Maciste all'inferno / The Witch's Curse

Maciste is unusual amongst the peplum heroes in that his origins are not mythological but literary, making his first appearance in Emilio Salgari’s novel Cabiria. Though a relatively minor character in the novel and Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 film adaptation, Masciste proved a hit with Italian audiences, with dockworker turned actor Bartolomeo Pagano going on to play him in a further 24 films in the silent era.

Maciste’s adventures in these films established the character as unbounded by time and space, setting a precedent for his reincarnations in the peplum boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Maciste alpino, for instance, Maciste actually fights in the First World War for Italy, while in the original Maciste all’inferno he is presented as a 19th century petit bourgeois type.


The English language title screen

In this remake cum reinterpretation of Maciste all’inferno the action is relocated to 16th and 17th century Scotland.

If this setting is one against which Kirk Morris’s / Adriano Bellini’s pepla wearing, bare-chested Maciste looks somewhat out of place, it is at least consistent with the nature of the character’s previous adventures. For, as we see via flashback interpolations of footage from other Maciste films – none featuring Morris, it might be added – the character’s mission to fight injustice wherever it may be found had earlier saw him face the mythical Cyclops and the historical Mongols.

The choice of setting might also be attributed to either director Riccardo Freda and / or producers Panda film, given that their previous collaboration on The Ghost had also had seen the use of Scottish locations.

As with that film, Maciste all’inferno / The Witch's Curse’s representations of Scotland is unconvincing, particularly through what appears to be the Catholicism rather than Protestantism of the Christianity on display when the priest officiating at the ceremony recites “in nomine patris” and so on.


Some rather un-Presbyterian hand gesturing here

This is excusable given that the purpose of the film was to entertain its target audiences in Italy, not to educate them on religious distinctions that might have interfered with their enjoyment of the film.

It does, however, also provide a further clue to why the typical peplum was unlikely to be well received by anyone emphasising fidelity to myth and history.

The story comes across as something of a combination of two films by Freda’s former cinematographer turned director Mario Bava, Black Sunday and Hercules in the Haunted World.

The opening sequence seems inspired by Black Sunday as a woman is burnt at the stake for being a witch and dies leaving a curse upon the village and its people.


I Vardella, er Martha, will have my revenge!

100 years later another woman is feared to be the re-incarnation of the witch and to have brought her curse to fruition.

While having the same name as the witch, Martha Gunt, she is not a double / reincarnation in the way Barbara Steele’s Asa and Katya are in Bava’s film, with the witch Martha and the innocent Martha being played by different actresses.

With the innocent Martha placed in gaol, tried, found guilty and sentenced to also burn at the stake, Maciste makes a timely entrance.

At this point the film becomes more like Hercules in the Haunted World as Maciste determines that the witch Martha’s curse can be lifted if he enters into Hell itself and bests her there.


The entry to Hell is beneath a tree

The complication is that the witch then ensorcels Maciste so that he loses his memory and cannot remember why he entered Hell in the first place

Although its story has affinities with the two Bava films, Maciste all’inferno is somewhat distinctive in its visual style. In part this is unsurprising when we consider the differences between the black and white expressionism of Black Sunday and the expressive use of colour in Hercules in the Haunted World. But another aspect of the difference appears more budgetary than aesthetic. Freda appears to have had the kind of material resources at his disposal to do crowd scenes denied Bava and to be able to deploy the sort of spectacular Bava had to fake through skilful mise-en-scene.


A relatively populous hell

In this regard it is also worth noting that, despite the film’s historical setting, Maciste all Inferno’s version of hell is a largely mythological one, as Maciste encounters the likes of Sisyphus and Prometheus rather than Satan, leading one to suspect that the lord of this hell is in fact Hades rather than Satan.


Maciste and Sisyphus...


and with Prometheus

One of the ways in which Maciste all’inferno remains distinctive even in its The Witch's Curse is that Maciste goes by this name, rather than being renamed as Hercules or Goliath for the sake of Anglophone audiences unfamiliar with the character and his history.


Maciste crosses a ravine...


to fight a giant; there is some good use of trick perspectives here to make the giant seem bigger than he really is

As a Freda film of this period it is also odd in that it sees him credited under his own name rather than his Robert Hampton pseudonym. This is perhaps because, unlike the cases of the western and the horror film, there was no-one to fool as regards the national origins of the peplum.

In terms of its own influence, meanwhile, Maciste all’inferno’s Scottish scenes are reminiscent of Michael Reeves’s The She Beast and Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General. If this seems co-incidental, it is worth noting the visual similarities between the witch Martha and her She Beast counterpart Vardella. Moreover, Reeves was clearly familiar with Italian horror given his second-unit work on Castle of the Living Dead; the Italian co-production nature of that film and The She Beast, and the casting there of Steele in a distinctively Italian-style dual role.

Barbablù / Bluebeard / Barbe-bleue / Blaubart

Why discuss Edward Dmytryk's Richard Burton vehicle Bluebeard in a blog dedicated to European popular cinema?

Well, for starters it's a French-Italian-West German co-production, with Italian co-writers, including Maria Pia Fusco, a frequent contributor to the Black Emanuelle series.

Then it's got an extensive list of Euro-performers, playing the titular characters' victims alongside the higher-billed US imports Raquel Welch and Joey Heatherton: Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, Marilu Tolo, Karin Schubert, Agostina Belli and Sybil Danning.

Then there's the quirky soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, which I can only describe as the giallo version of what Giu La Testa was to its spaghetti western predecessors, and the cinematography by Gabor Pogany.


Every frame is beautifully composed and lit

And, finally, there are certain intertextual references which suggest that Dmytryk had either seen some of Bava and Freda's films, namely The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, Blood and Black Lace and A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, or if not that they were working from some of the same reference points.

It's the last aspect which is, of course, the most complex: when you're dealing with a mythic / fairy-tale / Gothic text, which Bluebeard is despite regardless of whatever period trappings the film-maker happens to give it - in this case a somewhat vaguely defined inter-war setting, with Bluebeard as a Red Baron style war hero and enthusiastic anti-Bolshevik cum fascist.

To wit, we've got the new wife who is too inquisitive for her own good, breaks the prohibition not to enter into the forbidden room, and thereby discovers the truth about her husband, that he has murdered his previous wives; there's also a hint of Poe's The Black Cat.


Bluebeard watches

What we've then got, however, is a distinctively modern take on the subject, through the foregrounding of Bluebeard's impotence and the way in which this wife then attempts to affect a kind of quasi-psychoanalytic talking cure on him so that she may avoid the fate that has befallen her predecessors. (Those who have seen Femina Ridens may also see something of a precursor here, whilst there's also the obligatory allusion to Psycho.)


The obligatory dark-room scene

The setting also allows for a mass-psychology of fascism type interpretation, in which the ostensibly normal, outwardly respectable man can be the real monster. Besides suggesting a connection with Dmytryk's own Crossfire, in which a returning GI murders a Jewish man in an ironic comment on the existence of fascist attitudes in the US itself - in the original source novel the victim was homosexual, a theme too hot for Hollywood at the time - it also recalls a comment made by Freda:

"I believe in a subtle, psychological kind of horror [...] My theory is that authentic terror can be attained with simple, common means. The most terrifying monster is the neighbour who cuts his wife's throat."

Accordingly one wife (Schubert) is murdered because she threatens to reveal the secret of Bluebeard's impotence; another (Belli) because she proves more whore than virgin; a third (Tolo) because of her proto-feminist and left-wing politics; and a fourth (Lisi) simply because, much like Laura Betti's character in A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, she's simply extremely annoying...


More than Five Dolls for an August Moon

Schubert's 'accidental' shooting during a hunting trip highlights another intertext, Renoir's The Rules of the Game, down to the blasting of assorted rabbits and other game animals, whilst the way in which Bluebeard accumulates hunting trophies to signify the passage of time recalls a montage in Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. (Both these are also, of course, films which also need to be read in relation to fascism.)


An abstract title image


Recontextualised

Also amongst Bluebeard's trophies are abstract prints representing each of his wives. Taken from portrait photographs and manipulated, these also form the Saul Bass-style credits sequence to the film, pointing to the possible influence of Vertigo - as another film about obsession, amour fou and necrophilia - and the further mess of influences and intertexts.


The domineering picture of the dead mother

In giallo terms, meanwhile, the distinction between Heatherton's wife and her less fortunate predecessors is that she sees what they did not here: looking at the prints she starts to imagine faces within them, with adding eyes further confirming her suspicions. In other words, it's all about the problem of vision, of seeing things correctly.

Besides some of the murder set pieces, the other area where the giallo influence is most apparent is visually. Though Dmytryk's style is more restrained that that of Bava or Freda, the rich production design, with the the various rooms of Bluebeard's castle colour-coded, and expressive/neo-expressionist use of colour seem to come straight out of the Italian directors' playbook.

L' Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock / The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock / The Terror of Dr Hichcock / The Secret of Dr Hichcock / Raptus

The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock is, of course, that he is a necrophile.

It's a theme which showcases the boldness of Freda and other Italian gothic specialists of this time, if we consider that Hitchcock himself – the difference between the two spellings explicable for legal reasons, that Freda and screenwriter Gastaldi were thus not referring to any actual person, living or dead – had declined to make explicit the horrible secret of Vertigo, that “it's about a man who is in love with a dead woman,” except in interview, and the circumspection with which he approached the motives underlying Norman Bates' taxidermy in Psycho given the character's derivation from Ed Gein.

At the same time, hoever, the film obviously isn't as explicit as the likes of Beyond the Darkness, Nekromantic and Aftermath in terms of its depiction of Hichcock's practices, just as The Whip and the Body was less explicit in its depictions of sado-masochism than a Punishment of Anne or Glissements progressifs du plaisir: there were still strict limits in what could be depicted in the early 1960s within a popular / vernacular / genre context.


Another Hitchockian image, recalling Foreign Correspondent

Nonetheless, there is no question that, like Bava's film, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock remains one of the Italian, and indeed world, cinema's supreme depictions of amour fou, and an absolute must for anyone interested in the capacity of cinema to present perverse, sublime and subversive images and ideas.

Indeed, given that the two films were often censored on their initial release, it's clear that they were pushing the envelope for their time, daring to go where most other popular filmmakers had feared to tread, not only in shock-value exploitation content but also for their surprisingly adult, romantic and non-judgemental approach to their subject matter.

This is evident in the early scenes between Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) and his first wife, Margaret (Teresa Fitzgerald / Maria Teresa Vianello). Rather than being a victim, Margaret is presented an equal participant in what we might term their sadomasochistic edge play. If the active / passive, sadist / masochist positions assigned Hichcock and Margaret here appear conventional, such that the mainstream feminist critic might accuse Freda and Gastaldi of being male sadists presenting a woman suffering from a kind of “false consciousness” in her masochistic identification, this remains an unsatifactory critique in a number of fairly transparent ways.

Indeed the filmmakers actually bring broadly psychoanalytic discourses like these into the film itself, with one of Hichcock's students, Dr Kurt (Montomery Glenn / Silvano Tranquilli) later indicating his engagement with the ideas of a certain Freud from Vienna, whilst in discussing the film in interviews Freda also often made reference to Kraft Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis and case studies therein.

Likewise, Hitchcock is not so much the conventional mad scientist as a dedicated medical professional whose experiments with anaesthesia have proven of benefit in both his personal and private lives. We do not know which came first, whether he discovered that anaesthetising his patients provoked a sexual response, or whether his sexual adventures with Margaret had unexpected benefit for others in the public rather than the private sphere.

Rather than presenting binary oppositions, the filmmakers thus seem more concerned with challenging them, and with exploring those undecidable areas in between, the slippage between poison and cure in Hichcock's use of anaesthetics perhaps even having something of the quality of the Derridean “pharmakon,” to invoke a theoretical term that comes to mind.


Poison was the cure?

Of course, one could have things another way and suggest that the life-saving operations Hichcock performs on his patients are but sadism by proxy, that a man becomes a surgeon because it gives him a way of legitimately cutting up women. While I have no doubt that there was an element of this to Victorian medicine when unnecessary surgeries such as the removal of the ovaries as a means of controlling 'unruly' or 'hysterical' women are considered, to make such a reading of the film appears an interepretive step too far.

Hitchcock, after all, is genuinely distraught when Margaret dies as a result of an overdose, leaving his home immediately after the funeral and being unable to face returning for twelve years: while he may take pleasure in necrophiliac activities, actually precipitating death through his own actions or inactions is a source of considerable distress.


The housekeeper, Martha, dominated by the image of Margaret; note that on the Italian dub their names, Margaretha and Martha, are even closer than in the English subtitles.

Indeed, we might wonder how much simpler his life would have been were he a stock psychotic killer type whom we, as viewers, could then place at a safe distance, as something and someone apart from ourselves; think here of Flesh for Frankenstein with the connotations of the Warhol and Morrisey names and their camp approach actually lessening the extent to which their film really challenges. Put another way, you – i.e. the implied art cinema elite – watch Warhol to show how superior you are, even if the joke may well be just as much on you.

Yes, I like that film's jokes about “fuck[ing] death in the gall bladder” and on the distinctive nasum of the ideal typical member of the Serbian master race as much as the next person, but also find it hard to get away from the sense that Morrisey didn't really have as much genuine feel for a popular form as, say, Polanksi with Dance of the Vampires.

On Hichcock's return he has a new wife, Cynthia (Barbara Steele) to whom his devoted housekeeper Martha, who had remained in the house during his years of absence, appears to take an immediate dislike, recalling the character of Mrs Danvers in Rebecca; we also soon after learn that Cynthia's marriage was preceded by a breakdown following the death of her father, hinting that Hichcock represents something of a substitute father for her.






The Woman at the Window, seeing the woman in the garden

Before long strange things start to happen in and around the house. Cynthia sees a female figure in a shroud in the garden near Margaret's crypt. A phantom or just an overactive imagination or trick of the light given the ferocious tempest outside? Later that night she hears what footsteps in the passage outside her room and sees the handle turning, though her husband, whose room is adjacent, professes to have heard nothing.








Martha frequently appears as if out of nowhere, like a phantom

Later, exploring the house, Cynthia finds a locked room that Martha seems rather overly protective of and, returning alone after a visit to the opera when her husband is called away to the hospital, hears a figure calling to her from the fog, proclaiming that “death will catch you as you sleep” to foregrounding another of the film's major themes, the slippage between different states of unconscious being in that to die / to sleep / to sleep perchance to dream manner.


Memento mori

Maybe the voice was that Martha's insane sister, mentioned in passing earlier as yet another ingredient in the gothic stew, but the servant claims to have taken her to the asylum earlier in the day.

Something is clearly going on, however, as testified to by Cynthia then discovering a skull in her bed, a shock moment that allows the filmmakers to reference yet another Hitchcock film, Under Capricorn, just as later a glass of milk will allude to Notorious as it becomes the pivotal element in the mise en scène and the unfolding drama.


The glass of milk

Meanwhile, one of Hichcock's patients has just died in surgery, primarily because he declined to use his anaesthetic: “I shall never use that aneasthetic again. It isn't perfected yet. It can be fatal.”

As the woman's body, covered by a sheet, is led away, Hichcock looks ambiguously at it, a cut to him at home where he then attempts to drown his sorrows once more indicates the lasting consequences of Margaret's traumatic death.

Yet, as Robert Flemyng's wonderful facial tics suggest as Hichcock drinks, he is also desperately trying to suppress the thought of the woman's corpse in the morgue, as yet more memories flood back in a near Proustian manner. Or, as his student's mentor Freud argued, the repressed will return one way or another...

Taken in its own terms as a work of delirious romantic excess, where everything is about overwrought emotion and atmospherics, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock is an unqualified success, even a masterpiece, in which every element contributes to the whole.

Thus, for instance, though we might quibble about the Italianate appearance of Hichcock's house and the near absense of any other real locations apart from the hospital, the former and the mix of location and studio work also serve to give a suitably uncanny cast to the proceedings and the lack of much sense of the wider metropolis to emphasise Hichcock's growing obsession and the concomitant isolation of his new wife.

Indeed, the one exception to this general pattern, which sees the Hichcock's attend a concert and thus meet other members of society and his colleagues, is itself a pivotal moment in the film by confirming the doctor's inability to really rejoin this world, his wife's concomitant isolation cum encagement and generally setting everything else that follows in motion.

Freda's direction is superb, his camera movements and choice of set ups always telling. He uses close-ups and zooms sparingly and thus more effectively than in some of his later works. Besides the customarily excellent use of light and shadow, fog, and flashes of lightning to momentarily (overly) illuminate a scene, he and his collaborators also make excellent use of colour and production design more generally.


An almost irridescent image of a phantom like Steele




More images of Margaret dominating over Hichcock and her replacement, Cynthia

The Hichcock house is dominated by heavy, subdued colours and a number of portraits of Margaret, the hospital by a sterile whiteness, thus allowing the more obviously stylised, expressive and poetic uses of colour at key points to really stand out. Here we might note, for instance, the flashes of red as Hichcock passion builds or the sickly Vertigo-esque green of the secret passages investigated by Cynthia.












The red of Hichcock's rising passion

The performances are also note perfect, a fact that is all the more vital considering that there are only really five characters in total, two major and three minor.






La signora in verde

Though he might have expressed misgivings about the subject matter, British actor Robert Flemyng's portrayal of Hichcock is genuinely powerful, not so much stiff upper lip as quivering and bitten lower one, as he fights, again and again, against the weight of his past and emerging future...

Whilst Steele is here limited to portraying the light / victim side of her persona and perhaps doesn't do anything we hadn't seen before or wouldn't see again in her other Italian gothic roles, that ineffable facilty for these roles that she possessed again, that inimatable something, again comes through even as at times Cynthia's propensity to faint at the merest provocation foregrounds the character's stock origins.

Here, it's also an interesting thought experiment to try to imagine what the film would have been like had Steele played both Margaret and Cynthia: if the Hichcockian transference motif would have been then stronger, this would have been at the expense of subtlety elsewhere, that we would then have known from the outset why Hichcock had remarried after all these years and that he was not over Margaret but had rather at last found her reincarnation and / or someone who could be refashioned in her image a la Vertigo.

Freda and Gastaldi are engaging with the Hitchcockian in their own terms, rather than merely imitating. Or, to note a neat coincidence, given the importance of anesthesia in their film, it's worth mentioning in passing that Hitchcock's first published piece of writing, a short sensation narrative, was itself an account of an anaesthesia inspired nightmare, in the style of Poe. There is really nothing new under the sun – or the moon for that matter...


An image of premature burial, after Poe

Harriet White was making a career out of playing sinister governesses and housekeepers at this time, and as such has the withering glance and the curt delivery down to an art.

Teresa Fitzgerald beautifully conveys the secret life of her Victorian lady through gestures and expressions that are initially enigmatic – what are her smiles anticipating – and then convey a sublime bliss followed by “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” as the games goes wrong.

Montgomery Glenn rounds things off with a fine, if necessarily somewhat bland by comparison performance as the dashing romantic lead, a figure who represents one of the film's few concessions to convention.

Yet, if the eventual resolution is not as perverse as some might wished, there is little question that the film is a triumph, the whole being topped off by Roman Vlad's lush, romantic score with a lyrical passage or sweeping crescendo to complement each and every image, pushing the whole from melodramatic to operatic intensity.

In a word, unmissable.

[Having previously only seen The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock through a washed out print – though I retrospectively realise that part of this washing out was a reflection of the film's distinctive use of colour – and a somewhat fuzzy VHS source, both in English, this AVI in Italian with custom-made English subtitles came as something of a revelation. It is available from Cinemageddon.]

Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea / Tragic Ceremony

Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea is a strange title for a strange film.


A subtitler's nightmare

It translates as Extracted from the Secret Archives of the Police of a European Capital, suggesting a early 70s poliziotti along the lines of the previous year's Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica / Confessions of a Police Captain, whose vagueness in identifying a state compared to this apparent predecessor might be attributed to the combination of Italian and Spanish production money, with many Spanish genre films of the period using foreign settings as a means of getting around the censors by presenting their contents as offering a critique that was not directed at their conservative Francoist regime.

What we actually get, however, is a supernatural / fantastical horror that references in the dialogue to Scotland Yard, Chelsea and “Church Street” indicate to be around London, even as the sun-drenched sea and rural mediterranean locales and distinctly Italian cast to the architecture and fauna indicate very much otherwise.

Simultaneously, however, this also affords a degree of contuinity with director Riccardo Freda's previous British-Isles set, Italian-made gothics The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and The Ghost and the giallo Double Face, on each of which he also used his Robert Hampton pseudonym, even if the motivation underlying this name and perhaps the choice of settings could be understood as more commercial than artistic:

“I was in Sanremo, and I happened to be in front of the cinema where I Vampiri was on. At that time, I would sometimes go into the hall to study the audience's reactions. I don't know why, but the theatre was almost empty. Anyway, many people were attracted by the posters, which were very beautiful. The people would read I Vampiri, I Vampiri and that seemed to tempt them. Then, at the very last moment, they would notice the name: Freda. The reaction was sort of automatic: Freda? It's Italian, it must be horrible, the Italians can't make this kind of movie.”

Yet Tragic Ceremony – as I will from hereon refer to the film, both for brevity and as better suited to its actual content – also evinces elements of continuity even with I Vampiri, through its present-day setting, mixture of aristocratic and commoner characters and theme of the old and powerful feeding upon the young and powerless.

The film opens on a sailing yacht as we are introduced to our four hippie-ish protagonists. Bill (Tony Isbert) is the son of an industrialist, Jane (Camille Keaton) the girl he covets. Joe and Fred (Maximo Valverde and Giovanni Petrucci) are friends, of less privileged backgrounds and happy to take advantage of Bill's seeming gullibility.

The game the three men play here is interesting in the light of Freda's cynical world view and interests in fine art and games of skill and chance, including horseracing and the wager-based origins of some of his films.




Fortune and misfortune as the dune buggy attack batallion meets the mysterious Lord Alexander

Within the context of the film meanwhile it also serves to introduce a pervasive theme, that of the clash of cultures and values between generations and classes, as Joe remarks: “You might be the son of a great industrialist, but as far as boats go you know nothing. You're only good at spending money. It almost seems like you prefer it that way.”

Given Joe's own modest origins and coming from an interior part of Andalucia if an indicental line of dialogue can be accorded any weight, it is less clear where he picked up his specialised knowledge of nautical terminology.

Later, as the group go ashore and make camp for the night, Joe confesses to Fred that he read up on the subject beforehand because it seemed likely to prove useful, highlighting the idea of the working-class student who consciously studies bourgeois tastes and practices to move outwith the world of his own class.

Bill then follows after Jane to give her a gift of a pearl necklace. (Cue ZZ Top lyrics, although in this case it is jewellery we are talking about.) A match cuts as he places it round her neck sees him placing the item around his mother’s instead, following which he tells her – and thus the audience looking in – its curious history.

The necklace is said to contain an evil spirit, which took over the woman who once owned it. A psychic and medium then performed an exorcism, and was given the necklace in gratitude by its previous owner, but then herself died in doubtful circumstances shortly thereafter.


Good bad taste and bad bad taste, to invoke John Waters's distinction

Bill’s mother hesitated to wear his gift, not out of fear of its provenance – or so she claims at least – but rather because she finds this history to be “in bad taste,” to again highlight the film’s distinctive tendency to intertwine aesthetic and moral judgements. Given the relative prevalence of bello and brutto rather than buono and male in Italian compared to their English language counterparts of beautiful and ugly and good and evil, this might also be a wider aspect of Italian culture – note here also the notion of Fascism as the aestheticisation of politics – that Freda and his collaborators are making particularly obvious here.

Whatever the case, Tragic Ceremony is clearly one of that subset of Eurocult films – Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon would be another obvious example, along with much of Jess Franco's oeuvre – whose own discourses might profitable be analysed using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas around the social judgement of taste, as an ironic point of “distinction” from other examples of the form insofar as they tend to approached and interpreted more externally as cult film objects.

As Jane moves to kiss Bill, a dramatic image from her point of view shows his face all blue, as if he were dead – an image all the more shocking inasmuch as there is no indication that Bill has told her the item’s history and, as such, one which also suggests its curse may not yet have been lifted.

Having rested for a while, the group decides to return home. A few miles along the road their beach buggy runs out of petrol – this despite Bill having checked and being certain the tank should be half-full. Worse, the assistant at the petrol station (Jose Calvo), who seems to appear out of nowhere, is highly distrustful of Bill’s travellers cheques and reluctant gives them a little petrol, albeit for free.

A bit further along, the buggy breaks down again anyway, with the weather also having worsened considerably. Fortuitously there is a large house opposite. Even more fortuitously there are several cars in its driveway, indicating that someone must be at home. Joe rings the doorbell, which is answered by Count Alexander (Luigi Pistilli). He and his wife (Luciana Paluzzi) purport to be firm believers in noble traditions of hospitality and invite the group to stay overnight.


Jane and the Countess

While the three men are assigned the kitchens, the countess takes Jane up to a room of her own, next to the countess, who takes an interest in her the necklace. Elsewhere in the building, preparations are being made for a black magic ceremony – a ceremony in which Jane has been assigned the role of sacrificial victim.

Fortunately Bill, Fred and Joe realise something is up just in time, leading to a shocking orgy of violence and a deliberately confusing extended denouement, the events described thus far barely taking us to the midway point of the film.










The satanic ritual is one of the film's visual highlights, with effective use of black void space and distorting lenses and angles

If Freda's approach to exploitative material in Tragic Ceremony is reminiscent of its immediate predecessor The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire in its general crudity, its distinctive approach towards aesthetics-as-ethics means this also comes across as a more deliberate decision, that Freda was self-consciously indulging in bad taste and deploying techniques like the shock zoom because they were justified by the material.

In other places the film recalls its gothic predecessors more with the emphasis being squarely on atmosphere. The lighting and lightning effects are convincing and many of the individual compositions arresting.

Though the camerawork is mobile, it is not particularly fluid, sometimes having something of a stop-start quality, while the hand-held shots are often a bit on the wobbly side. While we might take these as further expressions of the film's themes, I think this would be going too far and that Freda really needed a better camera operator.




Some of the film's more striking images

Though on paper the film has quite a good cast it should be noted that Pistilli and Paluzzi aren't really in it for very long, with the youthful protagonists on screen for most of the time. Their performances are adequate rather than inspired, although Keaton displays an effective blank / traumatised expression that also served her in good stead as the titular victim in What Have you Done to Solange?

Stelvio Cipriani provides the music, with Freda also contributing lyrics to the opening and closing credit theme. The score is a strange and at times inconsistent seeming mixture of styles, though this could also again be taken as a reflection of the film itself, with the individual cues generally being effective excepting some overly dramatic shock horror pieces.