#96: Death Smiles on a Murderer

Death Smiles on a Murderer

Joe D'Amato
Initial release: July 11, 1973 (Italy)

Horror has always had a dreamlike quality, some films more than others; the unreality is part of what makes it so effective. These are our waking nightmares; they represent all our fears, from the fear of death to the fear of the other to the fear of ourselves. Few such nightmares are more hallucinatory than a Death Smiles On A Murderer, a low-budget Italian thriller by the prolific Joe D’Amato.

The film opens with a young man weeping before the body of his sister in a tomb; after a few flashbacks of an incestuous relationship that’s alternately consensual and explicitly nonconsensual, we flash forward three years into 1909, when a carriage crashes near an estate. The driver is killed, and its occupant, a young blonde lady who resembles the girl from the previous scenes, is injured with no memory. A doctor examines her and secretly discovers that she isn’t exactly alive. He also recognizes symbols on a medallion that she wears, but says nothing. With no memory or past, Greta, as she comes to be called from the name on her medallion, becomes friends with the young wealthy couple living at the estate she crashed at. Meanwhile, the maid, who is being haunted by disturbing visions of Greta’s brother, leaves her job, only to soon be mysteriously killed. Greta grows to form a relationship with both the husband and the wife, while the doctor, convinced he’s found the secret formula that unlocks the mysteries of life and death, winds up murdered as well. The wife grows jealous and seals Greta up in the cellar, and things get real weird from there.

D’Amato (real name Aristide Massaccesi) has crafted a sharp, complicated work of cinematographic genius that transcends a somewhat incoherent script. Masterful shooting combined with a standout soundtrack by Berto Pisano make up for weak set design and occasionally bad acting. This is a weird, sometimes transgressive film that hits on a lot of the classic tropes of gothic fiction, even straight up borrowing several elements from Edgar Allen Poe, but with a starkly 1970s erotic sensibility, as everyone who has a relationship with Greta ends up paying for it. There's plenty of sex scenes, both consensual and not; D’Amato, a cinematographer-turned-filmmaker like giallo godfather Mario Bava before him, was a pornographer at several points in his film career, and he brings that eroticism with him to his “serious” films. Perhaps that’s why voyeurism is a frequent theme in this film; always, someone is watching, be it the maid or the wife, or a cat… and speaking of Bava, there's at least a few thematic similarities with the spying ghost girl of Kill, Baby, Kill. (Incidentally, Kill star Giacomo Rossi-Stuart has a small role in this film.)

I have a hard time explaining my feelings about this film. It’s sexually transgressive at times, almost boilerplate 60s-style Italian gothic schlock at others, but the cinematography is frankly amazing, with some seriously good match cuts and other scene transitions. The soundtrack is absolutely standout, sidestepping traditional gothic orchestral for a mix of fuzzy strings (guitar and harpischord especially) and female vocalization. I will always appreciate soundtracks that do something different than expected, especially when they’re good. While the film is full of bad gore effects and lurid, Tabasco-colored blood, none of that really detracts from the film, even with a laugh-out-loud-funny scene of Greta’s brother getting his face clawed by an angry cat for a minute straight.

This is a 1970s love letter to 60s Italian gothic cinema, but at the same time quite representative of its own decade of transgressive sexual freedom and willingness to go the extra mile on gore. All films are a form of art, but Death Smiles on a Murderer is the kind of art that leaves the viewer wondering.

-june❤

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