Gothic Fantastico: Four Italian Tales of Terror (1963/66)(Blu-Ray Review)

Horror, as a genre, flows from the Gothic like a river – but not all rivers flow in straight lines. In its heyday, a Gothic novel might mean the Gothic adventures of Ann Radcliffe or the Gothic romances of the Brontë sisters. Now, though, the term is unshakeably associated with horror. That transition took place long before the 1960s, when the four films in this new Arrow box set were made. Watched in order, though, they still demonstrate a shift in the genre, from a more literary, tasteful kind of Gothic horror to one that took on board the influence of new forms – the giallo, the gore movie, sexploitation – that were beginning to take hold of Italian cinema.

As a result, the earliest films in the collection can be a bit creaky, although if there’s one genre that thrives on a certain kind of creakiness it’s the Gothic. 1963’s The Blancheville Monster is the earliest film in the set, and although it doesn’t deliver the rampaging demon some may expect from the title, it’s still a film with a certain edge. The story of a young aristocrat who returns to her ancestral home to find everything is subtly, off-puttingly different, it’s unmistakably a film about gaslighting. Gothic literature has always had a strong appeal for female readers, a connection old enough to be lampooned by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. For all its slow pace and its mish-mash of at least three different Edgar Allan Poe stories, The Blancheville Monster reminds you why this connection exists. Its central performance by Ombretta Colli – who would later become President of Milan! – is empathetic, and the film takes its heroine’s fears seriously.

Colli was credited as “Joan Hills” when the film was released in English-speaking territories under the less-than-inspired title Horror. There’s more fun with pseudonyms in 1965’s Lady Morgan’s Vengeance. Set designer Ugo Pericoli was credited on English prints as “Hugo Danger” while make-up artist Massimo Giustini was given the 2000AD-worthy name “Max Justice”. The film itself is less of a lark. It does at least showcase the possibilities of the Gothic more methodically than any of the other films on offer here, beginning as the kind of genteel romance where people discuss their dowries and inheritances at length and escalating into a ghostly revenger’s tragedy. Unfortunately, it takes an unholy amount of time to do so, and the end result is notable mainly for an early appearance from Italian cinema’s ultimate scarlet woman Erica Blanc.

Blanc also appears in 1966’s The Third Eye, released in the same year that Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill made her a cult legend. The Third Eye also features another future icon of Italian cinema in the lead role of Mino – none other than Franco Nero. Nero shot this around the same time as Django, and it suggests that at this stage his talents were best suited to taciturn hard men; his cry of anguish at the sight of his dead lover is not wholly convincing. But it doesn’t matter, because director & co-writer Mino Guerrini gets the maximum perversity out of this Bluebeard-inspired tale.

The release of The Third Eye was delayed four months when Italian censors objected to its violence being “presented with real sadism and a protracted insistence which conveys a sense of complacency by part of the makers”. (Also moderate language) Watching it in the context of this box set, you see what they mean. It’s nowhere near as grisly as some of the films Bava was making around the same time, but its brutality, kinkiness and shameless milking of Mino’s taxidermy hobby for extra gore is a world away from the two earlier, tamer films. Throw in an outrageous supporting performance from Olga Solbelli as Nero’s mother and you’ve got a small gem.

In one of film history’s stranger publicity stunts, The Third Eye was falsely billed as being based on the writing of the medieval child killer Gilles de Rais. The last film in the set, Damiano Damiani’s The Witch, really is based on an unlikely literary source – the novel Aura by the Mexican postmodern novelist Carlos Fuentes. The film has something of the bibliophilia common to Latin and South American magical realists, with its librarian hero played by Richard Johnson. The most important thing, though, is not that Damiani changes the setting from Mexico to Italy, it’s that he refuses to alter the present-day setting of Fuentes’s novel. Suddenly this Gothic yarn, which is just as filled with dark family secrets, spectral women and hidden rooms as the other three films in this box set, feels modern, even chic, with a funky lounge score from Django composer Luis Bacalov.

For all the strengths and weaknesses of each individual film, the collection as a whole will be fascinating to genre historians, showing how Italian horror got from Mill of the Stone Women (reissued by Arrow late last year) to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. All the films have been restored from the original negatives, and extras include art cards, introductions to all four films by Mark Thompson Ashworth, new commentaries, video essays by the likes of Miranda Corcoran and Kat Ellinger, and interviews with the stars. (Blanc turns up on the discs for the two films she’s in, and is as irrepressible as ever) You can also watch some of the films with the above-mentioned English-language opening credits, in case you fancy a laugh.

Gothic Fantastico

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