The gothic strain in Italian cinema came into its own in 1957 with I Vampiri, co-directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava. Gothicism has been said to combine melodrama, excess, and transgression—elements that Freda and Bava’s film conveys in spades. But right off the bat, the film introduced a new wrinkle into the musty old scenery of the classic gothic by staging its tenebrous horrors against the backdrop of the modern world.
The films collected in Gothic Fantastico: Four Italian Tales of Terror split the difference in this regard. Two take place in the distant past of the 19th century, while the other two are decidedly contemporary in their settings. Whatever the stagecraft, though, all four of them deliver the goods when it comes to the very definition of the gothic tale.
Massimo Pupillo’s Lady Morgan’s Vengeance delights in its genre trappings: baleful mesmerism, intimations of necrophilia, and even blood-sucking specters. The first half of this playful film’s narrative concerns the marriage of Lady Susan Blackhouse (Barbara Nelli) to Lord Harold Morgan (Paul Muller). After disposing of her preferred beau, Pierre (Michel Forain), by having him shoved overboard, Lord Harold engages in a plot to gaslight Susan into committing suicide so he can collect her inheritance. He’s aided in this scheme by sadistic housekeeper Lillian (Erika Blanc) and hulking majordomo Roger (Gordon Mitchell).
Following Susan’s shocking plunge from the battlements to her death, the film’s second half takes some truly unexpected twists. The least of them is that Pierre isn’t actually dead. Upon recuperating from his dunking, he returns to Blackhouse Manor looking for Susan. Soon they’re reunited and consummate their love, after which Susan reveals the niggling fact that she’s actually deceased. Lady Morgan’s Vengeance then morphs briefly into a tragic, doomed romance with a certain poignancy, only for it to hurry on to the next thing as Susan regales Pierre with the story of her titular vengeance in a lengthy flashback. The way this whole section of the narrative plays out is initially baffling, with Susan seemingly alive at first, then confirmed dead, yet able to make love with Pierre before becoming disincarnate again.
The disorienting flashback reveals that Susan’s wrongdoers, who we saw listening outside her door as she and Pierre canoodled, are also dead, picked off one by one by means of her spectral influence. Nothing is what it appears to be at first. The increasingly ghastly revenge sequence allows Pupillo to fully indulge in some cinematic sleight of hand, as Susan uses parlor tricks like turning whiskey into water to destabilize her tormentors and turn them against each other. But Susan’s victory proves pyrrhic. The dead can subsist if they feed regularly on blood. And all their eyes are on Pierre. The film then twists again into a really downbeat ending.
Alberto De Martino’s The Blancheville Monster plays like the Italian response to Roger Corman’s cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, blending elements of several stories (most notably The Fall of the House of Usher and The Premature Burial) into a delightfully atmospheric mélange. If a storyline involving the use of mesmerism to gaslight a young woman to the brink of death (and beyond) sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because this film is co-written by one of Lady Morgan’s Vengeance’s screenwriters, Giovanni Grimaldi. This time out it’s young Emilie De Blancheville (Ombretta Colli) who finds herself at the mercy of a cloaked and disfigured individual bent on driving her to an early grave in the family crypt. In proper gothic fashion, there’s a family curse that says the De Blancheville family is doomed should the first-born daughter reach the age of 21. Guess who’s got a birthday coming up?
The film spends a lot of time directing suspicion either at Emilie’s brother, Rodéric (Gérard Tichy), or else the Byronic local doctor, LaRouche (Leo Anchóriz). After a certain point, it’s not particularly difficult to guess which one it is, but the fact that the film evolves into something of a whodunit (even if it falls a bit too much on the Scooby Doo end of the spectrum) is an interesting spin on the subject matter, and nowhere to be found in the source material. The payoff for the culprit is properly poetic, and the film ends with its two romantic couples driving off into a future that might’ve been written by Jane Austen rather than Poe.
Mino Guerinni’s The Third Eye is the first of two modern-day takes on the gothic included in this set. The primary touchstone here would be Hitchcock’s Psycho, since The Third Eye also concerns a mother-obsessed young man with a penchant for taxidermy. But the elements are deployed in some unpredictable ways. Wandering the dilapidated halls of his ancestral palazzo, Count Mino (Franco Nero) seeks the approval of his stern mother (Olga Solbelli) for his proposed marriage to Laura (Erika Blanc), but that’s something she denies him. Equally critical of the match is the housemaid, Marta (Gioia Pascal), who wants the count for herself.
After Marta engineers the deaths of both Laura and Mino’s mother, Mino collapses mentally and physically, a moment of psychological trauma that Guerinni visualizes through the canny use of superimpositions and double exposures. Mino’s breakdown sends him out into the modern world to seek out victims for his cold embrace, a kind of lovemaking that ritualistically combines sex and death. Adding to the surreal grotesquerie of these scenes is the presence of the preserved body of Laura in the bed next to the prospective lovers. The Third Eye ups the ante on the notion of necrophilia that an earlier film like Lady Morgan’s Vengeance coyly skirted around, putting it front and center in a truly unnerving manner.
Easily the most ambitious film in the set, Damiano Damiani’s The Witch straddles the line between arthouse and genre cinema. Loosely based on a Carlos Fuentes novella, the film slyly plays around with elements of witch iconography of both the historical and fairy-tale variety. Inveterate womanizer Sergio (Richard Johnson) discovers a wanted ad that seems tailor-made just for him, working to catalog a library owned by a handsome older woman, Consuelo (Sarah Ferrati). Sergio decides to accept the job only after meeting lovely young Aura (Rosanna Schiaffino), Consuelo’s fetching daughter. Further complicating matters is the presence of Fabrizio (Gian Maria Volontè) on the premises, who apparently already has the job intended for Sergio. Fabrizio is like a figure out of Dostoevsky, alternately aggressive and cowering.
The film makes much of the erotic triangle between Sergio, Aura, and Fabrizio, which Consuelo seems to stage manage, despite her frequent absence from the scene. When mother and daughter are together, The Witch often shows them as mirror images, performing the same gesture, or answering in unison. Ultimately, they prove to be two aspects of the titular entity: maiden and crone, the virgin and the virago. Unwilling to suffer the same downfall as Fabrizio, Sergio performs a very modern version of an ancient ritual of purgation and destruction. The film itself never makes it entirely clear whether it endorses these developments, thereby positioning masculinity as something that needs protecting against the devouring feminine, or if it in fact is satirizing these very conservative and patriarchal notions.
Image/Sound
Arrow offers all four films in brand new 2K restorations from the original camera negatives, and they look excellent, their crisp black-and-white cinematography standing out with deep, uncrushed blacks and pleasing amounts of depth and clarity to the image overall. Audio comes in either English of Italian LPCM mono mixes for each title except Lady Morgan’s Vengeance, which is available only in Italian. The tracks sound relatively full and rich, considering the fact that they were all looped in post. The scores—from composers like Piero Umiliani, Francesco De Masi, and Luis Bacalov—all come across with wonderful richness and resonance.
Extras
Each film comes with an introduction from Italian film devotee Mark Thompson Ashworth that abounds in light context and significant appreciation. Things get a bit deeper with visual essays that examine themes and motifs evident in the films. The commentary tracks run the gamut from an emphasis on production history to broader examinations of the gothic mode both in its literary source materials as well as its specifically Italian cinematic tradition. Interviews with individual cast and crew members find them reflecting on their on-set experiences. Inside the slipcase there’s a double-sided fold-out poster with artwork for The Blancheville Monster (under its alternate Horror title) and The Third Eye, and a lavishly illustrated 80-page book with essays on Italian gothic cinema in general as well as the individual films.
Overall
Arrow Video’s Gothic Fantastico: Four Italian Tales of Terror contains some gorgeously restored genre offerings buttressed by a full roster of informative extras.
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