ITALIAN HORROR MOVIE BLOGATHON: The Beyond

Posted as part of Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies’ 2nd Annual Italian Horror Movie Blogathon

I don’t have any hard and fast rules when it comes to reviewing a film. In terms of style, content, structure and word length, it’s pretty much a case of however I’m feeling when I sit down at the computer and start typing. Sometimes I start with a plot synopsis, sometimes a contextual remark on the film’s place in the director’s canon, sometimes a personal recollection of the first time I saw the film, and sometimes a bit of straight-up unapologetic sarcasm.

With ‘The Beyond’, I really want to start with a comment along the lines of “this is one of the most gorgeous horror movies I’ve ever seen”. Only it seems a slightly inappropriate description for a movie featuring multiple face meltings, excessive eyeball trauma (what was it with Fulci and the introduction of sharp implements to the vitreous humor?), a chaining, a crucifixion, and some anti-social behaviour from the natural world, viz. a guide dog completely abandoning the job description and a protracted scene where some big-ass spiders eat a guy’s face. (Any arachnological issues one might have with the veracity of said set-piece will, I guarantee you, be swiftly dispelled by the sheer ickiness of it.)

And yet … ‘The Beyond’ is never less than handsomely mounted and often outright beautiful (not as potent a piece of cinematic eye-candy as Argento at his most visually florid but still more enough to turn the head of a DoP groupie), and nowhere more so than in the sepia toned 7-minute pre-credits sequence. There’s a note-perfect analysis of this scene in Tim’s review of ‘The Beyond’ at Antagony & Ecstasy, which I’d urge you to read. This sequence – set in 1927 – is a mini-movie which moves elegantly from painterly imagery to brutal narrative without ever sacrificing its aesthetic (kudos to cinematographer Sergio Salvati).

A group of townsfolk converge, by boat and car, on a dilapidated hotel where Schweik (Antoine Saint-John), a painter reviled as a warlock, is staying. They enter the premises and burst into his room. During what follows, Schweik attempts to reason with them, revealing that the hotel is built over one of the seven gateways to hell and that he has specialist knowledge which can ensure the portal is never opened … the kind of dialogue which, today, would earn him a fast-tracked referral to a mental health facility. The kind of dialogue which, in 1927, earns him the attentions of a lynch mob.

Incidentally, those dozen words: “the hotel is built over one of the seven gateways to hell”? That’s your plot synopsis, right there.

The story – i.e. the remaining 80 minutes during which property heiress Liza (Katherine MacColl) and general practitioner Dr John McCabe (David Warbeck) find out what the audience already know – recommences in 1981 with the hotel even more dilapidated. Liza, unexpectedly finding herself the new owner, decides to renovate and reopen it. Discovering a flooded basement and an incipient leak even though the water is turned off, she hires Joe the plumber (Giovanni di Nava) to fix the problem. Not only does the luckless Joe not fix the problem, he exacerbates it by way of opening the door to the undead. Fucked up and generally unpleasant set-pieces ensue; a nastily cynical coda kicks you in the balls; roll end credits.

As a work of narrative coherence, ‘The Beyond’ is up there with ‘Suspiria’. In fact, coming three years after Argento’s masterpiece of anti-narrative and just a year after his equally free-form follow-up ‘Inferno’, Fulci’s opus invites comparison to the Three Mothers mythos. If Argento’s concept was of three houses of evil, one for each of his triumvirate of demonic dames, one can only imagine where Fulci’s imagination might have taken him if he’d chosen to explore the other six entrances to the underworld. (Although an argument can be made for ‘City of the Living Dead’ and ‘The House by the Cemetery’ as companion pieces which use their settings to similar effect.)

But coherence isn’t what ‘The Beyond’ needs. No matter the weird feeding habits of spiders, the libraries and bookshops which are repositories of weirdness, the hospital in which a family doctor can happily conduct his own post-mortem or a grieving widow wander unaccompanied into an autopsy room; never mind the concept of Liza inheriting two staff members along with a hotel that hasn’t been open to the public in half a century, two staff members who can’t be much older than their late 30s; pshaw to idea of Dr McCabe, a man who (one presumes) has taken an oath to preserve life, grabbing a six shooter from his desk drawer and cutting loose like Harry Callahan the moment some weird shit goes down; and pshaw plus VAT that he routinely manages ten or twelve shots from said six shooter between fumbled reloadings.

‘The Beyond’ transcends logic and narrative coherence. All Fulci is interested in is generating an atmosphere of mounting terror. From the outset, before we’ve even got to the faces dissolving in acid or the gouged-out eyeballs, there’s a sense of something off-kilter. A handful of early manifestations – a painter startled by a figure in an unoccupied room; a service bell buzzing from an equally empty room – suggest a haunted house story in the classic tradition. Then Fulci ramps things up with Joe the plumber’s unfortunate transgression. After which – pardon the pun, but it really is the most apposite expression – all hell breaks loose. From hereon in, all bets are off. We’re in a fractured and disturbed cinematic space in which anything can happen.

Which isn’t to say that ‘The Beyond’ is simply a chaotic frenzy of gruesome set-pieces, one piling up against the other like a train wreck or a multiple-vehicle smash up. The craftsmanship behind the film is too artful and attentive to detail. The opening sequence sets up visual motifs which are revisited throughout the film:

Likewise, a striking shot of the mysterious blind girl Emily (Cinzia Monreale) and her guide dog standing stoically in the middle of a deserted highway is echoed in the existentially shattering final scene where Liza and John find themselves on a pathway of an entirely different sort.

‘The Beyond’ is a film better experienced than analysed, even though I do say so after expending a thousand words on it. In his rejection of logic and conventional narrative, Fulci achieves the illogical but inescapable fragmentary narrative of a dream, one palpitating onrush of primal horror or revulsion lurching into the next, one grotesque image supplanted by another until they sear the mind with a sort of visceral poetry, the entire nightmare suffused with enough pointers towards the corporeal world to make you wonder whether you’re not in fact dreaming and the bottom has simply dropped out of reality.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The Wax Mask

Wikipedia cites the Dario Argento produced ‘Wax Mask’ in its list of notable giallo titles, which was pretty much the only reason I approached it yesterday. I’d dispute its classification as a giallo, but not having watched any other giallo-rific titles in the last week, it’ll have to do for today’s post.

The story behind the film is possibly more notable than the film itself, so let’s start there. When the project got off the ground in 1996 it was intended as something of a comeback for Lucio Fulci, who hadn’t made anything for five years since the unfairly overlooked ‘Door to Silence’. Fulci collaborated with Argento on the screenplay (Daniele Stroppa also takes a script credit), the funding was lined up and pre-production completed. Just weeks before principle photography was due to start, Fulci died. Directing duties were swiftly assigned to SFX guru Sergio Stivaletti (Italy’s answer to Tom Savini). Stivaletti hadn’t directed before and has chalked up only three more directing credits since – two of them for television. The completed film was dedicated to Fulci and is something of a mixed bag.


Loosely based on a story by Gaston Leroux – the same story that, equally loosely, provided the raw material for Andre de Toth’s ‘House of Wax’ and Jaume Collet-Serra’s yawnsome remake – things kick off in Paris on New Year’s Eve 1900, fireworks bursting over the city in stark contrast to the crime scene Inspector Lanvin (Aldo Massasso) is called to. A couple have been gorily murdered, their hearts ripped out by a cloaked figure with a mechanical hand. Their young daughter, hiding, escapes the slaughter.

Twelve years later we’re in Italy and Boris Volkoff (Robert Hossein) is preparing for the grand opening of his wax museum, a place that is already being spoken about as a chamber of horrors. Aristocratic layabout Luca (Daniele Auber) accepts a bet to spend a night there, intending to blow his winnings on the company of pert hooker Giorgina (Valery Valmond). He doesn’t live long enough to collect them. Volkoff pretends he’s aghast, but is secretly delighted at the potential publicity. Meanwhile, journalist Andrea (Riccardo Serventi Longhi) senses a story and romances Sonia (Romina Mondello), newly employed as a costumier at the wax museum, with a view to getting close to the enigmatic Volkoff. Sonia, in case you haven’t guessed, is the girl who survived the attack in Paris. And no sooner has she commenced employment with Volkoff than she’s a mite curious (not to mention slightly traumatized) as to how Volkoff has managed to capture her parents’ murders in such accurate detail for one of his macabre tableaux.


I guess the not-particularly-engaging mystery element, Sonia and Andrea teaming up to unearth the incredibly transparent truth behind Volkoff’s creations, just about permits a case to be made for ‘The Wax Mask’ as giallo. The set design, particularly the baroque layout of the museum and the gothic stylizations of Volkoff’s workshop, are more in keeping with Argento’s ‘Suspiria’. In fact, if the filmmakers had reimagined Volkoff as a female character, played by – say – Mercedes McCambridge, this could easily have been a part of the ‘Three Mothers’ mythos. Come to think of it, for all its tired genre tropes and general air of predictability, ‘The Wax Mask’, retuned slightly to incorporate Mater Lachrymarum, would have still presented a better conclusion to the trilogy than Argento’s own ‘Mother of Tears’.

In its defence, ‘The Wax Mask’ is prettily shot in a BBC costume drama kind of way (not that your average BBC costume drama would feature a scene where two people’s hearts are ripped out and impaled on what looks suspiciously like a kebab skewer but, hey, that’s just one of the ways the Beeb misses out!), while Maurizio Albeni’s lushly romantic score is so deliriously OTT that it swiftly emerges as one of the film’s chief pleasures. Hossein, Mondello and Massasso turn in perfectly acceptable performances. Valmond, as the sparky but ultimately ill-fated Giorgina, is much better than the material gives her any right to be in what was the second of only two film appearances. The gore scenes do what they need to do, there’s enough nudity to keep the horny toad as entertained as the gore hound, the whole thing ends in a massive conflagration, and there’s the obligatory twist ending that you’ll be able to see coming like an ocean liner on a duckpond.


What you probably won’t see coming is an unrivalled moment of what-the-fuckery in during the fiery denouement where the film makes a sudden, jarring and jaw-droppingly inexplicable lurch into science-fiction. It sure ain’t Leroux’s original tale, I’ll tell you that.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: today’s Giallo Sunday offering, a blood-drenched, wax-spattered horror/sci-fi/costume drama with just a soupcon – maybe – of giallo.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The New York Ripper

Early in Lucio Fulci’s censor-baiting controversy-magnet ‘The New York Ripper’ – that staple of the BBFC and DOP hit lists, a film that remains so infamous that even mentioning the title gets you filthy looks in most social situations (try it; five points for talking about it at work, ten at the kids’ playground, fifteen in front of your mother, twenty in church) – there’s a scene where pathologist Dr Jones (Giordano Falzoni) performs an autopsy on a young woman who has been brutally murdered by the eponymous nut job, and describes his findings to Detective Williams (Jack Hedley). The murder weapon: a fucking big knife. The application thereof: “He stuck it up her love trail.”

Allow me to repeat that, just in case you didn’t pick up on the subtleties and nuances on a first reading:

“He stuck it up her love trail.”

Ladies and gentlemen, abandon your sense of aesthetics, put your aspirations to classy entertainment in cold storage, mothball your morality and drape the dust covers over your finer feelings. We’re about to submerge ourselves in 93 minutes of sleaze, depravity and nastily sexualized violence. (Well, what else were you going to do on a Sunday afternoon?)

An old man out walking his dog finds the mutilated corpse of a young woman. Williams pegs it as the same modus operandi as the killing of a hooker some weeks earlier. A cyclist in hot pants has an altercation with a motorist and is brutally assaulted and killed on the Manhattan ferry shortly thereafter. Jane Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli), the sexually provocative wife of respected academic Dr Lodge (Laurence Welles) attends a sex show after which one of the performers is murdered by way of a broken bottle applied to her nether regions. Jane’s taste for the seedier side of life brings her into the orbit of Mickey Scellenda (Howard Ross), a small time thug who might know more about the “Ripper” case than he’s letting on.

Meanwhile, troubled student Fay Majors (Alamanta Keller) has a narrow escape from a stalker on the subway. She’s the only witness Williams has, but with the taunting phone calls he’s receiving from the killer, and his somewhat seedy private life about to go public, can Williams hold it together, nail the “Ripper” and keep Fay out of danger? And does Fay herself have something to hide? Will her milquetoast boyfriend Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter) be able to defend her? And why does cynical psychologist Dr Paul Davis (Paolo Malco) so eagerly respond to Williams’s invitation to help profile the killer?

On the one hand, ‘The New York Ripper’ has all the elements of a clinically efficient giallo, ticking all the boxes as regards sleaze, nudity, protracted death scenes, cod-psychology and a pass-the-parcel red herrings game in which most of the major characters have good reason to invite suspicion at one time or another. Add to this the presence of Lucio Fulci – a man who, for all his notoriety, was a highly capable director who knew how to generate tension and keep a film’s narrative going, even when the script was no great shakes – and there ought to be enough here to mount a sterling defence of ‘The New York Ripper’ as a minor classic, undeservedly tainted by the smug, hyperbolic moralizing of the chattering classes.

But for one small problem.

It is fucking nasty. It is, in fact, one of the nastiest, seediest, grubbiest and downright unpleasant pieces of work I’ve seen. I’d make a case for the artistic integrity of ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ over ‘The New York Ripper’. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ at least reserves its journey into the most joyless recesses of the human psyche for the last half hour or so – and delivers its catalogue of cruelties in the service of a statement about the manipulation of the medium and whether “civilized” man is actually more reprehensible in his actions than the so-called savage.

‘The New York Ripper’, however, presents an interminable succession of women being murdered and sexually objectified, usually at the same time. Even scene that don’t end in slaughter treat the female characters like so much meat. Case in point: the narratively redundant but gratuitously lingered-on moment (for “moment” read “about ten minutes”) when Jane wanders into a pool hall and gets frigged by a latino thug’s toe. (Which is not a sentence I imagined myself typing when I got up this morning.) It’s a scene that serves no discernible purpose (it’s already been established that Jane likes it kinky), yet Fulci’s camera gloats over it like a voyeur.

Moreover, there’s none of the visual brilliance of ‘The Beyond’, ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’, ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ or ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’. In fact, the only commonality with that straight-up giallo classic is the duck-like voice the killer adopts prior to offing another poor woman or making a “you can’t catch me” call to Williams. Subject of whom, for all that Hedley tries to imbue him with some world-weary characterization, there’s no backstory to the cop, no motivational factor, and no indication of why the “Ripper” targets him when he rings the cops to bait them about his latest atrocity. In fact, this entire element seems to have been included purely as parallel to the actual Jack the Ripper case, where JtR wrote provocative letters to the press, mocking the police’s inability to catch him.

I’m not sure whether Fulci took the decision from the outset to make the film as visually dreary as possible, but he certainly succeeds in painting one of the unloveliest cinematic pictures of New York.

So, with an arguably deliberate anti-aesthetic, little to no emotional investment in the characters, and the procedural aspects of the story purely an exercise in mechanics (even the race-against-time finale is blandly by-the-numbers), all that is left are the killings themselves. All of which of have an explicitly sexual imperative. When the defining shot of a film is a close-up of a straight razor being applied to a woman’s breast, that pretty much tells you all you need to know.

There’s a lot of hate for ‘The New York Ripper’ – and it’s been earned.

Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 95 of 100

Made two years after ‘Deep Red’, Lucio Fulci’s ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ – the last of a decade’s worth of great gialli including ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ and ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ – has definite parallels with Dario Argento’s classic. Both centre on a protagonist who initially misinterprets a crucial detail glimpsed at the scene of a violent crime. Both follow the blundering amateur sleuthing of the protagonist only for them to realise, far too late in the game, the extent of their involvement in…

But that would be telling.

If you haven’t seen either of these films (and I hadn’t seen ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ until yesterday; kudos to the gentleman who made it available to me), make a point of doing so. They’re stone cold classics.

Before we go any further, a note on the title. In its original Italian, it’s ‘Sette Note in Nero’ (literally, ‘Seven Notes in Black’. It’s also been released as ‘Seven Black Notes’ and – most popularly – ‘The Psychic’. It was under this American release title that I watched the film and ordinarily that would be the title I’d have reviewed it under. But I’ll be damned if ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’, ticking two of the three traditional giallo boxes (animal, colour and number), isn’t one of the most awesome fucking titles in a genre renowned for awesome fucking titles. Also, ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ (and there’s no way in hell I’m opting for some ‘MttToSBN’ acronym for the rest of this review; I’m enjoying typing it way too much) yields up a darker meaning as the end credits roll and you’re left to ponder a supremely ambiguous closing shot.

But again, that would be telling.

The movie starts in England as a distraught woman drives to a clifftop, parks her car and walks to the edge. A credit tells us it’s 11.45am. The scene cuts to Florence, Italy, and a young girl who’s one of a party of schoolchildren on a trip suddenly stops dead, a look of horror on her face. A credit tells us it’s 11.45am. A series of shocking cuts (well, maybe not that shocking, since the body that smashes into the cliffs in loving close-up is plainly a mannequin) juxtapose the young woman’s suicide with the girl screaming “Mother!” (IMDb list these incredibly specific references to the time as a “goof”, citing the fact that “continental Europe is one hour ahead of the British Isles time zone in which the time in Florence should read 12.45”.)

I wonder if whoever wrote that even bothered to watch the film to the end. That was the first thing that nagged at me, because I was sure Fulci had done it for a reason. And even then I was completely taken aback when he pulled the rug from under me round about the halfway mark and everything that I had taken in one context – and which had fit together perfectly – suddenly took on a whole different meaning.

The opening scene is Fulci’s answer to Marc Daly’s slow, confused walk along the corridor to Helga Ullman’s apartment in ‘Deep Red’. It’s there if you know what you’re looking for, and it’s so brazenly stated on a second viewing, that the sheer chutzpah of it is magnificent. Note to IMDb: it’s not a goof. It’s quite deliberate. It’s layered with meaning.

Events then move forward eighteen years and that selfsame little girl – all grown up and very elegant with it – is revealed as American designer Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill), recently married to suave Italian businessman Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko). Bidding hubby farewell as he jets off to the States to close a deal, Virginia installs herself at an old farmhouse that’s been in his family for years, intending to renovate the property. En route, she has a vision: a room decorated in hellish red; an ornate mirror, broken; a reproduction of a Vermeer with something written on it; a hollowed out section of a wall; an ornament tipped over to reveal something hidden beneath; a man’s face emerging from the shadows; a discarded magazine with an attractive model on the cover; a cigarette with distinctive yellow paper smouldering in an ashtray; someone with a limp slowly approaching; bricks and mortar, a cavity being walled off, a corpse hidden. A strange, almost childlike tune floats through her mind during the vision.

Virginia reaches the farmhouse, starts pulling dust covers off furnishings and recognises the mirror from her vision. She hammers away at a section of wall (psychic visions; childlike musical cues; protagonist alone in creepy house; walled up area containing corpse – all ‘Deep Red’ touchstones). Next thing, the authorities are involved and Francesco, returning from America, is taken into custody pending a satisfactory explanation as to the presence of a skeleton in a home that’s been in his family for generations. Then the lab boys confirm said skeleton as the final remains of a model with whom Francisco once had a relationship. All of a sudden things are looking bad for our boy. Virginia reluctantly joins forces with Francesco’s hoity-toity sister Ida (Evelyn Stewart) and tries to prove his innocence.

For the next forty minutes or so, Virginia sifts red herrings (hmmm, a certain someone smokes a certain brand of cigarettes), identifies clues, and – with the help of her therapist Dr Fattori (Marc Porel) and his Nancy Drew-like secretary Bruna (Jenny Tamburi) – establishes a watertight mass of evidence that prove Francesco couldn’t possibly be the killer. Just one problem: the only thing that correlates all of the evidence is a vision. Which, as Francesco’s lawyer helpfully points out, is pretty frickin’ useless in a court of law.

Then Dr Fattori picks up on a crucial but overlooked detail and the entire picture changes …

I’ve rammed home the ‘Deep Red’ connotations to such a degree that I may have misrepresented ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ as being derivative. Like IMDb’s misunderstood “goof” at the start, Fulci is actually using the audience’s assumptions very very cleverly. He evokes ‘Deep Red’ so well – right down to some Goblin-like motifs on the soundtrack – that it’s easy to take Virginia as a replacement/stand-in for Helga and assume that when she …

But that, once more, would be telling.

‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ is brilliantly conceived and executed, beautifully shot (it’s a damn shame that most people remember Fulci primarily for the gore and not how inspired a visual stylist he was) and ends on such a viciously unresolved and debate-in-it-the-pub-for-hours-afterwards note (and I use the word “note” very specifically) that it makes the last shot of ‘Inception’ look like an act of closure.

There are two moments that don’t quite add up (one along the lines of “but if X and Y are still at Location 1 it must mean that only a couple of minutes have passed so how come Z is already at Location 2 and spouting reams of expositional dialogue to certain secondary characters?”; the other involving the from-nowhere availability of building materials and an unfeasibly fast clean-up operation), and he overuses the technique of zooming into Virginia’s eyes every time she uncovers a clue that prompts a flashback to her vision of the crime to the point at which it’s become a cliché after just half an hour, but why carp? For one thing, Jennifer O’Neill has the kind of opalescent eyes that close-up was invented for; and for another, Fulci manipulates imagery, timelines and audience perception with such legerdemain that ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ proves a headfuck so satisfying that you’ll be sparking up a post-coital cigarette and hoping you can do it again soon.