Ten Days of Terror!: Black Belly of the Tarantula

Film: Black Belly of the Tarantula (La tarantola dal ventre nero)
Format: Streaming video from AMC on gigantic television.

Horror movies are often judged on the quality of their kills. When people talk about slasher movies, for example, they talk about the killers, but mostly in the context of the various kills. People like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers based on their presence, but also based on their kill count and the actual kills themselves. The murder method may be the most important aspect of a movie killer. Over a franchise, this comes down to amount of blood and diversity of kills. In a single movie, it’s about the specific method itself. This is the main thing that makes Black Belly of the Tarantula (or La tarantola dal ventre nero work as well as it does.

In fact, in Black Belly of the Tarantula it’s less about the killing itself and more about the set up. The actual murders are pretty standard slasher fare—a knife and a lot of Jack the Ripper-like deep slashes. What makes all of this interesting is that before the victims are killed, they are injected with a wasp venom that leaves them conscious but paralyzed. In the natural world, wasps do this to large spiders, paralyzing them and then laying an egg in them; the egg then hatches and devours the still-living spider while the wasp is in its larval form. In this movie, our victims are merely sliced up and killed.

This murder method is what livens this film up in real ways. This is otherwise a pretty standard police procedural. Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) draws the case when he is called in on the first murder and begins his investigation. It looks at first like a crime of passion; the woman who was killed showed evidence of an extra-marital affair, making her husband an obvious suspect. When another murder happens to a completely unrelated woman, the case becomes much more difficult and confusing. Something much deeper is going on here, and there are more and more indications that the murder victims may have been the victims of a blackmail scheme. But if someone is blackmailing them, why are they being murdered?

One of the issues I often have with giallo films is that there is a certain amount of callousness to them. There are murders that happen, seem completely disconnected, and are created specifically as spectacle, regardless of how they might interact with the plot of the film. In Black Belly of the Tarantula, a considerable amount of the story focuses on Inspector Tellini and his own feelings of unsuitability for his job on the police force, and specifically as someone investigating these murders. When a tape of him having sex with his wife turns up after an investigation of another murder, he further questions what he is doing, but realizes that he may need to at least solve this las crime before he decides to leave.

My other issue with a lot of gialli is that many of them feel incoherent. I have often suggested that a number of Italian horror and mystery films appear to start from a position of having the idea of a couple of scenes and then attempting to build an entire movie around those set pieces. If that was the case here, it doesn’t come across that way. This is a completely coherent story, and one that makes sense as the plot is written.

There are also fun little details that add to the killer’s mystique. In Blood and Black Lace, the killer is marked by a faceless mask—something like a nylon stocking but somehow much more menacing. In Black Belly of the Tarantula, we get gloves that genuinely look like rubber or the hands of a mannequin. They are incredibly disturbing and add a great deal to the overall creepiness of the film’s vibe.

Beyond this, Black Belly of the Tarantula has many of the standard hallmarks of the style. There’s a lot of nudity here, and a lot of people wearing fashionable sunglasses and looking like they’ve just gotten off a Vespa scooter. It’s honestly surprising just how many women in Italian horror movies immediately strip down the moment they get home. Then again, fan service is all about keeping the audience happy.

I’m always surprised when I like a giallo, and I was surprised at how much this one worked for me. There are a few places (a man falling off a building who is obviously a very floppy dummy, places where the film is clearly sped up) where the effects fail, but these are pretty easy to overlook when the rest of the film works this well.

Why to watch Black Belly of the Tarantula: The method of murder is surprisingly inventive.
Why not to watch: Some very cheap effects.