Director: Mario Bava
Cast: Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Erika Blanc, Piero Lulli, Fabienne Dali
Have I Seen It Before: Never. Had it not been name-dropped by Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) in this year’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), I might not have ever come to it.
Did I Like It: I want to like Italian horror. I really, really do. Can you help me like it? I would really like some help.
This particular film is well-loved (hence the recommendation from the spooky girl to end all spooky girls), but I just don’t get it. I think the problems are two-fold, and only partially my fault.
For one, I think there’s a tendency in Italian horror to favor mood setting over any kind of actual tension, fear, or even terror. There’s plenty of that mood-setting on display here, but it leaves the entire movie feeling like a Halloween party I am begrudgingly attending as opposed to a scary movie. It actually serves to clarify my somewhat paradoxical feelings on Halloween at large. I love a good scary movie, but I’ve had my fill of costume parties.
Secondly, whatever moments of dread for which the film earnestly reaches feels like it has been aped to death by other, later (and themselves, generally underwhelming) American horror films. The 19th century setting? Check. The long dead child haunting characters unable to see more than two feet in front of them? Check. The occasional interruptions by disembodied child laughter? Double check. Hell, American films were already putting that one to barely tolerated use in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), so now I’m left sitting here wondering if the Americans stole from the Italians, or if it was the other way around. Either way, it’s pretty clear that I’ve been long since ruined for whatever charms the film might have had to offer.