Sighs and Darkness: Argento’s Infernal, Operatic Peak

I’ve previously reviewed the early gialli of Dario Argento here, (as well as his 1985 oddity Phenomena); I capped off the former review with Deep Red, the movie which kicked off what’s generally considered to be Argento’s creative peak. I may as well cover the rest of that – or at least, where I map out his creative peak to be, since opinions vary on whereabouts he lost his mojo.

The movies I’m going to cover here – Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebrae, and Opera – are perhaps the creative works which most directly contributed to Argento getting multiple entries on the “video nasty” lists compiled by the UK’s Department of Public Prosecutions; Deep Red got on there, but as a release from a bit before the moral panic it would have probably been overlooked if these movies hadn’t come out right at the peak of the controversy.

Specifically, Suspiria ended up as a so-called “section 3” video nasty – an entry on a supplemental list of films which the Department of Public Prosecutions would not regard as worth prosecuting over, but regarded as liable for confiscation. (This was a distinction it shared with Deep Red.) Inferno hit “section 2” – films liable to be confiscated too, and formerly on section 1, but which dropped out of that when they were the subject of unsuccessful prosecutions in court. Tenebrae was Argento’s “high score” on the video nasty chart, making it to section 1 – films which the DPP would prosecute over, and which weren’t relegated to section 2 due to an unsuccessful prosecution. By comparison, Opera didn’t make the list – perhaps having come out just after the moral panic had peaked and the appetite for adding films to the list had waned. We’re going to be hitting up progressively harder stuff here, with increasing levels of violence and explorations of misogyny on the part of perpetrators as we go.

This is also the era when Argento was cultivating various padawans (or should that be Sith apprentices?) to try and cultivate the next generation of Italian horror, with Lamberto Bava and/or Michele Soavi closely associated with several of these productions. Bava, as we have seen, would pander to the worst tendencies stalking the Italian film industry of the era, whilst Soavi served his time in a range of productions from the highbrow to the schlocky before coming into his own as a director and creating some of the last truly top-flight horror movies to come from the Italian arthouse-horror tradition that Argento was the lead proponent of.

In other words, these are the movies which not only forged the future of the field (brief though it was), but which Argento’s earlier movies were building to. Along with Deep Red, this is where Argento’s vision took its purest form.

Suspiria

American student Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in the middle of a hideous rainstorm at the Tanz Academie (dance school) in Freiburg, Germany, where she’ll be honing her craft at ballet. As her taxi arrives at the school, she sees a student – Pat (Eva Axén) – exit the front door, yell something which cannot be overheard over the driving rain, and run off into the downpour. The receptionist at the school is either unable or unwilling to understand that Suzy has an invitation to come study, so she has no choice other than to take the cab back into town to stay somewhere overnight. As the taxi returns to Freiburg, Suzy glimpses Pat rushing through the forest onfoot.

Pat makes it into town and finds sanctuary with a friend, declaring her intent to leave town in the morning and never return to the school again. Pat won’t survive to do that, however – going into her friend’s bathroom to clean up, she catches a glimpse of something in the darkness outside, and then someone bursts in through the window. What follows is a vicious, over-the-top, almost ritualistic killing, which leaves Pat gruesomely slain and leaves her friend as collateral damage – killed by falling debris when Pat’s body comes crashing through a skylight. So far, so giallo – and given that Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece Suspiria came after a string of some four gialli, audiences at the time would have likely expected another story in the same vein as Deep Red.

But the Tanz Academie is more than just a mere co-educational dance school. Though she initially tries to stay off-campus in the flat of one of her classmates, events conspire to prompt Suzy to live on-campus in the school itself, after she has a funny turn during practice – a turn which seems to have been brought on by a strange encounter with a staff member with a mirror in the hallway. Strange breezes and sounds rattle the structure of the building. The place is decorated in strange, vivid colours according to some esoteric plan. A crate of food apparently spontaneously spoils, prompting a plague of maggots throughout the female students’ quarters. And the director of the academy is never seen.

The trail of bodies continues to pile up, and bit by bit Suzy is drawn to the centre of the school’s mysteries – one of which is the unseen director, notable for her strange, sonorous breath, which Suzy overheard during the practice room sleepover when the director slept with a curtain separating her from the rest of the students. Yet is it remotely possible that the director may be none other than the original founder of the academy – the mysterious Helena Markos, who established the place in 1895? And if that is so, and she is still alive 80 years later, is there truth to the rumour that Markos was a witch?

The Sanguinary Sensation of Baron Blood

Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora) is an American who’s on a holiday to the “old country” – in his case, Austria, where he’s keen to look into family history. One of Kleist’s most infamous forebears was Baron Otto von Kleist (Joseph Cotten), a sadistic tyrant who in his time tortured and killed over 100 peasants to cater to his Gilles de Rais-esque appetites. One victim of his rampages was Elizabeth Hölle (Rada Rassimov), a witch whose dying curse upon the Baron bound his spirit such that it could be called back to life at a future date, in the expectation that in some future incarnation she could summon him and take revenge at her leisure.

As it happens, the castle is being renovated at the moment for use as a hotel; Eva Arnold (Elke Sommer), a former student of Peter’s uncle Karl (Massimo Girotti) with whom Peter is staying, is involved with the project to make sure the historical architecture of the castle is preserved. Peter and Eva start to get to know each other, and as they poke about the place they discover some old parchments – supposedly the incantations with which Hölle expected to call up the Baron, and banish him again. Intrigued by the possibility of actually meeting his centuries-dead ancestor, they give the spells a spin… but when the parchments fall into a fire, they lack the means of dispatching him. This leaves the old Baron free to get up to his old tricks again, indulging the sort of urges which gained him the nickname of… Baron Blood.

Mario Bava’s Baron Blood released in 1972, an era when the big craze in Italian horror cinema was the giallo subgenre which Bava had arguably originated with The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace. Whilst Bava had been at the forefront of the subgenre in the 1960s, by this point in team a new generation of directors were trying their hand at it, with Dario Argento’s early movies becoming the new benchmark – though Bava’s 1971 effort A Bay of Blood proved that he could be just as enjoyably cruel as any of the newcomers.

Giallo, however, was never the only string in Bava’s bow; in the past he’d also had a fine byline in Hammer-influenced gothic horror, with The Mask of Satan (AKA Black Sunday) from 1960 becoming the first commercially successful Italian horror movie since pre-Fascist times. In 1966 his Kill, Baby, Kill was the last of his gothic releases for a while, his gialli becoming the focus of his horror output; Baron Blood sees him return to the gothic subgenre.

The general concept of a long-dead individual coming back centuries later to continue their grim work has echoes of The Mask of Satan, of course – but this time around things are set in the modern day, rather than a period setting. This was in keeping with how the Hammer-adjacent gothic genre had developed; Hammer themselves were producing more modern-day films at this time (such as Dracula A.D. 1972 and Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb), possibly for budgetary reasons, but also as part of an attempt to modernise their output to keep up with changing tastes.

Perhaps the best way to think of Baron Blood is that it’s a very cheesy movie made by a very good director. Sometimes cheesy movies arise out of an Ed Wood-esque ineptitude, but in this case Bava seems to be fully aware of the campy silliness of the script that’s been foisted on him, but is determined to get the best out of it. It’s the visuals he gets the most out of, his shots making excellent use of the cramped and cluttered castle environment and the strange patterns of light, darkness, and shadow that result from this. Much as Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe movies for AIP were enhanced by gorgeous set design, so too is Baron Blood enhanced by the authentic location and the cunning use Bava makes of it.

Locations beyond the castle are also used well. The sequence in which the Baron pursues Eva through narrow, fog-bound alleyways being a particular highlight, as is the séance sequence, which uses an outdoor bonfire and modern-day neo-pagan aesthetics rather than being the sort of very standard Victorian-style séance which we’re more used to seeing in this sort of thing.

The interesting visuals are especially helpful because the story itself flags somewhat – particularly in the latter reaches, where we know what the Baron’s after and what guise he’s taken to pass in modern society. Still, the ending is nicely evocative. Despite all the hype offered by some of the more gruesome promotional material we don’t actually see that much in the way of the tortures the Baron inflicts on people, or which are inflicted on him in a gruesome reversal of fortune, Bava decides to hint at more than he shows – a shift after the extraordinary explicit A Bay of Blood – and ends on the suggestion that whilst the Baron is dealt with, Elizabeth Hölle may now have been freed in turn.

As far as resurrecting Italian gothic horror cinema at the height of the giallo boom goes, Baron Blood perhaps belongs in the same category as Lady Frankenstein – neither movies seem to have spurred much of a wave of imitators, but they certainly kept the flag flying for this particular style of horror at a time when Hammer and AIP, its greatest exponents, were pivoting away from it somewhat.

Welcome Back to the Horrorshow, Italy

Italian horror cinema has been celebrated both for the artistic heights it accomplished in the 1970s and the schlocky lows it reached in subsequent years; in both contexts, it presented gorier and more sexually frank material than many competing markets were producing. In its own small way, this is a victory over fascism; horror movie production ceased in Italy after 1920, due to Mussolini’s government banning it.

Mario Bava played a crucial role in this process. Bava began and ended his career in camera work; he stepped out of retirement in 1980 to do some visual effects work on Dario Argento’s Inferno, and he began his career as first a camera assistant and then a cinematographer and special effect artist at various studios; during the war he did some work on Italian propaganda films, but he seems to have had little trouble finding work again after the end of the war, and for about a decade or so he concentrated on his cinematography. Then along came a project which would see him get a chance to direct…

I Vampiri

Paris, 1957: a string of women are discovered dead, drained of blood; medical records show that all the victims had the same blood type. The media is naturally having a field day, speculating that this is the work of a serial killer that they dub “the Vampire”. Pierre Lantin (Dario Michaelis), a journalist, is investigating the matter, and soon discovers that this Vampire isn’t the traditional sort – the victims are drained of blood by a syringe, not by mouth.

As it turns out, the killings are being done at the behest of Professor Julian Du Grand (Antoine Balpêtré), who fakes his death when the heat starts closing in. But what bizarre experiments is the Professor conducting, why is he resorting to these methods, and what will happen to Pierre when, transferred off the Vampire investigation, he finds himself drawn into the Du Grand family’s affairs when he catches the eyes of Giselle Du Grand (Gianna Maria Canale).

Butterflies and Monsters – Two Unusual Italian Horror Movies

Italian genre cinema is largely known for particular genre features – spaghetti Westerns, the proto-slashers of the giallo genre, microgenres like the fads for zombie movies or cannibal movies, and rip-offs of more successful Hollywood releases – and I think it’s easy to assume it’s all rather samey. In the interests of this, today’s backlog clearance job is me putting a spotlight of a couple of more unusual Italian horror/crime pieces.

Caltiki – The Immortal Monster

It’s the 1950s, and a team of scientists are investigating the ruins of Tikal – an ancient Mayan city which was abandoned for reasons not known to modern historians. Folklore hints at the rise of a goddess known as Caltiki, a malevolent deity; a subterranean temple, its entrance exposed after a recent volcanic eruption, is discovered by the party and seems to be dedicated to her. Within it is a deep pool – they infer that it’s a sacrificial pool, into which human victims would be tossed to drown bedecked in jewellery as gifts to the goddess, and a quick scuba jaunt into the pool seems to prove this hypothesis. The entity in the lake is no anthropomorphic goddess, though – it’s an ancient, blob-like creature, some 20 million years old, awoken by the fumbling explorers…

This kicks off an old-timey SF-horror adventure that’s massively influenced by Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness – the ancient blob creature is extremely shoggoth-like – as well as the likes of Clark Ashton Smith. (A decidedly shoggoth-like spawn of Tsathoggua is found guarding a temple in one of Smith’s stories of long-ago Hyperborea, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.) There’s also a certain Quatermass angle to proceedings – the centrality of the scientific enigma to the story, for instance, and the increasing audacity of its revelations. (Just wait until you get to the comet angle…)

Ferretnibbles 6 – Blood and Black Death

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Sometimes you want to jabber about something on Ferretbrain to an extent which would be unwieldy for a Playpen post, but not necessarily make for a full-blooded article. To encourage contributors to offer up shorter pieces when the mood strikes them, here’s another set of Ferretnibbles – pocket-sized articles about all and sundry.

This time around, I’m taking the opportunity to talk a little about a couple of very different horror movies – a Mario Bava giallo from the 1960s and a German-British historical horror feature from 2010.

Blood and Black Lace

Countess Christina Como (Eva Bartok), recently widowed, has converted her expansive mansion into the hub of a high fashion empire, and is holding a grand salon there displaying her designers’ latest creations. Meanwhile, her designers, models, and other employees are embroiled in all sorts of tangled personal affairs, ranging from the deeply embarrassing to the actively illegal. Thus, when a mysterious masked figure begins a campaign of murder and terror against them, they fail spectacularly to co-operate with the police. The confusion allows the killer to keep things going to a terrifying extent, and as individual members of the salon try their own snooping, it’s hard to say who is truly determined to find the murderer, who is just trying to cover their back, and who has far more malevolent ends in mind.

Though Mario Bava’s preceding The Girl Who Knew Too Much is considered the first giallo film, I’d argue that it’s with Blood and Black Lace that Bava both hit on the archetypal giallo formula (right down to the killer’s garb) and, more importantly, the distinctive giallo atmosphere; The Girl Who Knew Too Much is just slightly too jolly and comedic for me to feel like it’s a true giallo – some of the comedy was, of course, added in the American cut of the movie (Evil Eye), but it was still present in the original. Conversely, Blood and Black Lace has the same mix of aesthetic luxury, eroticism, and horror that is distinctive to giallo and which The Girl Who Knew Too Much didn’t quite hit.

Bava shows a talent for directing truly chilling death sequences – low on gore, but the implications of what is happening are ably communicated to prompt the imagination to fill in the terrible blanks. The sheer violence exhibited by the killer is shocking to behold and renders the killings thoroughly untitillating, and like I said above the classic “raincoat, hat, gloves, mask” getup of the killer created a giallo archetype, and Bava has a great eye to throw in a shot here and there which underscores the terrible nature of what is happening. (See, for instance, a shot of a statue of Zeus chasing after some nymph as the killer drags away the corpse of the first victim, or the obscene tableau established by a suit of armour that has fallen on another victim.)

Bava also breaks from the standard whodunnit formula in a major way by revealing the killer’s identity well before the climax, and showing their planning process from the inside for the final go-around. To be honest, I find the movie comes a little unstuck after that, taking a bit took long to work its way through the final stages of the plot, but the movie is nonetheless still a classic of its subgenre. I particularly liked Thomas Ranier in his role as the disapproving police detective whose efforts to solve the case keep being tripped up by the self-serving lies and chicanery of the main characters.

Black Death

It is the 1300s, and as the title implies the Black Death is sweeping Europe. In a monastery struggling to contain the infection, Brother Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), has been kept quarantined, but is let out to join the prayers for one of his fallen comrades when he shows no symptoms of the plague. The next day, though, we see him stealing food and slipping out into the town to rendezvous with Averill (Kimberly Nixon), a woman that he is carrying on a secret affair with. Witnessing the dead piled up in the streets, Osmund tells Averill to take the supplies he’s obtained and go and hide in the forest until the plague passes; she ponders whether God is punishing the two of them for their sin, and whilst Osmund denies this, he also refuses to come with her, being willing to break his vows but not willing to abandon them entirely.

Osmund’s faith and character will soon undergo sterner tests, however, for he soon takes up a challenge his brothers fear to take: to accompany the Bishop’s envoy Ulric (Sean Bean) and his mercenaries on a mission as a guide and as theological counsel. Rumour has it that a certain village in the marshes close to where Osmund was raised is not only completely untouched by the plague, but is home to a necromancer who can return the dead to life. Ulric and Osmund’s task is to establish the truth of these stories; if the village has turned to Godless and sacrilegious ways to protect them, then they must be discredited and punished less others in their desperation abandon the Church.

A German-British coproduction (the story development and ideas came from the British side of the equation, the funding and locations from the Germans), this was directed by Christopher Smith, who made substantial changes to the conclusion of the film, which as originally scripted by Dario Poloni took the movie down an unambiguously supernatural route. In contrast to this, Smith goes for a more subtle, psychological approach, in keeping with his bid to go for a grimly realistic depiction of the time. You could probably characterise this as a full-blown grimdark piece, in fact, though frankly the Black Death was such a nightmarish period of history in Europe that if you don’t go dark with it you aren’t facing up to just how awful it was. Smith even gets minor historical points right, like remembering that the medieval church as an institution was more concerned with heresy than it was with witchcraft, but that the Black Death saw sentiments against witches becoming substantially more prevalent.

The group’s journey through the plague-ravaged landscape early on not only helps to establish the distinct characters of the various mercenaries, but also helps to drive home just how apocalyptic the Black Death was. Remember, this was a disease where if you say it decimated the population, pedants will point out that if anything you are underplaying just how awful it was, with recent research suggesting that about half the population of medieval Europe died of it. Panicing mobs burning a witch or turning to murderous banditry because they can’t think of anything else to do, entire depopulated villages, the discovery of plague within the party itself – all these incidents play out on the journey and make it obvious that the Bishop’s worries about people turning away from the Church are not mere control freakery. We are watching these people work their way through a disaster of such a magnitude that every certainty in their life has been brushed aside and the entire social order is disintegrating not because of any great revolutionary impulse on the part of anyone but simply because people are dying at too great a pace to keep it together.

The attention to detail extends to the costuming and sets; of the latter, the finely reproduced marshland village that is the destination of Ulric and Osmund’s mission is magnificently realised. As far as the acting goes, everyone does a smashing job; Sean Bean is at his Sean Beaniest and gets an appropriately Sean Beany death, Carice van Houten is great as the villagers’ spooky overlord, and Tim “Lord Percy” McInnerny has a great turn as Hob, the creepily welcoming village spokesman. (In fact, I wouldn’t have believed he could have pulled off such a sinister role had I not previously seen his appearance in Edge of Darkness.)

The ending, in which Osmund finds himself becoming a killer as brutal and merciless as any in Ulric’s band (and he’s murdered at least one person for absolutely no good reason, though he is more than capable of denying this), and in which it becomes apparent that the entire mission has done no good at all beyond murdering a village full of people who just wanted to be left alone, is the final touch of bleakness on what is a decidedly bleak prospect. Although it is possible to see the film as a slam on organised religion in general, to me it comes across more as a condemnation of what happens when religion or irreligion alike take to violence to serve their ends.

A Gulf of Gore

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Dario Argento might have the more widely-known name, but Mario Bava is arguably the director who laid the foundations of Italian horror cinema. As well as collaborating with Riccardo Freda on I Vampiri – the first Italian horror film to be produced after the Mussolini-era ban was finally lifted – his early 1960s efforts The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace set the mould for the “giallo” genre – a peculiar blend of murder mystery and horror film, frequently involving overt or sublimated erotic themes, that was itself a predecessor of the slasher movie.

Still, by the early 1970s the young upstart Argento managed to seize the momentum with works like The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, whose unflinching depictions of violence made earlier works seem positively tame. A Bay of Blood – also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve, Blood Bath, and a host of other alternate titles – seems to have been Bava’s attempt to catch up, with special effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi at hand to depict the murders with such gruesome realism that even old hands like Christopher Lee were revolted by the end result.