Killer Kid

In Anthony Ascott's giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris an otherwise innocuous seeming old lady is made into a suspect by the expedient of having her purchase of what are described as “horror comics” - fumetti neri, including the fictitious title Killerman - from an edicola.

One interesting thing here is how the transgressive aspect of such titles, including the real-world Diabolik, Kriminal, Sadistik and Satanik, seems to be signalled in the Italian at the level of their titular protagonists, the letter K being one that is foreign – with all the associated connotations of otherness, potential danger etc. – to the Italian alphabet.

The function of the K, then, seems akin to that of the X in more familiar English-language / American comics like X-Men. The difference is that whereas X-Men present us with the world from the perspective of the outsider (i.e. the mutant) who fights heroically for a society that fears and rejects them on account of their difference, in their fumetti counterparts the world is presented from the perspective of an outsider (i.e. the master criminal) who revels in their rejection of society and its norms.

Esotika, Erotika, Psicotika

This bi-lingual Italian-English book from Glittering Images, named after an AKA for Radley Metzger's sophisticated erotic drama The Lickerish Quartet, offers a “kaleidoscopic” view of “sexy Italia,” 1964-73, exploring the sexual revolution of the period as it was expressed in fumetti, fotoromanzi, books, magazines and cinema.

And as such it is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the subject whether in the general – what the Groovy Age of Horror calls the “groovyverse” – or the specific – such as the giallo, if perhaps not so much Argento, here – precisely because it demonstrates just how far it all connects together, whether it be fotoromanzi of films like The Monster of Venice; film adaptations of fumetti like Satanik and Kriminal; people like Corrado Farina and Erna Schurer moving between the forms, the former writing the Barbarella-like comic Selene, The Girl from the Stars then adapting the inimitable Guido Crepax's Baba Yaga for the screen, the latter moving from the fotoromanzi to the cinema; or just that general overarching aesthetic and sensibility.

Thus, for instance, one learns that the heroine of the fumetti Masokis was a reporter, who “is never one to give up [and will] do anything to get a sensational scoop, even sell her own body and violate the law,” suggestive of a prototypical Laura Gemser Emanuelle Nera figure. Likewise, the protagonist of Hessa, “a racist, sadistic, frigid woman” sounds like she would be at home in the likes of Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur.

Cultish Shocking Horrors: (Sur)realism, Sadism and Eroticism, 1950s-1960s

Another Bizarre Sinema series book, Cultish Shocking Horrors: (Sur)realism, Sadism and Eroticism, 1950s-1960s, arrived today. Again, comparatively expensive but once more worth every penny, being profusely illustrated and full of information that isn't really available elsewhere, as when you have someone like Jean-Pierre Bouyxou reminiscing on seeing these films on the Midi-Minuit-Fantastique circuit at the time of their first release.

For the English-language reader the book makes an especially nice companion piece to Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs's Immoral Tales, in that it covers some of the same films – Horror of Spider Island, Mill of the Stone Women and The Awful Dr Orloff – in greater detail and, more importantly, from a different perspective, that of the continental European.

This enables the volume's authors to respond to British films like Blood of the Vampire, Horrors of the Black Museum and Peeping Tom by situating them as part of the same international quasi-movement rather than as aberrations from the Hammer Gothic formula, and – perhaps most interestingly – discuss some little-known Mexican horrors such as El Monstuo Resuscitado.

One little fragment I found particularly intriguing is Leone Frollo's erotic / pornographic re-imagining of the monster from Horror of Spider Island's attack on one of the shipwrecked nubiles, which has certain affinities with these Lucifera and Maghella excerpts at Groovy Age of Horror, again highlighting the broader sense of that overarching cross-media, cross-culture - both in the sense of being an international phenomenon and one that crossing traditional high/low class culture distinctions within the national culture - sensibility.

Recommended.

Nightmare Castle

I watched Mario Caiano's Nightmare Castle yesterday. I had seen it before, but found I got more out of it this time around, thanks to having become more aware of Italian Gothic in the interim.

The story itself is one of those standard combinations of the supernatural and quotidian, as Paul Muller's scientist murders his first wife Muriel and her lover, then marries Muriel's half sister Jenny - both being played by Barbara Steele - and conspires with his mistress to use Jenny for a vampire-style blood transfusion to save his mistress's life.

Thus Steele gets to do her usual good / bad, pain / pleasure, sadistic / masochistic dualisms, here further emphasised by having Jenny being blonde in contrast to the dark Muriel, who also returns from beyond with one side of her face horribly scarred.



This last aspect I found quite Satanik-like, though unlike Satanik's alter-ego, Marny Bannister, whose scraped-back hair makes her disfigurement obvious, here Steele's character hides her scars behind i lungi capelli della morte until the time is right for the shock revelation.



There's also a spot of mask action, as Muller attempts to drive Steele #2 mad by drugging her and setting up weird nightmares. Somewhat Opera:



Also of interest are the little intertextual nods. At one point early on Muller's character announces that he's going to a conference in Edinburgh, recalling the Scottish setting of Riccardo Freda's The Ghost. That film and the director's earlier Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock also seem to be referenced via the original surname of Muriel and Jenny, Hampton - just like Freda's pseudonym of choice.

Argento and the fumetti

I recently got Jean-Baptiste Thoret's Dario Argento, magicien de la peur, in which he suggests the fumetti character Kriminal as a possible inspiration for Mater Tenebrarum's skeleton form at the end of Inferno. This made me want to find out more about the fumetti than the little I had already been exposed to - a brief appendix in Pete Tombs and Cathal Tohill's wonderful Immoral Tales and the film adaptations of Kriminal, Diabolik and Valentina in Baba Yaga. It was cool, then, to find a blog about the fumetti and a version of Biancaneve - i.e. Snow White - that was very different from the Disney one that part-inspired Suspiria - http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2006_02_12_groovyageofhorror_archive.html