General Horror Stuff

Revenge of the Deathless Guinea Pig: An Appreciation of “The Asphyx”

/ Jenny Ashford / 3 Comments

Cheerio, old chaps! Today’s movie is another kinda obscure 1970s flick from Europe, but we’ve temporarily travelled from Italy to Old Blighty. Bizarrely, and completely coincidentally, it also concerns a fucked up aristocratic family by the name of Cunningham, just like my last entry on The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. I swear I did NOT do that on purpose. Clearly, mysterious cinematic forces are at work here.

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Directed by Peter Newbrook and released in 1972, The Asphyx was also known under the titles Spirit of the Dead and The Horror of Death. Set in 1875, it explores many of the same themes as Frankenstein, what with all the hubris about scientists tampering in God’s romaine and suchlike. Sir Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens) is a widower, a gentleman scientist, and a cheery, progressive sort of bloke, using his money and expertise in service of the betterment of mankind. At the beginning of the movie, he is bringing his fiancée Anna (Fiona Walker) back to the family estate to introduce her to his two grown children Clive (Ralph Arliss) and Christina (Jane Lapotaire), as well as a young fella named Giles (Robert Powell), who he introduces as his adopted son, but who also has a thing going with Christina, so…huh. Yeah, technically they’re not blood relatives, but still, eeeewwwww. Moving on.

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One of Sir Hugo’s main scientific pursuits involves working with a psychical research society, photographing people at the moment of their deaths. A few of their photographs seem to show a strange black smudge near the dying people, which the psychical society believes are the souls leaving the bodies. Sir Hugo is excited about the implications of this research, but his ward/assistant/daughter-banger Giles is all kinda meh, skeptical of the society’s conclusions and not really seeing the point of it all.

Things start going to shit about twenty minutes into the festivities. Clive and Anna are killed in a freak boating accident, and Sir Hugo happens to capture their deaths on his newfangled video camera. Beside himself with grief, he insists on watching the footage to see his beloved Anna and his only son Clive one final time. He is simultaneously horrified and ecstatic to find that he can clearly see that telltale black smudge appearing on the film right before Clive gets beaned with the fatal tree branch, but now that he can see it as a moving image instead of a static one, he can’t help but notice that the smudge is not moving away from Clive, as his soul presumably would, but toward him. Dun dun duuuuuun.

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This doesn’t seem like a great deal to go on, but from this single piece of evidence, Sir Hugo formulates a theory that obviously, this black thingamabob isn’t really a soul per se, but an entity from Greek mythology called an asphyx, something like a grim reaper deal that comes to claim your ass when you’re fixing to bite the big one. He’s eager to do more research into the matter, and fortuitously, an opportunity soon presents itself: the president of the psychical society, Sir Edward Barrett (Alex Scott) arrives at Sir Hugo’s house, all in a lather because the barbaric British government has decided to reinstate public executions in order to try to stem the tide of a supposed explosion of violent crime. Sir Edward and Sir Hugo are both vehemently anti-capital punishment, and Sir Edward wants Sir Hugo to film the first hanging, hoping that the horror of the images will rally the public to their cause. Sir Hugo pretends that he doesn’t really want to do it, but secretly he’s all like AWWWW YEAH and metaphorically rubbing his hands together in anticipatory glee. He finally agrees, though he doesn’t tell Sir Edward what his true intentions are, vis-á-vis recording dying people’s repo-demons.

During the hanging, Sir Hugo uses a “light booster,” essentially a spotlight using phosphorous crystals, to illuminate the gallows as the condemned man meets the noose; but to the surprise of himself and everyone assembled, the criminal’s asphyx is clearly visible to all, and seems to be trapped within the phosphorous beam. When Sir Hugo reviews the footage later, both he and Giles realize that if a person’s asphyx could be halted by the phosphorescent light, and further, if the asphyx could then be transferred to a purpose-made lock-box with a phosphorous beam shining indefinitely into it, then a person could, theoretically, never die, provided the asphyx is never released. They try the experiment on a guinea pig and meet with rousing success, so of course the next logical step is that Sir Hugo, growing increasingly mad with the potential power of everlasting life, decides to immortalize himself, because his awesomeness cannot be contained within a single lifetime, goddammit.

If you know anything about this type of movie, you’ll know that the situation is going to go drastically, horrifically sideways from that point forward, and you may find yourself asking the following questions: Is it ever morally justifiable to toy with immortality? What lengths will a man go to to preserve his family and his legacy? Is it really prudent to have to live forever when your noggin is hanging on by a single sinew like Nearly Headless Nick? Some pretty fucked up shit happens at the end of this, folks, and here is yet another example of a Cunningham family who really, desperately need some kind of psychiatric intervention. Happy Days this ain’t.

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As with a lot of British films from the early 70s, this one moves at a snail’s pace and is ridiculously talky, so it’s definitely not for all tastes. The characters, further, are all intensely twee, upper-class-twit types, but I found myself kinda liking them in spite of myself. Plus I was so interested to see what new, profanely impious schemes Sir Hugo was gonna come up with next that I was utterly transfixed through the entire two-hour running time. I also found the ending wonderfully cruel, ironic, and immensely satisfying.

That’s all for this installment, so until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

It’s Not Uncommon for a Man to Want to Do Strange Things to Get His Kicks: An Appreciation of “The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave”

/ Jenny Ashford / 3 Comments

In the mood for more Italian? Excellent; let’s mangia. Our movie today is one I actually thought I hadn’t seen before, though when I got to one of the later scenes, I felt a definite tingle of recollection. See, when I was a kid, I saw a movie with this one scene that really stuck in my memory, of a guy going into a tomb and seeing a creepy skeleton woman sitting up in a coffin. For many years afterward, I thought of the scene often, but damned if I could remember what movie it came from. Initially I thought it might be Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, but I revisited that recently, and nope, no dice. Then I got it into my head that it might have been an episode of “Night Gallery,” so I watched the entire run of the series. And although the pilot episode with Roddy McDowall, “The Cemetery,” contained a scene that kinda reminded me of the one I was thinking of, it didn’t immediately smack me in the face with recognition.

But then, in all my wanderings through the giallo universe, I stumbled across a flick with the wonderfully outlandish title The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (aka La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba), released in 1971. And bingo was his name-o — THERE was that elusive scene I remembered. Long story short (too late), I said all that to say that I actually thought I had never seen this movie, but I guess I did. Which then led me to think, holy crap, my parents let me watch this movie when I was naught but a nugget? Because yeah, it’s a little smutty.

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Anyway, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (um…spoiler alert?) was directed by Emilio Miraglia, and it’s a pretty fun little gothic horror romp that features many of my favorite things. There’s a creepy old mansion with a family tomb! There’s a spooky portrait of an ostensibly dead first wife! There are dastardly double and triple crosses! There are red-headed strippers with perky boobies! There are ghosts and séances! There’s sadomasochism! Fabulous “I Dream of Jeannie” outfits! A disabled woman gets eaten by foxes! It really does have something for everybody.

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The plot revolves around main character/colossal fuckstick Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen), a wealthy aristocrat who flipped his shit after the death of his (perhaps unfaithful) wife Evelyn in childbirth. He was institutionalized, but has been released back to his crumbling, palatial estate under the care of his family physician and close friend Dr. Richard Timberlane (Giacomo Rossi Stuart). It’s not made entirely clear whether the good doctor is aware of the…ahem…unconventional methods Alan has concocted to help him come to terms with his grief. Said methods include picking up carrot-topped prostitutes using slick come-ons like viciously yanking their hair and then saying, “Sorry, I thought it was a wig,” then taking the hapless whores back to his castle and engaging in a bit of Torquemada-style roleplay before killing them stone dead. “In other ages, prostitutes were branded with a hot iron. It was an excellent system,” he tells one victim, charmingly. If Dr. Timberlane does know about his patient’s itchy murder finger, he seems incredibly blasé about it, but hell, what’s a little strumpet slaying between friends? Also, Alan is a titled lord with boatloads of cash, so y’know, peasant laws don’t apply, obviously.

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One person who definitely does know about Alan’s extracurricular activities is dead wife Evelyn’s brother Albert (Roberto Maldera), who lives in a house on the grounds and often spies on Alan’s hooker extermination project. Every time a new floozy goes down for the count, Albert asks for hush money, at one point requesting the lavish sum of thirty pounds sterling. Albert: the budget blackmailer.

So Alan has apparently been on this murderous treatment program for nigh on a year, trolling for trollops with his only male relative, cousin George (Enzo Tarascio), who wears a giant hoop earring and swishes around like Paul Lynde, yet is shown banging luscious ladies on multiple occasions, because he is one hundred percent heterosexual, no doubt about it. Shockingly, all of this whorin’ and killin’ isn’t helping Alan’s mental state, since he is still haunted by visions of Evelyn, who’s always turning up in his head all naked and persistent. Dr. Timberlane suggests that if Alan were to marry again, then all of his violent urges would magically disappear, and I’m left wondering if this guy got his doctorate from some online diploma mill or something, because that is some really wack advice. But Alan is on board, all, no problemo, I’ll find a girl and get hitched, and then I can put all this pesky murder business behind me. Moments later, he goes to a party with George, where he meets an intriguing redhead with the unlikely name of Gladys (Marina Malfatti), and before he’s even given her a taste of his spicy Italian sausage, he’s proposing marriage. She’s all, “You’re trippin’, but…sure, sounds legit.” And thus Gladys becomes the second Lady Cunningham.

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There then follows a convoluted series of events typical of the gothic genre. Is Evelyn really haunting the castle, or has Alan jumped on the express train back to crazytown? What’s going on in the family tomb that Alan refuses to let his new wife see? Who keeps murdering Alan’s family members and worse, stealing the silverware? What’s the deal with the troop of identical maids who all wear the same blonde afro wigs? Will George ever come out of the closet? I won’t spoil any of the surprises, but suffice it to say that the Cunningham clan could do with some serious family counseling.

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I really enjoyed this one a lot; it had a great, Hammer-esque atmosphere and was pleasingly drenched in over-the-top campiness. It’s not really a traditional giallo, I guess, but it was an entertaining, creepy slice of early 70s sleaze-horror nonetheless. Recommended for those who like their gialli served up with a large side-dish of old-school gothic goodness.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out

To Buy Them Horror Tales, You Gotta Be Nuts: An Appreciation of “The Case of the Bloody Iris”

/ Jenny Ashford / 4 Comments

Happy hangover Sunday, fellow horror hos and bros. I’m dipping back into the giallo well for today’s post, and while our subject today leans slightly more toward erotica than horror, it was still fairly bloody and a lot of fun, so we’re just gonna roll with it. That cool with everybody? Good.

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1972’s The Case of the Bloody Iris (also known by the ridiculously convoluted title Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?, or Why Are Those Strange Drops of Blood on Jennifer’s Body?) was directed by Giuliano Carnimeo under the pseudonym Anthony Ascott. It stars the gorgeous Edwige Fenech, who was in tons of European sex comedies and gialli back in the day, and it also boasts a pretty much nonstop cavalcade of perky, bouncing boobage, if you’re into that kind of thing (and who isn’t?).

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In fairly standard giallo fashion, the plot revolves around a killer with a black trenchcoat and hat, a black mask completely obscuring the face, and a wicked, scalpel-type knife which slices through pretty ladies with deadly efficiency and much spilling of garish crimson tempera paint. There is also the standard parade of red herrings, where almost anyone could be the murderer; is it main character Jennifer’s creepy ex-husband, who wants to draw her back into their nekkid orgy sex-cult days and keeps stalking her, leaving torn-up irises in her path? Is it her new beau/landlord, who has a strange aversion to blood and at one point tells her, “Wait until you find out what a bastard I am”? Is it the über-fey, walking-gay-stereotype photographer, who drinks like Dylan Thomas and has some of the movie’s most hilarious lines? Or how about that lecherous lesbian in the apartment next door? Or the busybody old bat in the building who rants about “whores” and buys piles of horror magazines from the newsstand every morning? Hell, what about the dismissive police inspector who gives more of a shit about collecting rare stamps from the crime scenes than he does actually solving the murders? The finger of suspicion falls on each one of them in turn, and the viewer doesn’t see the killer unmasked until the final five minutes, in what is actually a pretty fantastic, tense scene.

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As I implied earlier, this film is actually more like a mystery/sex farce with horror elements thrown into the mix than it is a traditional horror film. Yes, there are bloody murders aplenty, and there are creepy scenes of the victims being stalked in darkened streets and boiler rooms, but there are also psychedelic montages of the aforementioned nekkid orgies, topless blonde bimbos making light of shocking crimes while covered in soap bubbles, modeling sessions involving strategic body paint, and some good old fashioned erotic nightclub wrestling. There is also some patented early-70s misogyny (purported good guys smacking girls around and everyone being all NBD about it) and homophobia (personified in photographer Arthur, who is the gayest gay who ever gayed), plus a really bizarre, laissez-faire attitude that nearly all of the characters manifest toward the series of murders at the center of the plot. For example, at the beginning of the film, when a nameless call girl is stabbed in the elevator of the apartment building where the bulk of the action takes place, the residents who find her are all, “Eh, she doesn’t live here, so whatevs,” and that includes the first-on-the-scene, exotic dancer Mizar, who sees the bloody dead body and is all, “Huh, shame about that. Well, gotta split, got shit to do. Guess I’ll take the stairs.” Of course, she’s the next one to get offed, but still…kinda odd. Maybe the director was trying to make a statement about the modern world and its uncaring attitude toward others or something. Backing up this hypothesis is the scene where Jennifer’s goofball roommate Marilyn is stabbed to death on a crowded city street, and walks around bleeding and crying for help while pedestrians walk uncaringly around her. So yeah, could be a message there.

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Karma’s a bitch.

This is actually a decent giallo if you’re more into the softcore porn aspects of the genre, and if you don’t mind a copious amount of silliness and overdone seventies stereotypes. It’s a tad slow to get started, but the mystery is intriguing, and it’s unlikely that you’ll guess who the murderer is until the end (or at least I didn’t guess until right before the mask came off, but that might just be because I’m a big dummy). Of course it’s not up there with, say, Deep Red or Blood and Black Lace, but if you’re a giallo fan, it’s a pretty enjoyable little trifle.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

Insane People Seem to be Graced with Incredible Powers: An Appreciation of “God Told Me To”

/ Jenny Ashford / 1 Comment

A horrorific Monday to all of you fiends out there! I’ve returned once again to my favorite horror decade for today’s post, though I’m putting the gialli down for a brief rest so that I can discuss one of the weirder American horror flicks from the 1970s, one that I’d seen pop up on a lot of people’s “best underrated 70s horror” lists but had only just got around to seeing.

God Told Me To (1976) aka Demon Directed by Larry Cohen Shown: Poster Art

Larry Cohen is probably best known to horrorphiles as the director of the It’s Alive killer baby series, as well as a few other cult classics like The Stuff and Q: The Winged Serpent (and, it must be said, one of the better episodes of Mick Garris’s “Masters of Horror” series, the Fairuza Balk-starring “Pick Me Up”). But the film I want to discuss today is one of his stranger and more subversive ones, a film that actually had some pretty complex things to say about religious belief, violence, racial tensions, and gender fluidity. I’m speaking, of course, of 1976’s God Told Me To (also known as Demon, for some unfathomable reason).

The movie centers around New York City police detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco), who is investigating a bizarre series of crimes in which seemingly random people suddenly snap and go on mass killing sprees around the city, always giving the excuse that “God told me to,” right before they meet their own ends. You would think that this film, then, would progress something like a thriller or police procedural, and you’d be partially right, but honestly, if you’ve never seen it, I don’t think you could ever imagine the batshit directions this thing wanders off into. If you’d like to approach this movie cold, though, I suggest you not read any further here, as I’m inevitably going to spoil some key aspects of the plot. You have been warned.

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Detective Nicholas lives with his girlfriend Casey (Deborah Raffin), telling her that his devout wife Martha (Sandy Dennis) will not let him divorce her, even though in reality it’s his own Catholic guilt that prevents him. It is his very conflicted faith that causes him to obsess about the ostensibly religion-motivated mass murders occurring regularly around New York, but as he delves deeper into the crimes, he discovers some mightily disturbing facts about the motives of the killers, and also that he himself might somehow be involved in what appears to be some mass hysteria or conspiracy.

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And yes, that is indeed Andy Kaufman in his first film role!

It turns out that all of the murderers had fallen under the spell of a mysterious, androgynous cult figure known as Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch), who seems to have the power of mind control over his subjects. As Nicholas digs into Phillips’ murky past, he finds that Phillips’ mother was supposedly a virgin when she bore him, and further, that she had reported being abducted by a ball of light and subsequently impregnated by what amounted to extraterrestrials. After Nicholas locates the elusive Phillips in a dark basement ringed with flames (obviously a stand-in for Hell), he finds that Phillips wants to control him most of all, but cannot do it, for some reason he can’t fathom.

As the investigation goes on, Nicholas finds that Phillips’s history mirrors his own; the detective’s own mother was also knocked up by visitors from beyond the stars, and the only reason that Nicholas wasn’t aware of it was that his human genes turned out to be more dominant than the alien ones. In the final battle between the half-alien “siblings,” Phillips attempts to persuade Nicholas to impregnate him via a pulsating vagina in his abdomen, but Nicholas ain’t having none of that freaky extraterrestrial action and kills the being, repeating the mantra that “God told me to” when he is later arrested for murder.

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I have to say that this is probably the strangest of all the religion-themed horror flicks of the decade, and I haven’t even really scratched the surface of all the insane shit that goes on in this movie. The weirdest thing about it is that it isn’t lurid or funny at all; it’s played completely straight and serious, and is all the more unsettling because of it. God Told Me To is almost like a whacked-out mashup of Dog Day Afternoon, Rosemary’s Baby, Xtro, and the book Chariots of the Gods, and as such, it has many layers of satirical social commentary that are just as relevant today as they were in the 1970s. For example, what is the nature of religious belief, and is it detrimental to the individual and to society as a whole? What is God, and if God supposedly speaks to someone, who’s to say that what God says is right or moral? Where is the line between male and female, and does it even matter? These may seem pretty heavy questions for a little B-horror movie to be tackling, but God Told Me To does so with a surprisingly deft hand. The entire feeling the film evokes is one of a society teetering on the edge of chaos as conflicting forces—of good and evil, masculine and feminine, black and white—all clash in one enormous and yet insidious paroxysm of violence.

It also has some wonderfully frightening scenes, from the fantastic opener as a lone sniper atop a water tower calmly picks off random pedestrians on a city street; to Nicholas’ harrowing visit to Phillips’ mother, who suddenly attacks him in a knife-wielding frenzy; to the movie’s best and most chilling sequence, where Nicholas questions a man who has just massacred his entire family in cold blood at Phillips’ psychic behest. The lucid, almost beatific way the man describes the murders is disturbing in the extreme.

So if you’re a fan of religion-themed and/or gritty urban horror from the 1970s that’s cross-pollinated with a hint of sci-fi, then God Told Me To should definitely be added to your must-see list. Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

Tomatoes Feel Pain When You Poke Them: An Appreciation of “Short Night of Glass Dolls”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Greetings once again, my creepy companions! If you read my last post on The House with the Laughing Windows, you will perhaps have surmised that I’ve gone off on a bit of a giallo kick lately. Sure, I’ve always been a big fan of the best-known films in the genre, your Argentos and your Bavas, but recently I’ve gotten a bee in my bonnet about writing my own giallo-type story as a lark, and as such I decided to seek out a few of the lesser-known examples of the genre that I hadn’t seen, just to give me some additional inspiration. (And speaking of which, do you guys know about this random giallo generator? Because it is delightful.)

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So today I chose a 1971 film that has appeared on a few lists around the internet as one of the classics, though I admit I had never heard of it before I went hunting around. Originally known as Short Night of the Butterfly (which actually makes more sense to the plot), the film was eventually released under the title Short Night of Glass Dolls (or La Corta notte delle bambole di vetro, if you prefer) due to another movie with “butterfly” in the title being released around the same time. It was the directorial debut of Aldo Lado, who also directed another classic giallo, Who Saw Her Die? (which I might do a post about one of these days).

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In the film, an American journalist named Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) has been covering political unrest in Prague, and is planning to pull some strings to smuggle his smoking hot Czech girlfriend Mira (played by a very young Barbara Bach) out of the country and back to London with him at the end of his assignment. But one night after a party, he is called away on a story tip which turns out to be a distraction, and when he returns to his apartment, he discovers that Mira is missing. The weirdest thing about her disappearance is that she didn’t take her handbag, her passport, or apparently any of her clothes; even the dress she wore to the party is still in the apartment, flung over a chair as if she had just taken it off and then gone parading out into the night stark naked. The remainder of the main plot is Gregory’s investigation into what happened to Mira, which of course involves a bevy of shady characters who either stonewall him completely or mysteriously end up dead shortly after giving him information; police hostility and suspicion about his role in the disappearance; the discovery that Mira’s odd vanishing act isn’t the only such case by a long shot; and troubling hints at some pretty sinister forces lying just beneath the veneer of Prague’s supposedly respectable ruling class.

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I also neglected to mention that this film has an unusual conceit: The entire search for the lost Mira is detailed in flashback, as Gregory lies in a morgue awaiting autopsy. See, at the very beginning of the movie, he is found, apparently dead, in a public park, but a voiceover lets the audience know that he’s actually still very much alive, but frustratingly unable to let anyone else know about his terrifying predicament. The film flips back and forth between the doctors’ fruitless attempts to revive him and his memories of looking for Mira and falling into the big conspiratorial clusterfuck that led him to the sad state of affairs he finds himself in. It’s actually a great plot device, as not only is the viewer intrigued by the mystery of the missing girlfriend, but also held in nail-biting suspense over whether Gregory will be snapped out of his deathlike trance before the autopsy knife ends his life for real.

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Like The House With the Laughing Windows, Short Night of Glass Dolls has a definite political undercurrent, though it is much more overt than the former film, so much so that I would classify it less as an undercurrent and more as a pretty obvious allegory, which is why I believe its original title was more relevant. In the resolution if its mystery, I would actually hazard a guess that it was a precursor and/or inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, as it exposes the perverse and almost vampiric nature of those in society’s top echelons, as they drain the life, both literally and figuratively, from those unfortunate souls beneath them.

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Also like the formerly discussed film, the pace of the movie is rather slow, but there is a much more lurid sexual nature to the crimes than House with the Laughing Windows had. The Prague backdrop is also a highlight, oppressive and beautiful at the same time, which handily ties in with the movie’s themes. In addition, there is some lovely imagery of butterflies and glass chandeliers and those gorgeous baroque interiors that are often a fixture of these movies. I also liked some of the seemingly random, unsettling details, like the scientist who was experimenting on plants and trying to determine if they could feel pain. And as I mentioned before, the suspense throughout the film is fantastically well-done, as the whole story becomes something of an unbearable race against time. And I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that it was quite wonderfully cruel and shocking, and something I really didn’t expect. Highly recommended.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

My Colors Are Hot Like Fresh Blood: An Appreciation of “The House with the Laughing Windows”

/ Jenny Ashford / 2 Comments

Ciao, bambini! I know I’ve been writing more about newer movies recently with my Hulu Horror Double Feature series, so I figured it was about time to return to the decade that spawned most of my favorite films, the funky fly 70s, and also delve a bit deeper into that rich vein of goodness that is the Italian giallo genre.

I’ve written about Italian movies before (Suspiria, The Psychic, House of Clocks), and I even wrote a short overview of the history of the giallo film, in which I happened to mention the movie I want to talk about today, which is right here with English subtitles, if you want to watch along:

1976’s The House with the Laughing Windows (aka La casa dalle finestre che ridono), aside from its completely rad title, is considered a classic of the genre, even though many of the more lurid, baroque elements present in the better-known giallo films of Dario Argento and others are notably absent. Directed by Pupi Avati, the movie actually bears some resemblance to Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling, as well as the restrained but unsettling vibe of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. In other words, it’s actually more of a low-key mystery than a straight horror film, and as such it might be a tad too ponderous for some, but it does feature a subtle sense of dread as a constant undercurrent, and the final few minutes are fantastic.

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In brief, art expert Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) is summoned to a small village in rural Italy to restore a fresco of St. Sebastian on a wall of the town church. The rather macabre painting was done by a local artist named Legnani (Tonino Corazzari), who committed suicide two decades before and is known around town as the “painter of agony,” because he preferred to depict his subjects in terrible pain or in the final moments before their death. Stefano tries to get to work on the restoration, but to a man, every townsperson seems secretive and vaguely hostile, and someone keeps calling Stefano at his hotel, warning him against altering the fresco. The only friendly faces are Stefano’s longtime friend Antonio (Giulio Pizzirani), who mysteriously dies before he can tell Stefano what he knows about the painting, and a new schoolteacher, Francesca (Francesca Marciano), who arrived on the same ferry as Stefano did. Stefano and Francesca quickly become entangled, and their budding relationship constitutes a significant facet of the plot as it moves toward the discovery of the town’s secrets.

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Despite its rather subdued narrative, The House with the Laughing Windows does boast many of the hallmarks of a stereotypical giallo: The protagonist is thrust into a mystery he becomes obsessed with solving, there are numerous red herrings which are never explained, there is a somewhat dreamlike logic at work surrounding certain plot points, and the heart of the mystery deals with madness and sexual deviance (though any actual sex in the movie is generally implied rather than shown). Additionally, the house with the laughing windows itself serves as something of a metaphor for the plot, signifying as it does a decay of happiness, a loss of innocence, a hole of insanity that sucks in everyone in the vicinity. More historically-astute reviewers than I have also noticed the film’s inferred references to shame about Italy’s fascism during the war; this isn’t really relevant to the conventions of the giallo, but I thought I’d mention it here, as the subtext does elevate the film above lesser examples of the genre.

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Where the movie differs from better-known giallo films is in the absence of the trademark black-gloved killer, the unerotic nature of the murders (there is one rape preceding a murder, but it is not really shown, and the other murders are simply workmanlike and not fetishized), and the dearth of any particularly Grand Guignol moments like you’d see in many other typical gialli.

That said, the ending is fairly shocking and grotesque, especially since the rest of the movie is so slow-moving and understated. I’m not sure I’m completely on board with the final reveal of one of the troublemakers, and in light of the mystery’s resolution I’m not entirely certain why the townspeople behaved the way they did toward Stefano, but these are minor quibbles that contributed to the Polanski-esque feeling of paranoia that pervaded the whole enterprise, so I’m willing to forgive the inconsistencies. It really is a masterpiece of the genre, helped along immensely by its eerie, sepia-toned vistas and its steady ramping up of tension. A must-see for fans of gialli and atmospheric European horror.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

Hulu Horror Double Feature: Find Me and Spirit in the Woods

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Woo, look at me, doing another one of these things already. It’s Monday as I write this, and I can’t use a hangover as an excuse for my movie-watching sloth like I did on Sunday, but hey, I got all the work done I needed to get done today (two graphic design jobs, two loads of laundry, two mile walk, thorough kitchen clean, thank you very much), and decided to chill with some more Hulu. Don’t judge me, y’all.

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First on today’s agenda is 2014’s Find Me, one of many low-budget haunting flicks that came out following the smash success of The Conjuring. The setup of Find Me should be pretty familiar to any horror fan with two brain cells to rub together: Newlywed couple moves into long-empty house in wife’s rural hometown, scary noises and flashes of a female spirit in a white dress commence, there’s a creepy tinkly music box involved, and eventually a past tragedy concerning the wife comes to light. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don’t mean to be too hard on this movie, because it was actually pretty well done and enjoyable, but it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.

That said, one place where it really did bring something new to the table was the characters. The two leads were also co-writers of the screenplay, and they did a nice job of making the married couple at the center of the action quite likable and sympathetic. I really appreciated that they subverted the “husband doesn’t believe the wife about the haunting” trope; it was really refreshing to see the couple investigating the mystery together, and even making self-aware jokes about Indian burial grounds and quoting the movie Poltergeist in jest (“You only moved the headstones!!!”). The wife’s friend was also a sarcastic delight, and I was really happy to see the three characters treating the haunting the way most modern people probably would: Freaked out, but curious, and oddly bemused by the whole thing. Additionally, there were some pretty creepy moments and a few good scares, so points there.

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The resolution of the mystery at the center of the haunting, though, probably could have been handled better. For one thing, I found it pretty hard to believe that it took like an hour of the movie’s runtime before the wife figured out who the ghost might be, even though the answer was staring her right in the face. I mean—and this is a SPOILER ALERT, so don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to know who the ghost is—if you had a twin sister who was kidnapped and murdered as a child during a game of hide and seek, and there’s a ghost in your house who looks just like you and keeps leaving you messages to “find me,” you don’t have to be a rocket surgeon to grok what’s going on, dig? I thought you could.

Also, as much as I loved the way the movie clearly tried to undermine the typical horror movie clichés, in the final act of the story, it seems like it fell prey to pretty much all of them, all at once. The ending might have been much better if it had been toned down some, since the nice slow burn of the first two-thirds of the movie was kinda thrown out the window at the end, when it all just got preposterous.

So would I recommend this? It’s a serviceable ghost story with a few fresh elements that gets kinda hamstrung by its silly ending, but overall I thought it was pretty decent. I wasn’t bored at any point, the characters were good and kept me interested, and it didn’t annoy me overmuch, though the ending was a bit disappointing. If that sounds like something you can live with, then by all means, give it a whirl.

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Next on the Hulu agenda is a straight-up Blair Witch ripoff called Spirit in the Woods. It has the same premise of college students wandering off into the legend-rich forest and disappearing, with their video cameras turning up later and the contents presented as real found footage. In fact, it looks like it mirrored some shots from Blair Witch pretty much exactly. Now, this movie came out in 2014, and the whole found footage trend was way played out far before that. That’s not to say that something interesting still couldn’t be done with the concept, but this amateurish effort sure ain’t it. In fact, I had a really hard time just sitting through it; it was just painfully, cringingly bad. There is no way that anyone would ever believe that this was actual found footage, since the “actors” were so wincingly terrible that no one would ever mistake them for real people. And it wasn’t even bad enough to be entertaining in a Birdemic sorta way; it was just plodding and boring and lame and irritating as a hemorrhoidal itch. Nothing much happened for easily the first half of the movie; it was just poorly-acted “college students” deciding they were gonna go do their nebulous biology project (?) in the reputedly haunted “Spiritual Woods” (groan), and then there was seemingly endless footage of them getting ready to go out there, interspersed with stupid “news” footage with an anchorman who kept worrying about his hair and doesn’t know how to count down to live TV (note: It’s 3…2…silence, not 1…2…3). Also, did I notice some spelling mistakes on the purportedly real “Missing” posters? Jeez. Director Anthony Daniel raised the money for this on Kickstarter, and I hate to say it, but his backers got ripped off just as surely as The Blair Witch Project did. Honestly, if you’re lucky enough to raise some money from folks to make your movie, at least come up with something original and not something that actively insults your viewers. Spare yourself the hour and twenty minutes of agony and skip it. Blech.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.