Retracing the wounds of the martyrs

For an Italian horror film released in 1976, Pupi Avati's The House with Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) is a little weird. Old-fashioned, in a sense: in the second half of the seventies, the giallo was in decline, wandering into the dustbin of obsolescence just like the Gothic horror genre it had replaced. The trend towards outré gory exploitation was already clear, even if most of the zombie and cannibal films that would exemplify this tendency hadn't been released yet.

In comes The House with Laughing Windows, and it's at once a throwback to chaster times - no series of elaborate murders here - and a weirdly experimental thing: a post-giallo, perhaps, both chronologically and thematically. It's a coincidence - Avati could hardly know that the time he finally moved from his earlier Gothic horror-comedies to the giallo would be an age of transition - but it's an interesting one. It's an exercise in deconstruction: Avati explores the spaces between the traditional beats of the giallo and discovers new loci of terror.

The film is set in a small marshland town in Emilia-Romagna. Struggling artist Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) has been commissioned by the diminutive mayor, Solmi (Bob Tonnelli), to restore a fresco of St Sebastian by an infamously morbid, long-dead artist that's recently been discovered at the parish church. Stefano also rents a room at the villa of a bed-ridden old woman, Laura (Pina Borione), begins a relationship with a young teacher, Francesca (Francesca Marciano), and is increasingly freaked out by the painting and the town's many strange residents.

That's really it. There's a death early in the film, but where in most gialli that would trigger Stefano's investigation  (with the requisite crucial bit of detail buried in his memory), it mostly sets off an hour of thickening atmosphere here. It's a broody mood piece, largely free of outrageous murders and, to the shock of every giallo aficionado, entirely bereft of trenchcoat-wearing black-gloved killers. Instead of progressive plot movement, we get foreboding galore and a sudden rush towards a final twist that doesn't win any sense-making competitions.

Not that The House with Laughing Windows is tastefully free of violence. The film opens with the dead artist Legnani's insane, bloodthirsty ramblings playing over footage of a murder, and the ending is in a similar vein. For all that the giallo is violent, it tends not to reduce the human body to meat to the extent that The House with Laughing Windows does in crucial sequences; despite being extraordinarily invested in Italian particularity in every other respect, here the film feels like the horror films coming out of the United States at the same time, or indeed the cannibal film that was about to consume the Italian horror industry. What I'm saying, I guess, is that Avati's uncredited work on the screenplay of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) doesn't seem entirely out of character.

The film boasts a strong cast, beginning with a compelling central performance by Capolicchio. A classic giallo protagonist in the sense of being an outsider having to navigate an alien place and community, Capolicchio nevertheless remains opaque himself instead of being an easy audience stand-in. And this is the right choice: by only allowing us a loose and tentative anchor, Avati increases the sense of unease. Marciano is similarly great; but if I had to nominate a best-in-show it would be Borione's wonderful, unsettling weirdness.

The connection between sexual transgression and murderous violence is well-established in the giallo, even if it never became codified into the rigid sex-equals-death moralism of the slasher film. Avati takes those lingering shots of lacerated flesh and pushes them further, into a film that connects, spoiler, wickedness to gender-bending. Its sexual politics is now more obviously problematic, but hasn't lost all the potency it held in the seventies. And that goes for The House with Laughing Windows as a whole: in deviating from the conventional structure of the giallo, it's perhaps the most chilling film in the genre this side of Bava or Argento.

Gotta get that feline

Everyone agress there is a whole lot of lesser Argento: most projects the man has directed in the last three decades, say. 1971's The Cat o' Nine Tails (Il gatto a nove code) is commonly reckoned among the director's minor works, despite attempts to make it part of a poorly defined 'animal trilogy' with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

All things considered The Cat o' Nine Tails deserves its for-completists-only reputation. As an attempt to push the envelope at a time when the classic giallo of the sixties was running out of steam, the film is overshadowed by Mario Bava's violent Twitch of the Death Nerve. But it's still full of interesting ideas that Argento recycled in later masterpieces like Deep Red.

Franco Arnò (Serbian-American actor Karl Malden), a blind man, and his niece Lori (Cinzia de Carolis) are out for a walk at night when they overhear a man in a parked car talking about blackmail to an unseen companion. Arnò, disturbed by this, is up at his home later solving a crossword when he hears the sound of a guard being struck at the head at a nearby research facility. The next day, it turns out that somebody broke into the Terzi Institute, but apparently stole nothing. The police, led by Superintendent Spimi (Pier Paolo Capponi), suspect industrial espionage, especially as the institute was spearheading research into XYY syndrome.

The case turns uglier when one of the institute's researchers, Dr Calabresi (Carlo Alighiero), falls off a platform at the railway station and is crushed to death by a train. Arnò suspects foul play and teams up with the journalist working on the story, Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus). Realising that Calabresi was pushed they begin to investigate the owner of the institute, Fulvio Terzi (Tino Carraro), his scientists and Calabresi's paramour Bianca Merusi (Rada Rassimov). Nine leads in all - hence the title. But that number goes down quickly as somebody starts bumping off possible witnesses to their crimes...

It's a weak plot. And not in the 'Whee, let's have fun with crazy surreal murders!' way we're used to from Bava's films, but as if Argento ran up against a deadline, could not figure out his own mystery, and tried to cover the unconvincing reveal with a tremendously abrupt ending. And that's without the whole chromosome nonsense, inspired by sensationalistic misreporting of men with XYY syndrome at the time. It's not just silly now that public understanding of genetics has moved at least somewhat beyond 'it's magic, and also rigid biological determinism'; it's also pretty insulting to those who were vilified as likely delinquents on the basis that they had an extra chromosome. (Full disclosure: as far as I'm aware, I have just forty-six chromosomes. There's a sentence I never expected to write in a film review.)

The characters are much better, as much as Argento's screenplay attempts to make mincemeat out of any arcs. Giallo heroes tend to be foreigners, but as a blind man Arnò is an outsider of another kind. If his impairment is mostly rendered stereotypically (enhanced hearing, that sort of thing), Malden elevates the character to something much better than the script had in mind. Franciscus's Giordano is a far more milquetoast character, although he's never less than likeable and gets something of an arc through his affair with Terzi's daughter Anna (Catherine Spaak). But the film's treatment of its co-leads is wildly uneven, with early hopes of an unconventional protagonist dashed as he is increasingly upstaged by Giordano. Argento would get the balance of a journalist-and-amateur team right the second time around in Deep Red - by demoting one of the characters.

Like many of Argento's films The Cat o' Nine Tails touches on risqué themes. Here it's homosexuality, presented sensitively for its time (as would be the case in Deep Red). Then there's the police, who are more competent here than they are in a lot of gialli but are fully aware of their reputation for reactionary politics. When Giordano insults him, Spimi agrees nonchalantly: 'Cops are all bastards. We beat confessions out of people. Take bribes. Oppress minorities.'

As is standard in the giallo, plenty of people die between announcing they've solved the case and actually passing on that information. The role of the telephone is one of the strongest links between the giallo and its North American bastard child, the slasher. (It's also a neat way of separating the two distinct traditions that I've argued can be found in the American slasher: if it's obsessed with the telephone, it's a giallo-style slasher, not a descendant of the countryside-revenge film.) In both subgenres, the telephone connects and isolates at the same time, as characters are able to speak to one another but are physically alone and vulnerable. As such, conversations interrupted by the murderer can be a key event (Halloween) or even the whole concept (Scream).

Stylistically Argento begins to move beyond The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, arguably the apex of the classic giallo. That means experimenting with Bavaesque colour, an enterprise he subsequently abandoned until the later seventies. Above all, though, it's by escalating the violence. While less extreme than Twitch of the Death Nerve half a year later, Cat pushes the envelope in nastiness with unflinching death scenes. Surrounded by a better film, that might be impressive; but here it leaves a sour aftertaste, especially paired with an underwhelming, synth-heavy Ennio Morricone score. The Cat o' Nine Tails may have been a cul-de-sac, but thankfully the director learnt from it.

Italian Horror Blogathon: Deep Red (Argento, 1975)

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies.

Dario Argento's fifth film is perhaps the most famous giallo of them all, but in hindsight it emerges as a transitional effort. Bridging the gap between excellent but ultimately meat-and-potatoes gialli and the surreal fever dreams Argento directed in the late seventies and eighties, Deep Red (Profondo rosso) flirts with the supernatural without ever quite losing its mind in the manner of later films.

At a 'scientific' conference in Rome, Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) attempts to prove the existence of telepathy with the help of German medium Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril). The presentation goes awry, however, when Helga is overwhelmed by the evil presence of a murderer somewhere in the room. Disturbed, she returns home, but not before announcing that she knows the killer's identity, unaware the scoundrel is lurking in the shadows of the red-curtained theatre.

Cue the inevitable: Helga is murdered by a figure wearing a dark raincoat in a scene that pays homage to Hitchcock's Psycho, but plays Italian cinema's permissive attitude towards gore to the hilt. From the street below, the killing is witnessed by Marc Daly (David Hemmings), an English jazz pianist. Marc struggles to remember a painting he is convinced the murderer has removed from Helga's flat, while the police devote their time to mocking him for being a penniless artist instead of solving the case. He's aided in his investigation by his depressed alcoholic friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), a self-proclaimed 'proletarian of the pianoforte' who performs for bored society types wearing 1920s fashions at a local bar. He also teams up with extroverted reporter Gianna Brezi (Daria Nicolodi), and the two begin an affair.

After remembering a children's song he heard during the murder, Marc is told about a book describing a past murder connected to the same piece of music. He tracks down the author, Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra), but the killer gets there first, stabbing Righetti in the spine and killing her by scalding her face in the bath, because in Italy the taps apparently run boiling water. (This death was ripped off, with similarly terrific make-up effects and preposterous logic, by Halloween II.) Marc is nevertheless able to identify the haunted house pictured in Righetti's book and goes to investigate...

Deep Red has a pretty terrific plot, but it's the central conceit I like best. The murder spree is kicked off by Helga's public telepathic discovery that somebody in the room has killed before; if it were not for that single coincidence, the past would have remained buried and the killer wouldn't have had to bump people off to protect his secret. It's much better than the standard 'psycho killers kill because they are mad, and also because of sexual perversion' the giallo favours, and it grounds the film psychologically even as Argento incorporates elements of the supernatural.

Then there's the fact that Argento is a stylist of genius: not as compelling in his use of colour and contrast as Mario Bava, but his eye for space, blocking, and utilising the frame surpasses that of the father of the giallo. And Deep Red doesn't disappoint. There are plenty of creepy props (terrifying children's dolls, dead birds, etc.), but the greatest scares are derived from the Baroque stylisation in Argento's arrangements, using his actors' faces to the greatest effect while creating plenty of negative and off-camera space where threats might lurk.

Where Bava made his way from Gothic horror to inventing the giallo, Argento moved from screenwriting to directing films in a subgenre that was already fully formed at the turn of the seventies. To the giallo at its height Argento brought a keen focus on the corruption of Italy's social elite: the side-by-side of luxury, high culture and murder - blood and art, blood as art - distinguishes his work. It's unsurprising, then, that Deep Red touches on controversial or risqué subjects like homosexuality, women's liberation (Marc is a fairly chauvinist hero), and the impact of politics on the police (who seem to be on strike when they're not busy bungling the investigation).

Beyond its focus on lurid subject matter, Deep Red is also really damn gory. Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve had opened the floodgates in that respect, but let it never be said Argento was not a keen student. With the brutal death of Righetti, mentioned above, special effects wizards Germano Natali and Carlo Rambaldi outdo themselves. Their work on other scenes - including an infamous decapitation - is less brutally realistic, but Argento more than picks up the slack with unflinching direction. When Giordani is repeatedly smashed face first into walls and sideboards we keep expecting Argento to cut away, but he never does.

It's not a perfect film: even in the Italian original there is plenty of irritating overdubbing, suggesting the director's dissatisfaction with some line readings. Then there is the soundtrack, which improbably seems to have a cult following. Argento fired composer Giorgio Gaslini half-way through the job and replaced him with musical collective Goblin. Their progressive rock score isn't bad per se, although it suggests Goblin spent too much time listening to Tubular Bells and In Search of Space. It's just not very giallo: I want screeching strings, damn it, not space rock.

But those flaws can't damage Deep Red's status as one of the best and arguably the most famous giallo. As a giallo with supernatural elements and a mid-point in Argento's oeuvre it isn't a great introduction to the subgenre: that honour belongs to the director's own Bird with the Crystal Plumage. But, importantly for a horror film, Deep Red is no less terrifying than it was in 1975. Gialli, after all, age more gracefully than slashers because of their psychological themes and the general lack of stupidity.

3rd Annual Italian Horror Blogathon: Torso (Martino, 1973)

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies.

After making his way from sexploitation 'documentaries' to feature films, Sergio Martino dedicated much of his considerable energy to the crowded space between horror and thriller. Directing gialli and other B-movies at the breakneck pace typical of the Italian film industry, the Roman churned out two or more pictures a year throughout the first half of the seventies.

By 1973 Martino was thus a veteran of the giallo despite having worked in the subgenre all of two years. It was certainly an interesting time. In 1971 Mario Bava, the godfather of the giallo, had decisively abandoned procedural elements in favour of lurid violence with Twitch of the Death Nerve (Reazione a catena), although most of his colleagues would not follow this shift for a number of years; and North American filmmakers were beginning to notice Italian horror, resulting in the first slasher, Black Christmas, in 1974.

But I'd be lying if I claimed it's just its place in history that interested me in the first of Martino's 1973 films (and the only one to be released in North America the same year). It's the title. I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence) distils the contemporary appeal of the giallo to its essentials: blood and sex. It's not all there is to the film: although Martino was one of the sleazier giallo directors - which is saying something -, he was no hack. The promise of I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale, anyway, is not quite conveyed by the English rump title Torso - although that moniker is pertinent too, as we shall see.

In the film's opening shot Martino's camera travels from a woman's face down her bare upper body to a doll, whose eyes are gouged out by the man she straddles. Then we go to a ménage à trois between a man and two women, while their partially out-of-focus sex is photographed by an automatised camera. The creepy sex and clinical focus on viewing and recording anticipate the film's themes. It's undoubtedly sleazy, but the music by Guido and Maurizio de Angelis is sufficiently urgent and creepy to drain the scene of all potential titillation.

Cut to a university in Rome, where Franz (John Richardson) lectures on Renaissance art to a mixed group of Italians and American exchange students. Jane (Suzy Kendall) and her friend Daniela (Tina Aumont) reject the unwelcome advances of creepy coursemate Stefano (Roberto Bisacco). Meanwhile, their friend Flo (Patrizia Adiutori) and her boyfriend (Fausto di Bella) are strangled by a masked assailant after making love in a car. Later Carol (Cristina Airoldi), another student, is murdered in a swamp by the same cloaked figure.

When the police seek the help of the student body, Jane is conflicted. She knows that she has spotted somebody in the piazza the previous day wearing the distinctive red-and-black scarf used to strange the victims, but there is a detail she struggles to remember, a detail that might crack the case... After she receives a threatening phone call, she is more than willing to accept Dani's invitation to come out to her uncle's country manor for a couple of days to recover from the shocking events, along with friends Katia (Angela Covello) and Ursula (Carla Brait).

Up to that point Torso is a bog-standard giallo, featuring all the expected elements: a foreigner embroiled in a murder case in an Italian city, repressed memories, a killer in a mask and dark coat. On the trip to the country, however, it becomes something altogether darker and more lurid as Martino amps up both the titillation and the gore. As a murder mystery Torso does not satisfy: Stefano is such an obvious red herring that I began to wonder if Martino might be double-bluffing, while the true identity of the killer is easy to figure out by a process of elimination well before the reveal.

But by 1973, the giallo had broken free of its procedural roots, and the latter half of Torso is a thoroughly effective blood-and-nudity shocker, though one that asks uncomfortable questions of the audience. Although he does not use the murderer's point of view excessively, Martino's lingering, often deliberately overlong shots implicate the audience in his act of watching, and he does not flinch: where you'd expect the camera to cut away, it doesn't. I shan't claim that as seasoned an exploitation director as Martino is deliberately rubbing the audience's depravity in their faces, but something is going on here. Nor is his objectification of women as straightforward as expected, with close-ups more disorienting than titillating.

As common in the giallo, the killer suffers from psychosexual hang-ups that don't necessarily make sense, but are disturbing as all hell. And that's where the English title comes in. The killer has a habit of stripping his victims half-naked, groping their naked torso and attacking their chest and eyes with a knife. Martino thankfully cuts to a flashback of a doll's eyes being gouged out to spare us those gory details, although he does not hesitate to kill off several victims at once, shockingly wrongfooting a viewer who expects them to be offed one at a time; and in a scene hinted at by the film's US poster, we watch through Jane's eyes as the murderer saws his victims to pieces. It's bloody violent stuff, but Martino works hard to offset blatant titillation with disturbing subtext.

Torso also parodies left-wing student culture, albeit in the somewhat befuddled and clueless fashion common at the time. As usual in sensationalist coverage of counterculture mockery and leering projection go hand in hand, from a student's pseudo-Marxist dismissal of Perugio as a 'common-sense bourgeois' to a comically overdrawn hippie commune, complete with drugs and free love. For me, though, the peak of the film's humour is a police officer's suggestion that after helping him solve the murders, the students 'can protest and riot when we're a bit reluctant to let you dismantle the state', a line so dated I laughed out loud. Not that rebellious students like me aren't trying to dismantle the state anymore: we are. But the uncomprehending rhetoric dismissing us as lazy troublemakers just ain't what it used to be.

Viva Bava, Part 5: Cutting-edge fashion

After pushing the boundaries of Gothic horror to new and disturbing places with Black Sabbath and The Whip and the Body, Mario Bava wasted no time in returning to the new subgenre he had created. Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino), though in several ways a worse film than The Girl Who Knew Too Much, distilled all the distinctive elements of the giallo into a single picture for the first time.

As so often, Bava's backers didn't expect or want the archetype of the ultra-stylish murder mysteries of the sixties and seventies: as an Italian-West German co-production, Blood and Black Lace was planned as a whodunit in the tradition of the countless German Edgar Wallace adaptations of the time. (These are still a mainstay on television in the Fatherland.) Like so much of Bava's career, the film was to be work for hire.

The director, though, was bored of that and chose to focus on lurid murders and cheap thrills at the expense of plot. Commercially, the gamble didn't quite work out: a box office bomb in Italy and a modest success in West Germany, Blood and Black Lace was passed over by AIP, who'd distributed Bava's earlier horror films in the United States. Instead, the film was picked up by the Woolner Brothers and released in a widely disliked English dub, to a cool reception.

Woolner Brothers did, however, bestow upon Blood and Black Lace its glorious English title, the first time that a Bava film title was improved by translation. Sei donne per l'assassino (Six Women for the Murderer) is serviceably lurid, making it perfectly clear we're about to watch a slice of exploitation; but Blood and Black Lace, ah! The alliteration, the structure of the vowels, the progression from relatively soft consonants to the hard /k/ and the hissed /s/ of the final words! And then there's the heady mix of high fashion, titillation and gore the words themselves promise. It is, in a word, a stunning title for an exploitation film that would not be surpassed until Twitch of the Death Nerve.

After extraordinarily stylish opening credits in which the actors are arranged like mannequins in a luridly lit fashion studio, we meet a man and a woman outside a mansion, discussing their current acute lack of cocaine; it turns out that Isabella, the man's still-girlfriend, is holding out on them, and they agree they'll ask her for the white stuff when she gets back. But when we cut to Isabella (Francesca Ungaro) walking through the woods, it isn't long before she's attacked and strangled to death by a masked killer wearing a trenchcoat and black gloves (actor and stuntman Goffredo Unger) in a pretty vicious sequence.

 
The next day, Inspector Silvestri (Thomas Reiner) turns up at the fashion house where Isabella worked as a model. The house is run by Massimo Morlacchi (Cameron Mitchell) and his lover, fashion designer Contessa Cristina Cuomo (Eva Bartok). The models become nervous as it is revealed that Isabella kept a diary in which the fashion house's various sins - abortion, cocaine, blackmail, you name it - are detailed. Nicole (Ariana Gorini) is murdered by the killer at the antique shop of her lover Franco Scalo (Dante Di Paolo), but the diary has already been nicked from her purse by Peggy (Mary Arden), and...

You know what? If the above sounds confusing, imagine what the film is like to watch. Blood and Black Lace has loads and loads of characters, most of whom never matter as more than cannon fodder and/or red herrings: half a dozen models, as many men employed in various capacities, and hangers-on. The narrative isn't so much flawed as downright broken: Inspector Silvestri, whose perspective we assume as he begins to unravel the house's dark secrets, all but disappears in the third act, when the screenplay's attention shifts radically to other characters. It's an illogical mess of a plot, and a thoroughly unsatisfying mystery.

But! That critique isn't just not the whole picture: it misses the point fundamentally, for Blood and Black Lace is style as substance, full of Bava's signature use of shadow, spare lighting, strong colours (a lot of red this time round) and quasi-psychotic zooms - which fit right in with the lurid subject matter, where they seemed out of place in The Whip and the Body. Carlo Rustichelli's string-heavy score is overwrought but extraordinarily atmospheric, while a shot of the killer appearing and disappearing in flickering light is so good it was ripped off as far down the ladder as Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.

There's no doubt that unlike Bava's somewhat more artful earlier horror thrillers Blood and Black Lace is exploitation: the film revels in serving up scantily clad young women for the slaughter, and in the grand tradition of bodycount horror it's inventive when it comes to murder. There's a loving close-up of one model being stabbed to death with a spiked glove, for example; another is killed when her face is pressed against a burning furnace, while a third is drowned in the bath and then has her wrists slashed to suggest suicide, which gives us the above image of horrid loveliness.

It's quite shockingly violent for 1964, far more so than The Girl Who Knew Too Much, and sexually suggestive to boot: one girl is suffocated wearing her nightgown, and the way the scene is filmed and acted her death throes might as well be sexual ecstasy - which puts the viewer into an uncomfortable perspective, to say the least. The acting is, all in all, mostly functional, although Bartok knocks the rest of the cast into a hat.

At one point, Inspector Silvestri and his colleagues discuss what drives the killer. They turn out to be wrong, but the question is symptomatic of something Bava's films ask time and again: why murder? Because it's beautiful, the giallo answers disconcertingly. The look of the subgenre - black gloves, trenchcoats, gleaming blades, dead bodies draped in an aesthetic, even titillating fashion: the visual vocabulary that renders the viewer complicit in the horrors depicted first blossomed in Blood and Black Lace. If the film isn't perfect - not even, perhaps, good - it nonetheless proved sufficiently compelling to inspire legions of imitators.

Viva Bava, Part 2: Women in refrigerators

After Mario Bava first gained fame outside his native Italy with 1960's Black Sunday/The Mask of Satan, three years passed before his return to the horror genre. Not, mind you, that Bava was idle in those years. On the contrary, he directed, shot, co-directed and salvaged no fewer than five pepla in 1960 and 1961 (Esther and the King, The Last of the Vikings, The Wonders of Aladdin, Hercules in the Haunted World and Erik the Conqueror, since you ask).

This breakneck pace was not unheard of in the rough-and-ready boom days of the Italian film industry, but it could only be achieved by rushing production and releasing films in short intervals (the last three on the list above all hit cinemas in a timespan of just five weeks). Thus we have no Bava films from 1962, but he hit the ground running, and February 1963 saw the release of The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo).

By that time, cinema at the intersection between horror and murder mystery wasn't what it had been just three short years previously. Psycho had changed the rules of the game forever, introducing a focus on the lurid, female victims and disturbed psycho-killers that was immediately copied across the pond.

Granted, Hitchcock's tour de force had actually come out six weeks before The Mask of Satan, but if you expect copycats to appear that quickly I think you're overestimating even the great Italian rip-off machine. A few years on, though, Psycho's mark on Italian cinema was indelible. The Girl Who Knew Too Much is, therefore, above all a homage to the master of suspense (some have called it a spoof), referring to his work in its title (a play on Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much) and its camerawork. But it's also already something else: the prototype of a new subgenre, the first of the gialli.*

Nora Davis (Letícia Román) is an American visiting her sickly aunt Ethel (Chana Coubert) in Rome. During the night Ethel dies, and Nora is walking to the hospital to notify them of the death when she is mugged and knocked out on Piazza di Spagna. When she regains consciousness, she sees a woman staggering towards her before falling over dead, a knife in her back, and being dragged away by a bearded man. Nora faints again and is revived with brandy by a stranger, but the good Samaritan flees at the approach of the police - who, of course, will not listen to Nora's ravings, believing her to have been drunk, grief-stricken and delusional, especially since no body has been found.

Our heroine is still unsure if she's imagined the whole scene but gladly accepts when the late Ethel's neighbour, Laura (Valentina Cortese) offers her her house while she leaves the city for a few days. Nora explores Rome with the late Ethel's doctor, Marcello Bassi (John Saxon), but soon discovers that what she saw fits the profile of a murderer who killed three young women whose names began with consecutive letters of the alphabet ten years previously. Since her surname begins with a 'D' and she Knows Too Much, Nora fears she may be next.

It's almost as if Bava knew he was making the first cinematic giallo: The Girl Who Knew Too Much is positively awash in explicit references to that post-war Italian genre of cheap paperbacks that blended crime, horror and titillation. One of the very first things the voiceover narration (which would not become a trope of the genre) tells us about Nora is that she is an avid reader of libri gialli, 'yellow books', the full meaning of which is not quite conveyed by the 'murder mysteries' as which the subtitles translate the phrase. Later, our heroine uses skills gleaned from her reading to ward off the killer.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much is the first time the giallo made the jump to the big screen, but it's also Bava's last feature filmed in black and white. As such, it marks his highest mastery of monochrome both as a director and as a cinematographer. Bava may not have thought much of his lead actress ('it could have worked with James Stewart and Kim Novak, whereas I had...oh, well, I can't even remember their names'), but he sure made the most of Román's skin and blonde hair by throwing shadows on it, for delightful and spooky contrasts:

So even if Román's performance isn't all it could be (while John Saxon seems a bit lost, she looks uncomfortable, as if the on-set experience wasn't altogether pleasant), she certainly has the face to carry off a giallo. I don't subscribe to blanket condemnation of exploitation films as misogynistic: while they do have ingrained and often actively nasty patriarchal structures, they can also perform gender in surprisingly transgressive ways, as Carol Clover and others have shown.

But Ramón's character pioneers the 'type' of woman gialli would keep going for - young, beautiful, blonde - and the fact that the victims are women at all. Unlike the American slasher, which killed both sexes, though in heavily gendered and stereotyped ways, gialli almost always preferred female victims. The film's Italian poster says it all: if slashers are Dead Teenager Films, gialli have to strain not to be Dead Woman Films - hence the post title.

Bava's direction consciously borrow from Hitchcock - witness his use of signature zooms and pans - but in speaking its own visual dialect it sets up the giallo's most distinctive characteristic: in contrast to their sometimes brutally artless brethren across the pond, gialli are stylish. As such, you pretty much trip over moments of extraordinary visual flair like this shot in which Nora, lying in bed, finds herself menaced by a dark silhouette on the other side of the window:

The dramatic musical cues (lots of strings, à la the screeching climax of Psycho) and the editing by Mario Serandrei both betray Hitchcock's influence and mark the new subgenre (a cutaway on a crescendo is particularly effective). The outsider, often a foreigner, who's in the city where he witnesses a crime only for a limited period of time - another giallo distinctive - is also introduced here. (It survives in fossilised form in Black Christmas and subsequently disappears in North America.)

All in all, The Girl Who Knew Too Much seems like a sign of things to come. An emphasis on style (not, as yet gore) rather than plot; a list of female victims to be stalked and killed; crimes that (mild spoiler) are ultimately senseless and not rationally motivated; a knife-wielding murderer, though not yet masked; the presence of John Saxon, he of Black Christmas and A Nightmare on Elm Street: why yes, I think we're in proto-slasher territory.

At the same time, that teleological perspective is massively problematic. Reducing the giallo to the precursor of the slasher - even viewing The Girl Who Knew Too Much as nothing more than the first giallo - risks engaging in presentism and papering over the very real differences between genres and films.

The humour, for example: The Girl Who Knew Too Much is funny in quite a few scenes, and terror sometimes resolves into comic relief - something that is unheard of in at least the first wave of North American slashers, which seem to come from a darker, more brutal place. Even the film's outrageous final twist - which reveals either the protagonist's or the writers' ignorance of the psychoactive properties of marijuana - is ambiguous. We can't switch off hindsight, but The Girl Who Knew Too Much really does feel like Bava had discovered a potent formula - and there was more where that came from.

*The Girl Who Knew Too Much was released in a truncated cut in the US, as Evil Eye. This review is based on the original Italian version.

Meet the ur-slasher

Lest this blog be accused of lacking Christmas cheer, I decided to do what I do best: watch a low-budget slasher film. But not, gentle reader, any old dead teenager flick. No, nothing but a Christmas-themed horror picture would do, because if the stylish slaughter of innocents is not the reason for the season, I don't know what is. (Jesus is. It's not Herodmass, after all.)*

Black Christmas isn't just yuletide-friendly, though.  It's also an important film, after a fashion: released on 11 October 1974, Black Christmas is the first North American slasher film, predating Halloween by four and Friday the 13th by five and a half years. That's how long it took for the template the film pioneered to catch on - which may have something to do with the fact that the first, glorious flowering of this most American of horror subgenres was produced in Canada.

It's shortly before Christmas at the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house, somewhere in the northern US (portrayed by Toronto). The girls' Christmas party is interrupted by an obscene phone call from a man the sisters have dubbed the moaner for his fondness for gurgling, screaming, and animal noises. Foul-mouthed Barb (Margot Kidder, of Superman fame) shouts at the caller, causing 'professional virgin' Clare (Lynne Griffin) to worry about provoking someone obviously unhinged. She's right to fret since, while packing in her room, Clare is asphyxiated in plastic foil by an unseen assailant.

The next day Clare's father, Mr Harrison (James Edmond) arrives in town to pick up his daughter but finds that the house mother, Mrs Mac (Marian Waldman) hasn't seen her of late. (Mrs Mac, by the way, is an alcoholic spinster, and I'm never quite sure whether to be grateful or appalled that screaming stereotypes tend to die early on, as this character does.) Meanwhile, Jess (Olivia Hussey, who shot to fame with Romeo and Juliet) meets her boyfriend, highly strung music student Peter (Keir Dullea, of 2001: A Space Odyssey), to tell him she is pregnant but will have an abortion. Peter takes this badly, and the two part without agreeing.

Mr Harrison and the concerned sisters report the threatening calls to the police. There, Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon, who later played a similar authority figure in A Nightmare on Elm Street) decides to put a tap on the house phone. (The specifics of telephony - rather different in those primitive days - are rather important to the plot, and are thankfully well explained.) Before long, the police discover the shocking truth: the calls are coming from inside the house.

As a horror film Black Christmas is extraordinarily satisfying: suspenseful and, well, scary - a less common trait in the genre than one might suppose - it towers over its lesser brethren. That's in no small degree thanks to having an unusually threatening baddie in the Moaner (voiced by Nick Mancuso and director Bob Clark himself). Most slasher villains are not actually insane: sure, Michael Myers spent most of his life in an asylum and his madness is frequently asserted, but for all practical purposes he's a functioning guy who just really enjoys stabbing teenagers to death. The Moaner, on the other hand, is frakking psychotic, and the psychosexual menace in his calls ('Let me lick your pretty piggy cunt!') makes your skin crawl in ways simpler murderfests cannot muster.

It can't be denied, unfortunately, that Black Christmas is filled to the brim with padding - although at the time many superfluous subplots seem like they'll lead to something, and I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. For example, the search for a missing teenage girl keeps Jess, Phyl (Andrea Martin) and Mr Harrison occupied during the film's second act, but ultimately peters out. At least they're always diverting, thanks to the well-written script by Roy Moore. (My favourite moment occurs when Phyl's boyfriend Patrick (Michael Rapport), dressed as Santa Claus, glumly mutters 'Ho ho ho shit... ho ho ho fuck' into his fake beard.)

It's well-acted, too: Margot Kidder as the hard-drinking Barb, who enjoys shocking people with tales of her promiscuity to hide her lack of meaningful relationships, is perhaps the best, but Olivia Hussey comes close despite being hampered by an unsteady accent. Then there's the undeniable fact of the film's feminist subtext - surprising in a subgenre generally known for its vicious misogyny. Like many slashers, Black Christmas is in no small part about a man violently reasserting control over women; unlike some of its brethren the film problematises the patriarchal murder spree rather than celebrate it.

That feminist edge is present in our Final Girl, too. Jess, you'll recall, is pregnant out of wedlock and determined to have an abortion, and yet she's a fully drawn, rounded human being. Her let's-get-married-and-have-the-baby boyfriend, with his obsessive need for control, is clearly the less mature of the two. I'd argue, in fact, that the old 'sex equals death' cliché conceals the fact that survival in a slasher film is not primarily about virginal purity but about level-headedness and maturity - qualities exhibited by the nonvirginal Jess and the virginal-by-lack-of-opportunity Laurie of Halloween, but not by their promiscuous friends. Seen in that light, Black Christmas is a far less heterodox slasher than it seems at first.

Bob Clark's direction is far too eager to waste time with gratuitous shots from the killer's point of view but is otherwise good: the best scenes, for my money, are a slow close-up pan over the girls' faces during the moaner's first call and an eeriely beautiful murder committed with a crystal unicorn statue, in the film's most Italian moment. Black Christmas never hides the debt it owes to the giallo: the telephone subplot is cribbed from Dario Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), as is what Tim Brayton has termed the uncovering of the tableau, the scene - present in most slashers and gialli - in which the Final Girl discovers the bodies of her slain comrades.

These characteristics lead me to identify Black Christmas as the first slasher film, despite the fact that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released ten days earlier. Tobe Hooper's violent fantasy grew out of the very American countryside-revenge film typified by Deliverance (1972) rather than the giallo, and the series has retained that genre's tropes - incestuous, unhygienic hillbillies, a rural, Southern setting, a group or family of killers rather than a lone murderer - to the present day even as it's been intertwined closely with the true slasher.

If Black Christmas still feels like a giallo in places, it has already transcended that genre and created something new - new in 1974, that is: after the Friday the 13th series set to churning out braindead paint-by-numbers slashers, its originality is easily missed almost four decades on. Many of the tropes it introduced - the lone, unseen killer, the meat whittled down one by one, the Final Girl, the crucial role of the telephone - form the bedrock of the genre to this day. Black Christmas is not, however, only the archetypical slasher. It's also one of the very best, and has lost little of its raw creepiness.

*And now I find myself wishing someone would do a slasher adaptation of the Christmas story, with Jesus as the Final Girl.

Birds of a feather

Giallo, the subgengre of violent 1970s Italian murder mysteries that inspired the North American slasher films, is a bit daunting. I finally decided to take the plunge after reading the A.V. Club's excellent introduction. And Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) proved a great place to start - a taut, thrilling slice of sleaze that introduces many of the genre's tropes.

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is an American writer living in Rome with his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall). The night before he is supposed to return to the States, Sam witnesses a cloaked, gloved madman attempt to murder a woman with a knife at an art gallery, but being locked on the other side of a glass door can't intervene. He's informed by police that this attack is the latest in a series of murders of young women in the city. Sam tells the police all he knows, but is certain that there is an important detail he just can't recall. He decides to aid the police by doing some amateur sleuthing of his own (the police are amazingly supportive of this, by the way) and speaks to, among others, a stammering pimp (Gildo di Marco), a bumbling snitch (Pino Patti) and an eccentric painter (Mario Adorf, much more famous in Germany than in the US), all while being pursued by the killer...

As I said, this was my first foray into giallo, but I do know a thing or two about slasher films. Early slashers borrow liberally from Argento (who himself pays homage to Hitchcock's Psycho in several shots, incidentally). The first North American slasher, Black Christmas (Bob Clark, Canada 1974), takes the framing of one murder, the prevalence of POV shots and a subplot about phones from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, among other things, but the most obvious influence is in the music. Ennio Morricone's score for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage - wildly different from his more familiar spaghetti western scores and remarkably prog-influenced - may well have provided the base Carl Zittrer worked from in Black Christmas.

The film is marked by what were to become the tropes of the giallo: a masked, glove-wearing psychopath stalking and murdering young women using - much like later slasher film killers - primarily bladed weapons (although the killer in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage sends a pistol-toting accomplice to off Sam). That iconic poster, drawn from a famous scene, is emblematic of the defining lurid, sexually suggestive threats to women (men are only murdered when they get in the killer's way). But it also points to the importance of style when assessing the giallo: the gleaming knife, the bright colours, the gloves, the symbols of wealth.

It may be too much to link the genre directly to the 'years of lead', the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when Italy was wracked by political violence, or to plays like Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which premiered in 1970. But what gialli share with Fo and left-wing critiques of the Italian state is a focus on the corruption of the wealthy and powerful. Their fear of knife-wielding maniacs invading decent people's homes, on the other hand, is much more conservative and parallels the obsessions of North American vigilante films from the same time; and although they are woefully incompetent, the police in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage are affable and well-intentioned. (Like Black Christmas and unlike later slashers, Argenton's film is a murder mystery first and a horror film second.)

An exceedingly well-filmed murder mystery at that: Argento's directing genius is displayed in the choreography and editing at least as much as in the framing of individual shots. There's an extraordinary number of killer's POV shots, later (wrongly) held to be a defining feature of the slasher film; but just as importantly we get POV shots from the victim, while being attacked - the knife stabbing at the audience, tearing the screen as in Psycho. For my money, the opening gallery scene is the highlight of the film: the protagonist is separated from the scene by glass that muffles sounds, allowing alternation between full volume and creepy almost-silent horror; the place itself, a cold white with a number of spooky-looking exhibits, contrasts with the killer's black outfit.

When Sam is trapped on the other side of the doors and can't intervene, Argento's use of negative space is brilliant:

Having sung the director's praises, I feel free to turn to what struck me as most odd about The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: the humour, of which there is an extraordinary amount. For me, the best of this is the snitch's excellent preamble: 'Now get this straight. I don't know anything, I don't know anybody, and I ain't seen anything. What do you want to know?' There are entire scenes - such as Sam's visit to shaggy cat-eating painter Mario Adorf - that rely on broad comedy. I don't think this is bad - by and large, the humour works - but it's certainly odd to anyone familiar with the fairly dark early slashers.

As someone new to the genre, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage strikes me as a weird hybrid between a cerebral mystery like Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder and a slasher film. It's a great film, though, disturbing and luridly entertaining, and I look forward to continuing my foray into the depths of the giallo.