Giallo and Gothic connections

Bava’s The Girl Who Knew too Much has certain affinities with Austen’s Northanger Abbey. In Bava’s film Nora Davis is an American thriller aficionado who travels to Rome and finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery much like those presented in her favourite reading material. In Austen’s novel Gothic enthusiast Catherine Morland visits the titular abbey which, from her reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho, she expects to be a place of Gothic horror and mystery.

I Lunghi cappelli della morte / The Long Hair of Death

Though the title might suggest a contemporary J-horror, The Long Hair of Death is, of course, a 1960s Italian Gothic. Whilst one of the less well known examples of the form, it serves as an ideal introduction to it through the dense network of intertextual references in Ernesto Gastaldi's script and the iconic presence of Barbara Steele.

Set in the 14th century we open with the impending execution of suspected witch, Adele Karnstein, for the sorcerous murder of the local lord, Franz Humbold. It's the usual damned either way trial by ordeal scenario, whereby death will provide absolution. (“Adele Karnstein the hour has arrived. The lord will save you if you are innocent. Be strong and have faith.”)


An almost unrecognisable Umberto Raho as the local witch-finder, here beautifully isolated by the all-encompassing blackness.

Desperately seeking a stay of execution, Adele's elder daughter Helene (Steele) pleads with the new lord, Franz's brother (Giuliano Raffaeli), for a stay of execution. She has evidence that the killer is one of the Count's own household.

Taking advantage of the situation, the Count demands that Helene first submit to his carnal desires. (“What can a man ask of a beautiful woman like you? There is only one thing that I want.”) She does. Unfortunately her mother is burnt at the stake anyway since the one presiding over the execution, the old count's son and the new count's nephew, Kurt Humbolt (Giorgio Ardisson), is the real murderer. As she dies, Adele swears vengeance on her persecutors.


Burn witch burn!

Later, as the distraught Helene flees, she is ambused by the Count, who murders her and throws her body into the river to conceal his own crimes. Helene's death is duly adjudged a suicide.

Left orphaned but exonerated through the deaths of her mother and sister, the young Elisabeth Karnstein adopted by the Count as one of his household in a display of magnanimity which further helps to conceal his family's crimes whilst also allowing him to feel that he has made amends for his own. Unfortunately for the Count, Elisabeth is reminded of her family's heritage by the family's housekeeper, Grumalda (Laura Nucci), who also lets her in on the secret of where her mother and sister's remains are hidden.

Time passes and Elisabetta (Halina Zalewska) grows into a beautiful young woman. Unable to come to terms with his crime and Kurt's revelation of his guilt, the Count has become ill, leaving Kurt in the position where he can do more or less as he wishes, including forcing Elisabeth to marry him.

But, as a plague sweeps across the land as Adele had cursed, a new woman comes into the Humbolt family's life in the form of the mysterious and beautiful Mary Karnstein (Steele). Almost immediately, Kurt resolves that she will be his, with Mary reciprocating his advances. This, however, only leads them to a new problem: what to do about Elisabeth. A dose of poison provides the cure, but then Kurt begins to wonder if his ex-wife is indeed ex...




The usual mirrors drawing into question identity and reality

To now itemise some of the intertextual connections:

The land ravaged by plague aspect recalls The Masque of the Red Death and thus the Corman Poe cycle, although the Christian rather than Satanic rituals that ensue are perhaps more reminiscent of Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

The family name of Karnstein and the arrival of Mary recall Carmilla and, through it, Mastrocinque's film Crypt of the Vampire. Though one of those rare-seeming Italian Gothics those in which Steele does not appear one nevertheless also gets the impression that the role of the vampire revenant was written with her in mind by Gastaldi, whose scenario there also incorporated a family curse for good measure.

The relationships amongst the Humbolt family are reminiscent of those amongst the Menliffe family in The Whip and the Body – itself another film featuring a more obvious Steele stand-in in the somewhat similar looking Daliah Lavi – as is the role played by the Harriet Medin White like family servant here. The film, directed by Bava and scripted by Gastaldi, also happened to feature a villainous black sheep of the family named none other than Kurt.

The return of characters from beyond the grave in search of revenge also alludes to Bava's Black Sunday and Freda's Hitchcock diptych of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and Lo Spettro – both penned by Gastaldi – albeit with a pre-modern tendency to inherently accept of supernatural in a manner that somewhat alien to these films and others with similar later settings, including Margheriti's own Castle of Blood which, whilst not written by Gastaldi, purports to be a Poe adaptation and even incorporates the author into its telling.

Beyond this, we also have some murderous black gloves, an iron-maiden type device – as per Margheriti's The Virgin of Nuremberg – and some point-of-view shots from behind its mask, a la Black Sunday.




Hands of doom

While the film isn't perhaps as atmospheric as some of these counterparts, in that there are fewer sequences of characters wandering through the castle and its environs that exist as much for their own sake as to advance the plot, the upside of this is a less somnambulistic pace that may appeal more to those who find the Italian Gothic at times veers too far in the direction of style over all else.

Some explary moments here arise when Elizabeth and the Count 'coincidentally' decide to venture into the castle's dungeons and catacombs at the same time: As Humbolt plead forgiveness from his dead brother and sees his skeleton move: as he flees in terror the camera lingers on for a moment to allow us to see the rat which has nested within Franz's remains and caused the disturbance, thus reminding us that we cannot just replace supernatural discourses and explanations for naturalistic ones to raise a degree of ambiguity over the nature of the plague soon to descent on the Humbolt lands. Then, as Elizabeth and the Count move through the darkness, they do so cautiously but also at speed, each wary of the possible presence of the other, their haste further accentuated by Margheriti's rapid tracking shots and relatively brisk cutting. Finally, as Elizabeth exits through a secret passage once the Count has passed, she emerges before the awaiting Kurt, who duly professes his desire to marry her and thus neatly moves the narrative on to its next sequence and plot point.


Dead




Undead

Though Steele's role perhaps doesn't stretch her abilities, in that she's incarnating much the same diva type as she had done before and would do again, rather than a more fully rounded real character as in Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Rober Musil's Young Torless – as the kind of film you suspect she would like to have moved into making, post 8½ – she again brings that distinctive physicality and intensity to the role.

Giorgio Ardisson turns in an effective performance as the dastardly Kurt, the kind of villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever whom we can be justified in hating, to further demonstrate that he was capable of being far more than just the pretty boy type showcased in Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World and Knives of the Avenger. (As he and Elizabeth are blessed by the priest on the occasion of their wedding, Kurt mockingly asks: “There are many people dying in the streets. Shouldn't you recite a prayer for them?”)

Technically the film is accomplished, with attractive black and white cinematography, solid production design and fluid camera work. Carlo Rustichelli delivers an agreeable if unexceptional score: if its tropes are at times predictable, they help further fix us within the film's distinctive world, having much the same function as James Bernard's work for Hammer in this regard.

La Mansión de la niebla / Quando Marta urlò dalla tomba / Maniac Mansion / Murder Mansion

This is one of those Spanish-Italian co-productions where the preponderance of Spanish names amongst the cast, including actors Andrés Resino, Analía Gadé, Alberto Dalbés and Edouardo Fajardo, and crew, most prominently director Francisco Lara Polop, leave one in little doubt as to who were the dominant partners.

The impression is further enhanced by small details like the pouring of a whisky from a Cutty Sark rather than a J&B bottle, if not the prominence given giallo regular Evelyn Stewart / Ida Galli amongst the performers.









Reading the signs

While somewhat slow to get started, the credits being followed by a five-minute, dialogue-free driving sequence, it's not padding, instead serving to neatly introduce some of the characters and something of their respective personalities, as we witness a macho competition between a young motorcycle riding vaguely counter-culture type, Fred, and his older sports coupe driving counterpart, Mr Porter, soon centring around their rivalry for the attentions of attractive hitch-hiker Laura.

Meanwhile, the middle aged Mr and Mrs Tremont calmly continue on in their VW beetle, declining to get involved.

Following some more introductions and exposition involving the pre-existing relationships between philandering husband, Ernest, and his neurotic, father-fixated wife, Elsa, everyone then finds themselves lost some way from their mutual destination, Milen.

Fortunately a mansion house is nearby. Even more fortuitously the house's owner, Martha, happens to be there. This is an especially lucky coincidence given that she was herself only visiting to do a spot of work on the dilapidated property.

As everyone introduce themselves attention turns to the portrait of Martha's grandmother above the fireplace. The woman, a well-known occultist who looks curiously like her granddaughter, apparently died alongside her chauffer in a car accident some 30 years before, but is rumoured to haunt the area, with the nearest village having been abandoned as a result of a wave of mysterious deaths.

Combined with the Bosch and Eliphas Levi style images all around the mansion, it hardly makes for a terribly reassuring place to spend the night – especially for Elsa, who had a terrifying encounter with the selfsame chauffer in the cemetery just beyond the mansion only a few minutes before.


Elsa encounters the chauffeur and the witch / vampire

Though himself almost run over by the chauffer's phantom car Fred proves more skeptical and, accompanied by Laura, adopts the role of investigator determined to get to the bottom of the mansion's many secrets...

Murder Mansion is one of those old-fashioned horror-thriller crossovers that hedges its bets around supernatural versus naturalistic explanations for most of its running time before ultimately plumping for the latter in the manner of the giallo. The most relevant reference points thus emerge as the likes of Something is Creeping in the Dark, with its similarly ill-matched group of travellers stranded in a remote “old dark house” location, and The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, with its tomb-using noir-style conspiracy of passion and wealth.


Against giallo convention this black glove is worn by the film's hero, Fred, as part of his motorcycling get up

Given Fred's role and apt name, the film is also clearly one of those “Scooby Doo” gialli identified by Mikel Koven, where the bad guys – don't worry, I won't reveal he, she or they are – would have “gotten away with it” were it not for the “pesky meddling kids”




Grandmother Martha and her reincarnation?

Though certainly featuring traditional horror devices like creepy music and shock zooms, Francisco Lara Polop's direction is also surprisingly subtle at times.

He often blurs the image to transition from one scene to the next rather than making a straight cut – a simple technique but undeniably also effective in imparting a oneiric sense to proceedings, especially when used both for routine changes of scene and as a route into the flashback sequences around Elsa and her father, played by familiar giallo film face Jorge Rigaud, and with whom she seems to have something of a Jocasta complex, if we want to be psychoanalytic about things.

Similarly Polop sometimes opens a scene on a detail rather than with an establishing shot, to momentarily make us that bit more confused as to our location and whose perspectives we are sharing.

The film's colour schemes is also interesting. The mansion interiors are dominated by orange, the exteriors of its surroundings by blue, thus creating a striking visual contrast between the two and a subtle recurring theme of the blurring and / or encroaching on these boundaries – further echoing the fantasy and reality theme – as when, for example, Martha and Elsa, the two most sensitive characters in the piece, don bright blue dresses.










Blurring the boundaries – sexual orientation, living and dead, past and present, reality and nightmare, orange and blue

Another major strength of the film is the sheer tangibility of its fog. Rather than looking all too obviously like the artificial, cliché, product of a smoke machine situated just off camera it has the cloying, obscuring physicality of the real thing, further helping location and studio material blend seamlessly and adding to the believability of the supernatural or otherwise manifestations, such that we don't immediately dismiss them as the obvious products of smoke and mirrors which our onscreen surrogates are curiously unable to see through.

Amongst the performers no one really stands out positively or negatively, the women being glamorous and threatened, the men heroic and shifty, all very much in accordance with types. Curious as it may sound this also contributes to the effectiveness of the film as a whole, precisely because there is thereby a uniformity of style and approach by which no-one stands out, in sharp contrast to some Italian or Spanish productions starring out of place ex-pat Americans. (As with many films of its type the setting is somewhat unclear, the names of the places and people – Soren, Milen, the Clinton family – serving instead to indicate that we're in that mythic Eurotrash land where “any reference to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”. )

Marcello Giombini's music is characteristically idiosyncratic, blending traditional horror pipe organs and the like with strange noises, laughter and screams, but generally works and further contributes to the atmosphere.

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.]

Le Amanti del mostro / The Lover of the Monster

There’s a joke formula which, reduced to its essential components goes as follows:

Question: What do you call a man who has done X – something deviant, often of a sexual nature – and A, B, C, D and E – a list of things that are exemplary in every respect?

Answer: an X

Taken back further, I suppose it’s a variant on that line in Julius Caesar, that “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

At this point you may well be wondering what the hell this has to with The Lover of the Monster. The answer is that its director, Sergio Garrone, increasingly appears to me as a victim of what could be described as the Italian filone cinema variant of this formula, which we might tentatively term “Umberto Lenzi Syndrome”.

This would be that, as a filone director, the filmmaker worked on a load of films in different genres, some good and some not so good, but comes to be recognised, if at all, for one or two of the worst and sometimes least representative ones.

With Lenzi it’s the emphasis on the cannibal films like Cannibal Ferox over his gialli and poliziotteschi. With The Lover of the Monster’s writer-director Sergio Garrone it’s the foregrounding of SS Experiment Camp and SS Camp 5 Woman’s Hell over the likes of Django the Bastard and this film.

As in his earlier supernatural horror tinged western, in which we aren’t sure if Anthony Steffen’s eponymous / nameless avenger is alive or dead, Garrone demonstrates a particular facility for conjuring up gothic atmospheres, albeit within a more traditional context.

We begin with the arrival of Anijeska / Anna Nijinsky (Katia Christine) and her husband Alex (Klaus Kinski) at her family's country house, where they intend to stay and to restore to its former glory.

Before long we learn that their marriage, despite both parties' efforts, is not a particularly happy or successful one, with the troubled Alex apparently having suffered an unspecified nervous illness that caused him to give up his own medical practice.


Alex and Anna arrive in characteristically non-communicative mode

Clearly unable to fulfil the dominant masculine role expected of him, the couple sleeping not just in separate beds but also separate rooms, with Alex being assigned Anna's father's old chamber by his wife in a further indication of his impotence and the power dynamics of their relationship, Alex comes to believe that his wife may even have engineered their move to the country house in order that she might be closer to Dr Walensky.

Certainly the young and handsome doctor is quick to pay the couple – or perhaps more specifically Anna – a courtest call, to return and, indeed, to indicate to Anna that his feelings are of an amorous nature and that he has concerns over her husband's mental and physical condition.

Against all this Alex discovers that the late Professor who stayed at the castle was engaged in some mysterious researches, with his well-equipped laboratory still remaining intact.

Alex decides to pick up where the professor left off, first performing some Frankenstein-like experiments with his wife's dog, dead as the result of a fortuitous accident, then moving into more Jekyll and Hyde / Wolfman territory as he becomes afflicted by the same side effects as his predecessor's notes had cryptically alluded via temporary transformation into a half-man, half-beast creature with the overwhelming impulse to kill whomsoever he may come across in the grounds of the house, the woods around it or the village nearby...

While The Lover of the Monster's not totally coherent amalgam of gothic themes could be taken as evidence of the declining relevance of the form, that this was not confined to the Italian gothic is evinced by much of Hammer's output of the time, such as Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde with its equally cut-and-paste mish-mash of Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, and the misjudged The Horror of Frankenstein.

Unlike Brian Clemens and Jimmy Sangster, Garrone however avoids the temptation to camp things up or indulge in self-parody, instead playing things commendably straight in inviting his audience to enagage with his scenario in a more traditional way to recall the more romantic and tragic strand represented by the likes of Fisher's The Curse of the Werewolf and Frankenstein Created Woman and Bava's The Whip and the Body.

The setting of the film remains somewhat vague as the late 19th / early 20th century – the book detailing the professor's experiments that Kinski finds is dated 1875 – apparently somewhere in eastern Europe. This dproves to the film's advantage, making us less concerned with the little details and their accuracy or otherwise beyond whether they feel right – though the production designs and uses of colour certainly help convey a verisimilitudinous impression – and concentrating our attention on the more universal aspects of the tale in that once upon a time / fairy tales for adults manner.

Of the film's themes another notable one is the way in which outsiders are treated by the rest of the community, with one man being lynched and another executed for the crimes of Nijinsky's alter-ego. While the treatment of the first victim highlights the attitude of the peasantry – an attitude which could still be represented in a contemporary setting by the likes of Fulci's southern Italian set Don't Torture a Duckling – that of the second is more of a commentary on the supposedly more enlightened authorities, as represented by a Dr Caligari-esque magistrate who quickly forms his own opinion on the facts of the case and will let nothing sway him thereafter. (When the accused pleads his innocence, the magistrate simply says that this is what 'they' always do, reading it as further evidence of the man's guilt in a damned if you do, damned if you don't way.)

Though two wrong accusations might be criticised as poor or lazy writing, especially given the film's already brief running time, I would argue that the variations between them allow Garrone to suggest that both peasantry and burghers alike are prejudiced and unthinking, their natural assumptions being that neither they nor their social superiors could ever have committed such crimes. (This said, however, the film doesn't quite have the same structural elegance of Frankenstein Created Woman, with its guillotining of father and son 15 or so years apart for crimes that they did not commit.)




(in)justice is done

For the 1970s or contemporary century viewer looking back on such representations with a knowledge of 19th century respectable hypocrisy and 20th century genocide – a theme also foregrounded here by the vague positioning of the outsiders as gypsy types and the naming of one as Polanski in an apparent reference to the Polish-Jewish director – the errors in such assumptions are self-evident. (Garrone's self-consious approach to naming his characters is evident elsewhere in the film, with Christine's character's father being called Ivan Rassimov in what appears an in-jokish reference to the star of another of the director's spaghetti westerns, Se vuoi vivere... spara.)


Wonder what the real Ivan Rassimov thought here

As themes these also suggest a degree of continuity with the Nazisploitation entries of a couple years later. Whether intentional or not, it points once more to the near omnipresence of political subtexts in Italian filone films of the period.

Garrone's direction is energetic, perhaps a touch over the top with canted angles, dramatic zooms and handheld work often being the sort of techniques where a more selective deployment proves more telling, but you can at least see he was making the effort and trying to conjure up the appropriate atmospheres. The laboratory and stalking scenes are particularly well realised, with both also making interesting use of sound, the former featuring insane laughter whose source remains unclear and the latter heavy breathing and heartbeats to provide an aural counterpart to the more familiar subjective camera visuals.




Kinski, haunted by visions as usual

Kinski is a natural for Alex thanks to his distictive physiognomy and performance style. Whether or not he actually thought anything much of the role or regarded it as another easy collect-the-paychceck and run job – the latter possibility perhaps more likely on account of his also working on the film's face-transplant themed companion piece, The Hand that Feeds the Dead – is thus something of an irrelevance. More often than not, he just has to be there and deliver one of those looks or expressions that tell us everything we need to know.

Katia Christine likewise impresses, being convincing in a role in which you suspect some actresses would have considered fulfilled by the presence of their beauty alone. There's always the sense of something more to Anna's interactions with Alex and Dr Walensky, that Christine's performance is telling you as much about what's going on as the lines she's delivering.

The film is scored in the old-fashioned orchestral style of composers like Roman Vlad and Carlo Rustichelli, with sweeping themes that do a good job of conveying the characters' passions and torments even if they were again perhaps a touch passe for 1974 audiences.

[This DVI copy of the film, apparently sourced from a TV broadcast and presented in Italian with hard English subtitles was downloaded from Cinemageddon]