Horror Icarus File No. 37: Peeping Tom (dir. by Michael Powell)

Posted on October 30, 2026 by Arleigh

“Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It’s fear.” — Mark Lewis

Every horror movie is, at some level, about watching — but Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s 1960 psychological horror-thriller, is the one that admits it out loud. It’s a movie about a man who can’t stop watching, made by a man who spent his life on the other side of the lens, released into a world that wasn’t ready to be told what cinema actually asks of us. The result is a fascinating double ruin: a killer destroyed by the camera in childhood, and a director destroyed by a camera of his own.

The killer first. Karlheinz Böhm plays Mark Lewis, a soft-spoken young man who works at a London film studio as a focus puller — the crew member whose job is literally keeping other people’s images sharp — and who, on the side, shoots glamour photos for a seedy newsagent. Upstairs in his late father’s house sits a darkroom and a private screening room where Mark watches his own footage over and over. Because Mark, you see, is a killer: he murders women with a spiked blade hidden in his camera tripod while filming their faces as they realize what’s happening, so he can capture the exact moment of terror.

It’s genuinely unsettling stuff, and Powell has the nerve to make us complicit. The camera on Mark’s shoulder becomes our point of view, and the movie repeatedly forces us into the killer’s eyepiece. There’s no way to watch Peeping Tom passively — you’re implicated from the first frame, and the film knows it.

What elevates all this from grisly gimmick to genuine tragedy is the empathy the film generates for Mark. He’s no boogeyman; he’s shy, awkward, almost childlike, and the movie patiently unpacks where he came from. His father, a famous psychologist, used little Mark as a lab rat for his experiments on fear, terrifying the boy on camera around the clock, waking him in the night with a lizard thrown onto his bed. Mark was never allowed to just be a kid, and the film frames his murders as a ghastly continuation of the experiment — a search for the perfect recording of fear.

There’s a devastating subplot involving his blind neighbor Helen, played by Anna Massey, who befriends him and eventually screens his childhood footage in a sequence that’s heartbreaking precisely because Mark narrates it with such flat, damaged calm. He can’t even recognize that what happened to him was monstrous. That confusion is the horror — and notice that in a film about seeing, the only person who truly trusts Mark is a woman who can’t see at all.

And then there’s the director, because Peeping Tom is as much a confession as it is a thriller. Powell, the man behind The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, filled this movie with himself: the studio where Mark works, the film-within-a-film shooting there, the director character who treats his actresses with casual cruelty, and above all the camera itself, presented as an instrument that’s inherently predatory. The famous moment when Mark photographs a woman’s face and we see it refracted through his lens, warped and distorted, is basically a thesis statement about the medium — a great artist asking whether the act of looking is itself an act of violence.

Audiences in 1960 were not ready for a beloved director suggesting that cinema might be a voyeur’s machine, and the damage was immediate and career-ending: the film was pulled from circulation within days, financiers closed their doors, and Powell — who co-wrote the screenplay with Leo Marks — found himself effectively unemployable in British cinema, scraping together scattered, underfunded work abroad for the next thirty years. He described the aftermath as being sent “into the wilderness.”

The irony is that Psycho came out the exact same year, and Hitchcock walked away with his legend enhanced while Powell walked away in ruins. Both are about isolated killers obsessed with spectatorship and the audience’s guilty hunger to see — but where Psycho cloaks its perversity in grease and melodrama, Peeping Tom is cool, clinical, and honest.

Honest, and gorgeous, too. Powell, the great colorist of British cinema, shoots it all in saturated Eastmancolor that turns the tawdry rooms into a garish fever dream. Carl Boehm is gentle and creepy at once, impossible to imagine anyone else in the role, and Anna Massey grounds the film as its emotional conscience. Moira Shearer, the ballerina from The Red Shoes, shows up in a wonderful extended cameo as a stand-in who walks into Mark’s apartment and walks out of it dead — a scene that’s somehow both ghastly and elegant.

The legacy story is where the rehabilitation gets really satisfying, because once the film resurfaced, its DNA turned out to be everywhere in modern horror. Start with the most obvious inheritance: the killer’s point of view. Every horror movie that puts the audience behind the murderer’s eyes — the opening POV stalk of Halloween, the drifting camera-eye of Black Christmas, the whole slasher tradition of the subjective tracking shot — is following a trail Powell blazed in 1960: the camera becomes the killer, and watching becomes a kind of participation.

Then there’s the found-footage vein. Mark Lewis is cinema’s original killer-cameraman, and you can draw a straight line from his home screening room to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and all the way to The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, where the very act of recording is what summons and sustains the horror. The killer’s home movies prefigure the deadly broadcast of Videodrome, the cursed tape of Ringu and The Ring, the home-video nightmares of Sinister, and the killer-documenting-his-crimes conceit of Man Bites Dog.

Brian De Palma deserves his own sentence in this ledger: from Sisters to Dressed to Kill and Body Double — a film about watching a murder through a lens — he kept returning to Powell’s question of whether the director’s gaze is pleasure or predation, and got away with it simply by making his movies a decade or two later.

The film’s psychological approach proved just as contagious. Mark Lewis is a killer with an actual explanation, a case history we’re invited to understand, and every horror film that humanizes its monster rather than simply unleashing it — The Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter‘s tormented Francis Dolarhyde, the grief-stricken ghosts of The Babadook and Hereditary — owes something to Powell’s refusal to treat his killer as a cheap bogeyman. Even the art-house provocations that implicate the viewer, from Funny Games to Caché, are playing on the same board Powell set up: what the person behind the camera — and the person in the seat — really wants to see.

The most bittersweet chapter of the legacy, though, is the giallo. Almost as soon as Powell was chased out of British cinema for these techniques, Italian filmmakers picked them up and ran wild with them, to international acclaim. The giallo thrillers of the 1960s and 70s — Blood and Black Lace, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, the gorgeous-murder tradition that Mario Bava and Dario Argento built into an entire genre — are practically assembled from Peeping Tom‘s toolkit: the masked killer whose crimes we witness through his own eyes, the traumatic origin story, the fetishistic attention to the mechanics of murder, the color splashed over terrible violence. Argento’s black-gloved murderer is Mark Lewis with an Italian accent and a better tailor — Powell had made one of the first great giallo films without knowing the genre existed, and the Italians got celebrated for it while he got blacklisted. Proof that Peeping Tom wasn’t too much for audiences, it was simply too early, and too British, for its own good.

Which brings us back to the confession. Mark Lewis ends his film the only way a man made of recordings ever could: watching his own death footage, whispering about the fear his father’s experiments could never quite capture. Powell, ruined by a movie about a ruined man, spent thirty years in the wilderness before the world caught up to what he’d been saying all along. Both stories end the same way — the film outlives the man, the images outlive the shame. Peeping Tom is tense, strange, unexpectedly sad, and still one of the most honest movies ever made about why we sit in the dark. Watch it, and then try to pretend you’re innocent.

Previous Icarus Files:

4 Shots From 4 Films: October 26th

Posted on October 26, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.

4 Shots From 4 Films

Forbidden Photos Of A Lady Above Suspicion (1970, directed by Luciano Ercoli)

Torso (1973, directed by Sergio Martino)

Spasmo (1974, directed by Umberto Lenzi)

The House With Laughing Windows (1976, directed by Pupi Avati)

The Films of Dario Argento: Sleepless

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In Italy, a young boy named Giacomo Gallo can only hide under a bed as he witnesses his mother being stabbed to death by an English horn. He doesn’t see the murderer, who is believed to be a serial killer known as The Dwarf Killer due to his short stature. All he can remember for sure is the blood and a strange hissing sound. Detective Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow) promises Giacomo that he will capture the Dwarf Killer.

Twenty years later, Moretti is retired. He never caught the Dwarf Killer, whose killing spree ended just as abruptly as it began. However, when a sex worker named Angela (Barbara Lerici) is brutally murdered on a train, there is evidence that indicates the Dwarf Killer has returned. Moretti comes out of retirement, determined to close the one case that he never solved. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult because Moretti’s memory is failing. As he puts it at one point, there are times when he can’t even remember his late wife’s face. Moretti has forgotten much about the case, though as he investigates, it all starts to come back to him. Moretti finds himself working with the now grown-up Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), who hopes to finally capture the man who killed his mother. And while Moretti may be struggling to remember the past and Giacomo still isn’t quite sure what he saw while hiding under the bed, it soon becomes clear that the killer remembers both of them.

After the disappointingly mean-spirited Phantom of the Opera, Sleepless was a return to form for Dario Argento. The film is a giallo and, in typical Argento fashion, the mystery involves not just the physical clues but also how people interpret and edit their own memories. The hiss that Giacomo heard turns out to be not what he originally believed. The killer also turns out to be something even more disturbing than what the police originally assumed. At the heart of the mystery is a rather morbid nursery verse, the sort of thing that can be either innocent or dangerous depending on how one interprets the words. Sleepless is a throwback to the type of films that made Mario Bava famous and also the type of films with which Argento started his directorial career. Max von Sydow’s Moretti is not just a detective. He’s also a symbol of an aging genre, a reminder of the clever mysteries that shed blood with style without ever losing their essential humanity.

Argento has often been criticized for not getting particularly complex performances from his actors. I don’t think that criticism is always fair. One need only see David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red or Jessica Harper in Suspiria to see what Argento can do with the right cast. In Sleepless, Max von Sydow gives a strong performance as Moretti. In fact, it’s probably one of the best performances to have ever appeared in an Argento film. He plays Moretti as being a kindly man on a mission, someone who has seen the worst that the world has to offer but who hasn’t given up his soul. Von Sydow gives us someone who we truly care about, which makes the film’s set pieces (which are bloody even by Argento standards) all the more effective.

It’s become a bit of a cliché to claim that Argento went into a decline after Tenebrae. While it’s true that Argento’s post-Opera films have been uneven, Sleepless shows what he was still capable of producing.

The (Reviewed) Films of Dario Argento:

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Giallo Edition

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I love giallo!

4 Shots From 4 Giallo Films

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970, dir by Dario Argento)

Hatchet For The Honeymoon (1970, dir by Mario Bava)

A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (1971, dir by Lucio Fulci)

The House With Laughing Windows (1976, directed by Pupi Avati)

Anime You Should Be Watching (Horror Edition): Perfect Blue (dir. by Satoshi Kon)

Posted on October 6, 2025 by Arleigh

Satoshi Kon’s 1998 psychological thriller Perfect Blue remains a striking and influential work nearly three decades after its release. Despite being an animated film, it evokes the unsettling style and tension found in the classic Italian giallo thrillers of the 1970s and ’80s—films by directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava—and melds them admirably with elements of 1970s Eurotrash exploitation and arthouse psychological thriller reminiscent of Brian De Palma. Kon’s debut feature is a haunting exploration of fractured identity, blending show-business satire, Hitchcockian suspense, and surreal nightmare imagery into a profoundly relevant story in today’s age of parasocial fandom and digital voyeurism.

The film centers on Mima Kirigoe, a member of the bubblegum J-Pop group “CHAM!” who decides to leave the idol world to pursue a career in serious acting. This choice, rooted in her desire for personal growth and artistic expression, sets off devastating consequences. For her managers and many fans, Mima’s break from the manufactured idol persona is viewed as betrayal—a dissolution of a carefully crafted image designed for maximum market appeal. The pristine, innocent figure worshipped by fans begins to crumble, replaced by the complicated reality of adulthood and the harsh glare of fame.

To fully grasp the horror underpinning Perfect Blue, it’s important to understand the nature of Japanese idol culture. These idols are not merely singers or performers—they are highly managed brands. Every lyric, outfit, choreographed move, and public appearance is tightly controlled to project purity and accessibility. This system bears close resemblance to the meticulously produced Western pop acts of the late 1990s and early 2000s like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. Both rely on constructing polished, artificial personas that maximize commercial appeal, often at the expense of genuine selfhood. When an idol deviates from this script, it frequently provokes obsession, confusion, and even violent reactions from a subset of fans unable to reconcile the constructed image with evolving reality.

Mima’s transition from ingénue pop star to serious actress thrusts her into an intense psychological crucible. Her first major acting role requires her to perform a deeply disturbing rape scene, one that blurs lines between professional obligation and personal violation. Kon lingers on Mima’s shocked expression—a powerful mask of confusion and repressed trauma. This sequence sets the tone for the film: a world where performance, identity, and exploitation intertwine irrevocably, creating a landscape where self and roles imposed by society become indistinguishable.

As Mima’s public persona shifts, darker forces emerge. An eerie fan website titled “Mima’s Room” chronicles her life with disturbing accuracy but is clearly authored by an unknown party. Even more threatening is an obsessed fan fixated on the idol version of Mima, stalking her and insisting that the “real” Mima no longer exists. This duality—between reality and imitation, self and construct—becomes the film’s thematic centerpiece. The narrative loops and fractures, cutting between dreams, televised drama, and supposed reality until neither Mima nor the viewer can be sure what is authentic. This masterful ambiguity immerses us in the protagonist’s psychological collapse.

The horror in Perfect Blue operates on two deeply intertwined levels. First, it is a psychological portrait of a young woman’s unraveling, echoing themes explored in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan—films focused on fragile female psyches under immense pressure. While Aronofsky has publicly denied that Black Swan was directly inspired by Perfect Blue, the similarities in theme and specific visual motifs suggest otherwise. Both films explore the disintegration of identity in a young woman caught between innocence and adult roles, with dreamlike, unsettling sequences blurring reality and hallucination. The parallels in their portrayal of psychological breakdown, stalking, and the pressure of performance are striking, though Aronofsky’s work is set in the world of ballet rather than pop music and acting.

Second, Perfect Blue channels the lush, stylized dread characteristic of giallo cinema. Kon borrows Argento’s fascination with voyeuristic camera angles, saturated color palettes, and the interplay of beauty and violence. Like Argento’s heroines trapped in a hall of mirrors, Mima finds herself caught in a labyrinth where surreal horror becomes tangible and murder might be just another staged act in a disturbing performance.

Yet unlike Suspiria’s occult grotesques, Kon’s horror resides not in supernatural forces but within the mind and media itself. Animation becomes a revelatory choice—rather than softening violence, it frees Kon from physical constraints, allowing reality to fracture visually with startling fluidity. Identities shift from frame to frame, reflections move independently of their sources, and timelines collapse and fragment like psychic glitches. The medium’s flexibility intensifies the film’s psychological disorientation, blurring fact and fantasy in ways live-action cinema would struggle to capture so viscerally.

Kon’s prescient understanding of media obsession resonates more strongly than ever today. Long before social media reshaped how identity is constructed and perceived, Perfect Blue envisioned the internet as a distorting mirror that erases the line between self and performance. The “Mima’s Room” website serves both as diary and prison—a disturbing precursor to the carefully curated digital personas that dominate social media platforms now. As Mima reads falsified diary entries that resemble her life more “truthfully” than her own memory, she grows alienated from reality. The omnipresent gaze of fans, stalkers, and producers merges into an oppressive force she cannot escape.

This taps into a modern phenomenon: parasocial relationships. These one-sided emotional bonds fans develop with celebrities or fictional characters foster a dangerous illusion of intimacy and knowledge, often masking boundaries between admiration and entitlement. In Perfect Blue, the deranged fan believes he “knows” Mima in a way that justifies controlling her, even committing violence to preserve the image he idolizes. This mirrors the darker side of parasocial dynamics today, where fans demand absolute authenticity or control over public figures’ identities, sometimes leading to harassment or stalking. Kon’s film foreshadows how internet culture can exacerbate these fragile boundaries, blurring realities and fueling destructive obsession.

The film’s editing amplifies this psychological suffocation. Kon intercuts scenes from Mima’s TV drama—ironically titled Double Bind—with moments from her “real” life until one blurs imperceptibly into the other. Viewers are drawn deeper into uncertainty: are we witnessing actual events, staged fiction, or yet another deceptive layer? This deliberate manipulation creates unease without relying on cheap jump scares or graphic violence. The horror is existential—losing trust not only in others but in one’s own mind.

This theme has become exponentially more relevant with the rise of social media influencers and online streaming personalities. Today, countless individuals cultivate personal brands that blend their private lives with public personas online, often with blurred or deliberately ambiguous boundaries. The intense fan interaction, constant scrutiny, and expectation of accessibility echo the pressures Mima faces. As social media blurs the line between “real” self and online performance, the risks of losing grip on one’s identity—as Mima does—feel more immediate and widespread than ever.

It is extraordinary that Perfect Blue was Kon’s first feature film. His command of cinematic language is masterful—harnessing animation as a means to probe psychological depths rather than as mere escapism. His subsequent works—Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika—build on themes of identity, memory, and the fluid borders of reality, but Perfect Blue remains his rawest and most unsettling contribution. His untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2010 at just 46 left the film community mourning a visionary whose full promise was tragically unfulfilled.

One of Perfect Blue’s greatest achievements is rejecting outsider stereotypes about anime. It is neither childish fantasy nor gratuitous erotica, though it fearlessly explores sexual anxiety, trauma, and performance under intense scrutiny. Kon’s film proves that animation can tackle mature themes—mental illness, societal pressure, gender identity—with subtlety and emotional gravitas usually reserved for live-action cinema. It challenges the misinformed Western association of adult anime with “hentai,” affirming animation’s capacity as a serious art form.

Kon’s film also critiques fandom’s darker impulses, asking difficult questions about ownership and identity. How much of a celebrity’s life belongs to the public? How much of one’s self must be sacrificed under the weight of expectation? In today’s hyperconnected online world, Kon’s portrayal of obsessive fans demanding idealized idols is uncannily relevant and urgent.

Ultimately, Perfect Blue transcends genre and era. It is not merely a psychological thriller or celebrity critique but a mirror held to an increasingly performative world. Long before social media dissolved the lines between private and public selves, Kon foresaw how image can consume reality. The result is a masterful fusion of paranoia, empathy, and stunning visual style—a giallo-inspired fever dream painted in blood-red and neon blue. For animation, it remains a landmark in artistic maturity; for cinema as a whole, it stands as one of the most chilling and insightful portraits of fame’s corrosive gaze and the dark side of parasocial obsession.

Anime You Should Be Watching

International Horror Film Review: Bloody Moon (dir by Jesus Franco)

Posted on October 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A 1981 West German/Spanish co-production, Bloody Moon open with a disfigured man named Miguel (Alexander Waechter) putting on a Mickey Mouse mask and sneaking into a party being held on the campus of a private school that is known as (deep breath) Europe’s International Youth-Club Boarding School of Languages. It’s a school that is meant for the young, the rich, and the unburdened. In short, it’s not a place for Miguel at all.

With his face safely hidden behind the smiling image of Disney’s favorite mouse, Miguel meets a young woman who is dancing by herself. She mistakes him for her boyfriend and heads into a nearby bungalow with him. They start to make love but — uh oh! — the mask falls off! The woman screams at the sight of Miguel’s scarred face. Miguel grabs a pair of scissors and stabs her to death while Mickey Mouse’s smiling face smiles on the floor. (One can only imagine how Disney reacted to this film.)

A few years later, Miguel is being released from a mental hospital. He’s released into the custody of his sister, Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff). Miguel’s doctor (played by the film’s director, Jesus “Jess” Franco) says that Miguel should be fine as long as he’s not around anything that reminds him of the incident. Manuela says that she’ll look after him and then promptly takes him back to the school where he committed the murder. What part of not reminding him did she fail to understand?

Manuela does actually have an excuse for bringing Miguel to the school with her, though. She and her aunt, Countess Maria (Maria Rubio), own the school. Countess Maria is an angry, wheelchair-bound woman who is convinced that Manuela wants to kill her so that she can take over the school and it does seem that Manuela does have some hostility towards her aunt. Of course, another reason for bringing Miguel back to the school to live with her is that he and Manuela have an incestuous relationship …. or, at least, they did. Now that Manuela refuses to sleep him, Miguel is reduced to lurking around campus and staring at all the students while they sunbathe topless at the pool. While Manuela stands naked in her room and stares at the moon (the bloody moon?), Miguel is hunched down in the shrubbery and peeping through windows.

Among the students is Angela (Olivia Pascal). Angela is upset because she discovered a dead body but no one’s willing to believe her because she also enjoys reading mystery novels. Angela knows that someone is committing murders on campus but is it Miguel or it is Professor Alvaro (Christoph Moosbrugger) or could it even be the enigmatic Bueno (Otto Retzer), a bald guy who seems to randomly pop up around campus? Can Angela convince her remarkably stupid classmates that there’s a murderer on campus before it’s too late?

Bloody Moon was one of the many films directed by the Spanish auteur and former Orson Welles collaborator, Jesus Franco. In a career that lasted over 60 years, Franco directed at least 173 feature films. (It’s felt that he actually directed quite a bit more, usually under a pseudonym. Franco, himself, claimed that he didn’t really remember how many films he had directed.) As a director, Franco is remembered for his low budgets, his unapologetic embrace of the sordid, his rather casual attitude towards maintaining continuity from one scene to another, and for occasionally framing an interesting shot or two. By his own admission, Bloody Moon was not a personal project for Franco. It’s something that he did for the money, as a director-for-hire. However, Bloody Moon is unmistakably a Franco film. The budget is low. The subject matter is often so sordid that it borders on parody. As far as continuity goes, Angela goes from wearing a nightshirt when she discovers a dead body inside her bungalow to wearing a colorful sweater when she runs outside in a panic. (I guess she could have stopped to change clothes with a dead body on the bed and a killer lurking somewhere in the bungalow but I doubt it. When there’s a dead body on your bed, modesty should be the least of your concerns.) And yet, as silly as it all is, there are moments when Bloody Moon does achieve a certain dream-like intensity. The mix of badly dubbed performers, sudden jump cuts, bloody violence, and the total lack of narrative logic makes Bloody Moon feel a bit like a filmed nightmare. It works despite itself.

Bloody Moon is one of the films that was, for a while, banned in the UK due to its violence and bloodshed. And indeed, there is a lot of blood and the violence is a bit more graphic than what one might expect to find in the American slasher films that Bloody Moon was obviously meant to capitalize upon. This film is notable for just how cruel the killer is. Not even Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees resorted to using a giant radial saw. That said, this is one of those films that has a reputation for being bloodier than it actually is. The majority of the film is taken up with scenes of people wandering around campus, either searching for their friends or stalking a potential victim. Personally, I felt the nonstop searching scenes added to the film’s dreamlike feel but I imagine those who only watch films like this for the kills will find it all to be a bit slow.

Bloody Moon was clearly made to capitalize on the success of American slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th. That said, Bloody Moon has more in common with the Italian giallo genre, right down to the whodunit nature of the plot, the ludicrously sleazy motives of the killer, and the total lack of intentional comic relief. Like so many giallo films, Bloody Moon takes place in a world where everyone’s either a victim or a killer and no one’s particularly likable. It’s not one of Franco’s personal films but there’s still enough of his signature style to appeal to his fans. As with most of Franco’s film, it will be best appreciated by those who like a little ennui mixed with their horror.

International Horror Review: All the Colors of the Dark (dir by Sergio Martino)

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s giallo time!

In this 1972 Italian film, Edwidge Fenech plays Jane Harrison. Jane is haunted by both the murder of her mother and a more recent car accident, one that caused her to miscarry. Jane has nightmares, featuring violent murders and lots of spilt blood. Whenever Jane leaves her apartment, a mysterious man with piercing blue and perfect hair (played, of course, by the owner of the best head of hair in Italian cinema, Ivan Rassimov) follows her and threatens her. Is the man real or is he just a figment of her imagination? Her sister, Barbara (Susan Scott) insists that Jane see a psychiatrist. Meanwhile, Jane’s boyfriend, Richard (the ruggedly handsome George Hilton) insists that the two of them can work through it.

However, Jane’s new neighbor, Mary (Marina Malfatti) has a suggestion that involves neither therapy nor love. Mary suggests that Jane attend a black mass. Jane agrees and …. wait, what? A black mass? Out of all the solutions that have been suggested, Jane decides to go with Satanism? That seems like a bit of an extreme solution but then again, it was the 70s and it was Italy and maybe things were just different back then. I’m just saying that I, personally, would not join a cult but obviously, some people do. Maybe that’s how the Silent Hill cult got started. Someone tried to be helpful by saying, “Let’s go to a black mass,” everyone said, “Sure!” Who knows?

Anyway, Jane attends a few rituals, all of which will seem familiar to anyone who has seen Rosemary’s Baby. She drinks the blood of a dog. She takes part in an orgy. Or does she? The scenes are shot in such a fashion that we’re left to wonder whether they’re real or if they’re just taking place inside of Jane’s mind. With her paranoia growing, Jane herself isn’t sure what’s really happening either. All she knows is that it seems as if the members of the cult are everywhere and that the mysterious man still appears to be following her. When people start dying in various gruesome ways, who is responsible? Jane or the cult or someone else entirely?

All The Colors of the Dark is a favorite of mine, a stylish giallo with an insane plot, lots of sex and death, and killer performances from giallo regulars like Fenech, Hilton, and Rassimov. The solution to this film’s mystery is actually pretty clever and — in a rarity for the giallo genre — it actually hold together when you think about it after the movie ends. Visually, director Sergio Martino does a great job of creating an atmosphere of unease and suspicion and Jane’s dreams and visions are wonderfully executed. My favorite moment is when Jane suddenly realizes that everyone around her is a member of the cult. Are they really or is Jane just hallucinating? Watch the movie to find out!

In October, it’s always nice to make some time for a good giallo, especially ones that feature George Hilton looking handsome and Ivan Rassimov looking dangerously intriguing. All the Colors of the Dark is definitely one of the better ones.

International Horror: The Case of the Bloody Iris (dir by Giuliano Carnimeo)

Posted on October 3, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Luna, a blonde wearing a miniskirt, walks down a city street. She goes to a high-rise apartment building and is buzzed in. She doesn’t live in the building but someone who is expecting her does. She gets on an elevator, one that is full of people. One person in the elevator obviously notices when she enters. Eventually, everyone gets off the elevator, except for Luna and that one person. As the elevator approaches the top floor, Luna is suddenly stabbed to death. The murderer flees. When the elevator reaches the top floor, three residents discover Luna’s dead body….

And none of them seem to care!

Professor Isaacs (George Riguad) stares at the body, unconcerned. Miss Moss (Maria Tedeschi) makes a few judgmental comments about the victim. Mizar (Carla Brait) does, at least, scream when she finds the dead body but, ultimately, she’s more worried about how she’s going to get downstairs so that she can get to her job as a stripper/performance artist in a sleazy club.

Yes, we’ve entered giallo territory! The Italian giallo films are known for their brutal murders, stylish visuals, convoluted plots, and their black-gloved killers. However, what I always find to be most disturbing about them is that it’s rare that anyone really cares about all of the murders or the victims. Instead, giallo films are often full of bystanders who, at the most, get mildly annoyed at the idea of their day being interrupted by someone else’s murder. The typical giallo takes place in a heartless world, one where even the most grotesque scenes are often viewed with a disturbing nonchalance. That’s certainly the case with the opening of the 1972 Italian film, The Case of the Bloody Iris.

The rest of the film centers on Jennifer Langsbury (Edwige Fenech) and Marilyn (Paola Quattrini), two models who have recently been hired to star in a series of print ads for the building. They also live in the building, which would seem convenient if not for the fact that there’s also a killer on the loose who is only targeting young, single women. Even without the murders occurrin around her, Jennifer is struggling a bit getting adjusted to the world. Before becoming a model, she was a member of hippie sex cult and the cult’s leader, Adam (Ben Carra), has a bad habit of randomly showing up and demanding that she return to him. However, Jennifer is far more interested in Andrea Anitnori (giallo mainstay George Hilton), the handsome architect who built the building and who has an obsessive phobia about blood, which is going to be a bit of a problem because a lot of blood is about to be spilt.

Got all that?

The Case of the Bloody Iris is a typical, if entertaining, giallo, which means there’s a lot of sex, a lot of blood, a lot of bizarre suspects, and a few incredibly incompetent police detectives. It’s also pretty damn enjoyable, even if it doesn’t exactly break a lot of new ground as far as the genre is concerned. While director Giuliano Carnimeo never matches the visual heights of an Argento, a Bava, a Martino, or even a Lenzi, he still does a good job keeping the action moving and he shows just enough of a flair for capturing stylistic violence to make his film worthy of the genre. While the mystery itself doesn’t always make a lot of sense (which is actually to be expected when it comes to the giallo genra), The Case of the Bloody Iris features Edwige Fenech and George Hilton, two mainstays of the genre, at their best and (even though dubbed) most charismatic. It’s an enjoyable little thriller, one that’s worth the 90 minutes that it takes to watch it.

International Horror Film Review: Nothing Underneath (dir by Carlo Vanzina)

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1985 Italian film, Nothing Underneath, is a giallo that’s achieved some notoriety based on the fact that it’s not a very easy film to find.

Seriously, I’ve spent years looking for this film. I had read enough good things about it to make me believe that it was a film that I, as an unapologetic fan of Italian horror, simply had to see. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it’s never gotten a proper DVD or Blu-ray release in the United States. It’s not so much that the film is controversial or even particularly graphic. Apparently, the main problem is that the film takes place in the world of high fashion and that means that there are several scenes that take place at fashion shows and most of those scenes feature songs that were very popular in 1985. Nothing Underneath has never gotten a proper video release because of all the music. It’s kind of unfortunate, really. There are so many good movies that are currently in limbo because of disputes over the rights to the music on the film’s soundtrack.

Anyway, the good news is that last night, I was able to find Nothing Underneath on YouTube! So, I finally got to watch it.

The bad news is that I watched it in Italian with no subtitles.

Now, that’s not quite as big of an issue as you might think. The thing with Italian horror films is that the story is often less important than how it’s told. The best Italian horror films are all about style and suspense and less about keeping track of who did what to whom. That’s certainly appears to be the case with Nothing Underneath. Film is a visual medium, after all.

The film is about a brother and a sister. Bob (Tom Schanley) is a park ranger who works at Yellowstone and is very happy with his simple and honest life. Jessica (Nicole Peering) is a fashion model who currently lives in Milan and who spends all of her days modeling lingerie and fighting off sleazy coke addicts. Bob and Jessica have such an extremely strong bond that, occasionally, Bob has visions of Jessica’s life in Milan. Whenever Jessica is in danger, Bob knows it. When Bob has a vision of someone stalking Jessica while carrying scissors and wearing black gloves, he rushes back to his ranger station and calls Italy to warn her. Unfortunately, he’s too late. By the time he convinces the surly desk clerk as Jessica’s apartment building to give Jessica the message, Jessica has disappeared.

Bob flies to Milan, determined to find his sister. He teams up with Commissioner Danesi (Donald Pleasence) to investigate Jessica’s disappearance. As soon as I saw Donald Pleasence, I automatically assumed that he would eventually turn out to be involved in Jessica’s disappearance but no. Pleasence actually plays a good guy in the film, one who appears to harbor no dark secrets. That was kind of a nice change of pace and, even though he was dubbed into Italian, I could tell that Pleasence gave a likable and sympathetic performance in this film.

It turns out that the black-gloved killer is murdering models all over Milan. Can Bob discover the killer’s identity? Will he be able to protect Barbara (Renee Simonsen), the killer’s latest target? And will he discover all of the sordid details about Jessica’s life in Milan?

Despite the language barrier, I enjoyed Nothing Underneath. It’s an old school giallo, right down to the whodunit mystery and the point-of-view shots of the black-gloved killer. Visually, the film is impressive. The opening sequence neatly contrasted the simplicity of Yellowstone with the decadence of Milan and the scenes of the killer stalking their latest victim were nicely done and very suspenseful. It was a bit hard to judge the actors (as usual, some of the dubbing was very poorly done) but Donald Pleasence was a delight as always and Tom Schanley come across as being very sincere and likable as the park ranger.

I’m glad to have seen Nothing Underneath. I hope it gets a decent video release at some point in the future.

Sex And Drugs And BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (Allied Artists/Woolner Brothers 1964)

Posted on May 4, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Welcome to the weirdly wonderful world of giallo, pioneered by the late Italian maestroMario Bava . Though Bava’s THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (released stateside as EVIL EYE) is considered by connoisseurs the first, it was BLOOD AND BLACK LACE that defined the genre, with its comingling of crime drama, murder mystery, and horror elements coalescing into something truly unique. I hadn’t seen this film in decades before a recent rewatch, and was again dazzled by Bava’s technique. The film has proved to be highly influential in the decades-later slasher genre, yet has its roots set firmly in the past.

The opening sequence is a stunner, as we see the beautiful model Isabelle walking through a woodsy pathway on a dark and stormy night, stalked and then brutally murdered by a faceless, trenchcoated killer. From there, we’re introduced to the remaining cast, members of the haute couture fashion…

View original post 464 more words