Ten Days of Terror!: The Whip and the Body

Film: The Whip and the Body
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I do have a fondness for Gothic horror movies. I’m not sure if it’s the setting and the costuming, the stateliness and relative genteelness of the stories, or the presence of Christopher Lee in so many of them. While it’s certainly not the entirety of the genre, it’s hard not to view horror from the ‘60s without feeling that all of them took place a century previous in castles somewhere in Europe. That’s not the case, of course, but there are a hell of a lot of films that involve fancy people living in castles in the 18th or 19th century. A film like The Whip and the Body (or La frusta e il corpo if you prefer) certainly fits that whole Gothic idea, but certainly puts the idea of genteelness in question.

As you might get from the title, The Whip and the Body is very much a film about sadomasochism. Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee) returns to his family’s castle after many years ostensibly to congratulate his brother Christian (Tony Kendall) on his marriage. Christian has married Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), who was a former lover of Kurt’s. The truth is that Kurt is a known sadist and no one in the castle is happy with his return. Particularly enraged are Kurt’s father Count Menliff (Gustavo De Nardo) and Giorgia (Harriet Medin), the family servant who blames Kurt for the suicide death of her daughter.

Ten Days of Terror!: Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Film: Hatchet for the Honeymoon
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

One of the things that made Peeping Tom such a transgressive movie is the fact that we know immediately who the killer is. The rest of the movie then attempts to get the audience to sympathize with someone who they know to be a murderer. Hatchet for the Honeymoon does half of this. It tells us exactly who the killer is in the opening few minutes, and then honestly doesn’t care if we sympathize or not. It’s more about how things play out than it is about us caring about whether or not the psychotic killer survives or gets what he wants.

So it’s absolutely not a spoiler when I tell you that when we are introduced to John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) and he immediately tells us that he is a psychopath responsible for the murder in the opening scene of the film. What he tells us is that he suffered some terrible childhood trauma, and for some reason, when he murders a bride with a cleaver (and it’s definitely a cleaver and not a hatchet), he gets a glimpse of that trauma and gets closer to remembering exactly what happened.

Ten Days of Terror!: Planet of the Vampires

Film: Planet of the Vampires (Terrore nello Spazio)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I’ve never been quiet about my issues with Italian horror movies. They tend to be visually interesting but have serious issues when it comes to the plot. This is true of almost every Italian horror movie I can name, even classics like Suspiria. With Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, the biggest problem is the English title of the movie. The original Italian title, Terrore nello Spazio, or “Terror in Space” is much closer to something that makes sense. What’s the problem? There isn’t a single vampire in this movie.

There are some very strange connections here, though. There is a feeling in some ways of Planet of the Vampires following a film like Forbidden Planet in a lot of ways. While the plots are very different, a lot of the shots feel like they belong in the same movie. It’s also a movie that oddly presages Alien in a lot of respects. The movie follows the very basic outer space horror movie plot—ship intercepts distress beacon—but we also get a crashed alien ship with giant corpses and a lifeform on the planet that feeds on invaders in a unique way.

Ten Days of Terror!: Shock/Beyond the Door II

Films: Shock/Beyond the Door II
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

Beyond the Door was a movie that was clearly designed to attract the same audience as The Exorcist. The plot was similar in a lot of ways, but it was a cheap knock off, about as scary as one of my chihuahuas. A few years later, we got Beyond the Door II, which was so exploitative that the only thing it had in common with the first movie was the child actor. In truth, the movie was also released as Shock, so it’s not entirely a cashgrab.

We’re going to be focused on Dora Baldini (Daria Nicolodi), who has moved back into her old house with her son Marco (David Colin Jr.) and her new husband Bruno (John Steiner). It turns out this is a house she lived in before, with her first husband, Carlo (Nicola Salerno). While Dora was pregnant with Marco, Carlo became abusive and addicted to heroin, and was thought to have committed suicide when his boat was found abandoned and adrift. Dora ended up in an asylum, treated with electroshock therapy. It’s seven years later, Carlo has been declared legally dead after being missing for seven years. And now, with her shattered memory, she has returned remarried.

Wednesday Horror: Lisa and the Devil

Films: Lisa and the Devil (Lisa e il Diavolo)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on laptop.

My main complaint about Italian horror, particularly films from the ‘70s and ‘80s, is that it is long on style and short on coherent narrative. That’s very much true of the films of Dario Argento, a bit less true of those of Mario Bava. Bava still has some coherence problems at times, but he’s very much capable of putting together a story that more or less holds together. I was hopeful heading into Lisa and the Devil (otherwise called Lisa e il Diavolo), and there’s kind of a story here, but mostly it’s a bunch of set up and then a great deal of killing and blood that looks like red paint.

Lisa (Elke Sommer) is vacationing in Spain when her tour takes her by a fresco that depicts the devil, who looks quite a bit like Telly Savalas. This is not coincidental, because Lisa wanders away from her tour group and into a shop where she encounters a man named Leandro, who is played by Telly Savalas. She flees and encounters a man who claims to know her and calls her Elena. The fights with him, and he falls down a set of stone steps to his apparent death.

Off Script: Blood and Black Lace (Sei Donne per L'Assassino)

Film: Blood and Black Lace (Sei Donne per L’Assassino)
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Mario Bava more or less invented the slasher. Bay of Blood is typically thought of as the prototypical slasher film, Bava was starting to build up the style years before. That’s evidenced by 1964’s Blood and Black Lace (Sei Donne per L’Assassino, which translates to “Six Women for the Murderess”), which is also one of the earliest films in the giallo style. This is all about the style and far less about the actual plot, which is also pretty common for films made by Mario Bava.

The sell here is that the murders that are committed, and there are a bunch of them, happen in the context of a fashion house. That might not sound interesting, but it does make for a very interesting visual style. Since Bava spent a good deal of his professional life as a director of photography/cinematographer, this isn’t too surprising. What this means for us is that we get beautiful women in high fashion being brutally slaughtered by a maniac wearing a faceless mask. So, if nothing else, this is a movie that doesn’t look like anything else out there.

Off Script: Kill, Baby...Kill!

Film: Kill, Baby…Kill! (Operazione Paura)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Over the past few years, I’ve come more and more to the conclusion that some of Italian horror is lost on me for the same reason that a lot of anime is lost on me. There’s a certain level of expectation with Italian horror that I’ll be able to fill in a lot of blanks on my own that are never filled in for me. I follow along as well as I can, and I’m generally impressed by the visual style of Italian horror, but the story often leaves me cold. That’s certainly the case with Kill, Baby…Kill!, which is another of those Italian imports that has about 100 names, including Curse of the Dead, Don’t Walk in the Park, and Curse of the Living Dead as well as its original Italian title, Operazione Paura, which translates as Operation Fear.

Kill, Baby…Kill! was directed by Mario Bava, who started his cinematic life as a cinematographer and continued to do all of his own cinematography except on a couple of films when he directed. It shows. This is certainly a pretty film and one that uses the camera well. Bava was always smart about where he put his camera and with what he shows the audience. Where he frequently seems to fall down (and Blood and Black Lace and Bay of Blood bear this out as well) is in the story department.

Off Script: Black Sabbath

Film: I Tre Volti Della Paura (Black Sabbath)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

The anthology film is its own thing. While I may be wrong, it seems like most anthologies are of the horror variety. Horror lends itself to a shorter format well. All you need is a good couple of scares over the course of 20 minutes or so and everyone walks away happy. The problem with anthology films is that even good ones tend to be a little uneven at best. Take Creepshow for example; while a couple of the stories are really fun, a few are weaker and drag the film down a little. With Mario Bava’s I Tre Volti Della Paura (technically The Three Faces of Fear but distributed as Black Sabbath), we don’t have that problem. We get three pretty good little spook tales, all roughly the same length and about the same amount of fun.

It helps that there are only three stories here, so each one is given enough time to work up a good scare without overstaying its welcome. We start with a little opening monologue from Karloff, who tells us that ghosts and spirits are real. Specifically, he talks about vampires, saying that they may well be in the theater with us, since they look just like us and like to feed on those whom they loved during their lives. It’s fun and cheeky, and probably served to get a few theater goers to snuggle up closer to each other, or to eye each other a little more warily.

Off Script: House on Haunted Hill; Bay of Blood

Films: House on Haunted Hill; Reazione a Catena (Twitch of the Death Nerve, Bay of Blood
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

It might be coming out of an anti-intellectual closet to say this, but I tend to like the films of William Castle because they are so damn silly. Castle was the king of entertaining film promotions, having moviegoers sign waivers against the possibility of having a heart attack from fright while watching his films. It’s ballsy and fun. Seriously, there’s not a person alive today who would be so scared to be in any danger from one of Castle’s films. They’re scary sort of like Chris Kattan is funny, so, y’know, not. They also frequently have plot holes you could drive a truck through. Fortunately, they’re entertaining, and really that’s all I need. Castle’s films are probably an acquired taste, but it’s a taste I acquired pretty quickly.

It helps a film like House on Haunted Hill to have a legitimate actor like Vincent Price starring. Price, of course, made his name in cheap, not-very-scary horror movies, but he’s still Vincent Price, and he’s pretty damn awesome. The truth is that he’s really the best thing going in this one, but he’s also more than enough. Even when the movie was stupid, Price was worth watching.

Dead Man (and Woman) Walking

Films: I Walked with a Zombie, La Maschera del Demonio (The Mask of Satan, Black Sunday)
Format: DVD from Bettendorf Public Library through interlibrary loan (Zombie), DVD from person collection (Black Sunday) on itty bitty bedroom television.

Most of the time, when we talk about influential people behind the scenes in the film industry, we talk about directors. In the case of the sadly short-lived Val Lewton, we’re talking about a producer. In terms of the movies he wrote and produced, he was much like Hitchcock—there’s a particular theme to Lewton’s work. His films all have a suspense angle, but take it another step further, adding a true supernatural element. Of all his films, Cat People is the greatest (my opinion) and most well known. I Walked with a Zombie fits his pattern, though.

Since this film was released in 1943, it’s worth noting that the zombie mentioned in the title is one of the traditional type. George Romero hadn’t created his flesh-eating ghouls yet, so the term “zombie” meant a corpse reanimated by witchcraft or Voodoo, often used as a servant. We start in Canada, where a young nurse named Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is hired by a sugar company to head out to the West Indies. She is to care for the wife of a plantation owner.

On the trip over, she meets the man she will be working for, Paul Holland (Tom Conway). While she is enchanted by the ocean and the scenery, Holland acts as the world’s meanest buzzkiller, telling her that where they are going is a place of sorrow and death. Once there, Betsy meets a few important people. First is the family maid, Alma (Theresa Harris), who welcomes her in. She also encounters Paul Holland’s half-brother, Wesley Rand (James Ellison). That night, she gets her first encounter with Holland’s wife Jessica (Christine Gordon). Jessica is silent, staring, and if not a zombie, doing the best impression of one ever. Betsy is freaked out by this, but stays.

Betsy also starts discovering some of the family secrets. While out with Wes, she overhears a local singer playing a ballad about the Holland family. According to the song, Wes and Jessica loved each other, and then Jessica took very ill, turning her into the catatonic sleepwalker she’s become. Wes stops the musicians, but later, when he is sloppy drunk, the musician finishes the song for Betsy’s benefit. Here she also meets the men’s mother, Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett, who looks quite a bit like Jane Goodall).

Betsy soon suspects that Jessica is not sick, but is a zombie returned to life through Voodoo ritual. Alma aids her in this belief, and Betsy takes Jessica on a disturbing night stroll through the sugar cane fields to get help. It is here that they encounter the most disturbing spectre in the film in the form of the guardian, Carrefour (Darby Jones).

What works in this film is the atmosphere. Similar to the earlier Cat People, there really isn’t anything here in the way of gore, blood, or anything else. What there is, though, is a series of creepy moments, a sense of unrelenting paranoia, and claustrophobia. More remarkable, this film does not take the position that the people of the unnamed West Indian island of the story are terribly backwards, superstitious people who are to be treated like children. Instead, in general, their beliefs are given enough weight to carry the story. Many of the white people in the film give lip service to the crazy native beliefs, but as the film goes on, it becomes evident that the Voodoo has real power, and that the plantation owners believe in it as well. It’s not a film that could have been made by an American director in the ‘40s.

La Maschera del Demonio (released as Black Sunday in the U.S. and The Mask of Satan elsewhere) is a tale of horror, vampirism, Satanism, and the dead returning to life from director Mario Bava. Filmed in Italian and dubbed, this film is a prime example not only of horror films, but also a hint toward what would become known as giallo films a few short years later. Bava, in fact, was one of the first giallo directors. While often about crime, giallo films tend to have horrific or supernatural elements in them. This film isn’t all the way there, but Bava is credited with the first one ever a few years after this was made. Certainly the atmospheric camera, use of music, and hints of eroticism are leading the way to what would become a major Italian tradition.

This film starts with a 16th or 17th century ritual execution of a pair of witches. One is Princess Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele); the other is her demonic lover, Igor Javutich (Arturo Dominici). Asa is convicted of consorting with Satan, and has his brand burned onto her back. Rather than deny the charge, she curses her accusers, claiming that she will live again thanks to the power of Satan. Her punishment is a gruesome one—a huge metal, spiked mask is hammered onto her face in one of the most shocking and, frankly, truly awesome opening sequences I’ve ever seen. Sadly for the people of Moldavia, the ritual burning goes badly, and rain douses the fires that were consuming Asa’s and Javutich’s bodies. They are buried, him in unhallowed ground and her in the family tomb.

Two centuries later, two travelers come upon the tomb. These men are doctors, Thomas Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) and his assistant Andre Gorobec (John Richardson). What they discover is that it would be better for them to not mess around with dead bodies. They find Asa’s tomb, fitted with a cross and a window so that, should she rest uneasy, she will be forced to look at the cross, preventing her from rising. Kruvajan is attacked by a bat, and in fighting it off, manages to smash the cross, break the window on the tomb, and cut himself. He and Gorobec remove the mask from the corpse and discover that the body looks recently dead despite being in the tomb for two centuries.

Later, after they have left, the blood from Kruvajan’s wound drips into the eyes of Asa, who is reanimated by it. She calls to her dead lover, who also rises up from the grave. The two then plot to take over the body of Katia Vajda (also played by Barbara Steele) so that Asa can live again.

This is a fun, gothic film. It’s not particularly scary for anyone who has seen a scary movie before, although this probably wasn’t the case in 1961. The vampires are particularly nasty and creepy, and when fresh out of their graves, they are incredibly gooey. Barbara Steele is disturbing with the massive holes in her face, and when she attempts (and succeeds) to seduce Kruvajan, she is both horrifying and erotic. It’s a creepy moment.

This film is all about the atmosphere. It’s evident that Bava started his career in film as a cinematographer. This is more than just silly fun, though. It takes itself completely seriously, and for that, it’s worth watching. The dub is good, too, and the effect of Katia aging while Asa gets younger is surprisingly smooth and effective. It’s histrionic, it’s overacted, and I love the hell out of it.

Why to watch I Walked with a Zombie: Surprisingly respectful of non-Western culture and decidedly creepy atmosphere.
Why not to watch: The dude with bug eyes.

Why to watch La Maschera del Demonio: The most awesome film opening ever.
Why not to watch: The dead things are all…gooey.