When Horror Came to Shochiku (1967-1968) dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu; Hajime Sato; Hiroshi Matsuno

When Horror Came To Shochiku, The Criterion Collection's 37th release in their Eclipse Series, which strives to provide under-appreciated cinematic gems in moderately inexpensive no-frills DVD collections, is their first dedicated strictly to horror. Though the Criterion Collection is no stranger to Japanese horror cinema-- having previously released Godzilla (1954), Jigoku (1960), Onibaba (1964), Kwaidan (1965), Kurnoneko (1968), and Hausu (1977) in the mainline series-- the four films contained in this new Eclipse set are struck from an almost totally unique vein of genre referents. Those other Criterion horrors belong to a long tradition of Japanese horror cinema that finds inspiration in Japanese cultural mythology, tradition, religious practice, or (in the case of Godzilla) uniquely Japanese ecological concerns. Shochiku Studio's horror output (these four films making up the sum total of it) is more clearly derived from Western cinema, with its multinational casts and decided avoidance of blatant Japanese cultural signifiers leaving each film feeling as if it has been primed for international export. But it would be wrong to call the films mere imitations of horror films with Western sensibilities. Rather, the films engage an assortment of disparate genre conventions from both East and West--ghosts (maboroshi), aliens, giant monsters (dai-kaiju), UFOs, doppelgangers, killer insects, vampires, mad scientists, nuclear disasters--in their frenzied, low-budget madness, producing a quartet of simultaneously goofy and thrilling films that are, frankly, unclassifiable.

The X from Outer Space (1967) dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu

A cloyingly mirthful romantic comedy (in space!) meets a most preposterous giant rubber-suited monster movie, The X from Outer Space is Shochiku's attempt at mining the lucrative kaiju pot and winding up with one of the more bizarre and schizophrenic (though cheerfully optimistic) entries in the canon. It opens at the headquarters of one of those ideal Star Trek era international, multicultural space programs, which, for reasons left sketchy, sends a happy-go-lucky shuttle team into the void of space on a mission to Mars. Six previous missions have failed due to inexplicable UFO interference, and this expedition turns out much the same, with a UFO that looks akin to "the world's largest fried egg" bungling communications and forcing the "astroboat" to take respite on the moon, upon which her unfazed crew flirt with each other and bounce around to the tune of Latin-flavored ballroom music. Soon after the crew set off again, coming into contact with the UFO once more and having their ship's hull covered with blinking, frosted eggs. Scraping one off for a sample and bringing it back to Earth results in the astronauts unleashing the swift development of a gigantic space monster... possessing all the visual ferocity of an antennaed chicken with ruffled sleeves. This monster, dubbed Guilala, birthed in a shower of fireworks and lava, soon makes short work of a cardboard and plaster city, stumbling his gangly way towards the nearest power sources while floor-punching buildings and letting fighter jets crash into his head all the while. He consumes electricity and nuclear power for energy, see, (looking as if he's mindlessly orgasming while doing so), and it'll take the military's combined strength to cover him in shaving cream before he wreaks irreparable damage. In the Eclipse set's liner notes, critic Chuck Stephens pokes fun at the notion of reading any deep themes emanating from either the film's slight interracial romance drama or glowing space omelet. He's right, but I can't help but be floored by the wistfulness with which the survivors talk about Guilala in the immediate aftermath of his killing (probably) tens of thousands of people and the glib lesson that the experience of the frilly chicken monster has taught to blonde-haired astronaut Lisa (Peggy Neal), who then applies it to her love life: "All things should remain where they belong."

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968) dir. Hajime Sato

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell has the distinction of being the the most visually audacious of the Shochiku horrors. Commencing on a jetliner coasting cautiously through a blood red sky full of blood red clouds, it's no great surprise when events take a turn for the grisly and extravagant. Multiple birds suicide against the windshield, shady deals begin to unfold between the passengers, and a mysterious man attempts a hijacking. The plane loses control and crashes into a mountaintop before anything is resolved, but the situation only escalates from there: the hijacker's body is overtaken by an alien entity in the form of a slithering pile of silver metallic goo that enters him, quite graphically, through a yonic wound it creates on his forehead. The vaginal imagery in this wound is explicit, and the hijacker's campaign of alien-fueled sexual vampirism (enacted indiscriminately on both men and women) complicates the usual gender-specific vampire/victim relationships in an equally interesting and bizarre manner. Also of note is the film's blanket condemnation of human aggression, here pointed squarely at the conflict in Vietnam. The specter of the Vietnam War hovers over everything in the film: a blonde haired American passenger is traveling to pick up the body of her deceased soldier husband, another passenger is an arms dealer setting up dubious exchanges, and the Vietnam War gives the invading alien species the justification it seems to require in order to initiate the genocide of humankind, in a sort of "you-had-it-all-and-screwed-it-all-up" mass shunning. The alien envoy offers "no repentance" to the irresponsible humans and neither does Goke. Innocents die in extreme and merciless fashion, a black and white photo montage of images from Vietnam reminding us of the source of its resolve. As the film ends on a breathtaking apocalyptic tableau, there's little question that director Hajime Sato has painted a bold political critique on his brazen and tawdry genre canvas.

The Living Skeleton (1968) dir. Hiroshi Matsuno

Shochiku's most fascinating genre mashup, The Living Skeleton combines elements of murderous pirates, haunted boats, vengeful ghosts, mad scientists, disguised psychopaths, and wayward bats. The only of these films shot in black and white, its delectable cinematography casts a rain-soaked melancholy over this outwardly simple yet increasingly convoluted tale. It's also the most charmingly spartan production, its hokey special effects (misshapen plastic skeletons floating at the bottom of the ocean, toy boats caught in bathtub storms, rubber bats on strings being thunked against windows) never detracting from the poignancy of the tale in any meaningful way. An initial scene of a group of pirates machine-gunning a boat's restrained passengers segues to events transpiring three years later. Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka) is a young girl taken in by a priest after her identical twin sister (one of the victims in the opening scene) disappeared at sea without a trace. When the long-missing ship that her sister was a passenger on reappears off in the distance of the waters of this seaside village, Saeko and her boyfriend take a disastrous boat ride out to it in a storm. In the aftermath, a ghostly doppelganger begins to take bloody, brutal vengeance on the pirates, most of whom have established themselves as "respectable" members of society with the booty they acquired from the heist. Through this section the film is comfortably formulaic. But, after the surprise strangulation of a main character and the reveal of the sadistic and hypocritical murderer's true identity, The Living Skeleton forgets itself in its perverse ride towards its conclusion. This is assuredly a good thing. The film's most unsettling sounds and images arise from this wild abandon: a sunken-eyed doctor who sleeps on an abandoned ship curled up next to the mummified corpse of his wife with a syringe in his hand and a tape recorder playing the sounds of her orgasmic/tortured moans on a table in the background; a possibly sentient but expressionless corpse clinging with unearthly strength to a man's leg as he drags her along; a boat's superstructure literally melting into the sea. Only in its final, mournful moments does it feel like its contemporaneous Japanese ghost story brethren-- what came before is far too strange and indelibly Western (placing a certain emphasis on Christianity and go-go clubs) to warrant such a simple classification.

Genocide (1968) dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu

The year after helming The X from Outer Space, director Kazui Nihonmatsu returned to Shochiku for another science fiction/horror hybrid, which turned out to be his last for the studio. Genocide is in every way a more accomplished effort than Nihonmatsu's previous film. Its apocalyptic horror derives from a wildly absurd scenario that tops Goke's while sharing a basic resemblance: as nuclear tensions between the Eastern and Western blocs heighten, colossal intelligent swarms of genetically modified insects decide that they would rather wipe out humanity first than risk obliteration at the whims of irresponsible and reckless human beings. No lie, the clever, evolved insects actually communicate this exact intention to a character while he's in a poison-induced trance. The misanthropic ecological message is bolstered by the film's characters, who prove themselves to be all too eager to betray and murder each other, even when facing the total extinction of the human species. Even the character who one would imagine to be the most sympathetic-- a (surprise) blonde-haired Jewish woman named Annabelle (Kathy Horan) who was raped and witnessed the deaths of her whole family while imprisoned in Auschwitz (and who spouts a line that would proudly grace the cover of any lurid 1950s Men's Adventure magazine: "Nazi Soldiers Made Me Their Plaything")-- actively seeks the eradication of humankind because she doesn't "trust humans beings anymore." Because Annabelle, when not scheming, is also the deceitful "plump white butterfly" lover of one the film's main characters, a married Japanese man, the film is also making a more pointed condemnation of interracial relationships than The X from Outer Space could-- sunbathe with a blonde white girl and you just might be precipitating the Insect Armageddon. In addition, there are a slew of unnerving moments here, particularly the bloody mess that the swarms of insects leave when they decide to suicide en masse against the windshields of planes and the agonized sounds of monkeys being wantonly killed by the insects, overheard by two characters as they await their own imminent fates under the protection of a flimsy wooden shack. The film concludes, swiftly, with a murder, a suicide, a plane exploding, an H-bomb detonating, most of the main characters perishing, the insect menace still very much a reality, and a lone pregnant woman stranded in a boat staring at the scorched sun and sky. The events serve as an echo of one of the film's earlier sentiments: "The world in indeed full of chaos and danger."  

Bloody Pit of Horror (1965) dir. Massimo Pupillo

a.k.a. Il boia scarlatto 

Logline: In the 17th-century, a megalomaniacal recluse who dons a cape and calls himself the Crimson Executioner (Mickey Hargitay) is executed in an Iron Maiden for the crimes he had committed in his basement's own fully operational torture chamber. In 1965, a plucky group consisting of a book publisher, a photographer, and a fistful of fashion models sneak into the Crimson Executioner's seemingly abandoned Gothic castle abode to snap some kitschy photographs. Soon they discover the castle's new owner, eccentric actor Travis Anderson (also Mickey Hargitay), who is only too happy to let them stay the night and meet a certain resurrected red-hooded fiend.

Bloody Pit of Horror is a fine modern Gothic chiller that-- like the best of them-- uses this context to explore the sexual mores of its age. Unfortunately, what we're given is a rather conservative film seeking to restore heteronormative values against the threat of perversion. Like Freddie Francis' The Skull (also produced in 1965), Bloody Pit of Horror's invocation of the name of the Marquis de Sade (in this case by way of a disingenuous title card claiming that it's "based on the writings of") is intended to clue the viewer into this intention: any proclivities associated with that sick, sick de Sade surely cannot be natural, sane, or morally sound. That's precisely what the film argues with regard to male homosexuality. It's a disappointing thesis, but one that is intriguing for the overt ways the film goes about arguing it and, to a small degree, the ways in which it subverts that same point.

Our homosexual villain is bulging beefcakey muscleman and Italian genre veteran Mickey Hargitay as Travis, a self-obsessed actor turned recluse. Travis' egotism is astounding both for its depth and for his apparent consciousness of it. He has retreated to this abandoned castle in order "to avoid the contagion of human sentiment" by escaping from other humans, those "inferior creatures" who would have "corrupted the harmony of [his] perfect body." (A scene of him delicately oiling up his muscles in front of a mirror confirms he is totally serious about that last part). But Travis isn't being completely forthright in claiming that he's sworn off all human contact: this would be omitting all of the hunky manservants (dressed up in blue and white stripped shirts like sailors, no less!) at his beck and call. Moreover, another of his revealing speeches makes plain his affection for the long departed Crimson Executioner's "magnificent body." It's the male physique he worships, and escaping from society was an escape from the pressures to submit to "a woman's love," which, he freely admits, would have "destroyed" him.

Travis/the Crimson Executioner 2.0 is such a fascinating homosexual villain for 1965 because he exists completely against type. Atypically, the gay man is not a sniveling, effeminate weakling but Mr. Universe 1955. Perhaps it's a stretch to call Hargitay a heartthrob, per se, but his screen presence certainly oozes testosterone. In fact, when he first starts making eyes at the models we imagine him to be leering at and openly coveting them. The movie plays up on this default association of physical manliness with uncontrollable heterosexuality for awhile (preventing us from immediately seeing the fate of a model who we can only assume is about to be sexually assaulted), before it begins to let us realize that Travis in fact despises women and hopes to punish them all for "lechery" and "sin." Under the hood of the Crimson Executioner, Travis attacks femininity, rather than fetishizing it. The torture devices he constructs are methods for him to rebel against the "poisonous" influence of women by destroying those aspects that make them women. Particularly exemplary is a bizarre torture apparatus featuring two women strapped to a revolving pillar, one side of which faces a wall of openings through which adjustable lengths of sword can be slid. Travis violently inches the blades closer to the women's breasts on each pass, taking sadistic pleasure in the feminine symbol he is tearing apart and scarring.

So, of course, the film argues that the only way a homosexual man can stay sane and maintain his lifestyle is by going insane and destroying the women in his life. In other words, the film seems to believe that there is something psychotic, perverse, unnatural, and perhaps even evil in a man (especially a manly man) desiring other men and forsaking women. In the end, Travis is killed by falling into an embrace with his own misogynist creation: a poison-tipped dummy wearing a blonde wig, or his own manufactured symbol of poisonous femininity. Before he meekly collapses to the ground, he moans, "My pure body has been contaminated. My perfect body in the poisonous clutches of the lover of death." Heterosexuality (or the "natural order") is reaffirmed by Travis' death-by-sexual-contact and the reunion of our bland de facto hero Rick (Walter Brandi) with his girlfriend, Edith (Luisa Baratto). But this is troublesome. Rick has proved to be a totally ineffectual schlub throughout the film (he fails to save anyone other than Edith, despite his every halfhearted effort). Placed against Travis' ingenuity, passion, and charisma-- however insane they may be-- Rick is an odd and dissatisfying choice for being the bearer of the new male standard. How sad for Edith. All of those deranged gay musclemen get to frolic around together shirtless in Gothic castles while she's stuck trying to start a conversation with insipid Rick.

 

I'd be remiss if I failed to point out that I enjoyed Bloody Pit of Horror greatly, in spite of its clunky and backwards subtext. Its sublimely cheap Gothic castle setting, over-elaborate torture devices, giant mechanical spiders, cheesy sense of humor, and bouts of prurient extravagance led me to lend it at least a sliver of my heart. And, furthermore, not all of the film's thematic concerns are completely bunk. Somewhat clever are the macabre photo shoots staged by the hip crew staying at the castle, wherein they lampoon Gothic conventions only to have those same conventions later usher them to their own dooms. One model, staged on the floor in a puddle of blood, quips, "It's no fun being dead"-- a classic case of allowing the harmless simulations of dangers to supplant the real dangers, leaving one totally unprepared and unsuspecting of those very real real dangers (see Dick Richards' Death Valley (1982) for a more developed treatment of the same idea). Director Massimo Pupillo was having his own personal Italian Gothic Renaissance in 1965, directing both this film and Terror-Creatures from the Grave, with Barbara Steele. I've yet to see the latter, but only one of them can boast the proud distinction of being filmed, as Bloody Pit of Horror's credits so garishly (dare we say gaily?) proclaim, "in Psychovision."

Alucarda (1977) dir. Juan López Moctezuma

a.k.a. Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas 

Logline: Fresh-faced orphan Justine (Susana Kamini) arrives at an orphanage run by a Mexican convent. While there, she makes fast friends with her spooky and easily attached new roommate, Alucarda (Tina Romero). Not long after a jaunt through the forest, in which the pair encountered a hunchbacked gypsy and broke open a sacred crypt, both girls start hissing at crucifixes.

A cursory search reveals that between the beginning of the 1950s and the close of the 1970s Mexico developed a comparatively small but rather rich horror cinema tradition, of which I remain mostly ignorant. Viewing Juan López Moctezuma's Alucarda was my first step towards a corrective, and while it may only be unearthing the topsoil of the country's deeper filmography, what a way to begin digging myself into the hole. Alucarda is a film quite unlike any other I've seen. It bears traces of the religious hysterics and sacrilege of Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) and the surreality of Alejando Jordorowsky's films (which is appropriate considering Moctezuma was a producer on Fando y Lis (1968) and El Topo (1970) before embarking on his own brief directorial career), but neither of those basic attributes suffices to describe all of the bold, dreamy, gory, histrionic, and excessive levels that Alucarda operates on. What opens as a whimsical period fairytale devolves over the film's condensed duration into inspired bits of madness and bloodshed, accompanied by the wailing of banshees. I'd marvelled at the intensity of Alain Robak's Baby Blood (1990) earlier in the month, but I suppose that was because I hadn't yet seen Alucarda. Moctezuma's film is as much an experience as it is a piece of cinema or a coherent narrative, and it's for this reason that it fits comfortably alongside similarly abstract and sensory  horror productions from the Continent during this same period.

The film centers itself on the taboo relationship between the titular Alucarda and the orphanage/convent's latest recruit, Justine. While Justine is the typical wide-eyed innocent, Tina Romero plays Alucarda as an eccentric and singular oddity. With her flowing brown mane and long black dress, she's the happy goth prancing around the forest, playing with insects, and conspiratorially declaring "every day I find a new secret." The ingratiating extrovert that she is, Alucarda forces her eternal friendship onto Justine, her new roommate. After the two embark on an afternoon's journey to discover some "new secrets," Alucarda confesses her undying love for Justine. Her quite sudden and exaggerated affections take on more of a sexual than a schoolgirl connotation-- she commands that Justine "must love [her] to death," and urges her towards agreeing to a suicide pact sealed with blood. When the girls arrive at Lucy Westenra's tomb (how she arrived in Mexico is beyond me) and crack open her coffin, they unleash demons that possess Alucarda, who goes into a hysterical fit (the word "Satan!" is bandied about quite a lot) and, with the help of a magical hunchbacked goat gypsy and his magic storm of raining blood, possesses Justine as well during an eroticized nude blood sharing ceremony (in which they suck the blood from wounds on each other's breasts). Henceforth Satanically influenced, the girls then fall deeper in love and participate in a kinky and perhaps hallucinatory Satanic orgy led by a goat-headed man. By this point the subtext reveals itself: the perception of lesbianism in society is that it is an anomalous and morally corrupt lifestyle, and its appeal to young girls can only be explained through Satanic and demonic forces. Moreover, lesbians breed lesbianism, as the perverting influence of the aggressive and deranged lesbian Alucarda seduces the helpless innocent Justine into her newfound wicked ways.

But to claim that the film is totally in accordance with this societal perception of the "horrors" of lesbianism would be to overlook the film's overt criticisms of religious moralism. Alucarda makes the religious hypocrisy plain when speaking to Father Lázaro (David Silva) in confession: "I worship life. You worship death. You are afraid of life, afraid of your strong body." She's not wrong. Alucarda and Justine's whimsical lesbianism (and specifically the Satanic orgy that they participate in) is contrasted with the activities of Father Lázaro and his nuns, who in one scene submit themselves to brutal, bloody, and sexually charged flagellation to atone for their sins. As their exposed flesh gleams with sweat and blood and as the nuns writhe in commingled agony/ecstasy, this scene appears to mirror the eroticism of the Satanic orgy but with one key difference: only the participants of one of these gatherings violently denies their own sexual desires. Vowing to protect the religious repression of sexuality and its physical expression by any means, Father Lázaro decides that he and his nuns must destroy the girls in order to set them "free." He surmises that if lesbianism is akin to Satanic possession, then non-heteronormative behavior can be exorcized. They abduct the two girls, and in a perverse ceremony straight out of the 15th century, they repeatedly stab Justine to death while she's strapped to a crucifix-- the violent introduction of the phallic knife into the body in order to cure her of lesbian possession. It's a horrifying and barbaric act, tearing apart two lovers for no valid reason. (The worst they'd done was declare their mutual allegiance to Satan during Bible study, which, sure, was a misapprehension of the situation and audience, but was far less than evil).

Somewhat complicating the above reading of the film is that both demonic and heavenly forces are clearly real in the film (we have levitating nuns and firestarting demons, after all), but neither force is obviously deemed the moral superior. We'd lean towards the demonic side if it weren't for the fact that they start killing the clergy. (But then, one supposes this treatment isn't totally undeserved). After the ceremony in which Justine "dies," the final act begins in earnest, with Alucarda launching into an all out revenge-fueled Carrie rampage, setting nuns and crucifixes on fire with her brain and tearing down the convent's foundations through sheer force of will and a handful of menacing glances. The finale is a frantically paced Grand Guignol, which may distract from the fact that though Alucarda and Justine lay vanquished at the conclusion, this is no moral victory.* The film closes on a shot of the figure of Jesus Christ in flames on a burning crucifix. I suppose one could claim that Alucarda and Justine's sacrilege had led to this defilement of religious imagery, but I'd hazard that the film's sentiments argue that the Church brought such destruction upon itself through the appropriation of that same imagery while committing some very bad deeds.

*Perhaps the surface level victory of "good" over "evil" was just misleading enough to let the film slip past censors and the general public's outrage without too much controversy.

A Bell from Hell (1973) dir. Claudio Guerín

a.k.a. La campana del infierno

Logline: John (Renaud Verley) is a motorcycle-riding, free-loving, intensely serious young man unjustly locked up in an asylum by his aunt and three cousins, who declared him insane so that they could claim the generous inheritance left to him by his parents. Upon his early release, John vows to take revenge against his duplicitous extended family members by concocting an even more elaborate scheme and proving that his confinement has turned him into every bit the psychopath that they said he was.

Enigmatic to a fault, Claudio Guerín's A Bell from Hell is probably best summarized by its most beautiful image: the rebellious John rides his motorcycle across a beach at night towards a Gothic castle shrouded in a layer of fog through which he soon vanishes. It's a suitable metaphor, as a figurative blanket of fog surrounds the entire film, preventing the viewer from grasping any but the most fleeting of impressions or interpretations. As the film concludes, the viewer mostly understands what has happened but the reasons informing the events have slipped away. Character motivations are ambiguous, and sympathies prove difficult to place with any confidence. Tonally hyperactive, it slips from Gothic to sleaze, from Mondo to sex comedy, producing an uneasy intermingling. In one regard, A Bell from Hell feels deliberately abstruse, like an arty European horror in the tradition of Rollin and Franco that strives to embody the thematically ephemeral and morally indistinct. But in other aspects it feels incomplete, like the loose assemblage of the stock situations from a hundred other European horrors with only a shared set of characters connecting them. Perhaps this state of incompleteness is not perceived in error: Guerín, a first time film director, fell to his death on the last day of principal photography from atop the bell tower constructed for the film's climax. The film was completed by compatriot Juan Antonio Bardem (The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973)), who one can say did an admirable job in attempting to fit together the amorphous jigsaw pieces that Guerín left behind him. But there's only so much to be made of this puzzle. A Bell from Hell is a film constructed of barely congruous components striving towards every endpoint at once-- a series of moods and feelings set to images and sounds. To rephrase: a film destined (perhaps desiring) to alienate most viewers.

The foundational ambivalence of the film is seen nowhere more clearly than in the example of its protagonist, John, who is one of those all-too-rare amiable sociopaths. Having been released from his enforced and perhaps wrongful imprisonment in a mental asylum, he immediately begins to plan some grisly revenge against the aunt and cousins who put him there. This isn't any simple sort of revenge: he plans on employing a hive of bees to sting his aunt to death and butchering his cousins like cows in a slaughterhouse. In the film's most chilling scene, John takes a job at an abattoir shortly after being released from the asylum. Only a day in at his his new job, having participated in a few minutes worth of extraordinarily queasy footage of real animal slaughter, John quits, stating that he has "learned enough." We're clearly not dealing with a man who's all there upstairs. But was he certifiably sane before being institutionalized? We never find out for certain, as it seems he was up to similar behavior before his prolonged vacation (pulling pranks, sleeping with his cousins, causing trouble). His aunt attempts to justify her actions, which we previously imagined were fueled by greed alone, by calling John a "malignant tumor" that needs to be cut out of the family. She might be overstating his condition, but John does vacillate between both ends of the morality spectrum rather freely. Throughout most of the film he's playing mean-spirited pranks on the only occasionally deserving townsfolk (by tearing apart marriages, frightening helpless men and women, making stops at the urinal uncomfortable). It's hard to like him much in these moments, but when he saves a poor peasant girl from rape at the hands of some loathsome fishermen it's tough to say he fails to redeem himself. But then, soon after, he's outfitting his basement as a slaughterhouse and hanging up meat hooks for his cousins' stripped and flayed carcasses to rest upon! What a conflicted fellow.

Like a Byronic hero, John is a melancholy and cruel man, yearning towards his own death while ignoring the plights of others. Roughly akin to the titular antihero of Byron's Manfred, John imagines that his own head is full of elemental "dust" and that he resides on a physical plain above that of humankind (easy, then, that he'd be able to see his own cousins as livestock for the slaughter). But, importantly, he eventually begins to realize his own inherent humanity-- right before landing the killing blow on one of his cousins he refrains, citing that "man is a strange animal; he has a conscience." This discovery of his own nascent conscience makes John vulnerable to those who do not, and it's not long after that he's being strung up to his own demise, caught in a macabre execution scenario that would make Poe envious. Literally, John becomes the counterweight for a church bell, hanged by the neck, his death leaving him stranded somewhere between the divinity and salvation that the bell represents and the hellish squabble of the cruel earth that he is suspended above. It would be easy to read the film as John's ambivalent redemption, but there are still a lot of questions to pose here. Why do John's memories of the slaughterhouse convince him to spare his cousins' lives? What do his metaphysical ramblings, such as those he vocalizes when he imagines his cousin's fingers decomposed and reincarnated as the leaves on a tree, mean to signify? What, precisely, are we to make of the film's final minutes and their sculpted wax ruse? I feel no pressing need to offer answers. A Bell from Hell, for reasons that may or may not be entirely of its own choosing, prizes the indeterminate and the ambiguous. It is, accompanied by a chorus of ghost girls chanting "Frère Jacques" through the chill still of the night air, a cinematic fog that never dissipates.

Mill of the Stone Women (1960) dir. Giorgio Ferroni

a.k.a. Il mulino delle donne di pietra

Logline: Young journalist Hans von Arnim (Pierre Brice) travels to an old Dutch mill house to collect information for a story about the eccentric man who lives there, Prof. Wahl (Herbert Boehme). The professor, when not teaching sculpture at the local university, operates his mill's locally famous carousel of blood-curdling wax statues. While studying the history of the mill's macabre exhibit, Hans encounters Prof. Wahl's reclusive daughter, Elfie (Scilla Gabel), who is afflicted with a peculiar disease and who will lead Hans through a hallucinatory nightmare of murder and madness.

Though prevented from attaining the role of protagonist by the presence of the ever so typically "dashing" Hans, Prof. Wahl's daughter, Elfie, remains Mill of the Stone Women's focal point. Elfie becomes so central to the film-- the main attraction in its carousel of horrors, we might say-- because her sad predicament so well encapsulates the film's attitudes towards women. Elfie is, simultaneously, a sort of kept pet and a dangerous fairytale monster, though neither role is one that she has chosen for herself. Rather, these roles have been thrust upon her by the men who control her. Because of a bizarre and fatal condition that corrupts her blood at the slightest shock or provocation, her father and the personal doctor he has hired for her, Dr. Bohlem (Wolfgang Preiss), conspire to keep her alive by giving her complete blood transfusions any time her disease attacks. The fact that this donor blood comes from still breathing victims (kidnapped girls from about town) renders Elfie an unwilling and passive vampire, feeding on the blood of others for life but dependent upon male intervention to do so. (So perhaps calling her a pet vampire would be more appropriate).

Her delicate condition and the two men's unwillingness to simply let her die forces Elfie into becoming a recluse at the mill house in which she lives, lurking its corridors like a trapped spirit. Moreover, Prof. Wahl and Dr. Bohlem continuously squabble throughout the film over ownership of Elfie, making the situation that her disease has wrought even clearer: Elfie has become an object of male desire and utility, despite her own intentions. Even our hero, Hans, is guilty of partaking in such thoughtless treatment of Elfie, as is evident when he gladly sleeps with her and then immediately forsakes her, preferring to confess his love for the safer, less sexually aggressive Liselotte (Danny Carrell). Elfie's ravenous desire for life (both literally through her passive blood consumption and figuratively through her attempts to love whom she chooses and escape her confinement) codes her as abnormal. It's for this reason that Hans forsakes her-- she's had lovers before, and, following the reliable virgin/whore dichotomy, this prevents her from becoming a person he could ever truly love (the virginal Liselotte, eager to be married and tied down, more adequately suits his requirements). As the cowardly Hans tells her as much, she remains steadfast: "What does that matter as long as you'd let me love you?" Scilla Gabel portrays Elfie with a haunting, tortured grace and brimming mania reminiscent of Barbara Steele at her most sympathetic (in, say, Margheriti's Castle of Blood (1964)). Her wraith-like appearances on screen are charged with pathos, her lapses into psychosis fueled by jealously and a basic desire to be allowed to take the independent action denied to her. She is a tragic figure, even if the film appears reluctant to label her as such, and in her heartbreaking lack of autonomy becomes one of the more uniquely ineffectual movie monsters.

But Elfie's story is representative because of its exceptional status. The film's other women acquiesce meekly to the hands of the film's men. They become pliable like wax figures-- literally so, in fact. Taking a page from André De Toth's House of Wax (1953), Prof. Wahl disposes of his victims' bodies by coating them in wax, posing them in the desired positions, and putting them on display in his carousel of sculpted horrors. One victim, Annelore (Liana Orfei), still puts her uncritical trust and faith into a wild-eyed Prof. Wahl as he pushes her towards her exsanguination, despite the fact that she's tied down to a gurney-- fittingly, the wax figure she becomes is shackled with some quite symbolic chains. Prof. Wahl's morbid carousel exclusively features strong or in some way aberrant women dying, being tortured, or being murdered for their troubles. Historical personages (Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Mary Queen of Scots) commingle with various other women in states of torment or restraint, paraded along a mechanical track as if each was a ghastly monster meant to frighten the intended audience. And perhaps that's so, as the only character we see who is disturbed by the display (rather than fascinated, as all the men invariably are) is the dainty Liselotte, her reaction making plain that she's discerned on some subconscious level the warning implicit in such a horrific attraction: there is only one destination for women who chance to break the mold society has cast for them, and that is preserved in failure on a stage of horrors. The popularity of Wahl's carousel attests to the community's assent of this restrictive message. And through the grim fate of Elfie, Mill of the Stone Women presents the tale of a woman who would find a well deserved place in its own diegetic attraction.

Released the same year as Mario Bava's official directorial debut, Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio; The Mask of Satan), Giorgio Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women has been almost completely overshadowed by that giant of the Italian Gothic. This is unfortunate considering what a tremendous film Ferroni's is, displaying in nascent though already quite well-developed form the same sort of phantasmagoric imagery that Bava would not perfect until later in the decade with Kill, Baby, Kill! (1966). Ferroni's film is beautifully lensed by cinematographer Pier Ludovico Pavoni, a veteran of sword and sandal epics who had his chance to shine in the horror genre with this film. The camera roams around the titular mill as if it's stuck on the same carousel that's at the center of the film's plot, putting on display the horrific art direction by Arrigo Equini, with its grotesque statuary--the disembodied limbs of women in agony-- adorning every open wall in cluttered fashion. Equini's surreal art direction lays bare the fact that Mill of the Stone Women has a touch of German Expressionism embedded in its DNA, with its windswept Dutch countryside and its creaky, imposing, and slightly askew windmill. It's a film one feels compelled to call "a visual feast" with total earnestness, awash as it is in (as the above poster attests) blazing Technicolor. Ferroni would go on to direct only one other horror film, the almost equally hallucinatory Night of the Devils (1972), another Gothic horrorshow that doubles as a quasi-remake of "The Wurdalak" segment of Bava's Black Sabbath (1963). The shadow of Bava looms large over Ferroni's horror output, but one hopes a greater appreciation of his distinctive, dynamic, and rather groundbreaking style will be fostered by efforts like RaroVideo's new blu-ray release of Night of the Devils.