

But where it is disappointing is that, though it is capably filmed, there’s no flash, and also little substance. It’s impossible not to compare this to Argento’s earlier work and imagine what a younger artist would have done with it. Blindness might be an artistic theme, a visual metaphor – it might resonate with some psychological trait of the killer or it might make visible something about the protagonist. Here, Diana simply can’t see and bumps into things and falls down – it’s a complication, but it doesn’t bear thematic fruit, and her experience doesn’t seem to especially change her. Similarly, the blindness isn’t used to create any particularly suspenseful set pieces, playing with who can watch and who is seen. As a sex worker who makes a living out of exploiting her visual appearance and interacting with clients in a sensory fashion, it feels like there is a lot of untapped potential here – playing with objectification, with being a subject and the power, and even violence, inherent in looking (ala Opera).

Finally, and crucially, there just not much style on display. Young Argento could be stylish to a fault, sometimes putting the narrative in service of creating an enrapturing look and a feel. In Dark Glasses, the camera never finds that perfect angle, the editing never makes the heart catch. The score is fine, but it is never paired with the imagery to make something indelible. At the end of the day, all of this criticism feels a bit unfair. This is its own film and Argento doesn’t owe me anything. As artists age, they shouldn’t feel behooved to constantly recreate the work of their youth. But when an artist has done such spectacular work early in their career, it’s hard not to compare.

Speak No Evil (2022) (Denmark)

I was actually hesitant to pull the trigger on this one. It made a splash when it came out last year (which meant that I saw loads of people praising it on social media and probably more complaining about it – that’s the internet for you), and my impression was that it would be really uncomfortable and heavy. And, to be fair, Christian Tafdrup’s film is indeed uncomfortable – a kind of social horror rooted in the deep and familiar awkwardness of feeling trapped in an interaction wherein you have to do things you don’t want to or risk coming off as some kind of rude jerk, but for all of that discomfort (and some pretty unpleasant places it goes once it turns to full-on horror), I wasn’t weighed down by it. Rather, I was mostly elated by just how very good it was.

In short, a Danish family (Bjørn and Louise, and their daughter Agnes), while on holiday in Italy, hit it off with Dutch family (Patrick and Karen, and their son Abel), who invite them to visit for a long weekend. Though they’d had such a good time together before, as soon as they arrive, the Danish family is immediately made to feel uncomfortable at every turn. Louise is a vegetarian, but Patrick insists she try the wild boar he’s prepared. The Dutch parents are much rougher with their son than Bjørn and Louise would ever be. When “invited” out to a restaurant (where again, they only order meat), Bjørn and Louise are first put off by Patrick and Karen grinding on the dance floor, before then being surprised that they are expected to cover the full cost of the rather expensive meal.

Time after time, Patrick and Karen do things (sometimes small irritations and sometimes quite significant violations of privacy) that seem to push Bjørn and Louise into accepting uncomfortable situations. But at the same time, it often just feels like a case of cultural or family difference. I don’t know enough about social mores in Holland and Denmark, but I can assume there are some different assumptions about “appropriate” behavior when it comes to issues of personal space, money, directness, private life, and risk aversion, among other things. And beyond national habits, each family can simply be different.

Time after time, Bjørn and Louise almost take their daughter and go, but one thing or another holds them back until they find themselves in the embarrassing position of having insulted their hosts, who are always quite open and charming, and when Bjørn and Louise try to explain what upset them, it always sounds unreasonable (even though while watching these things take place, red flags go off for the viewer non-stop). Tafdrup crafts an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension and dread and maintains it for over an hour (of a film that’s just a bit over 1 ½ hours long) before anything happens that feels like a horror movie per se. Of course though, when the penny finally drops, it’s clear that everything we’ve seen has been deliberate. Also, while for that first hour, nothing clues in the Danish family to the fact that this other couple is anything worse than unpleasantly inappropriate, this is a horror film from start to finish. The work of the camera and especially the soundtrack is just so doom-laden that it couldn’t be anything else.

Now, I will say that once some revelations were made, while still generally well handled, I wasn’t quite as thrilled with the final act. I think that I had just been so enjoying the ominous awkwardness, and had been so keyed-up, wanting the Danish couple to just get the hell out of there, that once the masks came off, the film lost some sparkle. It still follows through on the promise of its threats, but I wasn’t quite as spellbound as I had been. But never mind the destination – the journey was one of the best I’ve gone on in a good while. And while the filmmaking is strong, so much of this comes down to the performances. A Horror of Manners, this is an actor’s piece and everyone is spectacular. I particularly enjoyed Morten Burian (who plays Bjørn) – seduced by this open, wild couple who are so unlike him and his wife, stifled by the burden of polite behavior, he is finally pushed into a corner where his moral sense is challenged and he needs to break through his own socialization to try to do the right thing. It’s an emotional tightrope. And that’s before he discovers anything at all scary.  I really liked this one.

Slash/Back (2022) (Canadian Inuit)

Her feature debut, Nyla Innuksuk’s teen horror/sci-fi adventure is a unique and worthy effort even if it isn’t totally successful as a genre piece. Wearing its influences on its sleeve (early on, one character recounts the whole story of John Carpenter’s The Thing to her friends), the film charms more for how it spotlights an underrepresented population than for the novelty of its plot.

In short, a small group of teen Inuit girls in the tiny hamlet of Pangnirtung (about 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle, pop. approx. 1,500) discover and alone fend off an invasion of weird, shape shifting, body wearing, identity stealing aliens, saving their home town, and by extension, the planet. Along the way, they navigate their own interpersonal teenage conflicts (boys and school and parents who just don’t understand) and their own relationships to their home and culture. Innuksuk filmed on location in “Pang” (as the protagonists call it) and cast the film almost entirely with local, indigenous inhabitants, few if any of whom had worked before as actors.

Thus, there is an amateur quality to the performances; but in a way, that’s actually a strength of the film. I can’t say that the young leads manage particularly realistic performances (that’s hard), but the extent to which their own personalities shine through is honestly lovely. There is a precocious, brash quality to their portrayals which is essential to the project. Past the acting, much of the film is gorgeous, the local landscape offering overwhelming vistas to explore, and Innuksuk makes good use of them, while also digging into aspects of local small town life. The film is full of specific local details and character. And the periodic inclusion of the Inuk throat singing of Tanya Tagaq (who, like Innuksuk, is also from the region) adds such a cool, characteristic drive to it all. As for the scary horror/sci-fi alien invasion movie, it’s…fine. There’s some cool creature design and the CGI and practical effects do a solid job while obviously working within a budget, but the film never quite kicks into gear when it comes to the action or tension. Still, I think it’s so important that this is a genre piece. While it may not be amazing Sci-Fi or Horror, the sci-fi and horror give Innuksuk a rich space in which to tell a significant, meaningful story.

At its heart, we have 4 young girls torn between cultures. They have grown up in this hamlet and there is a degree of local, cultural pride (for some more than others), but for the rest, the world beyond holds so much more allure and they can’t wait to escape, to get out of this little village they view as poor or embarrassing, to go to some big city (one girl dreams of Winnipeg). In responding to this invasion, which so directly threatens their homes, families, and environment, they all tap into the cultural knowledge that has been instilled in them – the traditional tools of hunting and trapping their parents have passed on, and as they triumph over this colonizing presence, they repair their relationship to where they are from. It’s hard not to cheer when they rip what have come to be decorative, traditional gear off the walls, apply what I read as a kind of war paint (plus, one girl puts on a jacket with the slogan, “No Justice on Stolen Land” – which crystalizes the metaphor for anyone who hadn’t gotten it yet) and march off to hunt down the invading force, pushed on by the rallying cry of, “you don’t fuck with the girls from Pang!” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to tearing up.

The aliens are kinda creepy and have a cool design – tendrils writhing beneath loosely worn, stolen flesh, but the scares never really come. However, I really think that’s ok. This ‘kids on bikes’ movie, full of real people who are participating in telling a story of their land, their civilization, their struggles, all through the lens of this monster movie is really stirring in its own right. It might not be much of a “horror movie,” but it is a valuable film, while also being just a fun Kids vs Monsters flick. I’m glad it has a chance to be seen (at least by the pretty niche audience of Shudder viewers).

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And so there we have a little international sampling of Shudder in 2022. There was a good deal more, but I only have so many hours to work with here. Someday, I’ll catch up on the rest. I will say that it’s refreshing to take in such a wide range of work in one week. I generally don’t know enough about these countries to judge how accurately Senegalese, Taiwanese, Italian, Danish, Dutch, or Inuit cultural concerns have been presented, but I feel it’s been so worth taking the time to at least get a taste.

Fulci Pt. III – Fulci for Fake and A Cat in the Brain

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Maintaining my weekly writing schedule can sometimes be a challenge (case in point, I’m a couple days behind). Just choosing a topic can be difficult, especially since I don’t want to just review the latest thing I’ve seen. Rather, my goal is to only write about topics/films/books that I really find interesting or noteworthy. And so for the last few months, I’ve settled into a bit of a routine. I had my stint on “Lesbian Vampire” movies. I spent a month looking at Slashers and the “Final Girl.” I had a couple posts in a row on Argento. And now, most recently I’ve been digging into another notable Italian maestro, the prolific, varied, enigmatic filmmaker, Lucio Fulci.

Having first watched some of his early thrillers (all new for me) and then some of his most iconic horror work (all films I’d seen before and knew I liked), for my final post in this series, I wanted to look at a couple of pieces that might help contextualize him and his oeuvre: One of his last films, the 1990 quasi auto-biographical A Cat in the Brain (1990) and the recent biography, Fulci for Fake (2019). For some additional context, I’ve also referred to a book I picked up at Argento’s book store in Rome, “Lucio Fulci: Poetry and Cruelty in the Movies.”

Fulci For Fake (2019)

Simone Scafidi’s biography is framed with a somewhat odd narrative conceit. We follow an actor, Nicola Nocella as he prepares to play Fulci in a dramatization of his life. He spends hours in the makeup chair, sits around in his underwear drinking whiskey and contemplating images from films, and makes pilgrimages to interview a wide range of people who were either close to Fulci or are authorities on his work. The interviews are real, but nothing else is – there is no biopic and he is an actor playing an actor. Apparently the title homages a film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973), a largely fabricated documentary about an art forger. I have mixed feeling about the frame – the film probably could have functioned just fine based on the interviews alone, but there is maybe something to it. In accompanying this “actor” as he tries to get under the skin of his enigmatic subject, we try to do the same. But however much information we have, however many family members share their memories, Fulci remains more than a little unknowable. Which would be true for anybody; we all contain fathomless depths, and going on this actor’s journey helps highlight this truth. Approaching the mystery of this idiosyncratic, private, driven figure, both we and Nicola may get close, but we will always come up against a wall at one point or another, and watching him go through the process perhaps suggests a possibility of how we might engage emotionally with this investigation as well.

Nicola removing his makeup

As for the interviews, they are very warm, very personal reminiscences. A portrait is painted of a workhorse professional, proficient and flexible as he, chameleon-like, moved from one genre to the next, capably crafting effective work regardless of the subject matter or intended effect, and a probably loving but still emotionally removed father and husband, a figure clearly not without faults. Scholarly and technically adept, he’s presented as a very thoughtful, intelligent, practical artist, one who’s private life generally remained private, though it was sometimes touched by great sadness (his first wife committed suicide and his daughter broke her back in a horse riding accident).

The input of his daughter, Camilla adds a lot of personal, emotional detail.

Given my focus here, it is striking to hear some of the interviewees track his turn to horror. Now it’s probably clear after the last couple of posts that I am a big fan of (what I’ve seen of) his horror work in the 80s, but I can still totally understand how one could view even the best of them as weird, funny, messy, or even boring little films – ultra-violent, lurid B movies that don’t make sense, with odd acting choices and terrible dubbing. That said, I was fascinated, having learned more of his very accomplished early career, to hear friends and family speak of how he had never been so artistically satisfied before he left narrative coherence behind in pursuit of horror effect. One speaker countered the suggestion that these horrors suffered from their budget, that some potential had gone unfulfilled, that some kind of flaws were on display, stating that what the movies looked like and sounded like, every element in them, was actually exactly how Fulci had wanted them to be.

This suggests an interesting if obvious reading – everything is intentional – criticisms that something feels cheap or is unrealistic or non-logical are as aesthetically constructive as suggesting that “Guernica” would have been a better painting if Picasso had only learned how to paint photo-realistically. Clearly, here is a technician and an artist who fully grasped the methods of a typically understood “well-made-film” and simply decided that his path involved something quite different.

It is also quite sad by the end. Following a bout of illness in 1984, he simply didn’t seem to still have the power to do what he had once done. This led first to a decline in quality and then, as investors and producers lost faith in him, a massive and devastating loss in the opportunity to work at all. From 1959-1978, he had directed 33 movies in a wide range of styles. From 1979-1991, he worked almost exclusively in horror and ultra-violent thrillers (17 movies, 50 in total). He died in 1995 from complications of diabetes after not working for the last four years of his life.

A Cat in the Brain (1990)

His penultimate work, A Cat in The Brain is a fascinating, at times confounding, testament to leave behind. Fulci plays a horror film director named Dr. Lucio Fulci who begins to be haunted by the disturbing, violent images he’s committing to film. After opening credits featuring a cat puppet devouring brains, we meet Fulci as he calls “cut” on what had initially seemed to be a “real scene” of bloody dismemberment, thus initiating the film’s fungible relation between cinema and reality. He then takes himself to lunch at a nearby restaurant, only to find that seeing meat causes him to flash on the gory, cannibalistic scenes he’s just finished filming.

Plus, steak tartar REALLY shouldn’t just be left out unrefrigerated, on display.

This has been happening to him a lot – uncontrollable images, rooted in his own work but not exclusive to it, appearing uninvited, driving him mad. He can’t have a moment of peace without brutal violence impinging on his imagination, interfering with his ability to work, to eat, to maintain any normal human interactions. Unsurprisingly, he seeks professional assistance in the form of a psychiatrist who lives around the corner. Unfortunately (and this is a spoiler, but it happens very early in the film), the therapist, Professor Egon Schwarz, sees this as an opportunity to carry out some mayhem himself, and subsequently hypnotizes Fulci to think himself possibly responsible for a series of murders that Schwarz is undertaking. Really, Lucio should get his money back.

NOT a good therapist…

And so it goes: Fulci is attacked by his own dark thoughts, but is also witness to his therapist killing a bunch of people, thinking he might be guilty of these crimes (if they are, in fact, happening at all and not just his own fevered, hallucinatory imaginings).  But by the end, the real killer is found out and Fulci leaves with a beautiful woman on his boat, “Perversion” for a much needed holiday (better for the mind than a therapist and it won’t frame you for multiple murders). Or he kills her and cuts her up for bait. Nope – that’s just one more film being shot – off they go on vacation.

This is such an interesting almost final film – at once self-reflective, impishly playful, and as over-the-top sensationalistic as anything else he’d done. One detail of note is that it was almost entirely constructed in post, repurposing gory scenes from a number of unreleased recent projects. Just about the only new scenes filmed are those focusing on Fulci himself. With the help of his daughter, Camilla (as I understand from Fulci for Fake), he managed to salvage a string of recent disappointments and craft a bizarre, gorily personal work of quasi-autobiography.

But for all that it is so very personal, it is also deeply ambivalent. On the surface, it suggests a man who is disturbed by the work that he’s doing, preyed upon by the horrific images he’s in the business of producing. He wants them to leave him alone, to be able to enjoy a moment of “normal life,” but is being driven mad by the “cat in his brain,” scratching at his spirit, gnawing at his mind, driving him to obsession and unwilling to let him go. And yet, the tone is generally blackly comic throughout. Though filled with endless sequences of bloodletting (probably more than any other film he produced – because it is so explicitly about them), this feels less like a horror movie. I mean, it’s not really funny, per se, but the feeling is much more that of a light comedy, a lark. I just don’t feel he intends us to take all of it at face value, but is rather sending up the notion that his artistic predilections are anything to be at all disturbed by. The film feels playful, though the content is brutal and generally played straight – this is irony, not satire. And yet, you can’t help but wonder if it does reveal something true.

I don’t think this stands as a masterpiece of the genre, but it is really worth watching (and can sometimes be quite fun) for the sake of contextualizing him and his work. Plus, while he almost always gave himself a tiny cameo in his films, this was the only time he really “acted,” and he acquits himself quite well.

In Summation

So that’s Lucio Fulci. It’s been an interesting three weeks of really getting into him and there is so much more to explore in the future. There are a few other early 80s horrors which, while not as acclaimed as those I’ve covered, sound like they could be worth checking out (I hear The Black Cat is good). Some time, I’d also like to dig into his later, apparently less successful works (maybe Aenigma or The Devil’s Honey). Someday, I may even take in an old western or musical, just to scratch that itch of curiosity (Four of the Apocalypse sounds cool). I can’t say I’ve always considered him a favorite director exactly, but this focused time of consideration has really left an impression. I think it took me time to come around to embracing his particular flavor of dreamy, messy, sleazy, weirdly-transcendent splatter-art. But it really is something special, and when you are open to it, utterly effective.

I had read that he described the “Gates of Hell” trilogy as “total films” but misinterpreted what he’d meant. I had imagined an Artaudian (see Antonin Artaud and the “theatre of cruelty”) intention, assaulting the viewer with every available tool, using surreal non-reality as one of many devices that might crack open a receptive mind: a horror film as “a victim burned at the stake, signaling through the flames.” But the phrase was touched on in Fulci for Fake and apparently, he meant rather a kind of total freedom. The films are free to be film, not story exactly, but its own artistic medium (something Artaud would have approved of as well). After years of working as a craftsperson, honing his filmmaking prowess as an adroit gun-for-hire, he finally allowed himself to pursue “Art.” However, his particular brand of art would probably be seen as trash by many and I think that is an element of what makes it so very lovable. And not everybody has to love everything.

His is an oeuvre all his own, and I think the world is a richer place to have had him in it.