Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) The Italian Gore Master’s Pivotal Horror

For anyone who has made the deep dive into horror or lowbrow Italian cinema, it’s hard to find a person who doesn’t harbour an affection for the dirty, sleazy, violently imaginative work of Lucio Fulci. He’s a director who’s gory nightmares rank him among Mario Bava and Dario Argento as one of the country’s most prolific horror filmmakers, and one who was making horror films right up to the 90s until his death in 1996. However, it’s easy to overlook that for half his career Fulci was a chameleon of sorts, jumping from genre to genre as a low-budget journeyman. As absurd as it sounds for fans of his more well known films, Fulci was primarily a comedy director during the 50s and 60s, but was always quick to mash other genres together like war, fantasy, and sci-fi. He dabbled in jukebox musicals, erotica, and even dipped his toe in the spaghetti western with Massacre Time starring Django himself Franco Nero. 

Entering the 70s is when Fulci found his home in horror, his London-set psychedelic breakdown A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin was a confident first foray into the genre, but the following year in 1972 he made what many consider to be the first properly Fulci-esque giallo, Don’t Torture a Duckling. The story here is of a rural village in the south of Italy that is rocked by a spate of murders, all the victims young boys who attend a Catholic school. The regular giallo tropes ensue from there, with the priest, the big-city detective, and the bumbling cops all scrambling to find the culprit of this convoluted and predictably bad taste mystery.

In Fulci’s body of work this is sandwiched between The Eroticist, a Tinto Brass-lite political sex comedy, and White Fang, a family-friendly western about a dog, clearly marking how he was still very much in his phase of genre experimentation before he carved his niche in horror. But from the opening frames you can see Fulci’s engagement with the material on display, an opening establishing shot of the beautiful Italian mountains that is violently cut in half by a huge, meandering motorway bridge, a feat of manmade engineering but a vulgar eyesore all the same. Just this simple image establishes the central conflict at the heart of this story, one of the inherent modernisation, rising immigration, and economic shift in Italy that was taking place at the time. Throughout the film various town pariahs are accused of the murders, ranging from a local weirdo, a promiscuous socialite, and an estranged witch, but with each false accusation the suspects come closer and closer to the core of the community. The call is indeed coming from inside the house as Fulci’s characters wrestle with their own prejudices against outsiders and their natural instinct to protect their own small community.

Alongside a more focused approach to theme and character than what you might expect from his films, Duckling is significant for being Fulci’s first foray into the viscerally mean violence that has typified his career, a notable step for the director who would become known as the Godfather of Gore. Absurdly tasteless sequences such as a POV shot of a child being strangled to death and his body floating to the surface of a fountain while a lady washes her laundry display the seeds of the kind of filmmaker he would become. The gore here is less akin to the splatter horror Fulci is most notorious for in films like Zombi and City of the Living Dead but instead reaches for the more lyrical heights of the likes of The Beyond. In the film’s most infamous scene a local witch is the victim of, well, a witch hunt, as she’s followed to a church by a group of men and lynched in broad daylight. Her demise is a slow and methodical scene that sees her getting whipped and beaten by various weapons, each attack followed by a closeup of the pulsating wounds on her body, the strangely hypnotic rhythm of this scene contrapuntally scored to some hip American rock playing on the radio. It’s a painful, cruel scene that is also strangely humanising for its victim in a way I struggle to describe, as is often the case in this film’s grotesque lyricism.

Throughout it all though we have a pristine level of craft on display here that marks Duckling’s place as not only one of the 70’s greatest Italian genre pics but also an incredible relic of a very specific era of shift for the country’s cinema, a moment of transition where money was being poured into the industry to produce an unprecedented output of films. Old masters such as Mario Bava were producing some of their finest work (1971’s Bay of Blood) and up-and-comers like Dario Argento and Sergio Martino were just emerging too with influential, industry changing works straight out the gate, but what we now clearly identify as giallo or Euro-horror was yet to be defined. Don’t Torture a Duckling is one of the rare examples of this type of film that, while clearly made on a low budget for a low brow audience, feels disparaging to label as a ‘b-movie’, despite having all the features and hallmarks of one. The film employs abrupt music cues, dutch angles, crash zooms (lots of crash zooms), pretty much every trick in the book, but with an adept understanding of these techniques that deserves comparison to Sergio Leone. The final death is a moment of brutal, profound poetry that by surprise intensely moved me, not because the film puts aside its style and genre but because it leans so heavily into its perverse, violent proclivities to a point that it emerges out the other side as a scene of horrific catharsis that solidifies Lucio Fulci’s film as a work that deserves a place alongside the likes of Suspiria, A Fistful of Dollars, and Fulci’s own The Beyond in the pantheon of major Italian genre cinema.

Don’t Torture a Duckling is also available on Standard Blu-Ray from Arrow Video

Jake’s Archive – Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)