Hello and welcome to Director of the Month, your cut-out-and-keep guide to the very finest auteurs in filmland…

This Month: Dario Argento

Nationality: Italian

D.O.B: 07/09/1940

Years active: 1970 – present

Number of films (as director): 19

Do say: “You are undoubtedly one of the most influential horror directors of the modern era, if not actually the most. At the peak of your abilities you crafted an untouchable run of horror classics so powerful and dazzling that even sniffy serial detractors of the genre were compelled to doff their caps in your honour. But, y’know, who cares what they think, anyway?”

Don’t say: “Have you ever made a film that wasn’t scary?”*

*…and that’s just one of several insightful and well-researched questions that a not at all out-of-her-depth Kirsty Wark sprung on Argento during the most cringe-inducing interview since Serge Gainsbourg expressed a fondness for Whitney Houston. You can watch it here.

Who Hell He? If any film director has seen their stock rise dramatically in the last 10 or 15 years, then that film director is Dario Argento. And if any film director has deserved to see their stock rise dramatically at any time, then that director is Dario Argento again. Don’t get me wrong, horror fans have hero-worshipped the Italian ever since he made his directorial debut with the revolutionary giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, of course. It’s just that it only seems to be fairly recently that Argento has transcended the often snobbish diregard afforded to his chosen genre, and garnered the praise he deserves for both his technical virtuosity and his cryptic, ingenious storytelling.

But, if people don’t like horror, then that’s their problem. I, for one, am sick of having my ear bent by Johnny-come-lately’s telling me how great Argento’s pictures look, and how brauva his use of colour and mise-en-scene is. We all knew this all along, didn’t we? And while his technical ability is certainly awe-inspiring, it’s just one of several elements that have contributed to Argento being one of the most revered horror directors of modern times. So, let us never lose sight of the fact that he is a horror director, and that his films represent the genre at it’s very, very best. As we shall now see…

Six of the Best:

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Everybody knows what a giallo is by now, don’t they? And this is probably the best film ever made that belongs to that peculiar and perverse, oh-so Italian, murder-mystery/horror hybrid genre. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage tells the tale of an American writer in Rome who becomes embroiled in the dangerous search to find a serial murderer. The scene-setting sequence in which our main protagonist, trapped between two sliding doors, witnesses a frenzied attempted murder, announced Argento’s arrival as a talent to watch in grand style.

Profondo Rosso (1975)

Two giallos later, Argento abandoned the horror genre alogether to make a Zapata Western called The Five Days, which failed spectacularly at the box office. For his next film, he returned to horror, but it was hardly with his tale between his legs. Oh no. Profondo Rosso is my own personal favourite horror film of time; a brutal, suspenseful, nightmarish beast of a film, that packs an almost intellectual punch, with the deviously creepy mystery at it’s heart. I can’t bring myself to classify it as a giallo, though, as it busts free of the confines of that genre, and points towards Argento’s increasing interest in the supernatural.

Suspiria (1977)

Argento’s most famous film, and another absolute masterpiece, Suspiria forms the first part of a loose trilogy concerning the bloody havoc wreaked by a trio of witches. Jessica Harper stars as an American ballet student who begins to suspect that something rather sinister is afoot at her dance school in the black forests of Germany. One of the most visually entrancing films ever made, the only thing as ghastly as the gory murders therein is the fact that it is currently being remade by a man who previously directed this. What a fucking joke…

Inferno (1980)

A follow-up of sorts to Suspiria, in which we learn the second witch is residing in a strange, neo-gothic appartment building in New York. The most non-linear film Argento has ever made, this floats from character to character with a beguiling, dreamy logic; the brutal murders that disrupt the free flowing narrative provide the main consistency. This found it’s way onto the infamous Video Nasties list in 80s Britain, as did Argento’s next film…

Tenebrae (1982)

Tenebrae is not necessarily the most violent film in the Argento canon, but it is appropriately enough the nastiest, and few have watched this to it’s nihilistically bleak finale without feeling at least significantly disturbed. A slight return to the giallo format, Tenebrae boasts one of the director’s most inspired mysteries, as horror novelist Peter Neal becomes obssessed with a killer who is imitating the murders in his books. After the dark, moody visuals of his previous three films, Argento also manages to blow our minds with his inspired use of surprisingly bright, glossy colours, and even finds time to throw in the most incredible crane shot this side of A Touch of Evil.

Phenomena (1985)

A bit of a curate’s egg, this one… Phenomena is almost certainly Argento’s most ridiculous film, but it’s also a sheer joy to watch, being a rambling, weirdy, defiantly surreal, supernatural romp. Jennifer Connelly (for it is she) stars as the lonely daughter of an American movie star, living in a Swiss boarding school. She doesn’t stay lonely for long, though, as she develops a telepathic bond with insects and helps a Scottish entomologist (Donald Pleasance, whose accent actually diminishes as the film progresses) solve a spate of local murders. And that’s without even mentioning the razorblade-wielding monkey!

What about the rest?: The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) is a cracking giallo which stars Karl Malden as a blind puzzle-maker-turned-murder-solver… Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972) is an even better giallo, about a rock star who is framed for murder, which almost matches The Bird with the Crystal Plumage… The Five Days (1973) is a complete mystery to me as I’ve never seen it, and it’s unlikely that Dario Argento will ever let anyone see it again… Opera (1987) is one of Argento’s most dazzling films, as well as one of his most violent, and would be a stone-cold classic where it not for it’s unbelievably awful finale… Two Evil Eyes (1990) sees Argento and George Romero team up to deliver a pair of Edgar Allan Poe tales (one each), with sadly disappointing results… Trauma (1993) is Argento’s most underrated film, and his last great one, and sees daughter Asia make her debut as an anorexic teen tormented by the strange murder of her parents… and The Stendahl Syndrome (1996) is his most shocking film, a rather lumpen thriller in which Asia’s disturbed police detective is stalked by a sadistic rapist… The Phantom of the Opera (1998) is a patchy detour into period horror, and no, it’s not an adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical… Sleepless (2001) marks a return to the giallo genre, if not quite a full return to form, but it boasts an intriguing plot and a great turn from Max Von Sydow… The Card Player (2004) is a so-so giallo with a techno sheen, as the police are preturbed by a killer who murders his victims during online poker games… Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005) is a dull murder-mystery which features some rather lame attempts at humour, but it’s still not anywhere near as bad as… The Mother of Tears (2007), which is a frankly appalling conclusion to the story began in Suspiria, which Argento would have been better off leaving unfinished… after that, how could Giallo (2009) not mark at least some kind of an improvement (even if it’s not actually a giallo, and is more of a weird Silence of the Lambs rip-off)?

So, that’s yer lot… But if you’re (blood)thirsty for more, you could do worse than check out the two Argento-directed episodes of his 70s Italian TV series Door into Darkness; ‘The Tram’ and ‘Eyewitness’ (the former is hands-down one of the best things Argento has ever done). Less good, but still worth watching, are the episodes he directed for US TV horror franchise Masters of Horror; ‘Jenifer’ and ‘Pelts’ (the latter does at least star Meat Loaf). Good night, and please do have nightmares. I think.

Surreal. Surreal. It’s one of those words, isn’t it? It seems to me that often people aren’t 100% sure of what it actually really means exactly, but it still gets used an awful lot. A bit like “ironic”. However, a quick glance in the dictionary tells us that surreal means: 1.  Having qualities attributed to or associated with surrealism, and 2. Having an oddly dreamlike quality. Of course, dreams are strange, bizarre and often unsettling, so it’s little wonder that the word surreal is often attributed to things that bear one, or all, of these qualities.

When I came to chose which films I would cover for Days Are Numbers’ Surreal Week, I was a little bit daunted not only by the exact definition of the word surreal, but by the sheer number of films that could potentially be classified as surreal. With that in mind, I’ve decided instead to look at some of the kinds of films that are often described as surreal, and we’ll see how many of them actually cut the mustard (which is a pretty surreal saying in itself, if you think about it… You can’t really cut mustard, can you?). This method will also handily double as a whistle-stop tour of surrealism’s influence on film in general.

So, follow me now through the looking glass, and don’t dilly-”Dali”! Groan.

The Surreal Deal

If we refer back to the first part of the definition of surreal, we may want to clarify what exactly surrealism itself is supposed to be. Well, as I’m sure you’re all already aware (but I’m going to tell you anyway!), surrealism was an art and literature movement started in the 1920s by the likes of Andre Breton, Man Ray, Antonin Artaud, and yes, Salvador Dali. Surrealism was all about creating a forum for the mind-boggling, the eccentric and the shocking in the arts, and while this was easily achieved on canvas and paper (provided you had the talent, of course), nascent film technology was a bit more difficult to master. Many of the movement’s founding members gave it a go however, and with some very special results.

Early cinema was often pretty bloody strange anyway, as anyone who has seen George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon or anything from the German expressionist movement can testify. Surrealism proper takes it’s bow onscreen in 1928 with The Seashell and the Clergyman, directed by the largely overlooked Germaine Dulac, and scripted by Artaud. This was overshadowed the following year, however, by the infamous Un Chien Andalou, a collaboration between Spanish director Luis Bunuel and his fellow countryman Dali. Anyone who’s ever done any kind of film studies should be intimately familiar with Un Chien Andalou, featuring as it does several of the most pored over sequences in cinema history, including the notorious “razor slitting eye/moon passing cloud” opening. Un Chien Andalou is a fine and important film, but how much you enjoy it may well depend on how interested you are in the surrealist movement, as it is a film that almost exclusively reflects their aims and interests.

Bunuel would go on to have a long and varied career without ever fully losing interest in surrealism, and traces of it can be found in much of his later work, including such critical triumphs as The Exterminating Angel, Belle de Jour, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Dali, on the other hand, will always be remembered primarily for his painted work, but his adventures in, not to mention influence on, cinema would continue…

Dali Goes to Hollywood

The influence of surrealism on mainstream culture would be profound, if not always immediately traceable, and among it’s keenest students were some of the most widely watched American cartoonists of the 30s and 40s. Animators at Warner Bros.’ aptly named Looney Toons, home to many beloved characters including Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, gleefully lapped up the more zany elements of surrealism and applied them to their cartoon frolics. Even their more traditionally straight-laced rivals at Disney began taking their cue from Dali et al, with nutty ol’ Walt himself even beginning, but sadly never finishing, a direct collaboration with Dali on a short called Destino.

One Hollywood assignment that Dali did manage to finish, however, was his contribution of a frankly incredible, and still powerful, dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller, Spellbound. Dali concieved and designed the revolutionary sequence, the direction of which was overseen by Things to Come helmer William Cameron Menzies, rather than Hitchcock himself, whose relationship with producer David O. Selznick was rather frayed at the time. Indeed, Spellbound itself is far from Hitchcock’s best film, and is probably best remembered today for Dali’s dream sequence alone. A startling addition to the film, it sees Gregory Peck trapped in a nightmarish, recognisably Dali-esque world of gigantic, staring eyes (which get sliced in two, a la Un Chien Andalou), mysterious figures, and bizzaro landscapes.

Spellbound was released in 1945, the year the Second World War ended. It’s at this point that the shadow of surrealism begins to fade away in mainstream American culture, at least for the time being. It’s not difficult to see why, either. Following their horrific experiences, a generation of war-hardy Americans decided to move away from the strange and unknown, instead reaffirming their national identity as wholesome, pure, and rather sterile, traits reflected in the popular entertainment of the time (think Leave it to Beaver etc.). In order to keep track of surrealism, we’re going to have to head elsewhere…

The Surreal World

Of course, Europe also experienced some “difficulties” during the Second World War, and while surrealism was pushed down on the agenda on that continent also, it was for slightly different reasons. From the early 50s onwards, European directors would begin to work with newly available light-weight equipment and very soon a “new wave” of independent filmmaking was developing in almost every country. Initially at least, and led by Italian neorealism, these movements were influenced by the very leftist, Soviet notion that all true art should possess a poetic realism, and ideally focus on the day-to-day lives of the proleteriat. Not much scope for surrealism there, of course, but within time almost every director of the Italian neorealism movement would add a splash of the fantastical to their filmmaking, most notably Federico Fellini.

 Ah, Fellini. Possibly the only film director to have warranted his own word; Felliniesque. But what does it mean? Well, it’s a catch-all adjetive used to describe the great man’s most famous films, including the likes of La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, and Juliet of the Spirits, all of which could be described as colourful, fanciful, and peculiar. Surreal, in other words? Certainly to some extent, but I personally believe that Felliniesque should be interpreted as having one major difference from straight-up surrealism; namely that Fellini’s fantastical occurences usually take place in an everyday, perfectly explainable context. Think of the gigantic fish pulled from the sea at the end of La Dolce Vita. Yes, it’s strange, but it could probably happen. The record player blaring out the sound of church bells sat beside a real, disused church bell in Nights of Cabiria also springs to mind. It would seem that Federico rather ingeniusously found a way to import the surreal into everyday life.

The French New Wave is probably the post-war film movement most widely regarded as being somewhat surreal, but it too began under the influence of social realism, with the rural dramas of Agnes Varda and Claude Chabrol leading the way. It is possible to see traces of surreal humour in many of it’s later films, however, and efforts from Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) and Louis Malle (Zazie dans la metro) are as straight-up surreal as cinema gets; although I would argue that the output of the movement’s most famously “out-there” director, Jean-Luc Godard, couldn’t be described as truly surreal (too cynical and satirical, if ya ask me). Interestingly, possibly the most surreal international film movements of the era sprang from the east, the same breeding ground as social realism. Anyone who supposes that filmmaking under communist regimes was always drab or stilted should check out such fare as Czechoslovakia’s bonkers anarcho-feminist caper Daisies, or the East German children’s classic The Singing Ringing Tree and have their minds duly blown.

Feed your Head

When I started thinking about what films to include in this here surreal special, I instinctively decided that I should shy away from anything that could be percieved as psychedelic. But now that I’ve decided to take a more general look at the influence on surrealism in cinema, I’m going to attempt to explain why. Namely, that I think psychedelia is a completely different, albeit superficially similar, school of thought to surrealism. In much the same way that I find Godard a bit to calculating to be considered a genuine surrealist, I also find the movers and shakers of the Swinging 60s a bit too loose and, quite often, too vacuous. It was a movement primarily based on getting out of your skull, was it not?

That’s not to say that I don’t love psychedelic things, as I very much do, and I also concede that the aforementioned superficial similarity between all things psychedelic and surreal at least permits us to have a look at a handful of films from the era. My own personal all-time favourite psychedelic film is probably The Monkees’ vehicle Head, a freewheeling, almost sociopathic attempt to deconstruct the public image of the manufactured mop tops by having them mock a disabled cowboy, fraternise with Frank Zappa’s talking cow, and battle a giant Victor Mature, among other activities. Bob “Five Easy Pieces” Rafelson directed and co-wrote the script with none other than Jack Nicholson, who also contributed lyrics to the film’s fine soundtrack. Of course, you can’t talk about great psychedelic music without mentioning The Beatles, and their 1967 TV special Magical Mystery Tour is also a treasure trove of bizarre delights, even if it is notoriously uneven and lacks Head’s dark edge.

So intrinsically linked were psychedelia and music that it’s hard to find a psychedelic film without some kind of popular musician attached to it somewhere. Kooky Brit drama Wonderwall (yes, that’s where he got it from) had George Harrison twanging the soundtrack, and Nic Roeg and Donald Cammel’s dark crime drama Performance famously boasted Mick Jagger in the lead. In fact, the only psychedelic films I can find that don’t have some immediately obvious rock ‘n’ roll connection are the ultra-strange, and often completely mindblowing, westerns and fantasy fables of mad Chilean mystic Alejandro Jodorowski. But even then a little research shows that both of his most famous films, El Topo and Holy Mountain, were made with the help of late-era Beatles manager Allen Klein and that both were also enthusiastically supported by messrs Harrison and John Lennon! Still, they’re both great films, and due to their allegorical and philosophical stylings, they’re probably the closest psychedelic cinema comes to true surrealism.

A Nightmarelike Quality?

I would argue that the most surreal of all genres is horror. Yes, there are probably surreal variants of films from every genre, from comedy (Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis) to westerns (generally those of the spaghetti variety, most notably Giulio Questi’s staggering Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!). But horror, by it’s very nature, is the genre that most readily relies on the uncanny, the otherwordly, and the unusual to do it’s job, and these traits serve to align it closely with many fundamental aspects of surrealism. Just think of how many renowned horror films contain surreal elements, and you’ll find that the list is almost endless; The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now, Dawn of the Dead, Rosemary’s Baby etc.

More than anything else, the one motif regularly used in horror that links it to surrealism is it’s use of dreams, or rather nightmares. The Nightmare on Elm Street series is undoubtedly the most famous example of this, but a personal favourite of mine is the framing device used by Ealing’s celebrated portmanteau film, 1945′s Dead of Night, which sees the narrator trapped in a recurring nightmare. Another great example of this is The Slayer, a little known slasher film from 1982, which contains a number of similarities to A Nightmare on Elm Street, but was in fact made two years before. In it a mysterious, barely glimpsed killer stalks his victim in both her dreams and her everday reality, and very fittingly, his victim just so happens to be a surrealist painter by trade!

In fact, of all modern filmmakers I can think of, the one who strikes me as having arguably the most surrealistic bent is none other than Italian horror maestro Dario Arento. Practically every film Argento has made since returning to the horror genre in 1975 (following a brief detour into westerns) has come with a generous side order of dark surrealism. Consider the schizophrenic logic of Profondo Rosso, Suspiria’s dark fairytale theatrics, or 1980′s Inferno as a whole, which almost feels like Spellbound’s Dali dream sequence feverishly stretched to breaking point over the duration of an entire film. As dazzling as Inferno is, however, I suspect Argento’s most authentically surreal film may be one of his most maligned; Phenomena. Appearing five years after Inferno, and initially released in many territories as Creepers, Phenomena boasts a beguiling plot that is so multi-faceted it is scarcely believable. Featuring sleepwalking, telepathic communication with insects, a razorblade-weilding chimp, and a murderous dwarf, it might require a few viewings of Phenomena for you to take it all in, but surely that’s the way any surrealist worth his salt would want it.

Back to Sur-reality

So, what lasting influence has surrealism had on modern cinema? Well, it’s hard to gage. It can’t be denied that we live in a time when bizarre images and juxtapositions are more prevelant in mainstream media than ever before, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. It would seem that even surrealism has been harnessed as yet another stylistic weapon of choice in our ever more corporate culture, and you only have to switch on your television set to see any number of bizarre advertisements selling any number of dull products.

What you won’t see, however, is anything really, genuinely, dangerously strange. Modern surrealism may be pervasive, but it has also been sanitised. That’s why I can’t really think of any modern films that I could really bring myself to describe as thoroughbred surreal. I could mention either of Michel Gondry’s popular efforts Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or The Science of Sleep, but aside from the fact that I don’t particularly like either film, they also smack somewhat of false surrealism. It seems to me that the point of both of those films is that they’re supposed to be surreal, so therefore they can’t really be properly surreal, can they? It all seems a bit forced. The same goes for the films of David Lynch, although I’ll give him the sublime and disturbing Eraserhead, which also helps back up my horror-as-surrealism theory. Thanks, Dave!

Really, one of the few modern films I can think of that I would unequivocally classify as being surreal is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and that was made over 25 years ago! Perhaps still best known as the man behind the madcap animations on Monty Python, Gilliam’s most recent films may have a tang of whimsical surrealism about them themselves, but Brazil remains as razor-sharp as the very razor that Bunuel and Dali dragged across an eyeball all those years ago. A kind of Fritz Lang-directed revue of George Orwell’s 1984, the film depicts a dystopian future in which human life is very cheap and all the better for it, as bungling bureaucracy is steadily swallowing it up. It’s this grotesque humour, combined with Gilliam’s off-kilter visual style, that marks Brazil out as not only a great film, but a truly surreal one, also.

The Cat o’ Nine Tails (Dario Argento, 1971)

So what’s been happening since the last time I did a Morricone Monday? Well, Michael Jackson died, of course. You may have noticed that this website was probably the only media outlet in the world that didn’t register some kind of tribute to the self-proclaimed “King of Pop”, and we’re not going to do that now (I don’t think it could be easily incorporated into a review of a Dario Argento film). But, “King of the Convoluted Intro” as I am, the point I am scrambling to get to is that the overwhelming response to Jackson’s death overshadowed several other news stories, including another celebrity passing; that of Karl Malden. I didn’t discover this sad news until a few days ago, so starring in today’s film as he does, I’d like to make this Morricone Monday a belated tribute to the big man himself. More on Karl Malden later.

The last time we checked in on Dario Argento, he had just released his debut feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, to great critical acclaim and commercial success. Obviously adopting the true and tested policy of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, Argento would re-enlist Ennio Morricone to score his second film, and perhaps needless to say, like Bird… it would be another Giallo. That first film caused the popularity of the Italian murder mystery subgenre to sky rocket at home, as well as giving it a profile internationally. Argento’s second film, The Cat o’ Nine Tails, would provide the middle link in a thematic trilogy of Gialli that makes up the first stage of the director’s career (we’ll look at his third film, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, in the coming weeks). But how does it measure up to it’s predecessor?

The Cat o’ Nine Tails is just one of those (many) Giallos that has a plot that doesn’t quite add up, but here goes… Karl Malden stars as Arno, a blind puzzle maker who lives, and forms a cute if slightly questionable double act with, an orphaned little girl. One night the twosome are out walking when Malden, with his heightened senses, overhears a shady conversation between a scientist and a threatening, unknown figure outside a genetics lab. The next day there’s been a break-in at the lab, and newspaper man Giordani arrives on the scene. When Arno later learns that the scientist he overheard the night before has been mysteriously pushed under a train, he seeks out the assistance of the reporter, and the two resolve to solve the mystery together. Naturally enough, there are many more plot twists, not to mention several murders, to come, before Argento calls time on the whole thing with a sour and purposefully ambiguous finale which leaves certain pieces of the puzzle still in flux.

Dario Argento often cites The Cat o’ Nine Tails as his least favourite of all his films, and many of his fans hold a similar opinion. While I think this is simply ridiculous, based on the fact that Argento has not made a good film since 1993′s Trauma, I do have to concede that Cat… is certainly not one of the “King of Horror”‘s best. I feel this is partly to do with the plot, but not with regards to how confusing it can be (this is a Giallo, after all, confusion is par for the course), rather the story is often a little dry. Unlike Bird…, and the later Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Cat o’ Nine Tails, with it’s trio of leading protagonists, lacks the nightmarish, existential, one-man-against-the-odds feel of the very best Gialli. Also the hokey scientific espionage at the centre of the murder spree leaves the film occassionally feeling a little trite and something akin to a John Grisham novel.

Having said that, plot certainly isn’t everything in a Dario Argento film, and there are numerous nasty and brauva set-pieces that rank with the director’s very best. The opening “train push” murder will linger grimly in the mind of anyone (like me!) who stands a good, oh, 6 foot away from the edge of the platform when a train is approaching. There is also a terrific sequence in which a character is locked in a mausoleum with the killer on the prowl outside that’ll be an equally big hit with claustrophobics. Wimps everywhere (like me!) will also wince at the film’s brilliantly staged, but grisly climax, which involves something rather painful-looking occuring in an elevator shaft. We also see some of Argento’s cryptic artistic flourishes develop on from his first film, most notably the mysterious, blood red retina which flashes onscreen before a murder takes place, and which calls to mind some of the visual motifs he would employ in his later masterwork, Profondo Rosso.

Another of The Cat o’ Nine Tails undeniable strengths is that of the character of the blind puzzle maker, Arno. To have a character deprived of sight attempting to solve a murder mystery is a touch of genius, and gives the sleuthing in Cat… an added depth. To make him a puzzle maker, too, is almost doubly inspired (there is no cat, nor whips, in the film incidentally, the title is a reference to the number of clues Arno unearths surrounding the murders). Arno is, of course, brilliantly played by Karl Malden, and adds up to one of Argento’s more sympathetic and believable characters.

1912-2009

Karl Malden would be the first international star to appear in a Dario Argento film (ahead of the likes of David Hemmings, Donald Pleasance, and Max von Sydow), and he should be instantly recognisable to any self-respecting film fan. In an odd way, Malden is most famous for providing the de facto conscience of wild and salacious Marlon Brando, appearing as he does in sizeable supporting roles in two of the acting legend’s most famous films; A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. With his hulking, gentle giant demeanour, Malden creates the perfect foil for Marlon’s frenzied method acting, emerging as the most sympathetic character (dim-witted, well-intentioned best friend and courageous priest, respectively) in both films. He later put in another wonderful supporting turn in the wacky, Brando-directed One-Eyed Jacks. The Cat o’ Nine Tails was to mark Malden’s only role in a Euro horror film, but he did find the time to chalk up an appearance in the Spanish mafia revenge romp, Summertime Killer, just one of many films to partly-inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The year after Cat…, Malden took on one of his most enduring roles, that of Detective Mike Stone in the long-running cop series, The Streets of San Francisco, opposite Michael Douglas.

When we looked at The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, we decided that it’s sinister, yet sumptuous, score was Ennio Morricone’s best work for Dario Argento. So how does the music for The Cat o’ Nine Tails measure up? Let’s hand over to Aneet miaow… I mean “now”.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970)

Ennio Morricone is most famous for his work with Sergio Leone. Si? The films of Dario Argento are most closely associated with the music of Italian prog-rock monsters, Goblin. No? However, if we set aside these widely known and universally acclaimed creative partnerships for a moment, it may come as something of a surprise to see how many times Morricone and Argento themselves have collaborated.

Their paths first crossed when the then-film critic Dario Argento, along with the already established director Bernardo Bertolucci, were roped in to help dream up the epic, majestic and inventive scenario for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (Argento, Bertolucci and Leone writing a film together! Who do we get doing that these days? Matt Damon and Ben Affleck?). Ennio Morricone did the legendary, haunting score for that film, of course, and after it’s release, Argento presumably pulled Il Maestro to one side and asked him if he might consider writing a spot of music for his first film. Morricone agreed, and it would be the first of five collaborations between the two.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is Dario Argento’s first film, and it is also one of his very finest. The giallo genre (covered in some detail here) was already established and had been popular in Italy for some time by 1970, but the release and subsequent phenomenal success of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is generally credited with ushering in the golden age of the giallo in terms of box office returns, and also of creating a profile for this somewhat bizarre and niche genre overseas. After the critical and commercial success of his first film, Argento’s name (along with that of his mentor, Mario Bava) would become synonymous with the giallo genre, and it is a field he continues to operate in (to some extent or other) to this day.

But a very large part of what makes Dario Argento’s giallo films so great is that they are as influenced by the director’s own particular, peculiar traits as they are by those of the genre itself. Often referred to as the “Italian Hitchcock”, that nickname is perhaps most relevant as a clue to Argento’s dark and masterful talent, rather than for indicating any similarities between the two director’s films (which are most often only superficially similar, anyway). Dario Argento at the very top of his game can conjure up films which both dazzle the eye and assault the senses in ways that the viewer will find both awe-inspiring as well as terrifying. He is a modern master of perverse, suspenseful storytelling, and the undisputed king of the cruel, calculated set-piece. Much of his unique and fiendish brilliance is already on full display on his very first feature.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, like all giallos, is a bloodier, kinkier take on the classic murder mystery format popularised by American writers such as Fredric Brown (on whose short story, The Screaming Mimi, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is partially based). The mystery here revolves around American writer Sam Dalmas, who having been living it up and getting very little work done in Rome, is getting ready to head back home to the States (a trusty giallo standby; the bewildered foreigner abroad). Dilly-dallying back to his flat one night, Dalmas happens to walk past an art gallery where he witnesses a woman being attacked by a masked assailant with a knife. Attempting to break into the gallery to save the woman, the American is accidentally trapped in between two glass sliding doors and forced helplessly to watch the attack. Fortunately, the woman survives, but after the police arrive and free him, the previously homeward bound Sam has his passport taken off him and is told to go nowhere as he is now a valuable witness. With little else to do, he tries to unravel the mystery of the attacker’s identity, who could well also be the same knife-welding maniac currently partaking in a manic murder spree all over the city. It isn’t too long before Sam gets a little too mixed up in the mystery and finds his own life is in danger.

A classic giallo scenario then, but that brief synopsis alone should give a hint as to how much of a vintage Dario Argento masterpiece The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is. Only Argento would dream up such a diabolical means for having his protagonist helplessly, horrifically trapped and forced to watch a brutal attempted murder (this is another source for the Hitchcock comparisons; they are undeniably two of cinema’s most enthusiastic voyeurs). And anyone who has seen Profondo Rosso will recognise an Argento speciality in his having Sam seeing a key piece of evidence at the scene of the crime, but not quite being able to remember what it was, and having it haunt his mind until the truth is finally revealed during the brilliant, bloody climax. Unlike Profondo Rosso, however, Argento is not yet so accomplished as to be able to stand the giallo on its head completely, so instead he makes The Bird with the Crystal an exemplary, textbook example of the genre for the most part, and peppers it with skilfully orchestrated sequences of nail-biting suspense. My personal favourite scene from the film is one in which Sam chases a yellow mac-clad would-be assassin into a hotel lobby, only to find it is unexpectedly filled to capacity with men wearing similar yellow raincoats!

Dario Argento would make two more excellent giallos straight after The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; The Cat o’ Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, both of which Ennio Morricone would return to compose the music for. Argento would then take a break from the horror/thriller genre to make his now impossible to find western, The Five Days, before returning to the giallo with bloody zeal on Profondo Rosso in 1975. That incredible comeback would mark the beginning of Argento’s partnership with Goblin, but he and Morricone would regroup for two further projects in the 90s, The Stendhal Syndrome and an unorthodox take on the tale of The Phantom of the Opera. Sadly, although Morricone’s music for both of these films is rather fine, they are two of Argento’s weakest and most mishandled efforts.

The soundtracks to all three of Argento’s early giallos make for fantastic listening, but The Bird with the Crystal Plumage almost certainly represents the pinnacle of the Argento-Morricone partnership. What do you reckon, Aneet?

It certainly does Alan!

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is one of Morricone’s ground-breaking and intriguing soundtracks to date. It’s certainly one of the most important in regards of the relationship between Argento and Morricone, as only a year later the two would have a major falling out over the soundtrack to Four Flies on Grey Velvet which led to Goblin becoming Argento’s main composers.

Breaking the conventions of your usual horror score of screeching strings and winds with the breathy innocence of a solo woman’s voice – the solo woman being the wonderful Edda Dell’Orso and what sounds like the Swingle Sisters on lithium, contrasting both against another resulting in a swirling, percussive soundwash. Morricone perfectly compliments the crazy screen happenings with hypnotic intensity. From the spine chilling stalker scenes to the upbeat jazz/rock tracks for the chase scenes – every scene has added suspense and a sophisticated edge that took the movie to levels way above your average giallo.

What makes this score so spectacular is its haunting individuality and its influence on other composers and filmmakers. Alex Cox once commented on the similarities of this score with Pino Donaggio’s score to Brian DePalma’s 1984 warped Hitchcockian-inspired thriller ‘Body Double’. With both films reliant on the visual and the sound to compliment each other in order to enhance the plot as well as the rather violent nature of the films he has certainly got a point. DePalma would later use Morricone as his composer in his later career (these films being ‘The Untouchables’, ‘Casualties of War’ and ‘Mission to Mars’), which only adds to the illustrious list of directors that the Maestro has worked with.

So hopefully me and Alan have persuaded you to go out and buy both the film and soundtrack. If you’re still not convinced here’s the slightly scary title theme. Once again we salute you Maestro! See you next week for another instalment of Monday Morricone Madness!

Hello boys and ghouls. It’s actually not still Halloween, of course. But, for the purposes of finishing our rundown of the top 13 horror films of all time, we’re going to pretend it is.

Hope you all had a spooky one and enjoyed yourselves. You didn’t just stay in watching Halloween 2 on BBC1, did you? Thanks to some kind of minor social miracle, I actually got invited to a Halloween party! And most enjoyable it was, too. In case you’re wondering, I went as Alan Partridge as a zombie, which was met with predictably nonplussed responses. Oh, well. It was a great party, and they had The Texas Chainsaw Massacre playing on a loop in the living room and everything! And if you’re looking for a clue as to how terrifying and bloody brilliant the remainder of our list is going to be, I’ll let it slip that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t even in there!

But, what is? Read on to find out… IF YOU DARE!!!!!!

Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973)

Almost certainly the most obscure film on the list (more so than even Alice, Sweet Alice and Blue Sunshine from part one), this is a strange and enthralling gothic fairytale. Superbly put together and beautiful to look at, the only thing more remarkable than the fact it was made for peanuts is the fact that it has languished in obscurity for so long.

Lemora stars late B-movie regular Cheryl Smith (Caged Heat, Phantom of the Paradise) as Lila Lee, a 13-year-old gospel singer who has been fostered by the Reverend of her church. Upon recieving a letter from her real father, a gangster suffering from a fatal wound and being held at a strange house in a town called Astaroth, Lila steals away to see him before he dies. The journey alone is enough to make Lila uncertain of the wiseness of her decision to seek her father out, as a group of deformed maniacs lay siege to her bus and kill the driver. Managing to escape, Lila makes her way through a dark and dazzling Southern Gothic landscape to the house and her father, who is being guarded by the sinister Lemora of the title. Lemora already has loads of weird kids hanging around the house, and she seems keen to add Lila to her collection. She also has a private army of vampires under her control, and is waging a war against the same deformed maniacs who had earlier munched the bus driver. It’s not long before all hell breaks lose in Astaroth, but can Lila and her father escape in time?

I can’t stress enough how beautiful Lemora is to look at. Setting itself up as a dreamlike fable of childhood innocence under threat, the film is pitch perfect and incredibly atmospheric throughout. Strangely, its director, Richard Blackburn, never made another film, although he did co-write another dark fable, Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul. Despite all this talk of fable and fairytale, Lemora is also occassionally gruesome and always unsettling. The film is never more unsettling than when Lemora herself is onscreen. Played by the uncannily Sigourney Weaver-like Lesley Gilb, who never appeared in anything else, some of Lemora’s most haunting sequences are of the vampire queen grooming her young charges. 

Following its release, the film got into hot water with the Catholic League of Decency, due largely to the predatory nature of Lemora’s relationship with Lila. This controversy, and subsequent banning in some territories, is doubtless partly responsible for Lemora being tragically overlooked. Don’t make the same mistake. I urge you to seek out Synapse’s fantastic recent DVD release and prepare to have your breath taken away by a dark, forgotten classic.

Martin (1977)

Running the risk of widespread derision and, quite possibly, contempt, I hereby include George A. Romero’s Martin in the list at the exclusion of the generously spectacled horror legend’s two most famous masterpieces. Yes, that’s right; I prefer Martin to both Night and Dawn of the Living Dead. But rather than take that as sacrilege, simply accept it as testament to how excellent a film Martin is. And no, it’s not a Martin Kemp biopic.

Instead, Martin is the tale of a young lad with a penchant for sedating women, slicing their wrists open and drinking their blood. This makes him a vampire, non? Well, it certainly makes him a very modern one, and Martin’s Olde Worldy uncle is having none of it, forcing the eponymous anti-hero to come and stay with him in backwater Pittsburgh in order to be cured. Belonging very much to the old school of vampire handling, Martin’s uncle tries every hackneyed trick in the book, from the garlic clove to the crucifix, but nothing seems to work. The strangely sympathetic Martin resolves to cure himself and embarks on an affair with an unhappy housewife. But can he resist the old, murderous temptations, and how long before his uncle runs out of patience, and weans him off the blood by giving him some ”stake”? Groan.

Just one of a handful of criminally underrated Romero films (see also; Jack’s Wife, The Crazies, Creepshow and Monkey Shines. His romantic comedy (!) There’s Always Vanilla ain’t bad, either), Martin is his most restrained and, maybe even, personal film. As noted earlier, this is due in no small part to the depiction of Martin as more troubled teenager than maniacal monster, and the role is brilliantly brought to life by Romero regular John Amplas. That’s not to say that Martin isn’t as thrilling as George A.’s more famous films, and, indeed, I consider the opening, tensely staged, murder aboard a sleeper train to be the director’s finest hour. It’s also, perhaps unsurprisingly, very bloody, with the great Tom Savini on hand to lay on the gruesome effects (and, a la Dawn of the Dead, act in a minor role). And it’s a very funny film in places, maybe Romero’s wittiest, with Martin’s exasperated attempts to explain the nature of his vampirism to a sleazy phone-in radio DJ being nothing short of hilarious.

Martin is also available in a slightly different, Italian-language version, edited by Romero’s great mate Dario Argento, and featuring musical mayhem from none other than Goblin. For first-timers, however, I’d recommend the original; a unique and intelligent take on the vampire myth.

Profondo Rosso (1975)

“What horror movies seemed like when you were too young to get in to see them.” Alas, not my words, but the words of Time Out magazine, summarising the work of Dario Argento. I have yet to hear a more apt appraisal of the maestro’s talents, and it’s one I would most certainly apply to his greatest film; Profondo Rosso.

Please forgive me if you feel I’m being pretenious by neglecting to use its English title, Deep Red, but I was lumbered with an appallingly edited, dubbed version of the film bearing that title sometime in the mid-90s, and I instinctively use the Italian title to differentiate. I refuse to apologise, however, if you feel I should have selected Suspiria instead. Come on! We’ve just been through all this with George Romero! I will justify my selection by saying that Suspiria is, of course, an absolute masterpiece, however, as are several other Dario Argento films, including his debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. But, one of the things I like best about Profondo Rosso is the way it marries the breathless, mysterious Giallo style of Argento’s earlier films with the more fragmented, evocative supernatural power of his later films, most notably Suspiria. In my mind, at least, it is the definitive Argento film.

Regular readers may remember Days Are Numbers exhaustive Giallo bumper special a few months back, in which we laid out a potted history of these very Italian, very violent murder-mystery/horror hybrids. Profondo Rosso is very much in the Giallo mould, but here Argento takes the genre (which he helped to popularise) and does to it what his traditionally black glove-clad killer does to their many victims in the film. Takes it to bloody pieces. David Hemmings stars as a jazz pianist who witnesses the murder of a psychic (who had earlier claimed she could feel the presence of a killer at one of her meetings), but having failed to catch a glimpse of the killer’s mush, attempts to solve the mystery with the assistance of a fiesty female journalist. The more bizarre the case becomes, as Hemmings’ investigation leads him to a decrepit house with a dark secret, the higher the body count mounts. Very soon he has good reason to fear for his own life.

I’ll spare you an outpouring of superlatives and simply say this; Profondo Rosso is bloody brilliant. Nerve-jangling, brutal, darkly psychedelic, absolutely mesmerising (ok, that’s a few superlatives); I’d heartily recommend any Argento film (up to Trauma, at least), but Profondo Rosso is something else altogether compared to even its brothers and sisters. Goblin’s soundtrack is belting and bonkers, to boot. Naturally.

Targets (1968)

We got the ball rolling (in part one) with a Roger Corman film, and here, halfway through part two, we encounter the great man again. He’s not behind the camera this time, but instead flexing his creative muscle as a shrewd and resourceful producer, helping one of his numerous talented proteges crank out an ingenious and inventive modern horror film.

It’s remarkable to think that we wouldn’t even have Targets to enjoy had it not been for the fact that horror legend Boris Karloff owed Corman three days’ work. Many other producers would have simply written this meagre debt off, but not our Roger. He got on the blower to talented youngster Peter Bogdanovich and told him he would produce his first feature provided he cast Karloff and use him for three days. The second part of the brief stipulated that Bogdanovich would be required to include footage from the film Corman had just made with Karloff, The Terror, which starred another Corman discovery, Jack Nicholson.

Unfazed by this challenge, Bogdanovich sought help in devising a suitable storyline in which to include all these elements by calling on another mercurial movie maverick, Samuel Fuller. Possibly the greatest filmmaker most people have never heard of (more info on Days Are Numbers in the coming month), Fuller helped Bogdanovich craft an absolute peach of an idea; Karloff plays a loosely fictionalised version of himself, an elderly, Hollywood-era horror star named Byron Orlok. Increasingly tired and jaded, Orlok is touring the drive-in circuit to promote his new film, which looks suspicously like The Terror. Oh, hang on. IT IS The Terror. Being met with a subdued response, Orlok ponders the relevance of his traditional brand of wordy and theatrical horror in an increasingly violent and outrageous world. Meanwhile, an all-American boy and Vietnam veteran (whose rigid and mundane life we have been observing in snippets throughout) snaps suddenly across town and begins gunning down random passers-by, before making his way to the very same drive-in at which Orlok is appearing to continue his killing spree. It is here that the old school screen monster Orlok must confront a new, nihilistic horror.

If that’s not one of the best ideas for a film ever, then I don’t know what is. And Targets is indeed one of my favourite films ever. Hats off to everyone involved for a great job well done, from the ever-resourceful Corman for getting it off the ground, to Bogdanovich and Fuller for dreaming up a dynamite premise that is both exciting and intelligent, and still sadly relevant today. Bogdanovich would never direct another horror film, although he would turn in some wacko sci-fi for Corman (Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women), before becoming one of the most successful film directors of the early to mid 70s. He would later become one of the most derided and least loved film directors of the late 70s and 80s. Perhaps unfairly, but that’s another story.

Whilst not Karloff’s final film as is often widely misreported (he would slum it in Spain for a year or so after), Targets comes close enough to fit as a sterling swansong for a bona fide horror legend. Giving a charming and sad performance, Karloff reminds us just what a wonderful actor the man behind Frankenstein’s monster truly was.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)

Not technically a film-film, Whistle… weighs in at a mere 42 mins. long, and was never given a cinema release. It was instead made for BBC television’s seminal arts strand Omnibus, and directed by surely one of the least likely horror directors of all time.

To this day Jonathan Miller is still most famous as one-quarter of Britain’s pre-eminent pre-Python comedy troupe, Beyond the Fringe. Largely remembered for giving the world the far from inconsiderable gifts of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, BTF also housed treasured monolguist and writer Alan Bennett and, of course, Jonathan Miller, in their salad days, both of whom were as funny as their more celebrated peers, but neither of whom pursued a career in comedy following the group’s split. Immediately after, Miller found himself at the head of the BBC’s arts department, and directed two literary adaptations for TV; Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Whistle and I’ll Come to You, based on a story by M.R. James.

Anyone who’s read at least a handful of stories by M.R. James (and I don’t mean to disparage his abilities, I’m a big fan) will know that he is fond of one story template in particular; stuffy, cynical English academic goes on rural holiday, finds strange, ancient artefact buried somewhere, pockets artefact, then gets haunted by ghost of some kind until mysteriously dies/replaces artefact. So it is with Whistle…, which could transfer a little flat and formulaic if brought to the screen by a lesser hand, but fortunately Miller possesses the skills to make it absolutely riveting.

The artefact in question here is, suitably enough, a whistle, chanced upon by stuffy, cynical Professor Parkins whilst enjoying a ramble on holiday on the Suffolk coast. Parkins pockets the whistle, after giving it a quick blow, and for the rest of his walk, and his holiday, he is stalked by a large dark figure in the distance, looming ever closer and more threateningly. One of the masterstrokes pulled off by Miller is to illustrate the stark difference in atmosphere and mood between night and day. Contrasting the scenes which take place during the day time, in which the pompous Parkins makes tart remarks to himself during conversation with his fellow hotel guests, with those at night, with Parkins plagued by surreal, terrifying nightmares, makes for interesting viewing, and it is a ploy I have not seen used in quite the same way in any other horror film. Miller also handles the sequences of Parkins being followed by the figure along desolate shorelines beautifully, but it is the final sequence that is worthy of the highest praise. The finale employs eerie, stop-motion effects and jagged editing superbly to bring something utterly terrible to life. It is still powerful and frightening to this day, although Channel 4 ruined it for millions recently by showing the end in its near-entirety on the channel’s 100 Scariest Moments countdown. A more than admirable choice, all the same.

A true renaissance man in a time when some will apply the term to even Justin Timberlake, Jonathan Miller tired of film directing even quicker than he tired of comedy, and went off to become a sculptor, neurologist, author and God-knows-what-else. Based on the evidence here, it was a great loss, but his earlier Alice in Wonderland (with an all-star cast, including Peters’ Sellers and Cook) is equally well-worth watching and his one full-length feature film, another literary adaptation, Kingsley Amis’ Take a Girl Like You (released 1970, starring Oliver Reed) is about to be released on DVD after decades of unavailability. Hurrah! The late Michael Horden, superb as Professor Parkins in Whistle…, also deserves props. A lengthy and colourful career, he both narrated Kubrick’s masterpiece Barry Lyndon and appeared alongside Frankie Howerd in the film of Up Pompeii. Titter ye not! 

The Wicker Man (1973)

I almost felt like leaving out the “1973″ above as an act of defiance. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know when The Wicker Man was made, I’m sure everybody already does, it’s just that I loathe the idea that it’s nowadays required to differentiate the seminal, sublime original from the terrible, turgid remake.

Easily the most famous film on the second part of our list, The Wicker Man has gone onto become a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and watching it is almost a rites-of-passage type thing. One of the first things I normally ask people when the subject of The Wicker Man arises in conversation is whether or not they knew how it was going to end before they saw it. I alas, did know, and feel somewhat envious of those who didn’t, as in an era when hackneyed and contrived twist endings are commonplace in films, The Wicker Man’s denouement is a true stroke of dark genius. However, even if you do know how it’s going to end, The Wicker Man is still the most engrossing, enrapturing British horror film (perhaps) ever made.

Telly hardman Edward Woodward gives an expertly measured performance as a staunchly Christian copper summoned to a remote Scottish island to search for a missing girl. Once there he finds himself entangled in a web of intrigue seemingly constructed by corrupt English nobleman Lord Summerisle, who presides over the whole island, which is also called Summerisle like wot he is. The entire populace of Summerisle happen to be pagans, which obviously rattles our pious pig, with the locals first unsettling him, and then, apparently, threatening him. And just who is this “Wicker Man”? As if you don’t all know.

The remake of The Wicker Man is, of course, grossly inferior to the original in every way. In fact the remake of The Wicker Man is grossly inferior to most films in every way. However, one of the most hideously wrong things about the remake is that they chose to invent their own credibility-sapping religion (something about bees and Nazi feminism), which contributed to the whole affair’s damnation to failure. This, in turn, is one of the prized assets that the original can boast, and something that gives it even greater resonance. The fact that within and just without Britain’s Christian shores there remains remnants of a dark, pagan past where sinister things can apparently happen. Indeed, Halloween itself, which we are celebrating on this list, survives from that very past.

The Wicker Man also boasts a production history that is as unique and complex as the film itself. It’s much too long a story to get into, but I can heartily recommend the excellent commentary track on the terrific Anchor Bay DVD release, featuring a bagful of interesting anecdotes from Christopher Lee. The iconic star of nearly 300 films (many of them horror), Lee has always maintained that The Wicker Man is the best thing he’s ever done, and who’s going to argue? It’s certainly the best thing director Robin Hardy has ever done, although given the level of fame enjoyed by The Wicker Man, his only other film of note, The Fantasist, deserves to be at least a bit better known, despite not being very good. After years of trying, Hardy has finally succeeded in mounting his long-planned Wicker Man sequel, the almost alarmingly titled Cowboys for Christ. It’s hard to know what to expect, but at least it’s guaranteed to be better than The Wicker Man remake. Sadly, it won’t boast the writing talents of original Wicker Man scribe Anthony Shaffer, who also penned the twice-filmed hit stageplay Sleuth, as well as Frenzy, for Alfred Hitchcock, and who passed away in 2001.

Witchfinder General (1968)

Completing our list is a film that deserves to be as famous as The Wicker Man, in my opinion, and a film that may yet come close to achieving such a level of fame as it continues to grow in stature. It also completes two hat-tricks on this second half of the list; a hat-trick of films made in 1968 (what a great year for horror), and a hat-trick of career-redefining films from horror icons. We’ve already had Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. Now it’s the turn of Vincent Price.

Price stars as the witch-hunter and torturer of the title, actual historic figure Matthew Hopkins, except if director Michael Reeves had had his way the old ghoul wouldn’t have been allowed near the thing to begin with. Reeves really wanted another horror stalwart, Donald Pleasance, to play the lead, and considered Price too waspish and campy. This is not a massively surprising conclusion for the young director to have arrived at, considering Price’s most recent credits at the time included the role of Egghead in the Batman TV series, and a film called Dr. Goldfoot and the Sex Bombs (albeit directed by Mario Bava). However, the decision was not Reeves’ to make as American International Pictures were stumping up the cash, and counted Price as a treasured contract player (he had spent the early 60s making a series of fantastic Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with Roger Corman at AIP). So, Price it was to be.

And a good thing too, as despite numerous on-set arguments and clashes, Price proved Reeves wrong and put in a poised and dead-eyed performance in a film that still astounds with its unflinching sadism to this day. Reeves has described Witchfinder General as a western set in East Anglia, during the English Civil War of the 17th century, and indeed, the film does have a distinct gunslinger tang to it. Maliciously touring the war-torn English countryside carrying out his grim trade of accusing innocent young women of witchcraft and murdering them for profit, Hopkins encounters Roundhead soldier Richard Marshall, who unaware of what he’s doing, gives Hopkins directions to his hometown. Once there, Hopkins chooses Marshall’s beloved and her clergyman uncle as his latest victims, and soon numbers the disillusioned soldier as his number one enemy. Marshall sets out for revenge, but does the shrewd and sadistic Hopkins wield too much power in these troubled times?

An excellent storyline, and if it seems a little superficially slender, don’t worry. Michael Reeves places numerous scenes of cruel and brutal torture throughout the film, which created a minor outrage on its release. In fact, one of the film’s leading opponents was none other than Jonathan Miller’s old Beyond the Fringe chum Alan Bennett, who decried the film as morbid and thoroughly unenjoyable, and claimed watching it made him feel dirty. Reeves responded by stating that the violence of Witchfinder General was not meant to be enjoyed, but that he would love the opportunity to watch Bennett try and scrub himself clean. Despite being a distant cousin of then BBFC big cheese John Trevelyan, Reeves’ film would be shorn of several minutes, which have subsequently been restored and are still incrediby shocking. The film also boasts a belter of an ending, and if not exactly as surprising as the final scene of The Wicker Man, it easily matches it for bleakness. An unforgettable, harrowing lesson in the futility of violent revenge.

Michael Reeves is the great lost talent of British cinema. A scarcely believable mere 25-years-old when he died a year after Witchfinder General’s release, Reeves is also responsible for another dark and intoxicatingly imaginitive British horror, The Sorcerers, which he made with Boris Karloff in 1967. I had a headache deciding whether or not I should include The Sorcerers or Witchfinder General on the list, and the earlier film missed out only just. A brilliant tale of bitter old folks controlling jaded youngsters through mind control, expect it to make a full appearance on these pages very soon. Reeves’ first film, The She Beast, is also very good, if hamstrung by a zero-budget and nowhere near as sophisticated as his later two (running 74 min. long, more than a third of the film is taken up by a elaborate car chase!). It does, however, feature several early glimpses of his supreme, ruthless talent, not to mention his dark humour.

It’s impossible to guess where Reeves would have gone next, and before his untimely death from an apparent suicide bid, he had already pulled out of filming his next production, The Oblong Box, a Poe story starring Vincent Price (Witchfinder General is known as The Conqueror Worm in the US, after a Poe poem, to cash in on the Price connection). Had he lived longer, I believe we would have been guaranteed several more films as masterful as those he left us, but at least we’ll always have those.

Well, thanks for being patient and keeping up the pretence that Halloween is still occurring. I hope you enjoyed the list, and please forgive me for any glaring omissions. I’ve decided not to think about it, as I don’t want to kick myself too hard for leaving brilliant things out (i.e. “The Birds? Doh!”). You may also have noticed that we in fact covered 14 films, rather than the promised 13. The decision to throw another one in was meant to both trick and treat, in keeping with the spirit of the season. Also, 13 is too darn unlucky.

Anyway, until next year… Happy haunting!

(NB: Please stay tuned for the third and final part of Days Are Number’s banned series. It’s comin’ to get ya!)          

Like just about every fellow aficionado I have encountered, I was introduced to the fiendish allure of the Italian giallo when I first saw Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso. A confirmed fan of the maestro already, this mesmerising, mind-bending murder mystery was like nothing I had ever seen before. Henceforth, I became committed to not only tracking down every Argento film I could lay my hands on (no easy feat in the mid-90s), but I was also determined to find at least a few other films as warped and darkly riveting as Profondo Rosso. I was in luck, for I soon discovered an entire genre of them.

For the uninitiated, giallos (or, gialli) are Italian horror films that follow the twisting, turning plot structures found in the classic whodunit murder mysteries of Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace et al. Indeed, the genre takes its name from the fact that these stories were originally published in Italy between bright yellow covers (‘giallo’ being Italian for ‘yellow’) serving to both entice and to warn readers of the forbidden thrills contained within. These immensely popular tales would serve to inspire and inform their cinematic offspring, yet let loose on the silver-screen the giallo was to grow into something infinitely more shocking, salacious and psychedelic than Christie and co. could ever have imagined. With loose morals and enthusiastic zeal, writers and directors began to use the murder mystery blueprint as a framework from which to hang ever more violent set pieces and around which to weave ever less plausible plotlines. At its maturity, the giallo was a wonderfully unruly hybrid genre, mixing elements of thriller, horror, occult and exploitation (most often, and with frequently unsavoury results, of the sex variety) cinema. Gialli performed extraordinarily well at the Italian box office, amply satisfying that country’s traditional appetite for ghastly Grand Guignol, and would later influence the American slasher boom of the late 70s (Halloween creator John Carpenter is a dedicated Argento and giallo fan).

The giallo has many hallmarks, and getting acquainted with the genre can easily lead to an addiction as the viewer learns to first look out for and then love the gleeful trait and hackneyed tradition which are found in abundance. Firstly, there are the titles, and these can be mini-masterpieces in themselves. Most often perversely poetic (A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, Seven Bloodstained Orchids) they can also be alarmingly lewd (Strip Nude for Your Killer, The French Sex Murders), or unintentionally comical (The Killer Has Reserved Nine Seats, Spasmo). Once you’ve actually started to watch one, you’ll notice that the murder mystery that forms the film’s core is rather hard to keep up with. This is because often, it doesn’t make any sense at all, and is loaded with bamboozling developments that spring from nowhere at terrifying tangents. This is something I really enjoy about watching gialli, the fact that the films are so bent on mad invention and surreal surprise that you can’t really follow the plot as easily as you should be able to in a traditional whodunit. Just about the one guarantee you’ll have from the plot of any giallo is that the suspect who is seemingly the most innocent will turn out to be the killer. Either that or it will turn out to be the suspect who was the most likely after all, one or the other. Don’t worry, though, you’ll only be as confused as the main character, but then it’s not you being stalked by an apparently unstoppable killer. No one ever believes them, either (at least not until it’s too late), and the life of the giallo protagonist is one of overwhelming paranoia as well as dangerous peril. They also have to suffer the dual indignity of being not only really badly dubbed, but having to speak in astoundingly dated dialogue, too. For, although many gialli are genuinely brilliant, an awful lot really aren’t. But even at their shoddiest, there’s still much enjoyment to be had from at least a single screening, and the rankest giallo will always betray a smidgen of twisted charm.

Happily, it’s the wheat we’re going to be taking a look at today (although I would heartily recommend the odd bit of chaff for appreciation heightening purposes, as well as for a good laugh), and the eight films below represent the giallo at its very best. I have opted to omit Dario Argento from the list as it doesn’t feel quite right to pigeonhole such a mercurial talent as a genre director (albeit a genre he reinvented and popularised, and has never completely broken away from), and the ghoulish Roman visionary is of course worthy of a feature in his own right, if indeed I am worthy of writing it (watch this space!). Also, his best giallo (and best film, in my opinion), Profondo Rosso, is streets ahead of everything else, and appearing in 1975 towards the tail-end of the boom, is actually something of a revisionist take on the genre.

So, to borrow completely inappropriately from The Sound of Music, let’s start at the very beginning, and join me on a journey, if you dare, to a savage and sensationalised parallel Europe of the 60s and 70s, where the shades are garish, the carpet shag-pile, the fashions outrageous, the attitudes outmoded, the body-count high, and the gore gleefully generous; in short, it’s (Multiple) Murder Italian Style.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) – Just as I decided Dario Argento might be too much the proverbial big fish for inclusion in this article, I could easily have made the same call for Mario Bava. The creative force behind the most eclectic and colourful filmography ever assembled (making his directorial debut at the tender age of 44!), Bava made his name with a handful of Hammer-inspiring macabre masterpieces (most notably the majestic Black Sunday), and took in everything from comic crime caper (Danger: Diabolik) to genre-splicing sci-fi (Planet of the Vampires), along the way. He also turned in this, the first ever giallo, and would later bestow two further masterpieces on the genre.

As the title suggests, The Girl Who Knew Too Much takes its cue from Hitchcock, and the rotund master of suspense is as much a touchstone for the giallo as the whodunits. The story concerns Nora, who in a trademark giallo ploy is a foreigner (in this case an American, despite having a thick Italian accent. Oh, and being fluent in Italian), visiting her sick aunt in Rome. Roughly ten minutes after she gets there, her aunt dies (of natural causes, which is incredibly lucky, this being a giallo), and wracked with grief Nora wanders outside, only to witness a murder right in front of the house. Or does she? Luckily, a hunky young doctor (played by future horror veteran John Saxon, who would later appear in Argento’s uber-giallo, Tenebrae) is on hand to help her get to the bottom of the mystery, which appears to be somehow connected to an identical murder which took place in the same spot ten years previously.

Appearing as early as it did, it’s no surprise that The Girl Who Knew Too Much is rather low on both body-count and gory spills ‘n’ thrills. It more than makes up for it, however, by having a genuinely corking mystery at its heart, and boasting several masterful little set-pieces (we are startled by the sudden crack of a toy pistol as Nora revisits the scene of the crime, for example), the like of which would become Bava’s trademark. It’s also a pleasantly witty and wry film, recruiting a handful of colourful bit characters for comic relief (as most gialli subsequently would), and in a delicious nod to the novels that partly inspired it, Nora is revealed to be an avid Agatha Christie fan, something which severely undermines her credibility when trying to convince others that the mysterious murder actually took place. A scene in which our heroine sets up an elaborate, Home Alone-style trap to catch the killer is expertly played for laughs, and an audaciously silly drug smuggling subplot serves to bookend the action. As would become par-for-the-course with all great (and even some not so great) gialli, The Girl Who Knew Too Much has a cracking soundtrack to boot, including an ace title song by “Italian Elvis”, Adriano Celentano.

A year later Bava would further cultivate the giallo, before anyone else even had a chance to hand their work in, with Blood and Black Lace. Set in a surprisingly rural and remote fashion house teeming with manipulative models and duplicitous designers, it would mark the first appearance of the giallos identikit (at least until the denouement) villain, the black glove-clad and knife welding assassin of masked visage. While The Girl Who Knew Too Much was filmed in black and white, the release of Blood and Black Lace marked the giallos first outing in its trademark lurid Technicolor, and this complex and cut-throat concoction is now rightly heralded as a gruesome classic by a host of top film bods, including Martin Scorsese. In 1970 Bava returned to the genre for the thoroughly enjoyable 5 Dolls for an August Moon, based on Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, and featuring a fucking amazing soundtrack (matching blistering prog rock with funky compositions by Pier Umiliani, he of Mah Na, Mah Na fame). Not satisfied with effortlessly reeling off above average examples of the genre, he decided once more to raise the bar for the giallo with the body-count busting, randy teens caught in crossfire of summer camp property dispute massacre magnum opus Bloodbath (or A Bay of Blood, or Twitch of The Death Nerve. Giallo’s often come strewn with several alternative titles) in 1971. Bloodbath, featuring a legendary, preconception popping, head-spinner of an opening sequence in which the apparent killer is unceremoniously killed, presented the clearest pointer yet towards the American slasher films that would borrow heavily from the gialli, and this bonkers original was liberally pilfered from for the turgid Friday the 13^th. It also comes complete with another outrageously great soundtrack, and as far as I’m aware, neither the music for it nor 5 Dolls has ever seen official release. I believe an investigation is in order, Aneet.

Death Laid an Egg (1968) – Approaching the end of the 60s the giallo would add another key element to the mix, acquiring a strangely seductive psychedelic sheen, although this barmy yarn concerning murder among (you guessed it) chicken farmers takes it further than most.

Despite the appearance of a pair of bona fide A-list stars (as opposed to the procession of faded and jaded has-beens and hammy character actors that the genre would normally make do with) in Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gina Lollobrigida, Death Laid an Egg is the strangest, most perplexing giallo I have ever seen. Like the later Bloodbath, the motive here is potential financial gain through the acquisition of a lucrative piece of property by murderous means, in this case a state-of-the-art chicken farm. Trintignant has married Lollobrigida to get his hands on the feather-festooned fortune, and if that weren’t bad enough he’s also having an affair with her cousin AND murdering high-class hookers in his spare time (confusingly, that doesn’t necessarily make him the killer, so don’t get ahead of yourself). Further complications arise when his lover’s lover (they’re all at it, of course, being Italians) decides it is high-time he got rid of Trintignant, and before you know it there is some serious foul play (pun intended) afoot. There’s also a weird eco subplot concerning the genetically engineered growth of headless, legless chickens, in order to reap only the desired meat, which may have seemed preposterous at the time, but sadly doesn’t seem so silly these days (Minger Tower Burger, anyone?).

All these bizarre happenings are shot through with some appropriately crazy camerawork, and mind-boggling non-linear editing, leading some to venture that Death Laid an Egg resembles what might have been the result had a true creative maverick such as, say, Nicolas Roeg or Jean-Luc Godard, ever turned their hand to a giallo. That might be a little generous, but Death Laid an Egg is still a real original and marvellous fun, directed by a minor scale genius in his own right, Giulio Questi, who also helmed a strange variation on that other bloodthirsty Italian subgenre, the spaghetti western, with the unforgettably surreal Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! That cheekily unofficial sequel to the earlier Django is probably your best bet if you wish to see the fruits of Questi’s insane imagination splattered onscreen, as despite all its askew pluck (pun intended), Death Laid an Egg remains impossible to get hold of on any format.

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) – If you were forced (at knifepoint, perhaps) to compile a list of the key giallo directors in order of importance, you’d be certain to give the top places to Argento and Bava. The trickier to call third spot, however, would probably have to go to Sergio Martino. While nowhere near as talented as either aforementioned master, or indeed some other directors who dabbled in the genre, Martino’s efforts in the field would certainly be as influential on later gialli, and this marks his saucily titled entry into the world of grisly murder and even grislier interior design.

Perhaps the most iconic impression Martino would make on the giallo would be to coin the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire combo of Italian stalk ‘n’ slash, Edwige Fenech (who had earlier appeared in 5 Dolls for an August Moon) and George Hilton, seen together here for the first time. She was a willowy, haunted looking French-Algerian, who when she wasn’t racking up the gialli, also appeared in sex comedies with names like Cream Horn. He was a debonair, rugged looking Uruguayan, who when he wasn’t racking up the gialli, also appeared in action romps with names like Macho Killers. When they got together, it was movie magic. Well, sort of… But they’re both watchable and likeable enough, and they ably contribute the required oomph to The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh.

Fenech plays the wife of an American diplomat in Austria, and when a crazed maniac begins slicing up the lovely young ladies of Vienna, she fears she might be next. This fear is further enhanced by the fact her ex-husband, coincidentally enough also a crazed maniac, has started sending her some rather threatening letters. You’d think her present husband might be sympathetic, but he merely chides her mardily for being so bloody melodramatic all the time. Luckily, George Hilton is on hand, as a mysterious Irish (Irish!) playboy more than eager to lend a sympathetic ear, but is there more to him than meets the eye?

Influential in its being the first giallo to inject some unbridled raunchiness into the genre, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh might not be for those uneasy with a mix of sex and violence in film, but it is still relatively tame and doesn’t go half as far as some later titles. It is also a very effective thriller, and although he doesn’t possess the creative verve of an Argento or Bava, Martino steers this brilliantly in places, with a pursuit in an underground car park being particularly memorable. It also has an unpredictable and excellent (not to mention rather amusing) twist ending, and a suitably eerie, seductive soundtrack by Nora Orlandi.

Martino would later direct six more gialli, including The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (starring Hilton), Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (what a title! starring Fenech), and All the Colors of the Dark (starring Hilton AND Fenech, but dismissed by some, including myself, as being a) not really a giallo and b) not really any good).

Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971) – Some giallos are really rather good, most giallos are at least a bit bad. But, as we have already learned, even many of the very worst are still worth sitting through for any dedicated fan of the genre. A select few gialli, meanwhile, are authentic Grade A horror classics, and of the fewer still that are so, but which don’t bear the names of Argento or Bava, Short Night of the Glass Dolls is perhaps the most shining example of the genre at its very best.

Featuring Belle de Jour star turned giallo regular, Jean Sorel, part of what makes Short Night so special is that it is propelled along by an absolute humdinger of a premise. Sorel plays an American journalist in Cold War Prague (cue some breathtaking location filming), who awakens one morning with a bit of a problem… He’s dead. Except he’s not really dead, he’s actually been drugged to appear dead to everyone around him, and trapped inside his catatonic body he must rack his brain in order to figure out who put him in this state and why, all the while hoping that help arrives in time to stop the pathologist’s primed blade.

For fans of any genre, a film that can cleverly and creatively subvert the conventions of their favoured flicks is always more than welcome, and Short Night expertly stands the giallo on its head. Having the central protagonist essentially trying to solve his own murder is an invigorating twist, and although superficially similar to noir classic D.O.A., Short Night’s take on the idea makes for an engrossingly paranoid nightmare. The film is also beautifully shot and engagingly directed, playing its grim plot for every morbid note of fear and phobia it can wring out. It is also an example of the giallo at its most subtle, with a relatively low body-count, and murder scenes that are more often off-screen and eerie than in-your-face and gory. One memorably haunting kill takes place by moonlight on a steam enshrouded railway bridge.

The film was directed by debutant Aldo Lado, and we’ll hear some more from him a little bit later. In addition to the excellent Sorel (although he really only plays a corpse for the most part), the cast also features future Mrs Ringo Starr and Bond girl, Barbara Bach as a Czech dissident at the heart of the mystery, a strand which gifts the film some interesting political subtext. The atmospheric score, integral to the action, was composed by the giallo in-house composer, none other than the master of all film music himself, Ennio Morricone. Il Maestro Supremo would contribute the scores for at least a dozen gialli (including three sets for Dario Argento), and some of the best cuts are available on the superb Morricone Giallo compilation as lovingly collected by the fabulous Bella Casa label.

The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) – If Short Night of the Glass Dolls is a showcase example of just how chillingly captivating a giallo can be, then The Case of the Bloody Iris is the genre at its most raucous, rude, and fun. There are so many woolly and wacky twists and turns in Bloody Iris that I can’t really remember what actually happens in the central mystery, and I can only vaguely recall the identity of the killer, but it’s still one of my favourites because it’s so defiantly cheesy and cheerful that it is impossible not to love it.

Giallo golden couple Fenech and Hilton step out together once again, as a rash of killings take place in a thoroughly modern 60s apartment building. Fenech is a chic fashion model (a dangerous occupation to have in a giallo) who becomes embroiled in the grisly mystery after one of her colleagues turns up dead in said apartment building. Despite this tragic occurrence, she decides it would be a good idea for her and a gal pal to rent the dead girls apartment off hunky landlord Hilton, who then proceeds to give Fenech’s friend a tasty slap for having the nerve to be frightened about the fact that there’s a killer on the loose! As for the identity of the killer, there are more suspects than you can shake a stick at, including almost every occupant of the apartment block, and what a shady bunch of assorted perverts and weirdoes they are. And if all that weren’t bad enough, Fenech has yet another crazed maniac of an ex-husband to contend with, a la Mrs Wardh, this time the leader of a sadistic sex cult, who leaves the titular Bloody Iris as his calling card. What’s a girl to do?

Ah, it’s great fun indeed, The Case of the Bloody Iris. I thoroughly recommend it as a starting point for anybody interested in exploring the genre, perhaps as double bill with the more sophisticated Short Night of the Glass Dolls. Director Giuliano Carnimeo (using an excessively English pseudonym, in this case Anthony Ascott, as was strangely popular among Italian directors of the time) appears to have been a prolific hack, and his credits count more than a handful of spaghetti westerns, some of which also star George Hilton. The sloppy, dated direction of Bloody Iris, not to mention its raft of wooden performances, actually lend it a not inconsiderable nostalgic glow, and by approaching every scene and set-up with shrill excitement, Carnimeo never once allows us to get bored. I’d also like to give props to my favourite giallo comedy bit character of all time, the unbelievably Woody Allen-esque fashion photographer who isn’t in the least bit bothered that most of his subjects are being slaughtered. The snazzy, jazzy soundtrack, incidentally, was composed by another genre stalwart, and regular Morricone accomplice, Bruno Nicolai.

The Case of the Bloody Iris is killer kitsch at its best, who cares if you can’t remember who done it?

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) – After our old friends Dario and Mario, the most renowned director to put his name to a giallo was Lucio Fulci, even if he never immersed himself in the genre as fully, or with as successful results, as his peers were to. Aptly enough, however, for the director of such gut-wrenching gore-fests as Zombie Flesh Eaters (a classic) and The Beyond (not so good, amazing soundtrack), Fulci would soak his gialli in blood and guts, making them easily the goriest entries in the canon. Indeed, such a wizard with the old tomato sauce and cold vegetable soup was he that he was made to present the special effects from his debut giallo, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, to an Italian court of law in order to prove that he hadn’t actually mutilated a couple of dogs as depicted in the film.    

His second giallo, Don’t Torture a Duckling ups the gore to greater levels still, and features two unflinching set-pieces that are almost ludicrous in their sheer brutality, including a dizzyingly vicious whipping sequence, cruelly set to pappy muzak. It’s also a very compelling film, however, and one of only a small assortment of gialli which eschew the city for the countryside, with the picturesque rural setting lending it a shimmering, dreamlike quality that suits Fulci’s almost otherworldly touch very well. Some may find the storyline as troubling as the gore, with prepubescent boys being ruthlessly bumped off around the church playing fields in a small village. It’s a raw idea, to be sure, but it’s interestingly handled, as the fearful villagers emerge as a mistrustful, reactionary bunch following the village’s chief priest’s lead in pinning the murders on an ostracised gypsy witch. This leaves a reporter (spaghetti western regular and star of the aforementioned Django Kill, Tomas Milian) and a hedonistic socialite living in country retreat (Barbara Bouchet, second only to Edwige Fenech as the giallo queen and a former Bond girl) to approach the mystery without prejudice and lead the film to its gob-smashingly gruesome climax.   

Don’t Torture a Duckling (the meaning of the title is revealed towards the end, not that you necessarily expect these titles to mean anything) is a truly superb giallo, although it may be a little strong for some. And even if you’re not bothered by the gore or the storyline, the Bouchet character’s alarming penchant for seducing the terrorised young boys could still have the potential to cause offence. Both leads are very good, however, and the religious element to the storyline does give the film more depth than many of its contemporaries. Indeed, Duckling appears to have got the ball rolling for gialli that tackle church corruption, a rather taboo topic in staunchly catholic Italy. By the end of the 70s religious exploitation, or ‘nunsploitation’ films, close cousins of the giallo in form, would be briefly vogue in Italy, the most famous example being Killer Nun, starring faded Fellini muse, Anita Ekberg.

This was to be Tomas Milian’s sole appearance in a giallo, and he would later find wider fame as a supporting actor in several recent Hollywood films (Amistad, Traffic). Bouchet, too, would call time on her rather more considerable giallo career after filming wrapped, but can claim to have starred in three of the genre’s very best with this, The Red Queen Kills 7 Times and The Black Belly of the Tarantula (which stars no fewer than THREE Bond girls; Bouchet, of course, Short Night’s Barbara Bach, and Claudine Auger, who also appeared in Bava’s Bloodbath). The surprisingly versatile Fulci followed up Duckling with an adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang for Italian audiences, before striking gory gold with Zombie Flesh Eaters in 1979. He would not return to the giallo until the early 80s, when the genre was on its very last legs, with the sordid, ultra violent mess The New York Ripper, featuring a killer who incredibly disconcertingly has the voice of Donald Duck. As poor and unpleasant as that was, Fulci will always be highly regarded in giallo circles for chipping in with two high quality efforts, his best being Don’t Torture a Duckling.

Who Saw Her Die? (1972) – Aldo Lado’s third film as director, and his second giallo (I can’t find out a single thing about his second film, La Cossa Buffa, but it’s got a gorgeous Morricone soundtrack, available on Cinevox Records). After omitting Dario Argento from the list completely, and restricting Mario Bava to a single entry, how come I’m letting this Lado character in twice? Well, mainly because I feel he’s been unfairly overlooked in the past, and while not quite as inventive or taut, Who Saw Her Die? is as striking and distinct a giallo as his earlier Short Night of the Glass Dolls, and thus worthy of our attention.

We’ve already had a slew of Bond girls pass this way, but here comes the super-spy himself, as nobody’s favourite 007, George Lazenby, stars as one half of an estranged married couple, receiving a visit from his daughter in the haunting environs of Venice. As with Don’t Torture a Duckling, a child killer is on the loose, and a distracted Lazenby soon discovers his raincoat-clad daughter floating face down in one of the city’s famous canals. Wracked with guilt and grief, he sets out to find the culprit, aided by his spiritually troubled wife, and stumbles upon a fiercely guarded secret society of filthy Venetian bon vivants, who appear to be protecting the murderer’s identity for reasons he must uncover.

Following my first viewing of Who Saw Her Die? I immediately resolved to get in touch with Nicolas Roeg by any means necessary and inform him that I knew of his dirty little secret, and would only agree to keep quiet upon receipt of a generous bribe, or at least a signed Performance poster. Because, yes, the Venice setting, the estranged, grieving couple, the drowned girl in the mac; Who Saw Her Die? bears more than a passing resemblance in several places to Roeg’s legendary shocker Don’t Look Now, released a year later. Heck, Who Saw Her Die? even has it’s own touchy-feely, soft-focus sex scene between tearful spouses, as if further proof were needed. I eventually calmed down, however, after a friend pointed out to me that Don’t Look Now was in fact based on a 1971 short story by horror bard Daphne du Maurier (Hitchcock’s The Birds was also based on one of her tales), and it could simply be that Lado too had drawn inspiration from her writing and that the two directors had delivered occasionally similar interpretations.

Even so, I do still suspect that Roeg could well have seen Who Saw Her Die?, and while Lado’s film cannot really match the menacing majesty of Don’t Look Now, it is still an excellent film and an exemplary giallo. Beautifully filmed, and with a brain-jolting opening sequence, Lado shows us once more what a truly talented director he was, breathing the same air of atmospheric dread into this work as he did into Short Night. He displays another hand of superb set-pieces with a murder in an oversized birdcage and a beautifully photographed cat and mouse chase in a derelict warehouse, proving memorable this time round. This maudlin and mysterious atmosphere is further heightened by another peach of a Morricone score, and Lado uses his music as effectively here as he did in his earlier giallo. In fact, the intense, gothic sounds Morricone conjures up for this film (making excellent use of a creepy children’s choir) are, in my opinion, his best work for the genre, and sit comfortably with the best of his oeuvre in general.

For all that, though, Who Saw Her Die? is noticeably less assured than Short Night of the Glass Dolls, and does suffer from the odd lull while the mystery spools itself out. Also, those who squirmed uncomfortably through Don’t Torture a Duckling, might not enjoy sitting through scenes in which we see Lazenby’s young daughter stalked and murdered through the killer’s voyeuristic gaze. Lazenby (only onboard to help battle his post-Bond bankruptcy, according to Lado) himself further hamstrings the film by being atrociously dubbed in the English print, but that’s not his fault, and his bedraggled performance is fine (especially for such a commonly derided actor) and again seems very similar to the part played by Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now. Playing the spiritually troubled wife part that Julie Christie would later fill is another giallo queen, Anita Strindberg, who had previously featured in Fulci’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, and deputised for Edwige Fenech opposite George Hilton in Sergio Martino’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale. The doomed daughter should also be familiar to giallo fans as Nicoletta Elmi, who crops up as a precocious brat in both Bloodbath and Profondo Rosso.

Aldo Lado never returned to the giallo following this, and disappointingly his only subsequent film of note is the depressingly grim, astoundingly unpleasant, and ultimately unrewarding Last House on the Left variant, Night Train Murders (with music charitably donated this time by his old chum Morricone). Based on the ability he displays in Short Night of the Glass Dolls and Who Saw Her Die?, however, it is a shame for us that Lado either got lazy and lost his way or just never got the big break that his talent deserved.

(NB: Short Night of the Glass Dolls, The Case of the Bloody Iris, and Who Saw Her Die? are available for purchase together on Anchor Bay’s excellent Giallo Collection Boxset, which is an essential purchase for any prospective fan. The fourth film in the set, The Bloodstained Shadow lets the side down a little, being a much poorer effort than the others, but it still boasts an odd and enthralling low-speed boat chase, and a funky soundtrack by Argento faves Goblin. See, I told you even the bad ones have their good points)

The Killer Must Kill Again (1975) – And, rather unsurprisingly, he does kill again… What’s infinitely more surprising, however, is that we find out who he is in the first ten minutes, because, as with Short Night of the Glass Dolls, we are in the company of a giallo that isn’t afraid of messing about with the medium. Unlike Short Night, unfortunately, The Killer Must Kill Again isn’t strong enough to continue supplying convention defying curveballs all the way to the end, and it falls apart far sooner than it’s diabolically ingenuous premise deserves.

George Hilton (oh, yes) has a problem. He hates his wife, but he loves her money, and so is searching for a way to be rid of her so he can continue his philandering activities. One night whilst returning home from an illicit tryst, he happens to stumble upon the killer of the title in the act of disposing of his latest victim’s cadaver. Slyly pocketing a valuable piece of incriminating evidence to be used as a bartering tool, Hilton neglects to inform the police, and instead offers the murderer a proposition; bump off my wife for me, or I’ll turn you over to the authorities. The killer begrudgingly agrees, heads over to chez Hilton, and carries out his task with ruthless efficiency. He loads the body into his car, but turning his attention back to the house for a last-minute clear-up, he returns to discover his motor’s been pinched by a pair of teenage joyriders unaware of the dead body in the boot. The killer sets off in hot pursuit, but can he catch his folly before they discover their grim cargo?

That really is an opening salvo guaranteed to ensnare one’s attention, and while it could be argued that the removal of any mystery surrounding the identity of the killer undermines the film’s validity as a true giallo, the first half-hour is so loaded with great ideas that it more than compensates for it. The killer being forced to slay an unwanted wife at the behest of an immoral and opportunistic husband is one of the most original scenarios I have seen in a giallo, and the beginning of The Killer Must Kill Again resembles a pulpier take on one of the crafty, classy murder dramas of the great French New Wave auteur, Claude Chabrol (an amazing talent, unfairly filed behind Truffaut, Godard, and even boring old Eric Rohmer, most of the time), which is high praise, indeed. And almost as if one diamond idea wasn’t enough, The Killer follows it up almost instantly with another, with the car thieves unwittingly stealing the corpse from under the killer’s nose. This too bears traces of the Nouvelle Vague, with a similar development being employed by the magnificent Louis Malle for his smoky Gallic noir, Lift to the Scaffold (check it out, amazing Miles Davis soundtrack).

It’s such a shame, then, that The Killer Must Kill Again drops the ball so shortly after starting so well. When the killer finally catches up with the car thieves, a horny hoodlum and his innocent girlfriend, at a seaside retreat, rather than give his characters something better and more inventive to do, director Luigi Cozzi instead settles down for a seriously and uncomfortably overlong session of sexual violence. The rape scene in The Killer Must Kill Again isn’t just incredibly unpleasant to watch (although rape scenes are not often noted for their entertainment value) it is also completely unnecessary, and always feels to me like a massive cop-out. It is rendered all the more dubious by Cozzi’s decision to inter-cut it with an almost Confessions-like (consensual) softcore sex scene taking place elsewhere between another main character and a giddy young lady listed in the credits as ‘Dizzy Blonde’ (played by the notorious Femi Benussi, Eurosleaze fans). Some have suggested that this split sequence was an attempt by Cozzi to somehow comment on the responsibilities connected with sex and its consequences, or some such grandiose idea, but that’s never worked for me, because there’s just no place for such lofty, speculative notions in a giallo. I feel that, on one hand, the film is forced to descend into dumb depravity because Cozzi, having exerted himself in the opening third, had run out of ideas. On the other hand, I believe it might have been a carefully planned centrepiece to lure the new breed of horror fans seeking ever grimmer thrills because, by 1975 (The Last House on the Left was three years old by now), horror had begun merging with exploitation and was becoming ever more mercilessly brutal, leaving the generic and increasingly archaic giallo (all whodunit and Hitchcock) looking almost quaint by comparison. The end was nigh.

For all that, though, I still really like The Killer Must Kill Again, at least I really like the beginning of it, and I’m happy to say it picks itself up a bit at the end. It’s often said that a great beginning and/or end can make a film on its own, and I think that can be doubly true for genre films like gialli (I remember dozing my way through Pupi Avati’s seemingly tedious giallo The House With Laughing Windows, only to be rudely awakened by the profoundly unsettling climax, which served to redeem the entire film instantly). Cozzi’s direction is for the most part excellent, up until he lets the action unravel at any rate, and the cinematography looks ravishing in the recent print released on DVD by Mondo Macabro (the scene in which George Hilton propositions the killer at an ice rink, in particular, is quite breathtaking). The director is perhaps best known for being Dario Argento’s unofficial sidekick and, having co-wrote two Argento films (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll giallo, and the western The Five Days of Milan, Argento’s only non-horror film. Both are sadly unavailable), he now runs the maestro’s souvenir shop and museum in Rome (I’ve been, it’s fucking wicked). Among the other films he directed, his two schlock-y sci-fi rip-offs are perhaps the most famous; Starcrash (rips off Star Wars) and Contamination (rips off Alien), both of which most people hate, but I really quite like. The performances in The Killer Must Kill Again also help lift it to another level, with the normally charmingly limited George Hilton giving a great turn as the sleazy, scheming wannabe widower. The film’s best performance, however, is easily that given by the killer himself, Antoine Saint-John, a truly extraordinary looking man, with a face that is both coldly evil and coolly intelligent, who many may recognise as the German tank commander in Sergio Leone’s underrated A Fistful of Dynamite. He would later play a Satanic painter who meets his sticky end after a ferocious whipping administered by Lucio Fulci, who obviously had a bit of a fetish, this time in The Beyond.

As we near the end I think we’ve cracked the case. The giallo is the guilty culprit, and has been unmasked as the weirdest, most wonderful, most vibrant and colourful horror subgenre there’s ever been. After its 60s and 70s heyday, it met a grisly demise and despite Dario Argento continuing to use it as a template for many of his recent films, attempts at revival have usually failed (although Michele Soavi’s 1987 effort Deliria and Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato’s insane Washing Machine from 1993, might both be worth a look). Having said that, Argento is currently filming what looks set to be his most high-profile release for years (following his disappointingly received Suspiria sequel), a straight giallo which is very imaginitively titled Giallo, and which could prove to be the catalyst for a major revival. Remember where you read it first. You read it at Days are Numbers first. We take great pride in keeping you abreast of such things.

Actually, if any particularly pragmatic film producers are looking to cash in on this forthcoming revival, my best buddy, former flatmate, and fellow gialli traveller Richard and I once had a stab at penning a giallo of our own. It was set in a museum, a great and underused setting for a giallo, I think, and I’ve still got the first draft if anyone wants to option it. All we need is an appropriately outlandish and unorthodox title and we’re away. Three Rabbits on the Knife’s Edge? The Killer Is Late For Work? Killerio?

Whilst writing this giallo of ours we piled through as many as we could get our hands on (Richard has a terrific copy of Bloodbath, the blurb on the back of which insists the film cannot be watched without a face-to-face warning, whatever that means), at a time when most were being made available, mainly by tiny no-thrills DVD distributors, for home viewing for the first time since the pre-cert video boom of the late 70s/early 80s. At the height of our giallo fever we were getting through several per week and sometimes even a couple per day. I remember once taking a break from all this saucy slash to go and watch something reassuringly normal at the cinema, History Boys, of all things. As I sat there watching this bland, sentimental tripe, I had a deeply unpleasant feeling that something was missing, something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. This feeling kept troubling me until I released that I had been unconsciously sitting there watching History Boys and waiting for someone to get murdered! That’s how much I had immersed myself in the giallo, dear reader; I had accidentally re-programmed my mind to anticipate a violent murder in every film and television programme I watched. These were dark and dangerous times, indeed.

But that’s another thing I dearly love about gialli, there are so bloody many of them that you can’t believe you never noticed they existed before you did. Provided you get hooked, it’s a dream genre for anyone with an insatiable completeist streak. There is a seemingly limitless supply of curios to be unearthed (my strangest discovery: Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye, a Scottish castle-based giallo starring Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. I kid ye not), even if the rank and file giallo is often complete dross. But, of course, many are not, and that is my favourite thing of all about the giallo. For a niche subgenre operating with both narrative and stylistic constrictions, it has an incredibly high strike rate, and I’ll never stop coming back to it for more.

The giallo; truly a cut above.